"Bowes-ShadowAndGunman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bowes Richard)

and said, "What makes this an Irish joke is that the bartender has all the
money."

At that moment someone knocked on the door upstairs. Dr. X rose, shook my hand,
and said, "See you next Saturday?" as if he looked forward to it. I nodded
eagerly.

A fox-faced man with red hair, the next patient, brushed past me on the cellar
steps. Stacey was not to be found on the first floor and I was shy about going
upstairs. Max still lay on the library couch. "Go in peace," he said as I left.

Outside was a cold drizzle. That didn't bother me. My pulses skipped. Lights
were on in other houses. But Stacey's, when I looked back from the end of the
driveway, was dark. Then I saw her at an upstairs window. My heart bounded with
speed and passion. She saw me. Or rather she saw the one who for a moment stood
beside me. Because he blew her a kiss and she returned it.

Too excited to let that worry me, with a Bostonian's sixth sense, I headed for
the nearest streetcar stop.

In the play, Falstaff says about Pores, "If men were saved by merit what hole in
hell were hot enough for him." Monday at rehearsal, remembering all Dr. X had
told me, I bounced on my toes and talked like Fred who lived in a projects.

"Easy does it, Grierson," said Mr. Royce, the faculty advisor. "This is
Shakespeare, not the Untouchables."

Over the next couple of weeks, I saw Dr. X regularly. Like amphetamine, he was
never as good as that first time. When there were pills on the table he'd give
me an upper or a downer. If there weren't, he borrowed some of mine.

I came to understand that there were ways in which he was a fool. Sometimes he
said stuff like, "I'm a quarter Irish, a quarter French, a quarter English with
a bit of German and smattering of Jew. Blood boils in me." He called speed
vitamins and claimed it enabled him to read other peoples' minds.

Despite that, he had his moments. "Who is the third who always walks beside
you?" he once asked. "When I count there's just you and me. But when I look
there is always another walking beside you." Later I realized he was
paraphrasing T.S. Eliot. But right then, the words hit home.

He followed it up. "Everybody's got another self, Kevin. Most people, the dull,
the mundane, never show it. But some get to let that dog run."

Every Saturday, I drove with Stacey out to her house. I thought about her
constantly. Everything else, school, family, Dr. Petrie, even the Gallery, was
backdrop to those rides. Yet, each week she seemed a little more distant. We
talked, but any mention by me of Dr. X and she became silent.

Max was always present and there were others: college guys in tweed jackets