"Theodore Sturgeon - It's You" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sturgeon Theodore)

Its You!!

It wasn't the hair that made him cry out like that, though God knows
California's enough to turn anyone into a hair freak these days; well she was
enough by herself with that silken waterfall of coppery-canary to freak you,
and it wasn't that or the crinkle cornered arch on arch of the eye and brow or
the perfect teeth, not by themselves. It wasn't even the absolute confidence
with which she wore the see-through shirt through which he saw the absolute
confidence of her breasts, or even that she was exactly tall enough and round
enough. More than anything else, it was that she was real.
Everybody does this thing, although some cats know it more than others: you
see chicks, you see pix, you add and subtract and over the years things settle
in-just so big, just so dark, just so-just exactly so until its all finished.
Then that finished thing, that her, settles down inside you and every time you
see someone, or in a magazine, or at the show, you set it up against her. It
could be great, you could get excited, you could dream a lot about any of the
others, but somehow they never, never check out with the her you've made. So
when he saw her he yelled it out. It came out of him and he hadn't known he
was going to say it, it hit him that hard.


Maybe that's how you know-it bursts out of you without a thought.

He'd just parked the Monster and was half in, half out when he saw her. She
was hitchhiking with a girlfriend-they do that a lot in California. He was
never able to remember much about that girlfriend, Susie or Dottie or
something. Maybe he never saw her, much. There was this truck parked off the
road with berries and com-on-the-cob and tomatoes and stuff, and he liked corn
and that was why he stopped. He walked over to the two girls and pointed at
the Monster and said, "I'll be right with you." They smiled at him and looked
him over, and at each other, checking him out, and then said Thanks and went
over to the car. Something developed fists inside his chest and began hitting
him from inside so bard be blinked with each beat. He went over to the truck
and bought corn, a couple of ears. He lived by himself.

But before he picked it up he went back to the Monster. They'd got themselves
somehow into the one bucket seat. He asked her, "Do you like corn?" She said
she did. He went back and got a couple more and some tomatoes and a
cantaloupe, and then be saw the stocks, long clusters of white and purple
flowers with a heavy scent that nobody's ever put in a bottle yet. He bought
one white bunch and one purple and mixed them together right there into one
big bunch, and he had never done anything like that in his life before.
They went first to the girlfriend's house. Without remembering the girlfriend
much, he long remembered the thick waves of disapproval she set up when she
got out and the other one, her, didn't. It made him laugh when he pulled away
from the curb and they were alone together, and he met her eyes and she was
laughing too.

She lived in Altadena, which was a hell of a hell away from where he lived,
but he didn't mind. Oh, he didn1 mind. She lived in a little two-room guest