Читать книгу Sombrero Fallout - Richard Brautigan - Страница 22

BROOM

The heart-broken American humorist of course had no idea what was going on among the torn pieces of paper in his waste-paper basket. He did not know that they now had a life of their own and had gone on without him. He grieved only for his lost Japanese love. He thought about calling her up on the telephone and telling her that he loved her and would do anything in this world to have her back again.

He looked at the telephone.

She was only seven numbers away from him.

All he had to do was dial them.

Then he would hear her voice.

It would be very sleepy because he would have awakened her. It would sound as if it were coming from a great distance. Perhaps Kyoto, though she was only a mile away in the Richmond District of San Francisco.

‘Hello,’ she said.

‘It’s me. Can you talk?’

‘No, somebody’s here with me. It’s over between us. Don’t call again. It irritates him when you call.’

‘What?’

‘The man I’m in love with. He doesn’t like it when you call. So don’t call any more. OK?’

click

Then she hung up.

While she was hanging up in his mind, she slept alone with her cat beside her in bed. She was sound asleep. She had gone to bed with no one since they had broken up a month ago. She hadn’t even gone out on a date with another man. All she did was work at her job, come home and do needlework or read. She was reading Proust. She didn’t know why. Sometimes she visited her brother and his wife and they would all watch television together.

It had been a very uneventful time for her since she had broken up with the American humorist. She had been thinking a lot about her life while she was doing these other things. She was twenty-six years old and she was trying to put it into perspective. Somewhere during the two years she had gone out with the humorist, she had lost the dimensions of her existence and what she wanted out of life. The humorist had taken an enormous amount of energy from her. She constantly had to feed his insecurity and neurosis with her security and mental stability. After two years of this, she didn’t know who she was any more. In the beginning all she had wanted out of life was to live with him, have children and enjoy a normal existence.

His basic insanity stopped any of this from becoming a reality.

After about a year together she realized that loving him was not good for her but it took another year for her to end it and now she was very glad that it was over.

Sometimes she wondered how she had allowed it to go on for such a long time.

I will be very careful the next time I fall in love, she told herself. Also, she had made a promise to herself that she intended on keeping. She was never going to go out with another writer: no matter how charming, sensitive, inventive or fun they could be. They weren’t worth it in the long run. They were emotionally too expensive and the upkeep was too complicated. They were like having a vacuum cleaner around that broke all the time and only Einstein could fix it.

She wanted her next lover to be a broom.