"George R. R. Martin - Portraits of His Children" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin George R R)

In the morning she was gone.

Cantling woke late, too exhausted to make himself breakfast. Instead he dressed and walked into town,
to a small cafe in a quaint hundred-year-old brick building at the foot of the bluffs. He tried to sort things
out over coffee and blueberry pancakes.

None of it made any sense. It could not be happening, but it was; denial accomplished nothing. Cantling
forked down a mouthful of homemade blueberry pancake, but the only taste in his mouth was fear. He
was afraid for his sanity. He was afraid because he did not understand, did not want to understand. And
there was another, deeper, more basic fear.

He was afraid of what would come next. Richard Cantling had published nine novels.

He thought of Michelle. He could phone her, beg her to call it off before he went mad. She was his
daughter, his flesh and blood, surely she would listen to him. She loved him. Of course she did. And he
loved her too, no matter what she might think. Cantling knew his faults. He had examined himself
countless times, under various guises, in the pages of his books. He was impossibly stubborn, willful,
opinionated. He could be rigid and unbending. He could be cold. Still, he thought of himself as a decent
man. MichelleтАж she had inherited some of his perversity, she was furious at him, hate was so very close
to love, but surely she did not mean to do him serious harm.

Yes, he could phone Michelle, ask her to stop. Would she? If he begged her forgiveness, perhaps. That
day, that terrible day, she'd told him that she would never forgive him, never, but she couldn't have meant
that. She was his only child. The only child of his flesh, at any rate.

Cantling pushed away his empty plate and sat back. His mouth was set in a hard rigid line. Beg for
mercy? He did not like that. What had he done, after all? Why couldn't they understand? Helen had
never understood and Michelle was as blind as her mother. A writer must live for his work. What had he
done that was so terrible? What had he done that required forgiveness? Michelle ought to be the one
phoning him.

The hell with it, Cantling thought. He refused to be cowed. He was right; she was wrong. Let Michelle
call him if she wanted a rapprochement. She was not going to terrify him into submission. What was he
so afraid of, anyway? Let her send her portraits, all the portraits she wanted to paint. He'd hang them up
on his walls, display the paintings proudly (they were really an hommage to his work, after all), and if the
damned things came alive at night and prowled through his house, so be it. He'd enjoy their visits.
Cantling smiled. He'd certainly enjoyed Cissy, no doubt of that. Part of him hoped she'd come back. And
even Dunnahoo, well, he was an insolent kid, but there was no real harm in him, he just liked to mouth
off.

Why, now that he stopped to consider it, Cantling found that the possibilities had a certain intoxicating
charm. He was uniquely privileged. Scott Fitzgerald never attended one of Gatsby's fabulous parties,
Conan Doyle could never really sit down with Holmes and Watson, Nabokov never actually tumbled
Lolita. What would they have said to the idea?

The more he considered things, the more cheerful he became. Michelle was trying to rebuke him, to
frighten him, but she was really giving him a delicious experience. He could play chess with Sergei
Tederenko, the cynical emigre hustler from En Passant. He could argue politics with Frank Corwin, the
union organizer from his Depression novel, Times Are Hard. He might flirt with beautiful Beth
McKenzie, go dancing with crazy old Miss Aggie, seduce the Danzinger twins and fulfill the one sexual