"Oates, Joyce Carol - We Were the Mulvaneys" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oates Joyce Carol)

Though had he noticed her at all, really? A shy, awkward girl who wore her carroty-fair frizzy hair in tight, tidy braids wound around her head like a maiden in a Grimm fairy tale. Too tall for his taste-nearly his own height, five feet nine. (Short men go for short women, no mystery why.) Corinne Hausmann was twenty years old, a college girl at Fredonia State with a 3.7 (out of 4) average, yet she might have passed for fifteen. Not a very experienced or selfconfident fifteen. Rangy and rawboned and disappointingly smallbreasted, freckled as if someone had playfully splattered paint drops across her, face and forearms especially. No need to ask if she was a farm girl! Her smile was slow and shy as if there were something shameful about her teeth (only a slight gap between the two front teeth) and her fingers and eyelids were fluttery, her laughter breathless. Clear wide luminous-blue eyes given to shifting evasively when anyone, a young man for instance, a good-looking darkly tanned sexually aggressive young man for instance like Michael Mulvaney, stood too close, or spoke too pointedly.

Well, I was afraid of you! I couldn't help it.

Hey, I was afraid of you-the virgin milkmaid!

And Michael would laugh, laugh. Happy-hyena laugh, you had to love him. Poor Corinne blushing to the roots of her carroty hair.

The truth was that Michael Mulvaney, when he'd first met his wife-to-be, was crazy about a girl named Donna whose last name he'd quickly forget but not his wild adventures with her, making love where and whenever they could, often in risky places like the backseat of a stranger's fancy car, in a just-vacated room at the hotel, on an isolated stretch of beach. This was not an era in which good girls or even not-so-good girls succumbed to sexual pressure from men but Donna (froni Glens Falls: "speedcar capital of New York State") was a notable exception. She too was a college girl, a thirdyear nursing student at Cornell. Liked to drink and got high- "high" not "drunk" which didn't sound so good-and meltingly amorous. How could Michael Mulvaney keep sweetly shy Corinne Hausmann in mind, or even, to be frank, remember her name, overwhelmed as he was by Donna? Her supple hips and pelvis, her bold exploring hands, her astonishing mouth that was so ardent, beyond even his lurid ex-Catholic-boy fantasies-Michael was prone to fall into an open-eyed stupor in the midst of work (roofs his specialty, from the start: being short-legged, compact, deft and muscular, with a strong tolerance for working in the sun, had its distinct advantages) contemplating Donna, the night-before and the nightto-come. He wasjust twenty-three years old and had been living on his own, parentless, family-less, for the past five years. His "real" life. He was a fast, reliable worker but clearly too smart to remain only a worker, you'd naturally give Michael Mulvaney more responsibility than you'd give the rest of the crew who were older, dumber. It helped that he was in peak physical condition (he swam, he dived, loved to show off at the lake) so he could subsist on four or three, occasionally two, one or even no hours of sleep, after a night of drinking and lovemaking with Donna before showering and hurriedly shaving and dressing and beginning the next long, so very long (you had to be at the work site by 7:30 A.M.) workday.

He'd have to adnut: his attitude toward females, especially college females, was predatory. It wasn't just the Fifties, it was Michael Mulvaney. He bore a grudge against his several sisters for reasons we won't go into, still more against his mother about whom he'd never speak, so don't ask. But college girls! He resented them almost as much, and as unfairly, as he resented college boys, contemptible in his mind as mere boys while he, on his own for years, was a man.

Also he was determined he'd make his way with no need for a college degree or any of that.

So, in July 1952, when Michael Mulvaney first met Corinne Hausmann, he wasn't in love with Donna what's-her-name, or any of them. He was hot-blooded, tireless, even after a day of hammering and tarring roofs in the Adirondack sun (so crystal-clear it seemed to be filtered through a pane of magnifying glass), a pumphandle of a kind wild to spurt seed, liquid seed, enough to populate a small city. Oh yes! Summers in the Adirondacks, everything is ternporary-what happiness in temporary! It suited him just fine. All he had to be cautious of was knocking up a girl, otherwise just take amid enjoy, take what you can while you can, no regrets and don't look back and after Labor Day he'd be hundreds of miles away. Hadn't his own asshole old man kicked him out, shut the door after him?- and his mother and sisters he'd thought had loved him, his sister Marian three years younger especially, and all but two brothers ceased to know him?-just wiped him out of existence, at the old man's bidding? Can't trust them, can't trust women he blamed them, the women, the most.

Jesus! his veins beat with rage just to think of it! so he rarely thought of it, at least while sober. And when not sober Michael Mulvaney was in the presence of amorous females ninety-nine percent of the time so he rarely thought of it then, either.

Now somehow it happened, never did figure out the connection, Michael's girl Donna was a friend of a friend of Corinne's; or, if not a friend, a friendly acquaintance. (It puzzled Michael, maybe it puzzles most men? how girls and women can befriend each other so quickly? intimately?) So after he'd broken up with Donna who'd been putting the screws on him and she'd gotten what you had to call upset, distraught, one early evening there came the tall carrory- haired girl from the hotel (Carol? Cora? Corinne?) to the boardinghouse where Michael was staying, and she bore him a message from all the girls, she said, except Donna, who didn't know anything about it. "She's so hurt! She loves you."

Michael was so surprised, he had to take a step back.

Stammering, "N-No, she does not."

"Of course she does! You should hear her talk about you."

"I don't want to hear her talk about me-I've heard it."

"We're afraid she might hurt herself, somehow. She's a nurse, she knows too much!"

Michael broke into a sweat, imnagimng Donna dead: the girls at the hotel accusing him, the police arresting him, his picture in the papers.

He said, gaining a little more control, "She's exaggerating, and you're exaggerating. Donna might imagine she loves me but she does not love me-she's too shallow for love."

"Too shallow for love! Listen to him-what an authority!"

Corinne was literally breathless, her cheeks flushed as if she'd rubbed spots of rouge on them quickly and carelessly. She trembled with indignation, fingers and eyelids fluttering. The ridiculous braided hair weighed upon her head and slender neck like a crown of a kind a demented child might fashion and in her off-hours summer clothes-dime Store sleeveless T-shirt, blue cotton "pedal pushers" and straw made-in-Japan sandals-Corinne did resemble an overgrown child, excited and audacious and-well, dangerous. No telling what this babe might say!

Michael took her arm, her firm upper ann in his firm fingers, led her panting and protesting Out of the boardinghouse, walked with her-who knows where: he'd have liked to steer them to one of the lakeside places where they could get beers, sit down and discuss this like rational human beings-in a park, around a kind of lagoon, where families were picnicking, barbecuing, the kids running around, people tossing bread pellets and other treats to a noisy flock of ducks, Canada geese, resident swans with their brood; l-fe as usual in the background which is usually the case when your own life is being decided without your knowing it; walked, and grew earnest in conversation, for Michael Mulvaney at twenty-three was in his deepest most secret heart a serious and not-predatory young man, perhaps not even a young man as he appeared but already beyond youth, impatient for the next phase of his life to begin. On their third or fourth time around the lagoon their attention was drawn to a tremendous squawking and wing-flapping in the water, a big white goose had gotten snarled in some nylon fishing line, his legs, webbed feet, and even his bill entangled, and Corinne cried, "Oh, look! That poor goose! We'll have to help it!"-with no hesitation, as if she'd been primed for just such an emergency, wading out into the brackish thigh-high littered water, taking it for granted that Michael, whom she hardly knew, would follow. Which, what the hell, he did. Dozens of geese and even killer swans honking, hissing, flapping their wings as these importunate strangers invaded their territory. But there was no choice, was there? Michael cursed, stumbling in Connne's wake, and grabbed the amicted bird, its eyes glaring in panic, wings flapping like a deranged windmill until Michael managed to pinion them against its sides, and deft-fingered Corinne, quicker and stronger than any girl Michael had known, managed to untangle the nylon line, maybe six feet of it, not an easy task in these circumstances, as, attracted by the commotion, a small appreciative crowd gathered on the bank of the lagoon to shout encouragement and break into cheers and applause when at last the goose was freed, and half swam half flew amphibian-airplane style to join the other indignant, honking and wing-thrashing birds at the far end of the lagoon.

Michael muttered, "Bastard didn't even thank us!"

Corinne said, "I'll thank you, Michael Mulvaney!"

Not a kiss, as he'd hoped, but a handshake. A good strong manto-man handshake.

So it began: what he wouldn't have wished to call love exactly- at least not so soon. He cringed at the thought of seeming, or actually being, weak and sentimental. How'd we meet?-over agoose,for Christ's sake! In the middle of a goose-pond! No, I'm not kidding. He had to admit that this odd pushy prim (and virginal) farm girl possessed an abundance of what you'd call character of a kind he hadn't previously encountered in any female of his acquaintance; certainly not in such easy-lay girls as Donna the nursing student, nor in his own piousCatholic sisters. And character could be sexy in its own way-oh, boy!-you'd arouse opposition, resistance, for sure-nothing easy about Corinne the freckled farm girl from Ransomville, New York.

How many times, how many years Michael Mulvaney would joke and tease about the goddamned goose, the kind of guy who doesn't let things go, but the fact was he'd been impressed by the way Corinne went for that goose to save it-hadn't been capable, you could figure, of looking the other way, passing it by like most people would. She'd recognized the situation as calling for immediate moral involvement. He, Michael Mulvaney, showered for the second time that day and dressed in clean pressed chinos and a sports shirt and new crepe-soled canvas shoes, might easily have passed by the goose-well, not easily, maybe guiltily, but, well-he could have. Probably would have. (He'd have gone to look for a park cop-maybe.) By way of this train of thought he.concluded that Corinne Hausmann was morally superior to him, as a woman should be morally superior to any man; and that this fact would be of benefit to him one day, as you might assume that the friendship of rich people might be beneficial, who knows exactly how.