"Bruce Holland Rogers - What the Wind Carries" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rogers Bruce Holland)

The other thing that Boulder had was women. There was an endless supply of new graduate students,
of summertime visitors, of women who felt drawn to the city for this therapy or that new school. By
auditing one or two classes each semester, patrolling the right bars, browsing long hours in bookstores,
he knew he would meet someone he could fall in love with, someone as young as he wanted to be again.
He built his life-- the part-time job, the cheap apartment-- so that he would have time to make what he
longed for real.
And he succeeded. He met Angela, and he fell in love. She was twenty-three, bright, beautiful, and he
pursued her with enough intensity to convince her but not so much that he scared her off. The age
difference, which worried him at first, only made him more complex and interesting to her. When he slept
with Angela, he gloried in her desire for him. It didn't make him nineteen again, but up until the last
moment, he felt more alive than he had for years.
But in that last moment, when she put her hands onto his hips and urged him into herself, looking into
the eyes of the man who made her feel alive, who made her know she was loved, that was when he
faltered. He entered her, and he did not love her. His movements were mechanical, a labor to maintain a
lie.
Perhaps he should have stopped then, rolled away from her and said, "I don't love you," even though
he had loved her just a moment before. But that would have hurt her, perhaps, even more than he would
have to. He closed his eyes and thought of someone else, of a woman he had met in a Pearl Street
bookstore, and only by thinking of her did he manage to spend himself.
Later, when Angela called in tears, humiliating herself with the number of times she phoned him, he
couldn't explain it to her except to say that he had loved her, he really had, but now did not.
He thought he couldn't feel worse than this, and the pain of love gone wrong made him crave even
more intensely the recklessness of love gone right. He called the woman from the bookstore. Her name
was Katya.
He was convinced that this time he had found someone whom he would love forever. Her accent, her
European education, made her seem far more worldly than her years. They spent months in a cautious
courtship, a reassuring contrast to the mad rush with Angela.
But when she decided that she loved him as much as he loved her, when they found themselves in bed
for the first time, his passion grew up to the moment he was inside of her. Then it was the same. He knew
he didn't love her any more, and when he held her and said her name and poured himself into her, it was
someone else he was thinking of, a student in the poetry seminar he was taking.
He was, he knew, becoming ridiculous: a skirt chaser at thirty-five, a fraternity boy forever. This was
not what he wanted.
But he could not stop. Time after time, he was convinced that the woman he'd just met electrified him
the way none of the others had, but that conviction began to feel hollow.
He turned thirty-six, then thirty-seven.
At thirty-eight, it horrified him to discover that some of the women were confused in his memory. Was
it Ericka or Michele who had thrown a brick through the window of his apartment? How could he
confuse a memory like that one? But whenever he met someone new, she was special, unique, impossible
to ever confuse with the others. She was always the woman who would make him lean into the wind at
three in the morning, shouting her name.
Chrissy was the latest. When she came to meet him at the Oasis, she brought with her a sudden gust of
wind that held the door open long after she had entered. Her face was flushed. Her hair looked frayed
and tangled. She stood near the entrance for a moment to collect herself before she hung up her coat and
joined him at the bar.
"Don't worry," he said as she tried to get a comb through her hair. He touched her cheek. "Wind
blown, you look more beautiful than ever." And he meant it. She would be the one.
She smiled uncertainly. "I almost didn't come tonight."
"No?" he said. "Developing a fear of older men? What do you want to drink?"
When the bartender brought her strawberry daiquiri, she sipped it through a straw. She had painted