Bücher online kostenlos Kostenlos Online Lesen
Runaway

Runaway

Titel: Runaway Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Alice Munro
Vom Netzwerk:
accident. For several weeks she was in a coma. She came out of that, but she was still paralyzed, unable to walk or even to feed herself. She seemed to know who he was, and who the woman who looked after her was—with the help of this woman he was able to keep her at home—but her attempts to talk, and to understand what was going on around her, soon faded away.
    They had been to a party. She hadn’t particularly wanted to go but he had wanted to go. Then she decided to walk home by herself, not being very happy with things at the party.
    It was a gang of drunks from another party who ran off the road and knocked her down. Teenagers.
    Luckily, he and Ann had no children. Yes, luckily.
    “You tell people about it and they feel they have to say, how terrible. What a tragedy. Et cetera.”
    “Can you blame them?” said Juliet, who had been about to say something of the sort herself.
    No, he said. But it was just that the whole thing was a lot more complicated than that. Did Ann feel that it was a tragedy? Probably not. Did he? It was something you got used to, it was a new kind of life. That was all.
    All of Juliet’s enjoyable experience of men had been in fantasy. One or two movie stars, the lovely tenor—not the virile heartless hero—on a certain old recording of
Don Giovanni.
Henry V, as she read about him in Shakespeare and as Laurence Olivier had played him in the movie.
    This was ridiculous, pathetic, but who ever needed to know? In actual life there had been humiliation and disappointment, which she had tried to push out of her mind as quickly as possible.
    There was the experience of being stranded head and shoulders above the gaggle of other unwanted girls at the high school dances, and being bored but making a rash attempt to be lively on college dates with boys she didn’t much like, who did not much like her. Going out with the visiting nephew of her thesis adviser last year and being broken into—you couldn’t call it rape, she too was determined—late at night on the ground in Willis Park.
    On the way home he had explained that she wasn’t his type. And she had felt too humiliated to retort—or even to be aware, at that moment—that he was not hers.
    She had never had fantasies about a particular, real man— least of all about any of her teachers. Older men—in real life—seemed to her to be slightly unsavory.
    This man was how old? He had been married for at least eight years—and perhaps two years, two or three years, more than that. Which made him probably thirty-five or thirty-six. His hair was dark and curly with some gray at the sides, his forehead wide and weathered, his shoulders strong and a little stooped. He was hardly any taller than she was. His eyes were wide set, dark, and eager but also wary. His chin was rounded, dimpled, pugnacious.
    She told him about her job, the name of the school— Torrance House. (“What do you want to bet it’s called Torments?”) She told him that she was not a real teacher but that they were glad to get anybody who had majored in Greek and Latin at college. Hardly anybody did anymore.
    “So why did you?”
    “Oh, just to be different, I guess.”
    Then she told him what she had always known that she should never tell any man or boy, lest he lose interest immediately.
    “And because I love it. I love all that stuff. I really do.”
    They ate dinner together—each drinking a glass of wine— and then went up to the observation car, where they sat in the dark, all by themselves. Juliet had brought her sweater this time.
    “People must think there’s nothing to see up here at night,” he said. “But look at the stars you can see on a clear night.”
    Indeed the night was clear. There was no moon—at least not yet—and the stars appeared in dense thickets, both faint and bright. And like anyone who had lived and worked on boats, he was familiar with the map of the sky. She was able to locate only the Big Dipper.
    “That’s your start,” he said. “Take the two stars on the side of the Dipper opposite the handle. Got them? Those are the pointers. Follow them up. Follow them, you’ll find the pole-star.” And so on.
    He found for her Orion, which he said was the major constellation in the Northern Hemisphere in winter. And Sirius, the Dog Star, at that time of year the brightest star in the whole northern sky.
    Juliet was pleased to be instructed but also pleased when it came her turn to be the instructor. He knew the names but

Weitere Kostenlose Bücher