Jack Livings - The Blizzard Party

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Jack Livings - The Blizzard Party» весь текст электронной книги совершенно бесплатно (целиком полную версию без сокращений). В некоторых случаях можно слушать аудио, скачать через торрент в формате fb2 и присутствует краткое содержание. Город: New York, Год выпуска: 2021, ISBN: 2021, Издательство: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Жанр: Историческая проза, на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале библиотеки ЛибКат.

The Blizzard Party: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

Предлагаем к чтению аннотацию, описание, краткое содержание или предисловие (зависит от того, что написал сам автор книги «The Blizzard Party»). Если вы не нашли необходимую информацию о книге — напишите в комментариях, мы постараемся отыскать её.

A panoramic novel set in New York City during the catastrophic blizzard of February 1978 On the night of February 6, 1978, an overwhelming nor’easter struck the city of New York. On that night, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in a penthouse apartment of the stately Apelles, a crowd gathered for a grand party. And on that night Mr. Albert Haynes Caldwell—a partner emeritus at Swank, Brady & Plescher; Harvard class of ’26; father of three; widower; atheist; and fiscal conservative—hatched a plan to fake a medical emergency and toss himself into the Hudson River, where he would drown. Jack Livings’s
is the story of that night.

The Blizzard Party — читать онлайн бесплатно полную книгу (весь текст) целиком

Ниже представлен текст книги, разбитый по страницам. Система сохранения места последней прочитанной страницы, позволяет с удобством читать онлайн бесплатно книгу «The Blizzard Party», без необходимости каждый раз заново искать на чём Вы остановились. Поставьте закладку, и сможете в любой момент перейти на страницу, на которой закончили чтение.

Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Jack Livings

THE BLIZZARD PARTY

Anna and Eleanor,

who traveled great distances

Prologue, you barrel-crouching rodeo clown, you sleight of hand, you basket viper, you abortion of a knock-knock joke. Foul whisperer, gossipmonger, ear poison enthusiast. Begone! Let me speak clearly in my own voice: something terrible is about to happen.

—from the prologue to The Blizzard Party by E. Saltwater

Blah, blah, blah.

—H. Saltwater
Part I 1 I am Hazel Saltwater daughter of Erwin and Sarah Saltwater a - фото 1

Part I

1.

I am Hazel Saltwater, daughter of Erwin and Sarah Saltwater, a citizen of the borough of Manhattan, proprietor, researcher, part-time recluse, widow, fury, known to the waiters at Wavy Grain Bistro (formerly the Cosmic Diner) as Ms. Patel, known to the co-op board at the Apelles as a compliant and reliable neighbor, among resident children of same known to be a Halloween enthusiast, known to my dry cleaner Tio as a generous December tipper, to my acquaintances a person of pleasant demeanor, to my lenders an exemplary credit risk, to my friends a mystic, a crazy woman, an apopheniac, a rationalist, an open wound.

It is a gray morning. The men working on the building across the street have arrived with their coffee in paper cups and egg sandwiches wrapped in foil. They’ve staked out the stoop, draping themselves variously over the railing, across the steps, boots on balustrades, shooting the shit, their voices pinwheeling like kids in a schoolyard. The contractor’s big Ford pickup, outfitted with racks and rails, drooping lengths of PVC pipe, assorted proofs of masculinity and patriotism affixed to the window, idles at the curb. They’re in and out. The doors squeak open, slam shut. It is 31.7 degrees Fahrenheit according to the website upon which I rely for semi-accurate readings, a hub formerly owned and operated by the University of Michigan and in accordance with the rules of academio-subversive nomenclature dubbed the Weather Underground back in the dork days of Telnet. The site was later purchased by the Weather Channel, an acquisition that precipitated the degradation of the Underground’s predictive qualities. These days storms blow in without warning, prophesied rain never falls, it’s hot when it’s supposed to be cold, snowing when it’s supposed to be hailing, tsunamis never show, hurricanes lose focus and drift out to sea. My handheld device, which came preset to display the Edenic atmospheric conditions over the city-state of Cupertino, the Holy See of our sparkling new aluminum universe, is equally worthless at making predictions. However, though it’s as useless as a crystal ball, the Underground is invaluable for historical readings.

I am alone, and the first to admit that I have not handled well the loss of my husband. I haunt the internet, as do we all, though perhaps I leave behind, pixelated, more of myself than most. Occasionally I chat with strangers on sites where I expose my body to the blue light of the screen, the empty cyclopean eye that so coolly observes whatever I can throw at it. The chats take a familiar, comforting route, along the lines of, Hey bb. Hey bb. Show tits? And I do. I am aware of government and extra-governmental surveillance, the great electronic blanket that shields and suffocates, and I do like to imagine an NSA agent on his or her break scrolling over to my feed and, while popping peanuts somewhere deep within the recesses of that shiny black rectangle in Maryland, possibly flipping through NBA trade rumors on a handheld, one eye on the monitor, one on Kevin Durant’s latest tweet, lingering just for a moment, just to see how far I’ll go. The thought strikes me like a depth charge. Here’s how far I’ll go. How about this? And this? Do you see this?

In the years after my husband’s disappearance, I froze up a little. I wouldn’t say I’ve ossified. I don’t leave the building much, though I’m not, strictly speaking, afraid of anything outside, not the way my father was. This is the same apartment where I grew up, which might be a signal that even before Vikram disappeared I was a creature of habit. New York, so fanatically public, is the world’s best place to hide. If I so choose, I may live unseen. But that’s not what twists my lemon. I want to be seen, to be observed, but without the knowledge that I am being observed. Like the lady said, I want to be alone. By which I’m pretty sure she meant, Think of Me Always.

Anonymous friend, please watch and see how far I’ll go.

Vik’s specialty was the assessment of undervalued companies. They called him Old Mother Hubbard, the lax bros and big swinging dicks who staffed his firm. He was the worrier, the detail-sweater, a man of the people who could be trusted to come back from the factory break room with the real story. He traveled a lot. He traveled so that he could sit in a sawdust-floor bar with the drill press operator, or the warehouse associate, or the Logistics Tech II who, after a few drinks, after Vik had listened more patiently to their catalogue of complaints than anyone had listened in their life, might begin to feel that maybe Vik wasn’t just some asshole vampire from New York who’d come to suck the life out of the factory that put food on his family’s table, but that this guy might actually be sympathetic to the plight of the workingman. Maybe he’d flown all that way because he wanted to do right by them.

They weren’t wrong for thinking such a thing. Vik had a soul. He was an avid conversationalist. And if he determined, after a period of information collection, that a distressed company might be made more profitable, his firm would purchase it and set to restructuring. Big deal, so management took a haircut. No one needed to worry about those guys. They parachuted into new Aeron chairs in new offices at new companies without putting so much as a single wrinkle in their khakis. My husband’s firm was not a buy-and-burn operation. And they did fine, just fine. They did fine, I should say, until the day they were obliterated, every last one of them.

Thus, by the grace of my husband’s good worry, I was allowed to remain on the island of my birth, in the only home I’ve ever known. I was two months out of Amherst, living in my childhood bedroom, when Vikram hired me as an analyst. He was seven years older than I. We were connected by a long history, though we didn’t know each other very well. At first our ages served as a natural barrier. We were formal, respectfully awkward. I told myself he was no different than his colleagues. Nice suits, tall collars, Breitlings, wallets fat as hamburgers parked on their desks lest their spines go crooked from twelve-hour days on misaligned hips. Strange men. Men of practiced masculinity, no subtlety, all of them silently yearning for a lost boyhood. I told myself I had no interest in a man who’d chosen such a life for himself. I told myself I was disappointed in how he’d turned out. We were married three years later.

Vik looked good in a convertible. He looked good in shorts and sunglasses, no shirt, hair blown back. He looked good at the console of Bo Vornado’s old Boston Whaler, which he’d scored at a sweet discount. Bo had tried to recruit him when he was twenty-five. The boat had been part of the mating dance. Bo had an eye for talent, but it never would have worked, which Vik recognized long before Bo did. Bo liked to hit the jugular with his fangs out. My husband was a gentleman. He met your eye and listened. He might touch your shoulder on parting. A spy, not a hairy forearm-to-the-face type. On a flight to Tulsa he could talk crop rotation with the Aggie on his right, then turn and talk shoelace production with the Sooner on his left. Mostly he listened, and for his patience he’d been rewarded with a mind that was a warehouse of the arcane. What good does a working knowledge of the lacing patterns attractive to the suburban Caucasian male American 13–17 demo do you? None until you need to assess the financial viability of Oklahoma’s last shoelace factory. That kind face, which was absent the menace that men manufacture to scare away the other dogs—it put people at ease. He had brown eyes, elegant bovine eyelashes.

Читать дальше
Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Похожие книги на «The Blizzard Party»

Представляем Вашему вниманию похожие книги на «The Blizzard Party» списком для выбора. Мы отобрали схожую по названию и смыслу литературу в надежде предоставить читателям больше вариантов отыскать новые, интересные, ещё непрочитанные произведения.


Отзывы о книге «The Blizzard Party»

Обсуждение, отзывы о книге «The Blizzard Party» и просто собственные мнения читателей. Оставьте ваши комментарии, напишите, что Вы думаете о произведении, его смысле или главных героях. Укажите что конкретно понравилось, а что нет, и почему Вы так считаете.

x