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

stutters. "Burroughs never wrote about monsters as good as
your Morlocks."

Wells is nonplussed. "Monsters."

"Yes." Kessel feels something's going wrong, but he sees
no way out. "But he does put more romance in his stories.
That princess--Deja Thoris?"

All Wells can think of is Tarzan in his loincloth on the
movie screen, and the moronic audience. After a lifetime of
struggling, a hundred books written to change the world, in
the service of men like this, is this all his work has come
to? To be compared to the writer of pulp trash? To "Eedgar
Rice Burroughs?" He laughs aloud.

At Wells's laugh, Kessel stops. He knows he's done
something wrong, but he doesn't know what.

Wells's weariness has dropped down onto his shoulders
again like an iron cloak. "Young man--go away," he says.
"You don't know what you're saying. Go back to Buffalo."

Kessel's face burns. He stumbles from the table. The
room is full of noise and laughter. He's run up against the
wall again. He's just an ignorant polack after all; it's
his stupid accent, his clothes. He should have talked about
something else--_ T_ h_ e _ O_ u_ t_ l_ i_ n_ e _ o_ f
_ H_ i_ s_ t_ o_ r_ y, politics. But
what made him think he could talk like an equal to a man
like Wells in the first place? Wells lives in a different
world. The future is for men like him. Kessel feels
himself the prey of fantasies. It's a bitter joke.

He clutches the bar, orders another beer. His reflection
in the mirror behind the ranked bottles is small and ugly.
 "Whatsa matter, Jack?" Turkel asks him. "Didn't he want
to dance neither?"

And that's the story, essentially, that never happened.

Not long after this, Kessel did go back to Buffalo.
During the Second World War he worked as a crane operator in
the 40-inch rolling mill of Bethlehem Steel. He met his
wife, Angela Giorlandino, during the war, and they married
in June 1945. After the war he quit the plant and became a
carpenter. Their first child, a girl, died in infancy.
Their second, a boy, was born in 1950. At that time Kessel
began building the house that, like so many things in his
life, he was never to entirely complete. He worked hard,