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

His first reaction was that it was a fine, fine piece of work, maybe the best thing that Michelle Cantling
had ever done.

Then, belatedly, the admiration washed away, and was replaced by anger. It wasn't her. It wasn't
Michelle. Which meant it wasn't a replacement for the portrait she had so willfully vandalized. It wasтАж
something else.

Someone else.

It was a face he had never before laid eyes on. But it was a face he recognized as readily as if he had
looked on it a thousand times. Oh, yes.

The man in the portrait was young. Twenty, maybe even younger, though his curly brown hair was
already well-streaked with gray. It was unruly hair, disarrayed as if the man had just come from sleep,
falling forward into his eyes. Those eyes were a bright green, lazy eyes somehow, shining with some
secret amusement. He had high Cantling cheekbones, but the jawline was all wrong for a relative.
Beneath a wide, flat nose, he wore a sardonic smile; his whole posture was somehow insolent. The
portrait showed him dressed in faded dungarees and a raveled WMCA Good Guy sweatshirt, with a
half-eaten raw onion in one hand. The background was a brick wall covered with graffiti.

Cantling had created him.

Edward Donohue. Dunnahoo, that's what they'd called him, his friends and peers, the other characters in
Richard Cantling's first novel, Hangin' Out. Dunnahoo had been the protagonist. A wise guy, a smart
mouth, too damn bright for his own good. Looking down at the portrait, Cantling felt as if he'd known
him for half his life. As indeed he had, in a way. Known him and, yes, cherished him, in the peculiar way
a writer can cherish one of his characters.

Michelle had captured him true. Cantling stared at the painting and it all came back to him, all the events
he had bled over so long ago, all the people he had fashioned and described with such loving care. He
remembered Jocko, and the Squid, and Nancy, and Ricci's Pizzeria where so much of the book's action
had taken place (he could see it vividly in his mind's eye), and the business with Arthur and the
motorcycle, and the climactic pizza fight. And Dunnahoo. Dunnahoo especially. Smarting off, fooling
around, hanging out, coming of age. "Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke," he said. A dozen times or so. It
was the book's closing line.

For a moment, Richard Cantling felt a vast, strange affection well up inside him, as if he had just been
reunited with an old, lost friend.

And then, almost as an afterthought, he remembered all the ugly words that he and Michelle had flung at
each other that night, and suddenly it made sense. Cantling's face went hard. "Bitch," he said aloud. He
turned away in fury, helpless without a target for his anger. "Bitch," he said again, as he slammed the door
of the den behind him.

"Bitch," he had called her.

She turned around with the knife in her hand. Her eyes were raw and red from crying. She had the smile
in her hand. She balled it up and threw it at him. "Here, you bastard, you like the damned smile so much,
here it is."