Kathryn Davis - Duplex

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Duplex: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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Mary and Eddie are meant for each other — but love is no guarantee, not in these suburbs. Like all children, they exist in an eternal present; time is imminent, and the adults of the street live in their assorted houses like numbers on a clock. Meanwhile, ominous rumors circulate, and the increasing agitation of the neighbors points to a future in which all will be lost. Soon a sorcerer’s car will speed down Mary’s street, and as past and future fold into each other, the resonant parenthesis of her girlhood will close forever. Beyond is adulthood, a world of robots and sorcerers, slaves and masters, bodies without souls. In
Kathryn Davis, whom the
has called “one of the most inventive novelists at work today,” has created a coming-of-age story like no other. Once you enter the duplex — that magical hinge between past and future, human and robot, space and time — there’s no telling where you might come out.

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Like that poor girl left behind by the Aquanauts, said someone else. That poor girl they left all alone.

Right, said the chemist. What about her?

By this time they had moved through the living room and dining room and kitchen and out the back door into the little yard. In the yard on the other side of the stockade fence someone was burning leaves.

I thought this time the story was going to be about the Great Division, said the opera singer. I have to admit I’m disappointed.

You wouldn’t think there’d be enough leaves yet to make a pile, the farmer said. She rose on her tiptoes to look over the fence.

Janice accepted a scallop wrapped in bacon from a tray offered by a serving person wearing a tight black dress and a small white apron. Disappointed? she said. What do you mean disappointed?

Just that this time nothing’s happening, not like with the Rain of Beads or the Horsewomen or the Aquanauts, the opera singer said.

I don’t know what you’re talking about. Janice had unwrapped the scallop and was looking at it critically. Sometimes they weren’t real scallops but skate cut in the shape of scallops with a cookie cutter. The way you could tell was if there was a hinge.

That was the important thing, Janice explained — the hinge not only being the place where a real scallop attached itself to its shell, but also the place where you could go forward and back with equal ease.

A lot of things happened, Janice said. Weren’t you listening? The way things happen to all of us. At some point the dead woman stopped being a child; she put her foot down. She went to school, she went to Italy, she went to work, she got sick and died. Some people live to be older than she did. Some people get married or have families. You could even be highly thought of by a lot of people before you die. You could be famous.

She means the opera singer, thought the curly-haired woman. Everyone knows who she is even if they hate opera. She’s over the hill and she’s still terrific-looking and she hasn’t had any work done. I hate you, thought the curly-haired woman, but she didn’t, not really. Out of all the girls she’d grown up with, the opera singer had always been one of her favorites.

For a period the curly-haired girl had enjoyed limited notoriety as a poet but her books had never garnered what you’d call widespread critical acclaim. She had lived here, she had lived there. At some point she moved to be near her little sister, who’d ended up happily married to a man who owned his own grocery store, and after that she didn’t move around anymore. She’d had lovers but she’d never been married; she’d known happiness and she’d known sorrow. She was not so very different, in other words, from the dead woman, except for the fact that she was alive. When Janice called to tell her the news she’d been having one of those boring dreams that pass through your subconscious like an endless train of boxcars. She woke up drenched with sweat and filled with dread and the phone was ringing. The first of you to go, Janice had said, and the next thing the curly-haired girl knew she was crying as if her heart would break, despite the fact that she hadn’t known the deceased all that well, not even long ago when they were girls together.

What she means is nothing interesting happened, said the farmer. She looked over at the opera singer to make sure she’d got it right.

Exactly, the opera singer said. She was staring toward the back of the yard where there was a little birdbath that had a statue of St. Francis standing in the middle of the water, looking down at it, watching a gray-brown bird. What became of all the interesting parts, she asked, things like getting taken up into the sky, or being part horse, or being immortal? This story doesn’t have anything like that going on in it. In this story things like that aren’t even possible. She cleared her throat and began to sing: You are lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry, Clementine.

Well, duh, Janice said. That’s the point. Haven’t you been paying attention? That’s the Great Division, like I was saying. That’s the hinge. On one side, St. Francis there receives the stigmata. On the other side, he isn’t even a saint. He’s a stonemason, something along those lines. She took a seat at the patio table and lit a cigarette. Maybe he gets lung cancer, she said, blowing out smoke. Stranger things have been known to happen.

I don’t understand, said the chemist.

The farmer was looking at the flowers growing around the birdbath. The deceased had a green thumb, she told us, a doting expression on her face.

Anyone can grow zinnias, someone said. Zinnias, marigolds — who cares.

But I’m serious, the opera singer persisted. What about those other parts? The parts before it gets boring? There must have been some parts like that in her life.

Oh, honey, Janice said. She opened her arms wide and waved them around in an attempt to take in all of us, the backyard, the birdbath, the sycamore trees, the whole wide world. They’re over, she said. They’ve been over for forever. Look at you, she said. Just look at you! What do you expect? It was your past too — how could you forget it?

What’s so bad about zinnias? the curly-haired girl wondered. What’s so bad about being brightly colored at a time when everything else is turning dark?

I want to go home now, she thought. She didn’t know what she meant by home, only that it wasn’t here. As usual no one was paying attention to her and her heart was heavy because of her failure. The serving person returned carrying a platter of miniature crab cakes. A second serving person appeared with a bottle of red wine. It doesn’t matter, the girl thought. She opened the gate and was surprised at how quiet it was on the other side of the stockade fence. The house across the driveway looked empty, the windows dark, the curtains drawn. It looked like no one had ever lived there but of course that wasn’t true — it was the house she’d grown up in. Maybe everyone was at the reception.

She hadn’t had that much to drink but even so she was careful as she started down the drive. She was wearing high-heeled shoes and on this side of the street the driveways were very steep. Soon it would be night; soon it would be autumn. Soon it would be winter and then it would be cold.

It wasn’t until she arrived on the sidewalk that she realized how late it had gotten to be. Most of the streetlights were broken but one of the ones that still worked was shining down on a big gray hare. The hare was hesitating in the center of the street on its hind legs, its front paws lifted and folded neatly against its chest. The girl spoke to it softly. Here, boy, here, but it just looked at her in exasperation before hopping off down the sidewalk in front of the houses on the opposite side of the street.

Hop hop hop. In another moment down went the curly-haired girl after it, never once considering how in the world she was going to get back again.

The houses on the street were all the same, it was just the people living in them who were different. The people who lived in the house where the girl had grown up had terrible taste in curtains. The brick of Janice’s house had been painted pale blue. A little dog barked behind the door of a house where no dog had lived before and instead of the ivy plant in its bow window there was a gold lamp shaped like a naked woman. The large holly bush at the corner was gone.

The vacant lot, though — the vacant lot was still exactly the way it had been when the girl was a girl. She threw herself down on the short green grass, heedless of getting grass stains on her good silk skirt, and somehow tearing a hole in its hem with the heel of her shoe in the process.

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