"Wilhelm,_Kate_-_Julian(1)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilhelm Kate)

He stared at her uncomprehendingly, then shook his head.
"Honey, sometimes it isn't easy to tell parents if things are really bothering you. Sometimes it's much easier to tell someone new, someone who has studied kids, a child psychologist, someone like that. Is there anything you'd like to talk over with someone like that?"
Again he shook his head. "I guess I just don't like school too much. It's boring," he mumbled.
He could sense his father's relief. His mother leaned back in her chair and her face smoothed out again, and he knew he had said the right thing.
That night he had another nightmare, the third that week. He did not call anyone, or make any noise, and when he got up he did not turn on any lights for fear his mother would come to see what was wrong. He sat in a straight chair in his dark bedroom, shivering and wide-eyed. There was no memory of what the nightmare had been about. Only when he began to fall asleep in the chair, sitting upright, did he go back to bed.
* * * *
He got by in high school, and his first years of college. He knew he was a constant source of disappointment to his parents, and he was a constant source of unhappiness to himself because of his own behavior that he realized was highly neurotic. He had irrational dislikes that set him apart from others. He would not shower or bathe. He washed all over, using as little water as possible. He refused to go swimming, or to participate in any water sport at all. If it rained he carried an umbrella and wore gloves, no matter what month or what the temperature was. He knew he was considered a prude because he did not like girlie magazines or nudie shows. People probably thought he was a latent homosexual because he avoided girls altogether. He knew he was afraid of them, and that this fear was as senseless as the others on the long list that made life hellish for him.
One day his psychology class discussed childhood fears. There were the usual things -- menacing shadows of tree limbs on the bedroom floor; the creakings of houses that went unnoticed by daylight and became magnified after dark; a mother's illness and absence with its accompanying feeling of abandonment. Nothing very different from those discussed by the professor had been revealed. It was both reassuring and disturbing to find such predictable patterns. Then Kim spoke up.
"I came out of a deep sleep with fires blazing all around me and I thought I was in hell, that I had died and gone to hell. I had a bunch of nightmares after that, and to this day I have a pretty irrational few of fire. What had happened was that our electricity had gone off during the night, and it was in the middle of winter, so my mother had taken me out to the living room to sleep in front of the fireplace. And I woke up."
Other more specific, more personal experiences came out then. One remembered early fears related to brakes squealing and metal clashing -- a carryover from being in an accident when she was two. Another recalled awakening to find himself in a bathroom filled with steam, and the fear of being scalded in the tub of hot water -- his mother's desperate attempt to relieve his croup as a baby had been to open his congested bronchial passages with steam.
Julian listened and tried to remember something from his own past that was similar. There had been a mild episode when he had been left alone at night once and the apartment had been filled with noises, but he knew that was not in the same category as the fears being discussed now. He had had nightmares off and on for years, but he had decided they were induced by a difficult passage over the threshold of puberty. He never had recalled any content of the nightmares anyway.
"How about your fear of water, Julian?" Rachel asked gently.
He hated her for bringing that up. It wasn't the same kind of thing, he felt certain. "I almost drowned once," he said shortly, harshly. There were some nods, and even a glimmer of sympathy here and there. Someone else began to talk.
Later he walked back to his dorm wondering why he had lied, why he had felt that rush of hatred for Rachel, the only girl on campus whom he thought he might be able to talk to, or ask out. Quickly there came the rationalization that he felt safe fantasizing about her because she was so unattainable.
Rachel caught up with him. "I'm sorry I brought that up," she said, putting her hand on his arm. "That was bitchy. I thought it might help you to talk about it while others were talking about the same kinds of things."
She was pretty, one of the best students on campus, and one of the most popular. He was amazed that she was aware of him enough to know he feared water. Kim must have told her. He felt certain her hand on his arm was an apology even more than her words. Brusquely he shook her off and strode ahead faster.
"It's all right. Forget it," he said, and turned in toward the nearest building.
The following year he was forced to take a health class to fulfill his requirements, and he sat through it glumly, bored, sometimes doing homework for other more demanding classes, sometimes simply brooding over his present life, his future, his past. All seemed equally hopeless. The teaching assistant was talking about various organs of the body, their relative size and importance .
"The largest organ of all, of course, is the skin. And probably it's the most complex. It's flexible, we can bend our joints and it gives, we can gain or lose weight. It has a one-way permeability. Perspiration can get out, but from the other direction it is totally waterproof..."
Julian clutched the desk top while the room spun. He saw the naked woman walking toward him, wet all over. He closed his eyes hard and put his head down on the desk and waited for the nausea and dizziness to pass; when he felt able, he got up and left the room.
Blindly he walked, then sat down, and again put his head down, his eyes closed.
His head ached, his eyes teared, and he stared through the eyepiece of the telescope fixedly, holding his breath until suddenly there she was. She was dripping wet, her hair was streaming water. He stared at the glistening pubic hair, and the little rivulets that ran down her smooth rounded belly. Her breasts were full and high, pink, with beads of water, one little stream running crazily down one side, vanishing in the crease below her breast. He looked at her face, glowing, beautiful, and her hair fluffing out, alive and soft, just a touch of wave in it, feathery about her face.
He had come then and never saw her again.
She had gone into the shower an old withered woman and had come out a beautiful girl gleaming with water on her body, in her hair. She had not dried herself. There had been no towel at all.
"She absorbed it!" he whispered. "She absorbed all the water!"
That was what his twelve-year-old self had rejected knowing. He had recognized it as impossible, as something grotesque and alien and too frightening to think about, and had buried it as deeply as he could.
The knowledge had lain in his mind like a snake in a bag, writhing, twisting, shooting out its venom now and then to poison his life, to bring him nightmares and make him afraid of girls and water and wet hands and rain on hair and a million other things that had separated him from everyone else.
He went over it again and again, recalling more details each time. There had been drops of water in her eyebrows, and he had seen them vanish, and beads of water on her upper lip ... She had been smiling slightly, as if she felt extraordinarily good ...
"Julian? Are you sleeping?"
He started at the voice close to his face and opened his eyes to see Rachel kneeling on the grass in front of him. Behind her there were two men from his health class, Kim and Robert.
"Are you okay?" Rachel moved back and held out her hand. "It's raining, you're getting awfully wet."
He stared at her hand for a long time, then looked at her face, back at her hand. Water was running off her finger, running along her wrist. He looked at her hair, cut so short that it was like a shiny black cap on her head; water ran down it onto her face, collected on her eyelashes. She blinked it away, watching him, waiting.
Suddenly Julian jumped up and pulled her to her feet also, grabbed her and swung her around and around, shouting, "It's all right! It's all right now!"
Rachel was laughing with him, gasping for breath, and Kim and Robert stood, uncomfortable and self-conscious, until Robert mumbled something about a term paper and they hurried off together with an air of relief.
"Tell me about it," Rachel demanded. "Let's walk in the rain, and you tell me what happened."
They walked, but Julian didn't want to talk yet. He wanted to watch the rain hitting grass, watch it roll off leaves and darken tree trunks, and bejewel flowers. He watched it collect in his palm, overflow, and run down like a miniature waterfall.
Two hours later they ended up in Rachel's apartment, which she shared with two other girls. "Let me change and get a raincoat and then we'll go let you change and then find someplace to talk," she said, toweling her head.
"How long would it take your hair to dry if you didn't do anything?" Julian asked, watching.
"In this weather? An hour, hour and a half. Why?"
"How long for hair down to your shoulders?"
"Three hours, unless you are out in the sun, or have a fan on it, or the wind. What are you driving at?"
And Julian told her, not all of it, but most. He finished saying, "I got so scared, or excited, that I knocked the telescope aside and by the time I got it focused again she was out of sight. I went to bed and fell asleep and had a nightmare that woke me up, and when I was really awake again, I had forgotten all about it, every bit of it, even using the telescope to snoop with. I never used it again for anything."
Rachel had become still as he talked, her eyes open wide, very dark blue, and, he thought, very disbelieving. Suddenly she shivered. "I'm freezing. Wait a minute while I change."
She hurried away and in a few moments came back in dry jeans and a sweater, carrying an umbrella. Her hair was still damp enough to cling to her head.
They didn't talk on the way to Julian's dorm, and she waited in the lounge while he went up and got dry clothes on, and then they went to The Caves, where they found a booth in the rear of the dark room well away from the pinball machines and the Foos Ball games and the tiny dance floor. Neither spoke until their pitcher of beer and bowl of peanuts had been delivered.
"It's too much, isn't it?" Julian said then. "You don't believe me..."
She shook her head. "It isn't that I think you're lying or anything like that. But you could remember wrong."
He reached across the table and felt her hair, still slightly damp. "Her hair became absolutely dry within a minute or two, no more than that. She was dry all over within a minute."
"There could have been a fan on her, or maybe she dried her hair before she came out, or she wore a shower cap."
He shook his head.