"Thomas M. Disch - The Businessman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Disch Thomas M)

get sloppy about what he wore; that would have been a mistake, since his company was
particular about its executives' dress code. He bought new shirts and suits as his bulk
demanded and, in general, surrendered to the inevitable.

A businessman: that was the image he liked to think he presented. A businessman who
played golf and smoked dollar cigars and spent a lot of money on drab clothes. A big, fat
businessman eating boozy lunches and boozier dinners and leading his peer-group into the
life-styles appropriate to middle age.

Not all his peers were prepared to follow him down this path. As the '70s advanced,
the serious jocks got more serious. You could see them out jogging on the winding lanes of
Willowville, where there'd never been pedestrians before, their styled hair bouncing on their
shoulders, their jogging suits stained dark with sweat, their faces locked into defiant grins.
Not for Glandier. For him it was the back yard, the lawn chair, a daquiri, a magazine. When old
college buddies kidded him about it, he made Falstaff-like jokes at his own expense and filed
away his resentment for later revenge. The older executives at work became friendlier. They
liked to see a young man in such a hurry to join them in their decrepitude.

Once, drunk and soaking complacently in the bathtub, it dawned on Glandier that
_every_ businessman at some point in his life must have come to this same decision - to
_become_ a businessman and leave his youth behind. Now, at forty-one, the transformation
was complete, but the bottom had dropped out of the image. Without a wife to show for
himself, a wife such as Giselle had been - pretty, deferential, and thirteen years younger than
he - there was no longer that important announcement being broadcast to the world
concerning his undiminished vitality in the physical department that mattered most of all, the
department of sex. He had entered upon a new and scarier stage of disintegration. His figure
was ballooning from the slack-muscled grossness allowable in a Brando or an Elvis to the
blimpy, sexless softness of an out-and-out fatso. Even the shape and meaning of his face was
altering.

He knew he looked terrible, that people made remarks about him, even the secretaries
(_especially_ the secretaries), that he was regarded, in some quarters, as a man who was
coming apart at the seams (as his suits were, once again). But he couldn't help himself. He
would get home at night after a hefty dinner at a downtown restaurant and immediately start
swilling Heinekens and Dorito Tortilla Chips in front of the TV. The beer made him put on
weight faster than hard liquor would have, but it moderated his tendency to get stinking drunk
every weekday night. This way at least he could keep his wits about him, and when there
wasn't anything worth watching after the news, which was usually the case, he could beaver
away at the dining-room table, compiling or inventing statistics to stuff in reports. The work
was the thing that kept him going. The work and the idea that somehow things were going to
change, that he was on the verge of something important. Even if that importance was a
negative factor, Glandier needed it in order to maintain a balance between himself and the
universe, one in which the latter did not too much preponderate.

He figured that people supposed he was becoming so fat as a result of the shock of his
wife's death in such unsavory circumstances. Maybe there was even something to be said for
that idea. Maybe he was feeling some kind of buried guilt (it was possible), and that guilt
triggered this terrible craving he felt whenever he resisted the least doughnut. If so, he was
glad that the symptom offered no clue to the crime. There was no M chalked on the back of
his jacket for everyone but himself to see.