"Moorcock, Michael - Behold The Man2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moorcock Michael)

"I'm all right," he said.
There was silence for a while as they smoked.
Eventually, and in spite of knowing what the result would
be if he did so, he found himself talking.
"It's ironic, isn't it?" he began.
He waited for her reply. She would delay for a little
while yet.
"What is?" she said at last.
"All this. You spend all day trying to help sexual neurotics
to become normal. You spend your nights doing what they
do."
"Not to the same extent. You know it's all a matter of
degree."
"So you say."
He turned his head and looked at her face in the starlight
from the window. She was a gaunt-featured redhead, with
the calm, professional seducer's voice of the psychiatric social
worker that she was. It was a voice that was soft, reasonable
and insincere. Only occasionally, when she became particu-
larly agitated, did her voice begin to indicate her real charac-
ter. Her features never seemed to be in repose, even when
she slept. Her eyes were forever wary, her movements rarely
spontaneous. Every inch of her was protected, which was
probably why she got so little pleasure from ordinary love-
niaking.
"You just can't let yourself go, can you?" he said.
"Oh, shut up, Karl. Have a look at yourself if you're
looking for a neurotic mess."
Both were amateur psychiatristsshe a psychiatric social
worker, he merely a reader, a dabbler, though he had done
a year's study some time ago when he had planned to be-
come a psychiatrist. They used the terminology of psychia-
try freely. They felt happier if they could name something.
He rolled away from her, groping for the ashtray on the
bedside table, catching a glance of himself in the dressing
table mirror. He was a sallow, intense, moody Jewish book-
seller, with a head full of images and unresolved obsessions,
a body full of emotions. He always lost these arguments
with Monica. Verbally, she was the dominant one. This kind
of exchange often seemed to him more perverse than their
lovemaking, where usually at least his role was masculine.
Essentially, he realized, he was passive, masochistic, in-
decisive. Even his anger, which came frequently, was im-
potent. Monica was ten years older than he was, ten years
more bitter. As an individual, of course, she had far more
dynamism than he had; but as a psychiatric social worker
she had had just as many failures. She plugged on, becoming
increasingly cynical on the surface but still, perhaps, hoping
for a few spectacular successes with patients. They tried to
do too much, that was the trouble, he thought. The priests