Читать книгу The Snow Queen - Michael Cunningham - Страница 19

The marriage thing is very weird,” Liz says to Andrew. They’re standing on her roof, with snow billowing around them. They’ve come up to the roof for the shock of it, after a night that just rolled off the time-spool (my god, Andrew, it’s four in the morning; shit, Andrew, how’d it suddenly get to be five thirty, we’ve got to get some sleep). They’ve been too high to have sex, but there were moments, there were moments, during the night, when it seemed to Liz that she was explaining herself entirely; that she was able to hold her very being in her outstretched palms and say, here I am, here’s the golden box all tricked open, every hidden drawer and false bottom released; here is my honor and my generosity, here are my wounds and my fears, the real as well as the imaginary; here is what I see and think and feel; here is my acuity and my hope and my way of turning a phrase; here is the … me-ness of me, the tangible but inchoate entity that shifts and buzzes within the flesh, the central part that simply is, the part that finds it wonderful and appalling and strange to be a woman named Liz who lives in Brooklyn and owns a shop; the unnamed and unnameable; that which God would recognize after the flesh has fallen away.

Really, who needed to have sex?

Now she is quieting, returning, reconnecting (with both sorrow and gratitude) to her more corporeal self, the self that still blazes with its own light and heat but is tethered by all the sinewy little strings—the self that’s capable of pettiness and irritation, skepticism and needless anxiety. She is no longer aloft, no longer spreading a star-studded cloak over the nocturnal woods; she is still full of mingled magic but she is also a woman standing on a roof with her much-younger boyfriend, pelted by blowing snow, a denizen of the ordinary world, someone who might say, The marriage thing is very weird.