Christine полностью

“I’ll tell you why you don’t want to look at it,” he said in the same soft voice. “It isn’t the money, because the car’s let me connect with a job that I’m good at and will end up making me money. You know that. It isn’t my grades, either. They’re no worse than they ever were. You know that, too. It’s because you can’t stand not to have me under your thumb, the way your department is, the way he is'—he jerked a thumb at Michael, who managed to look angry and guilty and miserable all at the same time—'the way I always was.”

Now Arnie’s face was flushed, his hands, clenched into fists at his sides.

“All that liberal bullshit about how the family decided things together, discussed things together, worked things out together, But the fact is, you were always the one who picked out my school-clothes, my school-shoes, who I was supposed to play with and who I couldn’t, you decided where we were going on vacation, you told him when to trade cars and what to trade for. Well, this is one thing you can’t run, and you fucking hate it, don’t you?”

She slapped his face. The sound was like a pistol-shot in the living room. Outside, dusk had fallen and cars cruised by, indistinct, their headlights like yellow eyes. Christine sat in the Cunninghams” asphalted driveway as she had once sat on Roland D. LeBay’s lawn, but looking considerably better now than she had then—she looked cool and above all this ugly, undignified family bickering. She had, perhaps, come up in the world.

Abruptly, shockingly, Regina Cunningham began to cry. This was a phenomenon, akin to rain in the desert, that Arnie had seen only four or five times in his entire life and on none of the other occasions had he been the cause of the tears.

Her tears were frightening, he told Dennis later, by virtue of the simple fact that they were there. That was enough, but there was more—the tears made her look old in a single terrifying stroke, as if she had made a quantum leap from forty-five to sixty in a space of seconds. The hard grey shine in her gaze turned blurry and weak, and suddenly the tears were spilling down her cheeks, cutting through her make-up.

She fumbled on the mantelpiece for her drink, jogged the glass instead with the tips of her fingers. It fell onto the hearth and shattered. A kind of incredulous silence held among the three of them, an amazement that things had come this far.

And somehow, even through the weakness of the tears, she managed to say, “I won’t have it in our garage or in this driveway, Arnold.”

He answered coldly, “I wouldn’t have it here, Mother.” He walked to the doorway, turned back, and looked at them both. “Thanks. For being so understanding. Thanks a lot, both of you.”

He left.

Michael caught Arnie in the driveway, headed for Christine. He put a hand on Arnie’s shoulder. Arnie shook it off and went on digging for his car-keys.

“Arnie. Please.”

Arnie turned around fast. For a moment he seemed on the verge of making that evening’s blackness total by striking his father. Then some of the tenseness in his body subsided and he leaned back against the car, touching it with his left hand, stroking it, seeming to draw strength from it.

“All right,” he said. “What do you want?”

Michael opened his mouth and then seemed unsure how to proceed. An expression of helplessness—it would have been funny if it hadn’t been so grimly awful—spread over his face. He seemed to have aged, to have gone grey and haggard around the edges.

“Arnie,” he said, seeming to force the words out against some great weight of opposing inertia, “Arnie, I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah,” Arnie said, and turned away again, opening the driver’s side door. A pleasant smell of well-cared-for car drifted out. “I could see that from the way you stood up for me.”

“Please,” he said. “This is hard for me. Harder than you know.”

Something in his voice made Arnie turn back. His father’s eyes were desperate and unhappy.

“I didn’t say I wanted to stand up for you,” Michael said. “I see her side as well, you know. I see the way you pushed her, determined to have your own way at any cost—”

Arnie uttered a harsh laugh. “Just like her, in other words.”

“Your- mother is going through the change of life,” Michael said quietly. “It’s been extremely difficult for her.”

Arnie blinked at him, at first not even sure what he had heard. It was as if his father had suddenly said something to him in igpay atinlay; it seemed to have no more relevance to what they were talking about than baseball scores.

“W-What?”