"MacDonald, John - Travis Mcgee 07 - Darker Than Amber" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacDonald John D)

skyrockets-just a quiet, pretty, decent gal with a nice oblique sense of
fun and games, and the manifest destiny of being a good wife.

After three years of Charlie, she was gaunted, shrill, shaky, and
couldn't tell you what time it was without her eyes filling with tears.
So I took her cruising. You have to let them talk it out. She felt
enormous guilt at not being able to make the marriage work. But the
more she talked, the more I realized she hadn't had a chance. She was
too passive, too permissive, too subdued for an emotional fascist like
Charlie. He had leaned too hard. He had eroded her confidence in
herself, in everything she thought she was able to do, from meeting
people to cooking dinner to driving a car. Finally he had gone to work
on her sexual capacities. Were the sexes reversed, you could call it
emasculation. People like Charlie work toward total and perpetual
domination. They feed on the mate. And Vidge didn't even realize that
running away from him had been a form of self-preservation, a way of
trying to hang fast to the last crumbs of identity and pride.

At first she talked endlessly, but she couldn't get all the way down to
it. She kept saying what a great guy he was and how she had failed him
in everything. The third evening, at anchor in a quiet corner of
Florida Bay, I managed to get enough of Dr. Travis McGee's truth serum
into her. Clean, pure Plymouth gin. By arguing with her, contradicting
her, I edged her ever closer to the truth. And in the final half hour,
before she passed out, she broke through the barrier and described how
much she truly hated that destructive, domineering son of a bitch
Charlie. It was very graphic, and she had no idea I was taping it. When
she passed out I toted her to the guest stateroom and tucked her in. She
slept a little better than around the clock, and was subdued and rueful
the next day. That evening she started handing me the Charlie-myth
again, and what a failure she was. I played her tape for her. She had
hysterics which settled down into a good long hard cry. And after that
she was famished enough to eat twenty ounces of rare steak. She slept
the clock around again, and woke up feeling that maybe it would be
pointless to give the marriage another big try.

Vidge and I had a private history of a small affair way back. It would
have been better if we had both wanted the same things out of life. But
we had kidded ourselves and each other for a time--before reality set
in.

The attempt to relive that pleasant nostalgia was a clumsy failure.
Charlie had so thoroughly insulted her womanhood she was far too nervous
and anxious to be reached. She was certain she had become frigid. I
attempted another of Dr. McGee's famous nostrums. I roused her early,
and I gave her a full day of swimming, fishing, beachcombing, skindiving
and maintenance and housekeeping chores aboard the Flush. I gave her a
day that would have reminded any marine of boot camp. That night, with
the waxing moon at the half, and a good breeze keeping the mosquitoes
away from the sun deck, she was too sodden with exhaustion to think of