"Murphy, Pat - Departure" - читать интересную книгу автора (Murphy Pat)

alone.

On the side of the train that took her to work, someone had painted a running
wolf. Gray and black, with slashes of red for the eyes. She boarded that car and
puzzled over the graffiti on her way to work. If she squinted, she thought she
could almost read it -- not read the letters perhaps, but figure out the sense
of it. Something about darkness and silence. Something about freedom and pain.

Marsha bustled around the studio apartment, fixing coffee and talking about the
art opening. Jan sat on the couch, watching the snow fall outside. The apartment
smelled faintly of perfume and powder.

"You just don't give yourself a chance," Marsha said. "You need to explore.
Experiment. Really let yourself go wild."

Jan studied the coffee in her cup. The cream formed white swirls, like
hurricanes viewed from space. "I'm thinking of going away," she told Marsha.

Her friend was rummaging in the closet, looking for the dress she wanted Jan to
wear. "Going where?"

Jan shrugged. "Away."

"I could use a vacation myself," Marsha said. "Bermuda maybe? Ah, here it is!"
She pulled a black dress from the closet. "I bought it on sale. I've been trying
to diet. down a size, but I just can't fit into it."

At Marsha's insistence, Jan put on the dress. Marsha put up Jan's hair and
applied eye liner and shadow to her eyes. "You can't look until I'm done. Oh,
you look so good."

Jan was startled by her reflection in the mirror. Her eyes had a faintly
carnivorous look. Her lips were red -- Marsha's choice of lipstick.

They took a cab to the gallery. Staring out the window, Jan saw the reflected
image of her own face: red lips, dark eyes. She listened to the hiss of the
cab's tires against the wet pavement. She was cold --the fur wrap that Marsha
had loaned her was for show, not warmth -- but the cold was a distant feeling
somehow unreal. She liked the feel of the fur against her shoulders.

The gallery was warm and crowded. She drank a glass of white wine --then
another. She lost track of Marsha in the crowd and wandered through the gallery,
stopping before each painting. The images were dark and violent: a tattooed man
with the head of a dog; a group of punks i n the subway, their eyes glowing in
the dim light; a naked woman running down a dark street, her body silver in the
moonlight, her shadow twisted and misshapen. Jan shivered when she saw that one,
but she studied it for a long time while people moved past her, chatting about
the artist's painterly technique, his use of mythic themes.

She met the artist when she was getting her third glass of wine. He was a tall,