ТОП просматриваемых книг сайта:
The Fifth Woman. Nona Caspers
Читать онлайн.Название The Fifth Woman
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781946448187
Автор произведения Nona Caspers
Жанр Здоровье
Серия Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction
Издательство Ingram
After the weather, we would talk about the people in the town, or the people living outside of town whom we both knew. Sometimes she told me sad stories about people I did not remember or perhaps had never met. I liked the sound of her voice, and I liked hearing the details of other people’s lives, people wounded in hunting accidents or run over by farm machinery or their children run over or somehow damaged by farm machinery.
The stories were often harsh. But my mother told them gently. She always said, at the end, “Isn’t that sad?” And she asked me to pray for so-and-so, and I said I would, even though I knew I wouldn’t because I didn’t know how. Sometimes I would stand in my living room and shut my eyes and say in my mind, I wish you all the best, or, I wish you a good day. If I was passing a church in the City, I would step inside and light a candle, or I would see a candle while seated at a table in a restaurant, and I would suddenly remember a story my mother had told me.
I was confused about what to ask for. Happiness seemed too large, given that they had lost limbs or children, or their children had lost limbs, or they had cancer. Once, in a church, I kneeled in front of a statue of some saint or other, the one with the little dog, and I folded my hands and said a Hail Mary.
About my life, in my little apartment in the City, I said very little. “How is your thesis going?” she asked several times. It was going well, I told her, it was always going well, and sometimes this was true, and sometimes it was almost true. More often it was not true.
One day, toward the end of my stay in the building, when the thesis was almost finished and had indeed gone well, though I didn’t know that yet, I called her early on a Monday morning. Her voice sounded different, fainter, and further away. She sounded puzzled.
“Is this you?” she asked several times.
“Yes, of course it’s me,” I said.
“Are you OK?” she asked several times. “It’s Monday morning, you have to go to work.”
She was right about that.
I told her I was not OK, but then, at the sound of her breathing, I took it back and said I was kidding, I was just a little tired.
Her voice remained faint and far away. There was the sound of her house barring the wind and the sound of my two rooms cloistered in fog. And then, the beginning of an even longer silence.
I kept a gun in the bottom drawer of my dresser. The black metal barrel like a dog’s snout. The chamber—which did move and could hold bullets—was empty. If Michelle had been alive, she would never have let me keep it. But, if she had been alive, this story never would have happened.
I found the gun while digging up a plant behind the rhododendron grove in the park. I wanted to bring the plant—the one that bloomed purple flowers she had liked—into my apartment for company. The park was so big, and so many plants flourished there, including many of these unofficial plants, that I didn’t think it would miss the one. I had brought a plastic bag with paper towels soaked in water tucked inside. I had excavated the roots and was ready to put them into the bag when the black metal of the gun glimmered up at me. Without really thinking about what I was doing, and even though I knew I should report the gun to the police, I plucked it out of the ground, unplugged the dirt from its barrel, wiped off the metal with my watchman’s cap, and slipped it into my jacket pocket.
Home in my studio apartment above the alley, I laid the gun on a towel on my small writing table. The plant fit nicely into a clay pot I had found in the alley some time earlier. I put the plant on the table next to the gun.
That night I went to the movies. In the movie I saw, Gregory so desperately loves Clara he can see no other way to be with her but to shoot her husband; the dead man’s blood trickles out from his chest onto the kitchen floor like a red string. They will never be happy, I thought. Yet, in the next scene, Gregory and Clara are holding hands outside a hut in the mountains of Chiapas. They cook over fire and are teaching children to read. Clara cuts her hair and wears bandannas; Gregory tans an earthy brown and grows a beard.
I wanted the movie to end with them building a school or something, but of course they are caught. In the final scene Clara sits under a thatched canopy reading a book. A shadow of a figure blocks the light and darkens her back; her bandanna is askew; she delicately straightens it, and turns. The music imitates a heartbeat to tell us that she has been waiting for this ending. Gregory is walking down a hill toward her, in time with the music. He slows—surprise and then recognition. The camera zooms in to his face, which looks nothing like the face of the desperate lover with the gun in the beginning of the movie.
The movie ends.
When Michelle’s cousin finally answered my knock she was wearing a robe made out of quilts.
“Michelle had a robe like that,” I said.
She looked at me. I wanted her to invite me in, to offer me something to drink. She had moved to the City in spring and now it was summer and we hadn’t seen each other since the funeral.
I stood at the door waiting.
She told me she couldn’t let me in because she hadn’t fully unpacked or cleaned her house. “The dust,” she said. “The clutter.” As soon as she spoke, I knew why I was there—they had the same voice, deep and solid as tree bark.
I told her I didn’t mind dust or clutter, I would shut my eyes if she wanted me to, I would walk in backward, or she could blindfold me.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.