"Barry N Malzberg - Ready When You Are" - читать интересную книгу автора (Malzberg Barry N)

could it be any better?"
The splendid Eve grinds a hip, brushes a breast to his side, touches his
back. "Who is to know?" she says. "If you say it's so, then it is so." An
actress, not introspective like most of them, Eve Harlow seems to have
exhausted most of her capacity for invention by accepting her change of
name. Twice married and twice divorced with many feature films beside her
and one Academy Award for best supporting, she lives in an eternal,
glistening present and tries not to think of metaphor. Or so she had once
told Finzie in one of their serious conversations. "You can make it better
if you want," she says. "You can make it even better than that."
Her hand pleads exactingly for a more convincing gesture, Finzie gives it
to her. Unheeded now, the film clatters on in the clutch of the player,
the scenes of the great dictator's magnanimity and sexual skills not to be
noticed by the pair tangled on the bed. It is splendor, splendor Finzie
thinks, but now and again that perilous insertion fails and he must start
all over again. Take five, take six. Climb the slippery and elusive
Pyrenees. Groan the expiring sigh of the damned and the doomed into the
solid panels of his lady's neck.
And that groan then the true encapsulation of an admission which Finzie
could not have otherwise made: somewhere back there in Flatbush the kid,
not yet a superhero, not even a top student in his audiovisual course,
tugs for a firmer grip upon himself, trying to overturn that sense of
fragility and despair which utterly encapsulates; but the mature Finzie,
this sliding and groaning Finzie as it were, cannot help the kid, cannot
communicate in any way. Finzie has his own and fraught concerns, not only
sexual climax but enlightenment seems to spill as he allows the calming
and soothing gestures of that appendage, Eve Harlow, to carry him his
anguished way home. In the spaces of his own theatre, on the internal
screen, an ever-greater and wondrous film of another kind seems to be
unreeling but Finzie is not able to see it now, so narrow is his funnel of
attention, so elongate the tube of concentration. Oh Eve, oh Eve this
famous filmmaker grunts, oh Eve, hold me how he cries and softly,
insistently, in search of a plum role, Eve Harlow gathers him in.

Later, sometime after the press has disbanded and the juries have returned
to their individual countries of origin, after the starlets have replaced
their upper garments and the last cajoling interviewer has packed away
recorder and headed for the Concorde, Finzie walks out and along the
waters by himself, the fine grains of beach glinting at him with small and
confidential messages. Gone too is Eve Harlow, returning to loop dialogue
on a romantic comedy, then an Arthur Miller revival in London for a few
months for the prestige before she returns to Finzie's palatial, guarded,
hidden estate in Glendale where she has promised to live with him and
embark upon pre-production. All alone now except for his memories, his
conscience, and his agent is this Finzie who walks slowly along the beach,
pondering many possibilities and the nature of his destiny. Superguy
Finzie, his Leaf of Gold-winning autobiographical odyssey already booked
into a thousand theatres worldwide, more thousands to follow: Finzie
sending unanswered and unanswerable messages to the kid in Flatbush who
perished in an apartment building fire in 1963 and whose ashes were