Ellison, Harlan Love ain, t nothing

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Rohrer sat with knees drawn up, staring at his limp hands, the way a fetus "sees" its limp,
relaxed hands before its face. Quiet in there, inside Victor Rohrer. Quiet for the first time.
Quiet after a long time of shrieking and sound and siren wails inside a skull that had offered no
defense, no protection.
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Victor Rohrer and Lilian Goldbosch, both Juden, both stalked; and on an afternoon in Detroit ...
...both had answered with their lives a question that had never even existed, much less been
asked, by two high school boys who now had begun to suspect...
...no one escapes, when night begins to fall.
--Hollywood, 1965
PUNKY AND THE YALE MEN
"Love ain't nothing but sex misspelled," he had said, when he had left New York, for the last
time. He had said it to the girl he had been sleeping with: a junior fashion and beauty editor
with one of the big women's slicks. He had just found out she was a thirty-six-dollar-a-day
cocaine addict, and it hadn't mattered, really, because he had gift-wrapped his love and given it
to her, asking nothing in return except that she let him be near her.
And yet, when he asked her, that final day, why they had made love only once (with all her stray
baby cats mewling in corners and walking over their intertwined bodies), she answered, "I was
stoned. It was the only way I could hack it." And he had been sick. Even in his middle thirties,
having been down so many dark roads that ended in nothingness, he had been hurt, had been
destroyed, and he had gone away from her, gone away from that place, in that special time, and he
had told her, "Love ain't nothing but sex misspelled."
It had been bad grammar for a writer as famous as Sorokin. But he was entitled to indulge. It had
been a bad year. So he had left New York, for the last time, once again resuming the search that
had no end; he had gone back to the studio in Hollywood, and had forgotten quite completely,
knowing he would never return to New York.
Now, in another time, still seeking the punchline of the bad joke his life had become, he was back
in New York.
Andy Sorokin came out of the elevator squinting, as though he had just stepped into dazzling
sunshine.
Dazzling.
It was the forty-second-floor reception room of Marquis magazine and the most dazzling thing in it
was the shadow-box display of Kodachrome transparencies from the pages of Marquis.
Dazzling:
P�che flamb�e at The Forum of The XII Caesars; tuxedoed and tuck-bow-tied stalwarts at a Joan
Sutherland premi�re; decorous girl stuff, no nylon and garter belt crotch shots; deep-sea fishing
with marlin and mad-eyed bonita breaking white water; Yousuf Karsh character studies of two post-
debs and a Louisiana racist politico; a brace of artily drawn cartoons; a Maserati spinning-out at
the N�rburg Ring; Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Nathanael West, others whose first work
had appeared in the magazine; a soft-nosed Labrador Retriever in high grass, ostensibly retrieving
a Labrador; two catamarans running before a gale.
Andy Sorokin was not dazzled. He squinted like a man suffering on the outside of a needle-thrust
of heartburn.
The unlit cigarette hung from the exact center of his mouth, and he worked with his teeth at the
spongy, now moist filter. Behind him, the elevator doors sighed shut, and he was almost alone in
the reception room. He stood, still only two steps onto the deep-pile wall-to-wall, a man
listening to silent songs in stone, as the nearly pretty receptionist looked up, waiting for him
to come to her.
When he didn't, she pursed, nibbled, and then flashed her receptionist eyes. When he still paid no
attention to her, she said firmly, projecting, "Yes, may I help you?"
Sorokin had not been daydreaming. He had been entirely there, assaulted by the almost pathological
density of good taste in the reception room, beguiled by the relentless masculinity of the Marquis
image as totemized in the Kodachromes, amused by an impending meeting that was intended to regain
for him that innocence of childhood or nature he had somewhen lost, by the preposterous expedient
of hurling him back into a scene, a past, he had fled--gladly--seventeen years before.
"I doubt it," he replied.
Steel shutters slammed down in her eyes. It had been a bitch of a day, lousy lunch, out of pills
and the Curse right on time, and but no room in a day like today for some sillyass cigarette-
nibbling smartass with funnys. It became unaccountably chill in the room.
Sorokin knew it had been a dumb remark. But it wasn't worth retracting.
"Walter Werringer, please," he said wearily.
"Your name?" in ice.
"Sorokin."
And she knew she had blown it. Ohmigod Sorokin. All day Werringer and the staff had been on
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tiptoes, like a basic training barracks waiting for the Inspector General. Sorokin, the giant.
Standing here rumpled and nibbling a filter, and she had chopped him. The word was ohmigod. And
but no way to recoup. If he so much as dropped a whisper to someone in editorial country, a
whisper, the time for moving out of her parents' apartment on Pelham Parkway was farther off, the
Times want ads.
She tried a smile, and then didn't bother. His eyes. How drawn and dark they were, like
pursestrings pulled tight closed. She should have guessed: those eyes: Sorokin.
"Right this way, Mr. Sorokin," she said, standing, smoothing her skirt across her thighs. There
was a momentary flicker of reprieve: he looked at her body. So she preceded him down the corridor
into editorial country, moving it fluidly. "Mr. Werringer and the staff have been expecting you,"
she said, turning to speak over her shoulder, letting the ironed-flat blonde discoth�que hair sway
back from her good left profile.
"Thank you," he said, wearily. It was a long quiet corridor.
"I really admired your book," she said, still walking. He had had fourteen novels published, she [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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