"Barry N. Malzberg - Gehenna" - читать интересную книгу автора (Malzberg Barry N)

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Vincent got on the IRT downtown local at 42nd Street for Greenwich
Village. The train stopped at 37th Street, 31st Street 19th Street and Christ
Towers. As it turned out, he lost his girl at this party. It was a standard
Greenwich Village look-how-liberated-we-are kind of party and it was a
strange thing that the two of them went separately since the 42nd Street
stop was the nearest to both of their apartments. But she believed in
maintaining her privacy in small, damning ways.
She was sad that night, sad with a misery he could not touch, much less
comprehend. It had been a good time for both of them—they had been
going together for the four months since she broke off with his closest
friend—and he played her songs on his mandolin—promises of lost and
terrible loves, promises of a better future, songs of freedom and
loneliness—and she loved his mandolin. She told him that she found her
whole soul in his music.
 So he was playing songs for her at the party this night, not even wanting
to be there, hoping that they could go back to her flat and put the
mandolin beside the bed and make their kind of love, when he saw that
she was looking at another man in the corner of the room—a man of a
different sort from the rest of them, since he was the only one who was not
already drunk. The man was looking back at her and in that moment
Vincent knew that he was quite doomed, that he and Julie were quite
finished.
To prove it to himself he left his instrument on her knee and went to the
bathroom. When he came back they sprang apart like assassins and he
knew that the man had her address. There was nothing to do, of course,
but to leave the party and he helped her with her coat, put his mandolin
over his shoulder and led her down the stairs. Halfway to the street he told
her that she had betrayed them. She did not answer, later murmured that
she could not help herself, much less another person—but she would make
this night the best of all the nights that she had ever given him.
And so she did, all night and into the dawn while her cat stroked the
mandolin making wooden sounds, rolling the instrument around and
around on the floor. In the morning he left her—and took his
clothing—and then he did not see her at all for a few days. When he came
back there was a different look on her face and the man was in her bed,
lying next to her.
He did not care—he had lost any capacity for surprise when she, had
come from his closest friend, broken enough to need him. He only wanted
to meet the man named Edward (who might become his closest friend
too) but the man did not want any part of him at all and there was a very
bad scene—a scene that ended only when Vicent knocked the man to the
door and smashed him there to the floor.
But he never saw her again, victory or not. He had no need
to—everything that needed proof had been proven. But he thought of her
often and many years later, when he killed himself by leaping from a
stranger's penthouse, his last thought as he felt the dry wind and saw the
street coming at him was of his old mandolin, her solemn cat and the
night she had given him her best because she had already partaken of his
worst.