"John Kessel - Some Like It Cold" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kessel John)

SOME LIKE IT COLD

John Kessel

Her heroes were Abraham Lincoln and Albert Einstein. Lincoln was out c the
question, but with a little work I could look Einsteinesque. I grew a dark
mustache, adopted wild graying hair. From wardrobe I requisitioned a pair of
wool slacks, a white cotton shirt, a gabardine jacket with narrow lapel The
shoes were my own, my prized possession-genuine leather, Australia copies of
mid twentieth-century brogues, comfortable, well broken in. The

prep-room mirror reflected back a handsomer, taller, younger relative of old
Albert, a cross between Einstein and her psychiatrist Dr. Greenson.
The moment-universes surrounding the evening of Saturday, August 4 were so
thoroughly burned-tourists, biographers, conspiracy hunters, masturbators-that
there was no sense arriving then. Besides, I wanted to get a taste of the old
LA, before the quake. So I selected the Friday evening 18:00 PDT
moment-universe. I materialized in a stall in the men's room at the Santa
Monica Municipal Airport. Some aim for deserted places; I like airports, train
stations, bus terminals. Lots of strangers if you've missed some detail of
costume. Public transport easily available. Crowds to lose oneself in. The
portable unit, disguised as an overnight bag, never looks out of place. I
stopped in a shop and bought a couple of packs of Luckies. At the Hertz
counter I rented a navy blue Plymouth with push-button transmission, threw my
canvas camera bag and overnight case into the back and, checking the map,
puzzled out the motel address on Wilshire Boulevard that Research had found
for me.
The hotel was ersatz Spanish, pink stucco and a red tile roof, a colonnade
around a courtyard pool where a teenage boy in white T-shirt and DA haircut
leaned on a cleaning net and flirted with a couple of fifteen-year-old girls.
I sat in the shadowed doorway of my room, smoked a Lucky and watched until a
fat woman in a caftan came out and yelled at the boy to get back to work. The
girls giggled.
The early evening I spent driving around. In Santa Monica I saw the
pre-tsunami pier, the one she would tell Greenson she was going to visit
Saturday night before she changed her mind and stayed home. I ate at the
Dancers: a slab of prime rib, a baked potato the size of a football, a bottle
of zinfandel. Afterward I drove my Plymouth along the Miracle Mile. I rolled
down the windows and let the warm air wash over me, inspecting the strip
joints, theaters, bars, and hookers. A number of the women, looking like her
in cotton-candy hair and tight dresses, gave me the eye as I cruised by.
I pulled into the lot beside a club called the Blue Note. Over the door a blue
neon martini glass swamped a green neon olive in gold neon gin. Inside I
ordered a scotch and listened to a trio play jazz. A thin white guy with a
goatee strangled his saxophone: somewhere in there might be a melody. These
cutting-edge late-modems thought they had the* future augured. The future
would be cool and atonal, they thought. No squares allowed. They didn't
understand that the future, like the present, would be dominated by saps, and
the big rush of 2043 would be barbershop quartets.
I sipped scotch. A brutal high, alcohol, like putting your head in a vise. I