by Rudoy, Danil
“How could you…” She stopped and looked at him as if trying to find the ending of the phrase in the air between them.
“How could I – what?”
“Deceive me,” she said so calmly he knew there was a hurricane in her heart. “You promised to marry me.”
“You prefer being a shrewd cynic?” His face assumed a dreamy look. “Maximizing the profit, minimizing the loss: our macro theory class. But I didn’t promise to marry you: all I asked for in return for my million was your consent. This happens all the time: one person agrees upon something and desires it, while the other one can’t be bothered. At college it was the same; we just swapped the roles, dear.”
“Don’t you call me that,” she whispered through clenched teeth.
“What else can I call a woman if a night with her cost me a million? Even the New-year rabbit got less than half of it.”
These words made Eleanor wince as if she were stung by a wasp. She flung forward like a frenzied feline, aiming at his face with her nails, but he caught her wrist an inch away from his cheek.
“Where is your pride?” he said, looking into her eyes so closely as if trying to discern something at their bottom. There was no more azure in them as the whites were covered with a thin pink shroud. The sight of it struck him so much that he eased his grip, and when Eleanor pulled her hand away he immediately let it go.
“Don’t try to hit me,” he said. “Please.”
“Will you kill me if I do?”
“Of course not. I will never hurt you. All I want is for you to be happy. After all, I donated a million to it.”
“Thank you, Mr. Benefactor: Heaven shall never forget your munificence!” The venom in her voice made it sweeter than he had ever heard it sound, and he could only regret he had to bring her to such a state to enjoy it.
“I don’t believe in it. Besides, if you want you can burn the money. It’s yours.” He kept looking at her face, hoping to feel the last touch of the sphere, but the monotonous and painfully sharp ticks of the quartz clock audible even from here were vanishing in the air one after another, and nothing changed. Then her upper lip trembled in disgust, and a sickening salty wave rolled up to his throat again.
“I loved you, Eleanor,” he said, feeling tremendously tired. “And you didn’t care. I thought I had a flaw that made you see nothing but a friend in me, a convenient friend who could always be used for cafeteria if others were busy. And your endless ‘Richard, why don’t you hit on Lyn, she’s so into you?’” He mocked her intonations. “I hated you so much in those moments!”
“Should have let me go,” she said with contempt, staring through him.
“But I never gave up the hope to win you. I wrote a song for you,” he said sadly. “Pity they didn’t let me perform at our annual concert. But you didn’t come anyway.” The sadness in his voice ceded to hopelessness. “You had a date with the guy who threw up on your room door: he wanted to make up for it. You know…” suddenly he felt as if his throat was full of sea water. “Some people never change, and some never change to the better. You are the second type.”
“Your sad philosopher is back again?” She found courage to depict a sarcastic grin on her face, which impressed him.
“You always preferred Germans, I know. But no one understood the Greek grief better than Nietzsche.” He tried to gulp down the disgusting lump, but it only grew larger.
“Go away, Richard,” she said icily. “Now. Wait a minute,” she added hastily, as if pausing all the emotions she was experiencing. “Why two fifty-two in the afternoon? We met in the evening.”
“That’s for you to remember. Farewell, Eleanor,” he pronounced her name as if tasting its syllables, but they all dissolved in the saltiness in his mouth. The collapse was total: everything that nourished his imagination for years was gone at once, and he needed a moment to accept his new status. He looked at her once again, realizing that even the overwhelming anger and disappointment did not make her face less beautiful, and stepped into the hallway. He paused for a second to give the valises the last melancholic glance, put his shoes on and walked out from the dusty silence of the house disturbed only by the scratchy ticking of the quartz clock.
He breathed in the fresh and balmy morning air and walked to his car as leisurely as a man who had just woken up with anticipations of a pleasant day. The warm October wind stirred his hair, adding another touch to the image of a law-abiding citizen which, unbeknownst to himself, he could display to a passerby or an idler staring from the window. They would probably assume the young man was on his way to church and, judging by the introspective expression of his face, already soared in physically inaccessible realms. Where else could one go at such an early hour on a Sunday morning, dressed up in a perfectly white suit?
As soon as the Cadillac took off, and the long string of similar-looking houses ran behind the windows, he fished his cell phone from the pocket and dialed the number.
“Morning, dad,” he said when the other end picked up. “Are you still at work? Splendid. Can you please remind me once again the address of your hospital?”
Danil Rudoy. 2010, 2014.