"M. Rickert - Cold Fires" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rickert Mary)

"Instead of going upstairs, I went out the front door. If this other painting was anything like the one of
Elizabeth, then I must see it.

"It was dark, the rain only a drizzle now, the town a slick black oil, maybe something by Dali with
disappearing ink. I had, out of habit, pocketed my car keys. I had to circle the town a few times, make a
few false starts, once finding myself in someone's driveway, before I selected the road that arched above
the town to the white chapel, which even in the rain glowed as though lit from within. The road was
winding but not treacherous. When I got to the top and stood on that cliff the wind whipped me, the town
below was lost in a haze of fog that only a few yellow lights shone through. I had the sensation of looking
down on the heavens from above. The waves crashed and I felt the salt on my face, tasted it on my lips.
Up close the chapel was much larger than it looked from below, the steeple that narrowed to a needle
point on which its ship balanced into the dark sky, quite imposing. As I walked up those stone steps I
thought again of Edward saying he wasn't sure I should see it. I reached for the hammered iron handle
and pulled. For a moment I thought it was locked, but it was just incredibly heavy. I pulled the door open
and entered the darkness of the church. Behind me, the door heaved shut. I smelled a flowery smoky
scent, the oily odor of wood, and heard from somewhere a faint drip of water as though there was a
leak. I was in the church foyer, there was another door before me, marked in the darkness by the thin
line of light that shone beneath it. I walked gingerly, uncertain in the dark. It too was extremely heavy. I
pulled it open."

He coughed and cleared his throat as though suddenly suffering a cold. She opened her eyes just a slit.
The heat from the wood stove must have been the reason for the red in his cheeks, how strange he
looked, as though in pain or fever! She let her eyes droop shut and it seemed a long time before he
continued, his voice raspy.

"All I can say is, I never should have looked. I wish I'd never seen either of those paintings. It was there
that I made myself the promise I would never settle for a love any less than spectacular, a love so great
that it would take me past my limitations, the way Emile's love for Elizabeth had taken him past his, that
somehow such a love would leave an imprint on the world, the way great art does, that all who saw it
would be changed by it, as I was.

"So you see, when you find me sad and ask what's on my mind, or when I am quiet and cannot explain to
you the reason, there it is. If I had never seen the paintings, maybe I would be a happy man. But always,
now, I wonder."

She waited but he said no more. After a long time, she whispered his name. But he did not answer and
when she peeked at him from the squint of her eyes, he appeared to be asleep. Eventually, she fell asleep
too.

All that night, as they told their stories, the flames burned heat onto that icy roof which melted down the
sides of the house and over the windows so that in the cold morning when they woke up, the fire gone to
ash and cinder, the house was encased in a sort of skin of ice which they tried to alleviate by burning
another fire, not realizing they were only sealing themselves in more firmly. They spent the rest of that
whole winter in their ice house. By burning all the wood and most of the furniture and eating canned food
even if it was out of date, they survived, thinner and less certain of fate, into a spring morning thaw,
though they never could forget those winter stories, not all that spring or summer and especially not that
autumn, when the winds began to carry that chill in the leaves, that odd combination of Sun and decay,
about which they did not speak, but which they knew would exist between them forever.