Trouble - Couverture rigide

Christensen, Kate

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0385527306 ISBN 13 : 9780385527309

Editeur : Doubleday, 2009

Synopsis

Book by Christensen Kate

A propos du livre

Extrait

CHAPTER ONE
On a Thursday night in late December, I stood in my friend Indrani Dressler's living room, flirting with a man I had just met.
"Oh, come on," Mick, the Englishman I was talking to, was saying, "business acumen and a finger on the zeitgeist are not the same as innovation or originality. She's a clever parasite."
"I heard one of her songs the other day in a deli," I said. "It brought back that feeling of being young and wild and idiotic. You just can't take her too seriously."
"She's got a fake accent," Mick said, his mouth gleaming with mirth and wine, firm and half-sneering. His breath smelled like corn. "She irons her hair and she's had too much plastic surgery and she's pasty. She looks like an emaciated Wife of Bath."
"She's got the body of a thirteen-year-old gymnast and she's almost fifty," I said.
"She's a maggot," he said. He was not much taller than I, but broad in the shoulders and solid. His head was large, his face half ugly, half handsome, more French-looking than English, nose too big, eyes narrow, chin jutting forward. We were talking as if the words themselves didn't matter. I had forgotten this feeling.
"A maggot," I repeated, laughing, egging him on.
"Tunneling her way through personas till they're totally rotten and riddled with holes, then moving on to the next one. She went from soft white larva to shriveled maggot in twenty-odd years."
"Obviously," I said with mild triumph, "you're obsessed with her."
"I'm writing an opera about her," he told me in a way that made it impossible to tell whether he was kidding or serious. "Back before she made it. Back when she was young and soft and nasty. I'm calling it Madonna of Loisaida. Madonna when she was a newborn vampire, a baby whore."

I realized with a shock of surprise who he was. About a year ago, one of my clients, a pale, severely chic young concert violinist named Alison Fisher, had precipitously quit therapy after five years and moved to Canada to take care of her dying aunt. She had spent many sessions complaining eloquently and, I'd thought, with very good reason, about her boyfriend, Mick Logan; he was British, he wrote avant-garde operas that told melodramatic fictional stories about famous people, and he made Alison feel clumsy and plain and dull with his devastatingly sharp but subtle put-downs. With much guidance and feedback on my part, she had finally managed to get rid of him. According to what Alison had told me, he was in his mid-thirties, about ten years younger than I was; he was very bad news. She'd said once that breaking up with Mick felt like being let out of jail. And now, here he was at a Christmas party, bantering with me, leading me into a sexually charged, ultimately nonsensical argument that seemed to be rapidly leading somewhere I knew I couldn't go, somewhere I hadn't even thought of going in a very, very long time.

Just then, I caught sight of a reflection of a woman in the tilted gilt-edged mirror across the room. She was dressed similarly to me, so I tilted my head to get a better look at her. As I did so, the woman tilted her head to match the movement of mine. I raised my wineglass; she raised hers along with me.

It was then, in that instant, that I knew that my marriage was over.
My heart stopped beating. I almost heard it squeak as it constricted with fear, and then it resumed its steady rhythm and life went on, as it usually does.

"She's not a villainess, though; she's not interesting enough," Mick was saying. "That's the challenge of this opera. She's all too human, just quite vile really."
"Vile," I repeated, laughing, mouth open, neck bared, my rib cage pulsing with my hard-beating heart. My laughter had a freaky sound in it, like the yelp of a wild dog. I had to move out, I thought with horror. Or Anthony did. No, I did. Our apartment was his when I married him. And I had to take Wendy with me. Where, though? Where would we go? She'd hate me even more than she did already. Of course, she'd blame me, because it was all going to be my fault. "Then why would you write an opera about her?"
"Because," he said, "like a maggot, she's got under my skin and it's the only way to get her out. That revoltingly nasal little voice. Those dead-fish eyes. Those ropy muscles . . ."

I felt the vastly gigantic, frightening wheels that drive the world begin to turn. Lawyers, custody, settlement, alimony. I'd always been someone who made decisions with agonizing thoroughness and caution; to have such a momentous realization thrust upon me with no control whatsoever felt the way being in an earthquake or avalanche might have felt.

Anthony had stayed home that night, ostensibly because he had a lot of research to do for his new book, but in truth, he was relieved not to have to go out. He hated parties in general and didn't much like Indrani; he thought she was boring, which she wasn't, but you couldn't argue with him when he got an idea about someone. Right then, he was probably sitting in his armchair, happily engrossed in some book about post-Communist Eastern Europe, his current preoccupation, sipping at a water glass filled with neat whiskey, reading glasses on the end of his nose, frowning, gently scratching and rubbing his sternum under his shirt in that abstracted way he had. Anthony was a political scientist and New School professor. When I first met him, he had been a dynamic, passionate man, but over the past years, as he got closer to death and the world continued to go down the tubes, his old fired-up passion had been gradually replaced by bitterness, fatalism, and weariness. I had watched it happen, powerless to stop it.

This attitude of defeated resignation now extended from his work to everything in his life, including our marriage. He was becoming, somehow, an old man. I was apparently still a youngish woman; I looked at my reflection again to make sure I hadn't been mistaken about this, and there I still was, radiant, my hair upswept, my eyes wide and sparkling. If that reflection had belonged to a stranger, I would have been intimidated by her. I had had no idea.

"You wrote an opera about Nico," I said giddily to Mick, just to say something; I had just realized that he seemed to be awaiting a reply from me.
He looked surprised. "How did you know that?"
"Oh," I said, realizing what I'd just revealed. "God. Well."
He looked at me, waiting.
"I just realized who you are," I said. I had never before made a slip like this in eighteen years of being a therapist. "I know a friend of yours."
"Which friend?"
"Alison."
"Alison," he said, as if he were hoping it weren't that Alison.
"Alison Fisher."
He shook his head. "How the hell do you know her?"
"Oh," I said, waving a casual hand sideways. "You know, New York."
"Right," he said.
"I haven't seen her in ages," I added by way of reassurance.
"She dumped me cold. Never happened to me before or since. Little witch." He looked briefly into his empty glass, then took my half-full glass from me, grazing his knuckles against mine so all the little hairs on his crackled electrically against all the little hairs on mine. He drank from my glass, his eyes audaciously on mine over the rim. "Enough about Alison. What do you do, Josephine? Doesn't everyone here ask that question before the topic turns to real estate?"
"Oh, I'm a painter," I lied. I had always wanted to be a painter, and I couldn't tell the truth after that slip about Alison; he might have put together that I was the very therapist involved in that little witch's cold dumping of him and surmised that I therefore knew certain things about him, certain highly unflattering things. And that would have been awkward, and the last thing I wanted in this conversation was awkwardness. What I did want, I wasn't yet sure.
Mick handed my glass back to me. My body curved to match the curve of his, as if we were two commas separated by nothing but air. "What sort of painting?"
"Abstract," I said.
"Abstract," he said.
"Abstract," I replied. Repeating each other's words was like sex, I was remembering. My reflection, I noticed, was leaning alluringly into him. I hadn't realized how willowy I was, how darkly elegant. I had to leave Anthony: I owed it to this woman in the mirror.
"Painting is sexy," said Mick. "Writing operas, on the other hand, is lonely and pointless. Who gives a fuck? Aria, schmaria."
"Painting is sexy," I repeated. "You stand in your studio half-naked, smearing paint all over the canvas until you explode from the sheer pleasure of it."
He laughed; there was a glint, a predatory edge, in his laughter, and I noticed that he was standing a little closer to me now. "Alison Fisher," he said malevolently, looking at me as if I were now inextricably associated with her, but he was willing to overlook it. I had a sudden urge to suck his cock.
"I need some more wine," I said. "You rudely guzzled my last glass."
"Wait here," he said, and plucked the glass from my hand. I watched him walk over to the dining room table, where all the bottles were. He was wearing a black turtleneck sweater and well-fitting brown jeans and black Doc Martens. He had a good ass. I glanced over at the mirror and again beheld my reflection. My new best friend, I thought with tipsy seasonal sentimentality.

"Josie," said Indrani, standing at my elbow. Her cheeks were flushed. Her blond hair shone. She wore red velvet. I had known her since college, and to me, she still looked exactly the same as the day I'd met her. She smelled of expensive, slightly astringent perfume. "Hi! Where's Anthony...

Revue de presse

Praise for The Great Man, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award

“The Great Man is as unexpectedly generous as it is entertaining . . . Christensen is a witty observer of the art universe.” —Janet Maslin, New York Times

“Christensen's writing is clear-eyed, bitingly funny, and supremely caustic about the niceties of social relations, contemporary American culture, and sexual politics.” —Vince Passaro, O, The Oprah Magazine

“Christensen is a writer of exceptional polish and keen intent, lacing her clever, well-designed plot with intriguing observations about the evolution (some might say devolution) of art, the inequities between men and women, and the insidiousness of racism. . . . Great fun from start to finish.” —Donna Seaman, Chicago Tribune

“Clever and incisive . . . The tension between her characters’ colorful pasts and the yearning (sexual and otherwise) for their latter days is heartbreaking. But these women brim with a wit and personality that overshadow the cocky artist around whom they’ve orbited.” —New York

“Provides no shortage of pop-intellectual entertainment . . . [A] profoundly feminist story of the three women who in various ways propped up Feldman’s career over the course of a lifetime.” —Elle

“The Great Man defies convention . . . That Christensen, who is in her mid-40s, can so aptly capture not just the loneliness, losses, and angst, but also the acceptance, of growing old, is a testament to her tremendous skill.” —Sally Abrahms, AARP magazine

“Present[s] vital characters who challenge typical depictions of the elderly as so conservative. These women are complicated, smart, witty, and sexy—even Internet savvy!”—Glen Helfand, San Francisco Bay Guardian

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Doubleday
• Date d'édition: 2009
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0385527306
• ISBN 13: 9780385527309
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 311
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible