Kate Wilhelm - Man On The Persian Carpet

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 52.05KB 22 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Kate Wilhelm - The Man On The Persian Carpet

CAROLYN HARLEY AND Drake Symes had fallen in and out of love ever since kindergarten when

he fought Billy Driscoll for hitting her and she declared her undying love for him. Two weeks later they

had fallen out of love when she saw him playing with Melanie Bosc. The next day she had fought Billy

herself.

When they were twelve they discovered sex together, and she said afterward, "Is that all? That's it?"

Drake, enraptured, exalted, ready to do battle with dragons or angels, had declared his undying love for

her.

"I didn't like it," she said. "It's silly and doesn't feel good, and I'm bleeding. Maybe I'm going to die and

go to hell now."

"We just need practice," he said desperately.

She shook her head. "I don't think so. Maybe I'll become a lesbian or a nun."

He didn't know what a lesbian was, and the following fall when he went to the public high school and she

went to St. Agnes Girls' School, he thought that was where girls were taught how to be lesbians or nuns.

She wouldn't let him touch her again until they were sixteen.

Now it was the summer following their graduations from high school and they were walking through her

father's apple orchard.

Her father was an orthopedic surgeon in Middletown, New York, and he owned a forty-acre apple

orchard. His father was a lineman for the telephone company. She was an only child; he had two sisters

and a brother.

"I got the job," he said.

"And I have to go to France," she said, as morose as he was, but also excited by the prospect of going

to Paris. "With Mother," she added, and he nodded in sympathy.

They walked in silence for a time, then she said, "Tell me about the job. You're going to work for a

publisher?"

"Yeah. Old man Broccoli knows this guy who's a publisher, Oracle Publications, and he needs someone

to read stuff that comes in. Broccoli recommended me. After the interview, the publisher gave me a load

of books to study, so I'll know what he's up to. It's all crazy stuff, astrology, Nostradamus revealed,

how to get in touch with the inner self.... Nutbooks."

"It sounds like fun," Carolyn said. "Can I see them?"

"Sure." He had taken the job because he could work his own hours all through college; if he didn't work

he couldn't go to college. He had been accepted by NYU, and Carolyn would go to Radcliffe.

"And the summer we both graduate," he said then, getting back to the topic, "we go to Europe. Right?

I'll save every cent I can, we'll be of age, and you'll have money by then from your grandmother. Deal?"

"Deal," she said.

She borrowed several of the books, then, a day or two before she left for her trip, she made his

handprints. "For practice," she said. "Maybe I'll become a palmist."

He groaned. "What have I done?"

She got the wrong kind of ink, and for the rest of the summer he had black palms, with the ink fading

away slowly. First the mounts emerged, like rounded hills rising from black water -- the mount of

Apollo, mount of Jupiter, of Venus, Saturn -- leaving dark valleys until they faded also and only the lines

remained deeply etched in black. It seemed appropriate to have his life- and heart-lines etched in black.

Eddie Norwich, the publisher of Oracle Publications, was a diminutive man in his mid-fifties, five feet

two, a hundred ten pounds after a big meal, with a surprisingly deep voice that made him impressive

over the telephone. Apparently he bought his clothes in the boys' department of a discount store: chinos,

T-shirt with a motorcycle logo on the pocket, high-top court shoes. A green and brown plaid sport coat

hung over the back of his chair, a blue necktie dripped from the side pocket of the coat onto the floor.

There were two other people in the offices, Becky Russo, thirty-something, a dimpled bottle-blond, who

at five feet nine or ten towered over her employer; she was the production department. Clyde

Dinwiddie, who appeared to be a hundred years old, bald, stooped, with protruding eyes and no

eyebrows, was the bookkeeping department.

Drake would get to know them all well, but that day he was overwhelmed by books in every stage from

inspiration to publication: Manuscripts, bound galleys, page proofs, copyedited manuscripts, unopened

boxes and bulging envelopes, completed books with dust jackets.... Every flat surface was piled high in

Eddie's inner office and the outer office that Becky and Clyde shared; there were heaps and stacks on

the floor, and against one wall the boxes of manuscripts reached the ceiling.

"We got behind," Eddie said, scowling at the chaos about them. "Every nut out there thinks he's got a

piece of the truth and wants to tell the world about it. But we do forty-eight books a year. Period. So

ninety-nine percent of what comes through the door gets sent back -- if they provided return postage. If

not, in the trash with it. But someone's got to check them out. Who knows when the next Castaneda will

turn up? Becky will walk you through some of those manuscripts."

Becky frowned. "You know I got those galleys, and a new manuscript from Madame Frieda.... "

"Just the rudiments," Eddie said. "He's a smart kid. He'll catch on fast. I gotta call what's-his-name

back...." He withdrew to his inner office and closed the door.

The first lesson Drake learned was that whatever Eddie didn't want to do, or didn't have time to do, he

delegated to Becky, and before very long, to Drake.

Then he began to learn how to read the slushpile, the over-the-transom, unagented manuscripts, unasked

for, unloved and unwanted. Written in crayon on brown paper bags -- out. Dim pencil on lined paper --

out. Dictated by Jesus -- out. Verse -- out. Yeti -- out....

While Carolyn was learning how to shop in Paris, how to order dinner in the finest restaurants, what to

look for in the museums, he was learning about the new interpretation of the pyramids, the secret

meaning of the Book of Revelation, the hidden messages on the backs of ancient sea turtles, what

Nostradamus really meant, how to bend the will of the world to do your bidding.... He understood now

the myth of the Augean stable. No matter how fast he read, and he got better at it day by day, the stacks

did not appear to be reduced.

THEN CAROLYN returned from her month-long vacation, and the next day he was standing at the

door of the train long before the Middletown stop was called. Her father was at the clinic that day, her

mother was out, while at his house his mother and one sister were both at home. "My house," Carolyn

had said on the phone the night before. She met his train, and they held each other hard, not kissing, not

in public, but straining toward each other.

"Let's beat it," he said huskily.

She drove; he didn't own a car since it would have been a hassle in New York City. He watched her

profile as she drove and talked.

"I kept a diary of all the places I want to go back to with you. A boat ride on the Seine at night; the Eiffel

Tower is all lighted up and looks like it's made out of gold.... "

He was thinking, Hurry! Hurry! Drive faster!

Her house was one of the biggest in Middletown, an old-fashioned two-story building with fluted

columns, like a colonial mansion. The driveway was flanked by two mature blue spruce trees; other trees

and shrubs screened the house from the street. She pulled into the driveway, hit the brake, and opened

her door almost as fast as he opened his; arm in arm they raced to the house.

Inside, he grabbed her and they kissed, a long, deep kiss that left them trembling. When she drew back

and took his hand, she turned toward the living room, and she gasped.

"Drake! Look!"

A naked man facing away from the door lay on the red Sarouk rug, one of his legs drawn up almost in a

fetal position, the back of his head visible.

Carolyn took a step toward the naked man and Drake pulled her back. "He must be one of your dad's

patients," he said. His voice was hoarse, raspy. "We'd better call nine one one."

"Is he dead? He looks dead!" she said in a whisper.

He tugged on her arm. "Where's the nearest phone?"

"We should see if he's dead."

"No. Don't go near him. He could be an escaped convict, or a dangerous lunatic. Come on, a telephone."

He pulled her to her father's study and dialed the emergency number. He was talking to the dispatcher

when Carolyn went to the hall door and said, "I'll see if he's moved or anything. I won't go into the living

room, just from the doorway."

He was holding on, the way the dispatcher told him to, when Carolyn screamed. "Jesus!" he cried and

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Kate Wilhelm - Man On The Persian Carpet.pdf

共22页,预览3页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Kate Wilhelm - Man On The Persian Carpet

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: