"John Kessel - Buffalo" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kessel John)

other, in his mind--the future, their peril and hope. Moths
fluttering through the window beat themselves against the
lampshade and fell onto the manuscript; he brushed them away
unconsciously and continued, furiously, in a white heat. The
time traveler, battered and hungry, returning from the
future with a warning, and a flower.

He opens the hotel windows all the way but the curtains
aren't stirred by a breath of air. Below, in the street, he
hears the sound of traffic, and music. He decides to send a
telegram to Moura, but after several false starts he finds
he has nothing to say. Why has she refused to marry him?
Maybe he is finally too old, and the magnetism of sex or
power or intellect that has drawn women to him for forty
years has finally all been squandered. The prospect of
spending the last years remaining to him alone fills him
with dread.

He turns on the radio, gets successive band shows: Morton
Downey. Fats Waller. Jazz. Paging through the newspaper,
he comes across an advertisement for the Ellington orchestra
Darrow mentioned; it's at the ballroom just down the block.
But the thought of a smoky room doesn't appeal to him. He
considers the cinema. He has never been much for the
"movies." Though he thinks them an unrivaled opportunity to
educate, that promise has never been properly seized--something
he hopes to do in _ T_ h_ i_ n_ g_ s _ t_ o _ C_ o_ m_ e. The newspaper
reveals an
uninspiring selection: "20 Million Sweethearts," a musical
at the Earle, "The Black Cat," with Boris Karloff and Bela
Lugosi at the Rialto, and "Tarzan and His Mate" at the
Palace. To these Americans he is the equivalent of this
hack, Edgar Rice Burroughs. The books I read as a child,
that fired my father's imagination and my own, Wells
considers his frivolous apprentice work. His serious work
is discounted. His ideas mean nothing.

Wells decides to try the Tarzan movie. He dresses for
the sultry weather--Washington in May is like high summer in
London and goes down to the lobby. He checks his street
guide and takes the streetcar to the Palace Theater, where
he buys an orchestra seat, for twenty-five cents to see
"Tarzan and His Mate."

It is a perfectly wretched movie, comprised wholly of
romantic fantasy, melodrama and sexual innuendo. The
dramatic leads perform with wooden idiocy surpassed only by
the idiocy of the screenplay. Wells is attracted by the
undeniable charms of the young heroine, Maureen O'Sullivan,
but the film is devoid of intellectual content. Thinking of