changed in his life. He tried to explain it to her: things were complicated. She nodded. She regarded him with a blank expression which was worse than scorn. He could see how maybe it didn’t look as if he loved her, but his hands were tied. What could he do? He had other people to consider. Another person, that is. He’d been in this thing too long a time to just walk away. He owed that person too much. He really did.
Kay didn’t argue with him. She just listened, arms folded, standing against the stove. Her expression said, You’re full of shit. But she was still listening and as long as she was listening he was going to keep talking. He needed her to understand: Vanessa had saved him. He didn’t put it that way to Kay, but tried to convey how Vanessa had stood by him all those years while he was struggling to get the damn movie made. Truth be told, she’d supported him for a solid year in there. Then on and off for a few more. How did you repay someone for that? At least now he was pulling his own weight. (Though it did help that he didn’t have to pay rent. Vanessa’s owning the apartment was a definite plus. He saw it as a matter of good luck, for the both of them. She had the good fortune to have family money and it was no skin off her back and they both benefited. She was starting actually to make money with her gallery and that money he considered distinctly different from the family money. The money she earned, he’d never take that money. She worked hard, and even if it was her family money which she’d used to back the gallery in the first place, she was now earning it herself. A lot of girls wouldn’t have bothered working at all. He admired Vanessa for that. But he wasn’t going to pretend that he didn’t like the fact that she had money. A woman with money was less helpless. A woman with money could choose. She had power. So, because Vanessa did happen to have money, she ended up, he admitted it, taking up a lot of financial slack. But a lot of it was out of his control. She was the one who wanted to be by the sea in the summer, so she took the share on the North Fork. He would have been perfectly content to slump his way through the summer in town stringing together visits to air-conditioned movie theaters, but if they were going to spend time together, then he had to go out there and when he did there was bound to be the inevitable mortifying moment when he didn’t have enough money to chip in for the tuna or the booze or whatever it was they were all madly consuming in that disorganized house. What else could he do? He was broke.)
But it wasn’t just the money that made him indebted to Vanessa. Everyone made too much of money, he thought. (He dimly acknowledged the fact that this assertion was usually made by those with not much of it.) The more important thing, though, with him and Vanessa was what went on emotionally. She had supported him in much more important ways. She encouraged him through those long deserted stretches when if he had to go out one more night and answer questions about what he did and have to say again working on an independent feature when he’d rather have put a bullet through his head. She’d stuck by him when even he didn’t think he was worth sticking by. And it wasn’t as if he didn’t love her for it. He did. She was … well, his best friend, he guessed. They’d been together since college nearly the whole time. With only a few on-and-off periods. Part of senior year was one. And after graduation when he needed to be on his own. He moved to Paris. He’d gotten a scholarship. The idea was to study film, but he dropped out of the school and used the money to watch two or three movies a day (easy to do in Paris), which he thought was as good a way as any of studying film, actually, but extremely lonely. He thought a lot about Vanessa, but was not ready to … to … what? To be only with her.
So he had little flirtations in Paris, mostly with other Americans at first. Then he branched out to the more adventurous Swedish hippie and eventually landed an actual Parisienne (though she was technically from Dijon). Vanessa came to see him once and they fought the whole time. They had agreed to be honest with each other about the other people they saw, despite the fact that it never made either of them feel better. But neither of them would admit to wounded feelings and instead tossed back and forth little grenades of amorous details—the length of hair of a girl he’d messed around with, the skiing weekend she ended up in bed with two guys but only kissed one of them. In telling the stories they’d begin tentatively, concerned with each other’s feelings, then, as the stings increased, would find it not so bad after all to divulge more. He remembered one fight (but not what it was about) walking by the Seine on some gray afternoon and how she stormed off and he waited for a few good hours before finding her again in the café near his apartment (belonging to friends of her parents). She stood out, a big-boned blonde, clearly American, at the corner table with a cup of coffee, scribbling furiously in a little book. When he approached, she reached for her cup and drained it, not looking at him. When she did look up, red-eyed, he saw she wasn’t mad anymore. ‘You had the keys,’ she said, suppressing a smile of relief. ‘So I had to wait.’
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
