Steven Millhauser - We Others - New and Selected Stories

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Steven Millhauser - We Others - New and Selected Stories» 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. Год выпуска: 2011, ISBN: 2011, Издательство: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Жанр: Современная проза, на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале библиотеки ЛибКат.

We Others: New and Selected Stories: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

Предлагаем к чтению аннотацию, описание, краткое содержание или предисловие (зависит от того, что написал сам автор книги «We Others: New and Selected Stories»). Если вы не нашли необходимую информацию о книге — напишите в комментариях, мы постараемся отыскать её.

“Every reader knows of writers who are like secrets one wants to keep, and whose books one wants to tell the world about. Millhauser is mine.”
— David Rollow, From the Pulitzer Prize — winning author: the essential stories across three decades that showcase his indomitable imagination.
Steven Millhauser’s fiction has consistently, and to dazzling effect, dissolved the boundaries between reality and fantasy, waking life and dreams, the past and the future, darkness and light, love and lust. The stories gathered here unfurl in settings as disparate as nineteenth-century Vienna, a contemporary Connecticut town, the corridors of a monstrous museum, and Thomas Edison’s laboratory, and they are inhabited by a wide-ranging cast of characters, including a knife thrower and teenage boys, ghosts and a cartoon cat and mouse. But all of the stories are united in their unfailing power to surprise and enchant. From the earliest to the stunning, previously unpublished novella-length title story — in which a man who is dead, but not quite gone, reaches out to two lonely women — Millhauser in this magnificent collection carves out ever more deeply his wondrous place in the American literary canon.

We Others: New and Selected Stories — 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 «We Others: New and Selected Stories», 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
2

I began walking home with her every day, dragging my feet through unraked leaves that sounded to me like waves drawing back on a beach. As the weather grew colder we moved indoors — sometimes to the living room, where we sat on the dark blue couch beside the armchair, sometimes to the kitchen table, with its maplewood chairs that had floral-patterned cushions tied to the seats. After a while we’d go upstairs to Emily’s room, where I straddled the wooden desk-chair and faced Emily, who sat on the big bed with her back propped up against the headboard and her legs stretched out on the pink spread. I admired her desk, an old-fashioned one with pigeonholes and a writing surface that swung out on brass hinges. In one corner of the room sat a small bookcase no higher than my waist. It held a pale blue leather jewelry box, eight or nine books, a Ginny doll with one arm, and many boxes of puzzles. The small number of books surprised me, since I had two large bookcases in my room, a row of books on my dresser, and piles of books on the floor by my desk. But I quickly came to connect the absence of such things with Emily’s calmness, as if books and edginess belonged together. We talked, we laughed, we did homework — I at the desk, she on the bed. Sometimes, turning over my shoulder, I would simply look at her, as she sat reading calmly on the bed with her black flats on the floor and her ankles crossed, reaching now and then to scratch the back of her left hand with two fingers of the right.

At 4:00 there would be a knock on the half-open door and Mrs. Hohn would sweep in with a tray bearing glasses of milk and a plate of chocolate chip cookies. At 5:30 I would hear Emily’s father opening the two front doors, the storm door and the wooden door, and ten minutes later he would drive me home. Mr. Hohn was a mild, balding man with large melancholy eyes and a rueful smile. He did something in insurance, collected plate blocks and first-day covers of every newly issued American stamp, and liked to ask me serious questions about whatever book I was reading. He said things like “Can you hand me that thingamajigger?” and “That’s for darn sure.” I felt so welcomed by the Hohn family, so bathed in their atmosphere, that when I entered my own house, with its bookcases and its polished dark piano with piles of yellow music books and its faint sweet odor of pipe tobacco, it was always with a slight shock of estrangement, before familiarity settled over me.

I kept planning to invite Emily to my house, but I never did. At my place, we would have done my kinds of things — I’d have shown her my books, and my records, and my twin-lens reflex, and my collection of labeled minerals from quarries all over Connecticut. I would have played the piano for her, a piece by Chopin or Debussy, and then, to show that I wasn’t stuck up, a boogie-woogie by Clarence Pine Top Smith. My parents would have welcomed her and made her feel at home. And as I imagined these things, all of which had happened many times before, a tiredness came over me, as if I were rehearsing for a play that I’d just finished performing in. It was as if, in my house, I could feel a continual soft pressure on me — emanating from the piano, from the reading chair in my room, from the mahogany bookcase in the front hall — to be the person I was, the one I felt I somehow had to be. What I liked about Emily’s house was that I didn’t have to be anything at all.

On weekends my father graded papers at home and let me have the car. When I asked about a curfew, he looked up from the armchair by the lamp table and said, “Your mother and I expect you home before the year is out.” Every Friday night I would drive over to Emily’s house, and every Saturday I would drive over in the late morning and stay past midnight. We did homework in Emily’s room; I helped Mr. Hohn rake leaves and clean the roof gutters; I sat in the kitchen peeling carrots and cutting the ends off string beans while Mrs. Hohn prepared the pot roast or the roast lamb. After dinner, Emily washed the dishes and I dried them with a thick dish towel decorated with little bluebirds. Then the four of us would play Scrabble at the dining room table, under a small brass chandelier with narrow bulbs shaped like flames. Mrs. Hohn liked to press her hand to her chest and say that, good gracious, with me around, who needed a dictionary, but she was a skillful and relentless player and usually won — the two of us always came in first or second, while Emily and her father trailed far behind. Something gentle and unaggressive in Mr. Hohn’s play, which reminded me of his melancholy eyes, seemed to invite defeat; but I was merciless. “I can’t believe these letters,” Mrs. Hohn would say, or “Em, don’t do that,” as Emily reached over to scratch the back of her hand. Mrs. Hohn liked to win; we inspired in each other a spirit of friendly fierce combat. At times, lashed to competitive fury by Mrs. Hohn, I glanced at Emily as she sat staring mildly at her tiles. For a moment her calmness baffled me, as if we were playing different games. Then the battle was over, with laughter and headshakes, and Mrs. Hohn served cookies and cider and apple crumb cake, while outside the winds of November rattled the dining room windows.

One Saturday afternoon when I was in the backyard helping Mr. Hohn repair a wood-framed storm window that we’d taken down and set against the house, he looked up and said, “Looks like we need a plane. Wait here and I’ll — or heck no, come on down.” He opened the sloping door, led me down six steps, and reached for a key hidden on the ledge above the red cellar door. In the deep basement he led me past the furnace and boiler to a shelf that held a ball-peen hammer, a spirit level, and a shiny black plane with a wooden knob. “Since we’re down here,” he said, and motioned me along with two quick curls of a forefinger. We came to a wall piled high with boxes; a tall metal cabinet with two doors stood in a corner. Mr. Hohn opened the metal doors. I saw a row of little dresses all hanging on small white plastic hangers. “Emmy’s,” he said. He took one out, on its hanger, and held it up for me — a little blue dress with a white collar. “Three years old.” He shrugged, rubbed the back of his neck, and hung up the dress. “We kept planning to give them away, but somehow—” He sighed. “Well!” he said, and closed the doors. Turning abruptly, he led me back up the steps into the backyard.

Meanwhile, in school, I waited for the day to end so that I could walk home with Emily. I liked to look over at her, in the classes we took together. Unlike me, always restless, always a little bored, Emily gazed at the teacher with full attention, or else bent her head over her notebook and wrote steadily. Sometimes she would give a subtle yawn, which revealed itself as a slight stiffening of her under-eye skin. Sometimes she would reach over and scratch the back of her left hand with two fingers of the right.

One day as I sat down in the cafeteria with my shepherd’s pie and my Devil Dog, I noticed that the back of Emily’s hand was a little red. “How’s your hand?” I asked. She immediately placed it on her lap. “It’s fine,” she said. “It’s this dry heat.” She pointed to a hissing radiator.

3

On a dreary Monday morning shortly before Christmas break, when the sky was so gray and dark that the school windows glowed, as at a night dance, I arrived late at the lockers and rushed into homeroom seconds before the bell. Emily’s seat was empty. Her desk, without her, seemed to be drawing attention to itself, like a lamp without a shade. It struck me that she’d never been absent before — it wasn’t the sort of thing she did. All that day her absence pressed on me. She seemed, absent, more insistently present than when she was actually there. Under the fluorescent ceiling lights I had the sensation that she was visibly, luminously, missing. At my house I let myself in with my key. I dropped my books on the kitchen table, where they slowly began to topple, and dialed Emily’s number. Mrs. Hohn answered the phone as the books slid along the tabletop. Emily was fine, there was nothing to worry about. She had gone to the doctor for a checkup. She was resting now, she’d be back in school probably tomorrow. Could I think of a six-letter word for “enliven”?

Читать дальше
Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Похожие книги на «We Others: New and Selected Stories»

Представляем Вашему вниманию похожие книги на «We Others: New and Selected Stories» 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 «We Others: New and Selected Stories»

Обсуждение, отзывы о книге «We Others: New and Selected Stories» 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