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Автор Джоан Дидион

Joan Didion

Run River

for my family and for N

“All night I’ve held your hand,

as if you had

a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad—

its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye—

and dragged me home alive …”

— ROBERT LOWELL

“… the real Eldorado is still further on. ”

— Peck’s 1837 New Guide to the West

Acknowledgments

TEA FOR TWO

Copyright 1924 by Harms, Inc.

Copyright Renewed

Reprinted by Permission

OF THEE I SING

Copyright 1931 by New World Music Corporation

Copyright Renewed

Reprinted by Permission

BLUE ROOM

Copyright 1926 by Harms, Inc.

Copyright Renewed

Reprinted by Permission

DON’T FENCE ME IN

Copyright 1944 by Harms, Inc.

Reprinted by Permission

“TEMPTATION”

Lyric by Arthur Freed.

Melody by Nacio Herb Brown

© Copyright 1933/Copyright Renewal 1961 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. , New York, N. Y. Rights throughout the world controlled by ROBBINS MUSIC CORPORATION, New York, N. Y. Reprinted by Permission.

The quotation from the poem “Man and Wife” from LIFE STUDIES by Robert Lowell, is reprinted by permission of the publisher, Farrar, Strauss & Company, Inc. Copyright © 1956, 1959 by Robert Lowell.

August 1959

1

Lily heard the shot at seventeen minutes to one.

She knew the time precisely because, without looking out the window into the dark where the shot reverberated, she continued fastening the clasp on the diamond wrist watch Everett had given her two years before on their seventeenth anniversary, looked at it on her wrist for a long time, and then, sitting on the edge of the bed, began winding it.

When she could wind the watch no further she stood up, still barefoot from the shower, picked up from her dressing table a bottle of Joy, splashed a large amount of it onto her hand, and reached down the neckline of her dress to spread it, a kind of amulet, across her small bare breasts: on the untroubled pages of those magazines where Joy was periodically proclaimed The Costliest Perfume in the World, nobody sat in her bedroom and heard shots on her dock.

Her eyes fixed not on the windows but upon the framed snapshots of the children which hung above her dressing table (Knight at eight, standing very straight in a Cub Scout uniform; Julie at seven, the same summer), Lily held her hand inside her dress until all the Joy had evaporated and there was nothing left to do but open the drawer where the. 38 had been since the day Everett killed the rattlesnake on the lawn: the drawer in the table by their bed where the. 38 should be still and where it was not. She had known it would not be.

Nine hours before, at four o’clock that afternoon, Lily had decided that she would not go at all to the Templetons’ party. It was entirely too hot. She had been upstairs all afternoon, lying on the bed in her slip, the shutters closed and the electric fan on. Everett was out in the hops, showing the new irrigation system to a grower from down the river; Knight had driven into town; Julie, she supposed, was somewhere with one of the Templeton twins. She did not really know.