Читать книгу Desperate Characters - Paula Fox - Страница 8

They went down the street silently, quickly, like conspirators, speaking only when they had turned a corner and were headed for downtown Brooklyn.

“Where are we going?” he asked. “Is there anything open?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been around here at this hour. Did you come by subway?”

“No. I took a taxi. He dropped me at the wrong corner, but I was too tired to argue. I walked to your house.”

“Did you tell Ruth you were coming?”

“No. I had gone out to a movie. A man who was sitting beside me told me I was talking to myself. I told him not to interrupt, then, and he told me I was fucking up his one night out. So I left and got a taxi and went to a Bickford’s, which was full of people talking to themselves. Christ! Look at the paper all over the sidewalks.”

“Please. Don’t talk to me about garbage.”

They had come to an intersection. From the west, bearing down on them with an echoing bang and rattle of mechanical parts, came a bus. It went through the red light. The driver was hunched forward, his arms encircling the wheel, his hands hanging down like paper hands. There was only one passenger, an old woman with dazzling white hair. She looked at once majestic and mindless.

“What is she thinking about?” Sophie said.

“Nothing. She’s asleep.”

The light changed and changed again. Discarded wrappings and newspapers rustled all around them. A block away, a few figures stood torpidly outside the windows of a lunch counter. As they walked toward it, Sophie could see two men inside, moving briskly as they rinsed out thick white cups and scrubbed a grill. The people outside were simply standing there, watching. Across the street, near a subway exit, a short fat dark man wearing a tiny black hat was staring down at a sewer grating. He had the stunned immobility of a displaced person who had come as far as he could without further instructions.