"Harlan Ellison - Love ain,t nothing" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

turns one off, they set up artificial grounds for a potential relationship that they have to
maintain all through the rest of the association. I know a young woman who met a guy at a party.
He turned her on, and he started voicing some of his rustic views on busing. She had worked for
the integration legislation as a regional attach├й to one of the senators pushing the facilitation
of busing. She came out of ten years of hard and thankless work trying to achieve racial balance.
He was a divorced businessman with two kids, who was, at heart, a man who feared and hated blacks.
Though he would have gone to his grave swearing there wasn't a scintilla of bigotry in his well-
clothed body. But they turned each other on, and she listened and nodded, and said nothing. They
started dating. It lasted six months. Then it fell apart. When his narrow view of the world became
too much for her, she started to fight back. Now he tells everyone she was a "castrating bitch"
and she harbors guilt feelings for her own intransigency. False and untenable rules for the


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relationship had been the order of their mating from the git-go. It was doomed to fail.
Earlier, I passed along a generality. There are, of course, exceptions. There are women who listen
to the crapola put out by guys at parties because they want to get laid, and there are guys who
put up with women's inanities because they want to be polite. It happens. But the point still
holds. They do it because they want to be liked. They lie and listen to lies so they'll be
accepted. The first faint stirrings of love--barely codified, still inarticulate--force them into
the role of liar.
And then the lies, once having been freed from Pandora's Hope Chest, begin to breed. They multiply
like maggots and riddle a relationship like a submarine hit by a depth charge. Consider just the
most obvious ones we've all either used or been victimized by:
You walk into a room and she (or he) is brooding.
"What's the matter, something wrong, something bothering you?" That's what you say.
Then he (or she) replies, "Nothing."
A lie, a bald-faced lie. You know damned well there's something wrong. The way the legs are
crossed, the way the arms are folded, that telltale pursing of the lips, the vacant, abstracted
stare, the peremptory way the words are bitten off. There's something wrong. But she (or he) says,
"Nothing."
Is it because the brooding party really has something heavy to brood about and, out of love,
chooses to lie rather than to lay it on the other person? Is it (more likely) that the brooder has
been brought down by something the other party did, and wants to whip a little unconscious, free-
floating guilt on the perpetrator before spilling the loadof shit being carried in the gut? Is it
part of the stylized ritual of hide-and-seek so many lovers play? Is it a physical manifestation
of the brooding party's having done something they mutually consider "wrong" (like going out and
getting laid on the sly), and getting him or herself set to rationalize it in such a way that the
other member of the team feels like the criminal, using the brooding dark mood as a kind of head
start in the argument that will follow?
What does it matter? What we're dealing with here is dishonesty, cupidity, misdirection, acting-
out ... lying.
Here's another one. And you've all been on one or the other end of this one:
"No, I have a headache."
"No, I'm tired."
"No, I'm a little inflamed."
"No, I have a hard day tomorrow."
"No, it isn't right."