"C M Kornbluth - The Mindworm" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kornbluth C M)

"Be wonderful!" The convertible cut left on an odd-numbered street.



"Play hooky, you said. What do you do?"



"Advertising."
 "Advertising!"Dolly wanted to kickherself for ever having doubted, for ever having thought in low,
self-loathing moments that it wouldn't work out, that she'd marry a grocer or a mechanic and live



foreverafter in a smelly tenement and grow old and sick and stooped. She felt vaguely in her happy daze
that it might have been cuter, she might have accidentally pushed him into a pond or something, but this
was cute enough. An advertising man, leopard-skin seat covers . . . what more could a girl with a sexy
smile and a nice little figure want?



Speeding down theSouthShoreshe learned that his name was Michael Brent, exactly as it ought to be.
She wished she could tell him she was Jennifer Brown or one of those real cute names they had
nowadays, but was reassured when he told her he thought Dolly Gonzalez was a beautiful name. He
didn't, and she noticed the omission, add: "It's the most beautiful name I ever heard!" That, she
comfortably thought as she settled herself against the cushions, would come later.



They stopped atMedfordfor lunch, a wonderful lunch in a little restaurant where you went down some
steps and there were candles on the table. She called him "Michael" and he called her "Dolly." She
learned that he liked dark girls and thought the stories in True Story really were true, and that he thought
she was just tall enough, and that Greer Garson was wonderful, but not the way she was, and that he
thought her dress was just wonderful.



They drove slowly afterMedford, and Michael Brent did most of the talking. He had traveled all over the
world. He had been in the war and woundedтАФjust a flesh wound. He was thirty-eight, and had been
married once, but she died. There were no children. He was alone in the world. He had nobody to share
his town house in the 50's, his country place inWestchester,his lodge in theMainewoods. Every word sent
the girl floating higher and higher on a tide of happiness; the signs were unmistakable.



When they reached Montauk Point, the last sandy bit of the continent before blue water and Europe, it
was sunset, with a great wrinkled sheet of purple and rose stretching half across the sky and the first stars
appearing above the dark horizon of the water.