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

house the other side of a swimming pool; the people in the big house hardly
ever used it. It had its own little driveway. It was nice. She said she would
cook the corn for him. She did, with some lamb chops she had in the freezer,
and they ate the cantaloupe with vanilla ice cream on it and a pinch of dry
instant coffee sprinkled on it. She could cook. You could tell. There were
more than forty herbs and spices in the kitchen. She made up a name for him,
Knightly. She said he looked like a knight in shining armor. He never did call
her by her name, except sometimes Hon.
It was one of those hot smoggy California evenings and the pool looked good,
but he didn't have a suit. She laughed at him and said who needs it? When she
peeled off the see-through top he saw it wasn't a see-through at all, no more
than a stained glass window is a see-through when you want to look at the sun.
There can't be a more perfect body than that one, not anywhere, not only for
the perfection of each part, but for the absolute rightness of a breast like
that with a shoulder like that, and a waist that turned just so together with
such slender ankles. Also, all her hair was that same yellowy-coppery color
and there wasn't a flaw on her skin anywhere.

They fell into the pool and laughed a lot, and you are not going to believe
this easily but it's true: there was something about the way she did it all,
something about the way she was, that made him not touch her then. They dried
off on some of a mountain of thick clean towels she had and got dressed again
and he never made the first pass. Maybe it was because passes often get made
because a guy just has to find out where it's at, and in this case he knew
where it was at. They both knew. It happened later, much later, about two in
the morning, after which (it was pretty wonderful) she said softly
"Knightly-night" and fell asleep in his arms. He didn't go home until
Saturday.

On the way back to his place he stopped at a Rents and hired a 6-by-10
trailer. They had a hell of a job rigging a hitch for it on the Monster
without bashing those beautiful chrome pipes, and it took a half hour to
figure a way to get the big right-hand rearview mounted, and when he took off
he was one hell of a sight. It was like a racehorse hitched to a manure
spreader and people all over stopped in their tracks to watch him go by, and
he was sure that one sideswipe on the freeway was caused by some yokel
rubbernecking him. At his place he loaded on every-

thing he owned, which wasn't really too much. He was paid till the end of the
month but screw it. He took it all out to the guest house in Altadena.
She was supposed to clear out the second room for him but when be got there
she had rearranged the whole house so that there was a real living room and a
real bedroom instead of the overlap she'd had before. There was plenty of room
in the closet for his clothes-more than he needed-but she'd fixed up
everything else so perfectly that there was really no place to put any~-thing
of his, and anyway, who needed it? It was an Our House.

He was on Emergency then, which had always suited him fine. He was one of
those lucky people who went to sleep bang whenever he felt tired, and could
wake up-all the way up-in twenty minutes or two hours or ten, whatever was