Эдвард Докс - Pravda ['Self Help' in the UK]

“But the new place is not actually open yet?”

“No.”

“So how does Dora know?”

“She’s seen ‘definite sluts’ going in for interviews, apparently. And she knows the chef. Famous for peeing in pelmeni the world over.”

Molly drew a faux-macho breath. “What the hell is pelmeni, anyway?”

“Dumplings. Stuffed with cabbage, cheese, mushrooms. That kind of thing. Gogol’s favorite.”

“Did Dora tell you that?”

“No… No, that was my mum.”

“Useful.”

“Very useful. Dietary preferences—I know ’em all, Turgenev to Tchaikovsky and back again. Just in case you ever need me to rustle up something for one of the great men of Russian culture.” Isabella wrinkled her nose. “I’d better jump in the bath now, if that’s okay. Wouldn’t want to be late for the office. I’ve got opportunity matrices to evaluate.”

“Sure. Go right ahead. Help yourself to one of those fizz-bomb things. They’re glorious. Really… fizzy.”

“Thanks. Don’t wait up. I may be a few days.”

Molly took a tentative sip of her milkless Darjeeling. She had a shrewd enough idea of what lay behind Isabella’s impromptu visit. For one thing, something was going on upstairs. She suspected that Isabella found Sasha unfulfilling—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. Indeed, she knew for certain that Isabella found the general obviousness of masculinity tedious, since a common theme of their concert nights out together was Isabella being amusingly caustic about the clumsy gambits of stupid men. She did a great impression of the coy-but-almost-immediate way that they peddled inventories of their “interests”—"the shit fiction, the shit films, the shit music, the clichés, the clichés, Mol, the same old clichés.” And yet Isabella also seemed to do down the smart ones—for their dishonest charm, their self-satisfied pride in playing the man-woman game, their “cultivated eccentricities,” their “depth.” All of which analysis Molly had much sympathy for. Sasha and men aside, though, it also occurred to Molly that Isabella’s habitually sardonic chatter might be symptomatic of a deeper unease. The difficulty, however, was getting Isabella to open up. Evidently this stuff about broken boilers was total crap.

Thirty-five minutes later, Isabella came back into Molly’s bedroom, dressed now in her trouser suit and businesslike despite herself.

“Thanks for the bath, Mol. That was just what I needed.” She fetched her cup from the little bedside table and dropped it into a brown paper bag. Reality poured back into the vacuum of the vanished humor. “I’ll call tomorrow.”

“Do.”

Isabella’s eyes met those of her friend a moment and then traveled around the room as if looking for further cups that required disposing of. “Shall I bring your laptop over?”

“Yes. Thanks. That’s helpful. You’d better bring the power cable too, though.” Molly shifted her weight. “The battery connection keeps cutting out. I’ll plug it in down here.”

The laptop was on the tiny desk by the window. Isabella moved smartly around the end of the bed.

“You know,” Molly said, her voice gentle, her head following the passage of her friend. “You know, I’ve been thinking—you should put on those mini-concerts we keep talking about. Keep the momentum going—find some musicians who don’t look and behave like social-problem children and persuade your friends to come along. Your thing for Sasha’s birthday was cool. How many people? Two hundred. And everybody loved it. Everybody. And that was only piano and violin.”

“I know,” Isabella said. “But I’m not sure people would come—not if it weren’t some kind of a special occasion.”

“Oh, they would. Definitely. You have a pretty big e-mail list already.”

The wires into Molly’s computer were all twisted.

“All these things start small,” Molly continued. “You could use the place on Eleventh again.”

Isabella clicked her tongue. “Which one is the power here?”

“Sorry, Is—it’s the thickest cable. You might have to unplug it under the desk and feed it back up—otherwise that adaptor thing gets stuck. It’s a pain.”

Molly was right about the concerts, of course. But Isabella did not believe her neighbor really understood that such a course was far from easy. In the past twenty years (yes, since the Wall collapsed, dear, crazy Mother) modern life had speedily (and rather gleefully) drawn up and ranged all its best and biggest guns against anything remotely vocational. (Molly was the exception—and it had cost her dearly to find her niche.) The arteries of the world were becoming more and more sclerotic: if you were not creating money, then you were not creating anything. And sure enough, down on her hands and knees, Isabella heard herself citing the hoary old defense: “I’ve saved quite a lot, though—one more year and, well, I reckon I’ll have enough for a six-month sabbatical rethink.”

“If there’s anyone who could rescue that kind of music, Is… I mean, the classical audience is so pompous and self-regarding, such a bunch of pricks.”

Isabella stood, glanced out the window, and leaned over the desk, trying to thread the freed cord up from behind.

“But you’re not,” Molly continued. “You’re young and you’re clever and you’re… capable. The only thing… the only thing is to make a start.”

So keenly was Isabella aware of her neighbor’s change of tone (and the kindness behind it) that she suddenly felt embarrassed and could not bring herself to turn around. Embarrassed because she wanted both to embrace Molly and to run away from her at the same time. Embarrassed too that she might be guilty of in some way soliciting such sympathy. And worst of all, embarrassed because the acuity of the insight made her want to demur, deny, deflect, evade… when actually she well knew that she was only being cheered and reassured—reassured that here was an understanding ear, if ever she needed it. And yet what was the point of talking about this or that, when really—the floor of her mind now cracked apart and rose up like a swarm of agitated wasps—when really the whole mess needed sorting: dropping out and then begging her way back into Cambridge; a false-start career in law—years wasted; a change of plan; unbelievable amounts of work; then not managing more than three months with the cultish children of Magog at Harvard Business School; this new farce of a career at Media Therapy, also very difficult to lie her way into, with these human simulacra for colleagues. Not forgetting a disastrous series of so-called relationships with infants, a violent cheating manipulative bastard for a father whom (subconsciously) she had crossed the Atlantic to get away from and whom she sometimes felt the urge to pretend (in her sickest moments) had actually physically abused her, so that at least she would have some factual and universally recognized problem to cite as the cause of all her ungovernable feelings of revulsion and nausea toward him. And now the letters. She turned.

“You’re right, Mol, I know. I should call the guy again. That place on Eleventh is perfect. But… but it’s not as if I’m going to do this job for more than another year, maximum. I think I just had to get the green card and, you know, find a proper footing here after all the arsing around. If there’s one thing about America these days, it’s that you have to be legal. Land of the free and all that.”

She passed the computer with both hands.

Molly placed it beside her on the bed and looked up, her face a picture of understanding.

And instantly Isabella felt the urge to share something real with her friend. It was cruel to push people away all the time. Give something. Anything.