"Joyce Carol Oates - Give Me Your Heart" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oates Joyce Carol)

someone “close” to you. (As if our families, especially our blood-kin, are
“close” to us in the true intimacy of erotic love.) So naturally you return, with
badly shaking fin-gers you pick up the scattered pages, smooth them out
and continue to read.

Dear Dr. K——! Please understand: I am not bitter, I don’t harbor
obsessions. That is not my nature. I have my own life, and I have even had
a (moderately successful) career. I am a normal woman of my time and
place. I am like the exquisite black-and-silver diamond-headed spider, the
so-called “happy” spider; the sole sub-species of Araneida that is said to
be free to spin part-improvised webs, both oval and funnel, and to roam the
world at will, equally at home in damp grasses and the dry, dark, protected
interiors of man-made places; re-joicing in (relative) free will within the
inevitable restrictions of Araneida behavior; with a sharp venomous sting,
some-times lethal to human beings, and especially to children.

Like the diamond-head, I have many eyes. Like the diamond-head, I
may be perceived as “happy”-”joyous”- “exulting”- in the eyes of others. For
such is my role, my per-formance.

It’s true, for years I was stoically reconciled to my loss, in fact to my
losses. (Not that I blame you for these losses, Dr. K——. Though a neutral
observer might conclude that my im-mune system has been damaged as a
result of my physical and mental collapse following your abrupt dismissal of
me from your life.) Then, last March, seeing your photograph in the
paper-DISTINGUISHED THEOLOGIAN K——TO HEAD SEMINARY-and,
a few weeks later, when you were named to the President’s Commission
on Religion and Bioethics, I recon-sidered. The time of anonymity and
silence is over, I thought. Why not try, why not try to collect what he owes
you.

Do you remember Angel’s name, now? That name that, for
twenty-three years, nine months and eleven days you have not wished to
utter.

Seek my name in any telephone directory, you won’t find it. For
possibly my number is unlisted, possibly I don’t have a telephone. Possibly
my name has been changed. (Legally.) Pos-sibly I live in a distant city in a
distant region of the continent; or possibly, like the diamond-head spider
(adult size, approxi-mately that of your right thumbnail, Dr. K——), I dwell
qui-etly within your roof, spinning my exquisite webs amid the shadowy
rafters of your basement, or in a niche between your handsome old
mahogany desk and the wall, or, a delicious thought, in the airless cave
beneath the four-poster brass an-tique bed you and the second Mrs.
K——share in the dol-drums of late middle age.

So close am I, yet invisible!

Dear Dr. K——! Once you marveled at my “flawless Vermeer” skin
and “spun gold” hair rippling down my back, which you stroked, and closed