"Bukowski, Charles - Short Stories Collection" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bukowski Charles)

"Aren't you going to answer?"
"No! Why should I?"
It rang again. The sound of the bell entered the room and searched them
out, scaled and scalded their skins, pummeled them with crawling eyes.
Then it was silent.
And the feet turned with their sound, turning and guiding some monster,
taking it back down the stairwell, one two three, 1, 2, 3; and then gone.
"I wonder," he said, still not moving, "what that was?"
"I don't know," she said, bending double at the waist and pulling her
petticoat back over her head.
"Here!" she yelled. "Here!" holding her arms out like feelers.
He finished yanking the petticoat off over her head with some distaste.
"Why do you women wear this crap?" he asked in a loud voice.
She didn't feel an answer was necessary and went over and pulled
Lawrence out from under the bed. Then she got into bed with Lorenzo and her
husband sat on the couch.
"They built a little shrine for him," he said.
"Who?" she asked irritably.
"Lawrence."
"Oh."
"They have a picture of it in that book."
"Yes, I've seen it."
"Have you ever seen a dog-graveyard?"
"What?"
"A dog-graveyard."
"Well, what about it?"
"They always have flowers. Every dog always has flowers, fresh, all in
neat little clusters on each grave. It's enough to make you cry."
She found her place in the book again, like a person searching for
solitude in the middle of a lake: So the bitter months dragged by miserably,
accompanied by Lorenzo's tragic feeling of loss, his-
"I wish I had studied ballet," he said. "I go about all slumped over
but that's because my spirit is wilted. I'm really lithe, ready to tumble on
spring mattresses of some sort. I should have been a frog, at least. You'll
see. Someday I'm going to turn into a frog."
Her lake rippled with the irritating breeze: "Well, for heaven's sake,
study ballet! Go at night! Get rid of your belly! Leap around! Be a frog!"
"You mean after WORK?" he asked woefully.
"God," she said, "you want everything for nothing." She got up and went
to the bathroom and closed the door.
She doesn't understand, he thought, sitting on the couch naked, she
doesn't understand that I'm joking. She's so god-damned serious. Everything
I say is supposed to carry truth or tragic import, or insight or something.
I've been through all that!
He noticed a pencil-scrawled piece of paper, in her handwriting, on the
side table. He picked it up:
My husband is a poet published alongside Sartre and Lorca;
he writes about insanity and Nietzsche and Lawrence,
but what has he written about me?
she reads the funnies