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

"Huh?тАЭ says Helen.

That's when he tells her she's the most beautiful woman in the world. It's only an accident that she catches
him checking his watch just before he says that he really can't control himself much longer, he wants to
get her alone, he wants her, and can they go back to her place now. She puts on a smile that's just as
sincere as his recitation of work-for-hire desire and orders another drink instead.

Let her wait. Let that little girl, that child he's hoping to rendezvous with after he's serviced Helen, wait.
(Helen knows there's another woman on his mind; he wears anticipation like aftershave.) Helen's paid her
dues at the woman's waiting game: Waiting to marry; waiting for Menelaus to finish his business with her
body and let her sleep; waiting for Paris to get a clue that she was willing, and not just because Aphrodite
was pulling the strings; waiting for the war to start, to end; waiting to hear Menelaus's verdict pronounced
against her when the Achaeans finally took Troy and brought her back from the burning walls to stand
before her sour-eyed cuckold.

That was when she'd made the waiting stop. Then, with Paris dead and kindly Hecuba driven barking
mad, with Hector's little son thrown from the heights of the city's parapet, fragile skull and bones
shattered on the rocks, solely because Agamemnon feared the possibility that those infant hands might
someday take up sword and shield and vengeance.

That was when, with a flash of insight worthy of the best and brightest of Daddy's thunderbolts, Helen
saw how much her husband's angry face had aged during the war years. He hadn't been a Cretan wall
painting when she'd married him, but now he reminded her of a cured olive, so brown and wrinkled,
hiding something hard and bitter at the core.

The legends claimed that her next move was sly and calculated, altogether womanly: She told him that if
he wanted her dead she'd make it easy for him by giving his sword an unobstructed path to her heart.
With those words she'd opened her gown, baring her breasts to the sun. They were perfect, firm despite
all the children that she'd borne and suckled, white and round as ewe's-milk cheeses. Menelaus took one
look and the bitter old man felt a sudden stiffening in the loins that made the most blood-soaked,
smoke-stained Mykenaean soldier look up from the Trojan woman he was raping and smile indulgently.

Sure, she's the reason why so many of our friends are dead, why we've wasted ten years of our
lives at the business of slaughter, but just get a load of those tits! Don't try telling me that's not
worth fighting for!

Helen's breasts are still pretty hot stuff, not that her escort will even notice. She makes a private bet with
herselfтАФhis tip, double or nothingтАФthat this handsome little sprat will either insist on the dusky mercy of
candlelight in the bedroom or no light at all. She can almost hear him muttering his excuses in her ear,
pleading Romanticism in the first degree when the truth is a charge of Premeditated Disgust. He'll screw
an old woman for money, but look at that body first? Gross.

And the saddest part of it all is that he'll never know what he's missing. The face that launched a thousand
ships is somewhat on the skids, but from the collarbone down, Helen is still Zeus's child. The flesh has
dwindled here and there, but nowhere that counts, and the skin is still a creamy, rose-tinged white as
smooth as any statue's skillfully sculpted arse-and-altogether.

Helen finishes her drink and sets the drained glass down slowly, deliberately stretching out the gesture
just because she can. She lowers her silver-shadowed eyes and gives her pretty boy a surreptitious