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

handy, and any part of the twenty-four was all right with him. She was a day
people, however, and midnight was late to her always, and 8 A.M. was late too.
She liked to be up before seven. He adjusted to that pretty well, and also
learned not to talk when she was going through the complicated secret ritual
of getting to sleep. Some people are like that. They have to do whatever it is
they do to get to sleep, everything in the right order and skipping none of
it, and if you interrupt, they have to go back to the beginning and start
over. She wouldn't sleep late, not ever, so when he'd kept her up late she
looked drawn and kind of sad all the next day and evening. He also found out
she would go to sleep almost instantly after sex, when it was good, and it was
almost always good. But the whole sleep thing was hard to handle while he was
on Emergency and would get calls at two and three in the morning and get out
and not know when he'd be back. She was sweet about it-she was sweet about
everything-but after awhile he put in for the day shift. It meant a little
less money, but what the bell.

He quit going to Mother's, which believe it or not is a chain of pool halls in
the L.A. area. Nobody said he couldn't, but pool or snooker just wasn't her
thing, and when he played, with her sitting patiently smiling in the front of
the place and waiting for him to get done, it wasn1 the same. She was nice as
could be to Scruffy and Ralph and Rod and the rest, and even the Blinker, even
though she didn't dig him. Well, you had to know the Blinker. And the way she
did it was great, warm and lively with all of them but there was never any
doubt as to whose girl she was and meant to be. But ... it wasn't the same,
and pretty soon be went less and less and didn't see the herd at Mother's any
more. Likewise the hang rounds at Butch's Air cooled except when something on
the Monster needed fixing, which wasn't often. Once when he went down for new
connectors on his tach he found himself taking an hour instead of ten minutes
to put them in, and driving away he felt a single wild strong tug inside him
that he just couldn't understand. Well they were just a bunch of greasy cats
who couldn't talk or think anything but chops and cams and pots and mags and
slicks, but ....

In the first couple of days she gave him a medallion on a chain around his
neck, a funny little twist of silver with a flat piece of fire opal on it, and
he wore it night and day. For a long time he wore it swinging outside and was
glad to say "My chick," when someone asked about it.

His subscriptions to Car and Driver and Road and Track got screwed up somehow
and six weeks went by and he didn't even miss them. You have to know him to
know what that really meant. He was very content. He'd tell her that every
once in a while just to see her fight up. He told himself that too. He bought
the magazines at the newsstand and when the next issues came out she threw
away the old ones. He was a little shook, and although he didn't say anything,
he kept the magazines at work after that.

One morning the alarm went off and he rolled out and fumbled for his clothes
and they felt different. Instead of the black tight cords and the Western
shirt with the rawhide on the pockets, there were a pair of black jeans, real
tailored, with slightly bell. bottoms and a dark dull kind of paisley print