Читать книгу Windows on the World - Frédéric Beigbeder - Страница 18

I pretend to sneer at the people at the nearby tables. It’s one of my favorite games when the kids are getting on my nerves. Look at this bunch of nonentities: they’re forgetting they’re descended from Dutch, Irish, German, Italian, French, English, and Spanish settlers who came across the Atlantic three or four centuries ago. Well Yee Ha! I hit the big time! I’ve got a house on Long Island, two rosy-cheeked kids who say “shoot” instead of “shit”! I’m not some hick off the boat anymore. Soft expensive sheets, soft expensive TP, soft expensive flower-print curtains, and enough domestic appliances to make my wife with her lacquered hair drool. The American dream: American Beauty. Sometimes I think the movie’s hero, Lester Burnham, is me. The cynical, phlegmatic guy bored shitless with his perfect family is “so me” a couple of years ago. Carthew Yorston walked out on his life from one day to the next. Actually, I arranged to have myself kicked out of my own house: I’m not sure if it was cowardice or respect for Mary. In the film, his wife wants to kill him but in the end he’s murdered by his homophobic ex-army neighbor. Let’s just say that for the moment, at least, I’m doing better than Lester. But, Jesus, I jerked off so much in the shower. And then there’s that brilliant phrase in the voice-over: “In a year, I’ll be dead, but in a way, I am dead already.” We have a lot in common, Lester Burnham and me.

Before long, I hope, my sons will be introducing me to their girlfriends. Uh-oh, I’m not too sure I’ll be able to resist hitting on them like some dirty old man. I wonder what Jerry and David Yorston will do when they grow up. Will they be successful artists, rock stars, Hollywood actors, TV presenters? Maybe industrialists, bankers, ruthless businessmen? As a father, I hope they choose the second option, but as an American, I can’t help but fantasize about the first. And, in reality, they’re most likely to end up realtors like their father. Forty years from now when I’m incontinent and bedridden in Fort Lauderdale they’ll be changing my diapers. I’ll eat dry crackers and fritter away their inheritance in some Florida gulag! It’ll be great: I’ll have my groceries delivered, order food online and some hooker who looks like Farrah Fawcett in Charlie’s Angels will suck my cock and smile. I love this country. Oh, yes, I forgot: I’ll play golf, if I can still walk. Jerry and David will caddy for me.

Looking down through the telescope I can see a white cube: the piazza where minuscule restaurant employees are putting chairs out on the terraces for people to lunch in the midday sunshine. I assume ice-cream sellers are putting out their blackboards, and hot-dog and pretzel vendors are setting up their carts round the WTC Plaza. That tiny cube? A stage for open-air rock concerts. That metal ball? A bronze globe sculpted by Fritz Koenig. There’s a bunch of hideous contemporary sculptures: mountains of tangled, stacked, warped metal girders. I have no idea what the artists were trying to say. It’s Indian summer; I hum “Autumn in New York.”

Autumn in New York

Why does it seem so invitiiiing?

Glittering crowwwds and shimmering clouuuds

In canyons of steeeel

Autuuuum in Neeeew Yorrk

Is often mingled wiiith pain

Dreaaamers with empty haaands

May sigh for exoootic lands…

Oscar Peterson on piano; Louis Armstrong on trumpet; vocals by Ella Fitzgerald.

I really must make an appointment to have a vasectomy. In the beginning, with Candace, everything was perfect. I met her on the Internet (on www.match.com). These days Internet dates are dime a dozen. Match.com has eight million members worldwide. If you’re visiting a foreign city, you set up a couple of dates before you arrive, it’s as easy as booking a hotel room. After dinner on our first date, I invited her up to my room for a drink so we could chat some more, and normally, that’s where she should have turned me down, because that’s the rule: never fuck on a first date. You know what she did? She looked me right in the eye and said: “If I’m coming up, it won’t be to chat.” Wow. Together, we went too far too fast: X-rated movies, a few sex toys. It was all too much. Ever since, the sex has been good, but a bit healthier. Like a merger between two lonely egomaniacs, we use each other’s bodies to get off and sometimes I think both of us are forcing ourselves. Hmm. She’s probably cheating on me. These days couples cheat on each other earlier and earlier.