"Lisa Tuttle - Honey, I'm Home!" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tuttle Lisa)

meant to ensure that she would stay home where he wanted her. He
seemed to think it was what she wanted, too. Maybe, if she had been Lucy,
he would have been right. But she wasnтАЩt Lucy and didnтАЩt want to be. He
was taking his clothes off, as if the spanking had been their customary
foreplay, when she turned him off.

Gina extinguished Ricky in the white heat of anger, but no regret or
calmer reflection would make her summon him back. It was time to be
sensible about this. For some reason, or none at all, sheтАЩd been given a
powerful gift, and it was up to her to use it wisely. She supposed it must
have something to do with the satellite dish. In the old days (she reflected)
there would have been a fairy or a dusty old shopkeeper to mutter a cryptic
warning if not tell you the rules, but these days it was all so impersonal,
caveat emptor and no one but yourself to blame when the magic did you in.

This time she would wish for a man she wanted now, not just in her
childish subconscious. It made perfect sense that the man of her dreams
should be found on television. It was television more than anything else,
more than movies or rockтАЩnтАЩroll, that had shaped her sexuality, had given
her the images and the vocabulary of desire. Other people her age talked
about movies, but sheтАЩd never seen anything but the occasional Walt
Disney film until she was old enough to date, and by then the pattern would
have been well-established. Popular music had stirred strange longings in
her soul, of course, but those longings were directed not at the
unimaginably distant musicians, but at actors, the men whose faces she
gazed at, intimately close, night after night in the half-dark of the family
room. (The Beatles were an exception; but sheтАЩd only fallen in love with the
Beatles after seeing them on The Ed Sullivan Show.)

Gina stretched out on the carpeted floor. The silence was eerie.
Silent, it didnтАЩt even feel like her apartment. On a weekday morning even
the usual noises from her upstairs neighbours were missing. Uneasy, she
got up and switched on Radio Two. Even real life should have a
sound-track. Returning to the floor, she closed her eyes and let her mind
drift back to the time when she had been madly in love with Napoleon Solo
and Ilya Kuryakin, unable to decide (just as she had always been unable to
choose just one favourite Beatle) which of the men from UNCLE she
preferred, Napoleon with his suave charm or Ilya with his icy cool. Yet now
that she thought of them, neither alternative was very appealing. It was all
new and thrilling when she was twelve, but in the years since sheтАЩd been out
with enough bed-hoppers to have the measure of Solo, and sheтАЩd broken
her heart against icebergs like Kuryakin enough to resent all that
unreciprocated effort.

She was no longer a girl, and the world had moved on.

Napoleon Solo would seem as ridiculously out of date and sexist now
as Ricky Ricardo.

The problem with finding a contemporary TV lover was that she never