Verwandte Artikel zu Trouble

Trouble - Softcover

Christensen, Kate

 
9780307390943: Trouble
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0307390942 ISBN 13: 9780307390943
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Josie is a Manhattan psychotherapist living a comfortable life with her husband and daughter. Raquel is a Los Angeles rock star with a platinum album and the attendant money and fame. When Josie realizes her marriage is over, and Raquel finds herself at the center of a scandal, these old friends take off for Mexico City where sweltering heat, new acquaintances, and tequila-fueled nights rapidly spiral out of control. In this vibrant novel, award-winning author Kate Christensen has crafted a bewitching tale of lust, loyalty, and the limits of friendship.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kate Christensen is the author of the novels In the Drink, Jeremy Thrane, The Epicure's Lament, The Great Man, winner of the 2008 PEN/Faulker Award, and Trouble. She lives in Brooklyn.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

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...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2010
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307390942
ISBN 13 
9780307390943
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
321
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

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