The Beautiful and Damned / Прекрасные и обреченные. Уровень 4

“I don’t know what you mean ‘counts,’” she objected.

“I wish you’d tell me how old you are.”

“Twenty-two,” she said. “How old did you think?”

“About eighteen.”

“Let’s be eighteen, then. I don’t like being twenty-two. I hate it more than anything in the world.”

“Being twenty-two?”

“No. Getting old and everything. Getting married.”

“Don’t you ever want to marry?”

“I don’t want to have responsibility and a lot of children to take care of.”

He waited rather breathlessly for her next remark. She was smiling, without amusement but pleasantly.

“What do you do with yourself?[19 - What do you do with yourself? – Чем вы занимаетесь?]” she asked.

Anthony was in a mood to talk. He wanted, moreover, to impress this girl. He wanted to pose.

“I do nothing,” he began. “I do nothing, for there’s nothing I can do that’s worth doing.”

“Well?” He had not surprised her.

“Don’t you approve of lazy men?”

She nodded.

“I want to know just why it’s impossible for an American to be gracefully idle, it astonishes me.

I don’t understand why people think that every young man ought to go downtown and work ten hours a day for the best twenty years of his life at dull, unimaginative work.”

She watched him inscrutably. He waited for her to agree or disagree, but she did neither.

“Don’t you ever form judgments on things?” he asked with some exasperation.

She shook her head and her eyes wandered back to the dancers as she answered:

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about – what you should do, or what anybody should do. I don’t mind if people don’t do anything. I don’t see why they should; in fact it always astonishes me when anybody does anything.”

“You don’t want to do anything?”

“I want to sleep.”

“Sleep?”

“Sort of. I want to just be lazy and I want some of the people around me to be doing things, because that makes me feel comfortable and safe. And some of them can do nothing at all, because they can be graceful and companionable for me. But I never want to change people.”

“You’re a little determinist,” laughed Anthony. “It’s your world, isn’t it?”

“Well,” she said, “isn’t it? As long as I’m – young.”

She paused slightly before the last word and Anthony suspected that she wanted to say “beautiful.”

Admiration

That winter afternoon at the Plaza was the first of a succession of “dates” Anthony made with her before Christmas. Invariably she was busy. She attended the charity dances at the big hotels; he saw her several times at dinner parties.

He made engagements with her several times for lunch and tea. She was sleepy, incapable of concentrating upon anything.

One Sunday afternoon just before Christmas he called up and found her after some important but mysterious quarrel.

“Let’s go to something!” she proposed. “I want to see a show, don’t you? Oh, let’s go somewhere!”

“We’ll go to a good cabaret.”

“I’ve seen every one in town.”

“Well, we’ll find a new one.”

“Well, come on, then.”

A dozen blocks down Broadway Anthony’s eyes were caught by a large and unfamiliar electric sign “Marathon” in glorious yellow script.

“Shall we try it?”

With a sigh Gloria tossed her cigarette out the open door; then they had passed under the screaming sign, under the wide portal, and up by a stuffy elevator into this palace of pleasure.

There on Sunday nights gather the credulous, sentimental, underpaid, overworked people: book-keepers, ticket-sellers, office-managers, salesmen, and, most of all, clerks – clerks of the mail, of the grocery, of the brokerage, of the bank.

Anthony and Gloria sat down.

“How do you like it?” inquired Anthony.

“I love it,” she said frankly. Her gray eyes roved here and there, drowsing on each group, passing to the next. They two, it seemed to him, were alone quiet.

“I’m like these people,” she murmured. “I’m like they are – like Japanese lanterns and crape paper, and the music of that orchestra. I am like them. You don’t know me.” She hesitated. “These people could appreciate me, and these men would fall in love with me and admire me, whereas the clever men I meet would just analyze me and tell me I’m this because of this or that because of that.”

Chapter III

Gloria

From his undergraduate days Richard Caramel had desired to write.

“I’m absorbed, Aunt Catherine,” he told his aunt, “I really am. All my friends are joshing me – but I don’t care.”