The Witches of Eastwick / Иствикские ведьмы. Джон Апдайк
that he had acquired of this mocking art specimens of good quality. He had money and needed a woman to help him spend it. Across his dark vest curved the gold chain of an antique watch; he was an inheritor, though ill at ease with his inheritance. A wife could put him at ease.
The tea with rum came, but formed a more sedate ceremony than she had imagined from Sukie's description. Fidel materialized with that ideal silence of servants. The long-haired cat called Thumbkin, with the deformed paws mentioned in the Word, jumped onto Alexandra's lap just as she lifted her cup to her lips. She felt at peace here, which she had not expected, here in these rooms almost empty except their overload of sardonic art. Her host seemed pleasanter too. The manner of a man who wants to sleep with you is aggressive, testing, predicting his eventual anger if he succeeds, and there seemed little of that in Van Horne's manner today. He looked tired. She fantasized that the business appointment for which he had put on his solemn three-piece suit had been a disappointment, perhaps a petition for a bank loan that had been refused. He poured extra rum into his tea from the bottle of Mount Gay his butler had put at his elbow. “How did you come to acquire such a large and wonderful collection?” Alexandra asked him.
“My investment adviser” was his disappointing answer. “Smartest thing financially you can ever do except finding oil in your back yard is to buy a name artist before he has the name. And anyway, I love the junk.”
“I see you do,” Alexandra said, trying to help him. How could she ever rouse this heavy rambling man to fall in love with her? He was like a house with too many rooms, and the rooms with too many doors.
“I hated,” he volunteered, “that abstract stuff they were trying to sell us in the Fifties; Christ, it all reminded me of Eisenhower,[3] a big blah. I want art to show me something, to tell me where I'm, even if it's Hell, right?”
“I guess so. I'm really very dilettantish,” Alexandra said, less comfortable now that he did seem to be rousing. What underwear had she put on? When had she last had a bath?
“So when this stuff came along, I thought, Jesus, this is the thing for me. So fucking cheerful, you know – going down but going down with a smile.” He continued talking of the impression those things made on him when he had visited the modern art galleries.
He had felt that Alexandra did not mind his talking dirty. She in fact rather liked it; it had a secret sweetness, like the scent of carrion on Coal's coat. She must go. Her dog's big heart would break in that little locked car.
Van Horne told her about another creation of modern art that had impressed him greatly during his visit to Los Angeles: the entire sawed-off Dodge car sitting on a mat of artificial turf with a couple inside having an intercourse, and a little other mat of turf about the size of a checkerboard, with a single empty beer bottle on it, which showed that they had been drinking and threw it out. He called it a work of genius, and predicted that such works would be Mona Lisas of the future.
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