"Esther M. Friesner - Helen Rembembers the Stork Club" - читать интересную книгу автора (Friesner Esther M)

ashes and little brown bits of bone. She's grown too weary to bother making new ones: They'll only die
and leave her all alone again, like Aggie did. She's heartsick at the very thought of facing more funerals
for those she's loved. They're gone, all gone, and she really doesn't know why she hasn't joined them.

Oh, wait, yes she does: Death is boring. Not as boring as the good old days back in Sparta when all she
had to look forward to was the loom by day and Menelaus grunting over her every second or third night,
but a close second.

Since death is not an option, she gets dressed and goes to Starbucks. The day passes with shopping at
Bendel's and Bloomie's and Bergdorf's, a brief phone call to arrange matters for the coming evening, and
tea at the Plaza Hotel. She's all by herself and looks well over thirty-five, so she's shunted aside despite
her standing reservation until such time as it suits the matre d' to decide she's visible again. Age before
beauty? This is Manhattan: Get real.

After tea there's time for one last spot of shoppingтАФthirty-three hundred years old and she hasn't got a
thing to wear tonightтАФso she strolls down Fifth Avenue to Saks. Just across the street from the great
department store, St. Patrick's Cathedral catches the golden light of the declining sun, but Helen has no
patience for any fading beauty but her own, especially when it comes from the enemy's camp. She glares
at the towering spires and mutters dreadful imprecations against the upstart Galilean whose minions
hounded Daddy to his death. Once upon a time, when Aggie was still alive, she'd stolen a handful of holy
water from the font inside St. Patrick's, dribbled it into a self-sealing plastic baggie and brought it home
for the dog to drink. It was a petty vengeance, one that did no good and made no difference, unless she
counted Aggie's subsequent bout of tummy trouble and the cost of cleaning all her best rugs. She learned
a valuable lesson from that: Misplaced faith can give you the runs.

She never thought it was a good lesson, merely valuable. There is a difference, as she herself proved
when she first met Paris and stopped being good.

In Saks she's swarmed by cosmetics salesgirls as she tries to get from the front doors to the elevators.
Scylla and Charybdis must be working on commission: On the one hand she's doused with the latest
fragrance, on the other she's beset by unemployed actress/model maenads brandishing jars of overpriced
glyceryl stearate-enriched promises. The Galilean would be shocked to learn that there can be no true
miracles without faith plus retinol. She reads all the fashion magazines, she knows all the lies by heart, but
knowledge is never proof against desire. Helen still holds onto a measure of magic, the last scrapings of
her old powers. She wants to believe that if she stares long enough into the eyes of the painted waifs in
the print ads and invokes Aphrodite while anointing herself with the prescribed creams and potions, she'll
be granted the means to draw unto herself some measure of the modelsтАЩ youthful appeal and once more
be the woman for whom empires tumbled and cities burned. And why not? This is America. Money is
the greatest magic of them all.

It's just too tiresome a gauntlet to run if she wants to ascend to the Olympic heights of Better Dresses.
She decides to dress for the evening out of the garments she's already got on hand. Just so her foray into
Saks won't be for naught, she buys a spray bottle of eau de wishful thinking from an older saleswoman, a
condescending creature with an affected accent that staggers back and forth between Merrick and
Marseilles. Her face bears one less layer of shellac than the silver-blue nightmare roller coaster of her
hair, but she seems to think she's caught her youth by the wings and captured it in amber.

"Are you sure you couldn't use something else?тАЭ she asks Helen as she slides the charge slip across the
glass-topped counter. тАЬSomething for your face? We have a fabulous new line of renewal creams. I've
dropped a few samples for mature skin into your bag. You must try them; they work wonders. I wanted