«Where are you living in Moscow?» asked Nelya.

She propped herself up on her elbow and looked at me over the dark glasses from under the Panama painted like a fly agaric. Her axillary hollow has deepened, and the shoulder straps of her bathing suit sagged down, and weak chest in the freckles, with swollen pink nipple looked out of her bra shyly. I buried my face in my fingers.

«So… At an acquaintance’s house.»

The girl, obviously, also laid down prone. Her voice sounded muffled:

«Dad said you are living at some woman.»

I pricked up my ears.

«He also said she was retired…»

«She doesn’t need handouts. Uncle reported?»

«Probably…»

We listened to the maiden squeal for a while: three jokers dragged her to the water.

«Katya told me why you had a fight with your uncle.»

«And what do you think?»

She shrugged and sighed. I felt like I was being x-rayed, and with professional curiosity poked their fingers at the dark spots of black and white picture. It is easy to guess how my relatives found out about my shelter. I grimaced at the thought, as if the dentist’s drill had dug into the fabric of my tooth: whether mistress said anything unwanted?

«Isn’t it hard for your mother to support you for the third month?» was pestering Nelia to me.

«May be!» I shrugged. I was too lazy to remind about the work in the seaside boarding house.

«My cousin is the third year was not working and not studying nowhere, and his mother can’t inhaled on him…»

«This is a common thing for Moscow. My sisters don’t work anywhere either. Thanks for the analogy.»

«Please don’t be angry. Just… I don’t think you’re what they say. And what kind of man you are, I don’t know.»

«And I don’t know either!» Imagination drew a confidential meeting of old friends, their participation in the boy. I bit my lip. «Why for she did that?»

For the rest of the day, I answered beside the point, and Nelia seemed to regret the beach conversation. At the bar I had too much and trudged behind the girl. I was annoyed by her manner to slow pace on high heels («Yes still with her stilts!» – thought I with drunk angry.), causing the hair on the back of her head were swaying like the mane of a horse, which is slowly climbing up the hill, revealing a thin neck and sharp vertebrae. In addition to pettiness, this evening I found inside me a huge store of spite to Kurashina. I also remember the crimson sunset with storm clouds over the flat roofs and the floating target of the keyhole.

The hostess opened the door, and the tenant tumbled into the hallway. The image was jumping to the right and to the starting point with the frequency of the pulse in the ears.

«Are you drunk?» Kurushina was stunned.

«A little bit!» answered I modestly and staggering hobbled past on the move discarding clothes. «Greetings from uncle»!

«Did you say something?» asked stunned Elena Nikolaevna.

«Did you call uncle?»

Kurushina talked to me like I’m sober. For this reason, she nervously wrapped herself up in a shawl, and replied somewhat arrogantly: «Yeah, I talked to him…»

«Then everything is clear!»

«Clear what?»

«And the fact that he is talking bosh! That I live at your expense and…» I gave a small sob: probably, I really fairly slurped of vodka.

«What a bullshit!» Kurushina perplexedly walked into the room. «Who told you that? Arkady got a call from your mother saying you were in Moscow. You haven’t written to her in a month. Arkady was very surprised and called back. I confirmed that you at me».

She was so upset she didn’t notice my nudity. I collapsed on the couch naked. I took deep breath: the woman became a silent accomplice of my naturist performances. All the spite and insulting words to her, like a pile of rubble spilled out the window. I was carrying tearful nonsense, was confessing to her in love, try to embrace and stumbling hobbled to the bathroom. She nursed with me, allowed me to molest and laid me on her sofa upon which I collapsed. I was laughing. And she was repeating with joking astonishment: «How awfully you’re drunk!»

But alcohol has little effect on my memory. In excitement, I tried to touch her hip, hands, belly as if playing little rough with a girlfriend, and was distracting her by chatter. I was drunk enough to overcome my shame, but sober enough to enjoy the forced touch of a woman’s clothing, sliding palm. I was hugging and pressing her hips (surprisingly firm) to my stomach. At one point the woman did not pull away and for a moment her hand froze on my shoulder, her head drooped, and it seemed to me, Elena Nikolaevna shuddered. But, guessing my tension, almost of ecstasy as she quickly pushed the admirer to the bed. I collapsed on the couch and pulled her along. She rested her fist to my pubic hair, jerked away, looked intently into my eyes. But I pretended to laugh and tried to stretch my lips to her cheek. She was not leaving, she fixing the pillow, padded the blanket, and when I was trying to grab her palm or to hug her waist, sliding by hand over the bottom of her belly, the woman firmly, but not abruptly was pulling away. It seemed that we both play and write off the game on a drunken night out, which tomorrow will forget. And this bliss continued until I fell into a motley starfall.

I lay in the predawn gloom with my eyes open, looking at the flowers on the Wallpaper, protruding in the transparent light of dawn, and timidly remembered the previous fun day. Imagination in vain drew a decrepit old woman, her wrinkled, dry hands, sluggish body. The obsession drove me crazy, but I did not resist the terrible lustful desire – it seemed shameful – to repeat…

In the kitchen, I was asking embarrassedly about yesterday’s riot, apologized and eagerly caught her gestures, facial expressions, with which she will betray herself. I wanted to kiss those hands that caressed my body without caressing. Kurushina was slowly stirring the spoon in the pot and ironically repeated: «Has amused himself, has amused!» And both of us were silent about my pranks which perfectly remembered.

10

One of those August evenings in Moscow, when the cramped apartment seemed to turn into a matchbox, and you feel like a caught bug, you want to go free, was fading away.

We were walking in the Park next to the house. Trees carefully hidden the scarlet sunset behind thick crowns, and in crystal silence, on the mirror surface of the pond clearly, the voices of people rolled to every word.

Kurushina asked if I had a girlfriend. I told her about Nelia.

«In vain I’m fooling her head…»

«You mean a fake marriage?» I nodded. «Invite her to us!»

I estimated: on the one hand Nelia will satisfy curiosity, with another – snorted – Elena Nikolaevna will see my «love».

«Good. When?»

«Yes, even tomorrow!»

«Goes. I’ll call her.»

Morning was busy: shop, kitchen, cleaning the apartment. Kurushina was preparing in earnest.

«Try to be easier!» I advised. «The girl without complexes, will indulge tea with crackers…»

«So and offer her a choice!» Kurushina joked.

She’s transformed! It gave me pleasure to spin in the kitchen, to beat egg yolks with a mixer in an iron bowl, to perform simple culinary tasks.

«When the father was alive,» Elena Nikolaevna was talking, «we even didn’t close doors. We had guests all the time. There was someone in the kitchen, either me or mom. Our housekeeper is aunt Ira… What are you grinning? Bourgeois manners?» she spread her hands, stained with flour, as saying – what can I do – we are like that! – and it amused me. «She taught me many delicious things!»

Where did her languor and measured movements, which I learned by heart, disappear? I suddenly realized: she was always sociable and cheerful, and only Arthur gloomy awarded her in his imagination the affectation, imprisoned her in this apartment. What did I know about her, her surroundings? The tenderness to the hostess did not leave me all the hours that I interfered with her.

We set up a meeting with Nellie After work at the subway entrance.

Kurushina even the night before made elaborate hairstyle using curlers —she did not have time to the hairdresser – and now bustled in the gas kerchief. Before leaving I looked into Elena Nikolaevna’s room. The woman was going through some dresses in the wardrobe. This ancient monster was exhaling from the open door, the thick odor of naphthalene.

«What will you wear?» I asked.

«This!» she answered boldly, straightening one of the antediluvian blouses with a frill and the hem of the mourning skirt. «Or, this!» catching the expression of the pretentious costumier, she showed me a dress-hoodie. I twisted my mouth skeptically.

«This is a friendly tea party, not an official reception. Evening dresses are inappropriate. Permission!» I gently pushed away from the wardrobe door the hostess, who was sitting on a chair, and buried himself in things, which were tightly pressed to each other on the hangers. «Wear something simple. But not washed to holes bathrobe. It’s too early for you to wear black headscarfes for crones’.»

«Should I dress like a girl?» Kurushina laughed and tried to pushed away me from things in the wardrobe. I stopped her.

«None of these things fit! Have you updated anything from your wardrobe over the past year?»

She thought for a moment, and pulled out of things cute beige sweater. A store tag hung on the collar. I mentally paired the sweater and dark straight skirt, and pulled her out of things.

«You’re crazy!» Kurushina threw up her hands. «It was worn in the sixties, when I was a little older than you…»

«Fashion returns every twenty years, with each new generation. You have beautiful legs, like girls who are hard to get!»

I slammed the wardrobe shut.

The woman snorted, but took her things, rose from her chair, and began to apply them alternately and examine them in outstretched hands.

To the subway by bus, then on foot, plus real women are always late and back, took an hour and a half. Nelya, as always before going to an unfamiliar place, was keeping silent. She was getting ready for the meeting. The girl was wearing a denim dress with short sleeves, universal for all occasions, and she looked quite solemn-ordinary with a bouquet of tea roses in a transparent cocoon.

Finally, we came.

At the domestic box office were at one time a popular movies about the transfiguration of the homely female-boss, or the matchmaker from the women’s hostel in charming beauties. At the end of the film, they were braughting colleagues, acquaintances and the audience into ecstasy, comparable, perhaps, with the shocks from Izaura or Mexican Marousi (although Latin soap Opera is far from our Russian cinema).The metamorphoses of real life shocked the young cynic (at least, who considered himself such) much more than the reincarnation of Alice Freundlich on the screen.

The door opens, I stumble into the denim back of the companion, a golden-haired lamb obscuring the view, and when the daylight finally painfully breaks narrowed pupils, I’m shocked.

Later, on the street, Nelya remembered not only mistress’s bracelet – a gold snake with diamond eyes – and earrings, but added with unusual swagger:

«She was a gorgeous woman when she was young. It’s awesome!»

Coming out of the grog state, I caught the subtle scent of perfume and fogs. My heart got worried. Before the charmed couple stood a graceful woman of thirty or barely more, in a beige light sweater, favorably outlined her high chest and slender waist. Straight, just below the knees skirt, beautifully outlined the narrow hips of a stranger. Her tiny feet in patent-leather pointed high-heeled shoes, with leather butterflies perched on them, struck with the proportion of all the fine thoroughbred stately beauty. The woman held the flowers presented to her, as they hold a newborn, gently and tenderly. I know, more picky looks immediately would have dug into her neck, to, as by the teeth of the horse to determine its freshness, with a ruler and a magnifying glass in the pupils began to measure millimeters of powder on the face, counting wrinkles. Let them! I was shocked by the identity of my imagination, which depicted the youth of a woman, and the reality, which crushed the myth of the evil omnipotence of years. Unfathomable! And I did not want to comprehend anything and do not want to.

Her face… Her face? How was I supposed to remember her face, in that enchanted distance, where my heart’s memory takes me! The magical glow of her eyes, the light that poured from her soul into mine, blinding every nook and cranny of the magic palace of the fairy. Perhaps from the side solemn view of mistress looked ridiculous in comparison with two gray sparrows-guests from everyday life. But when the queen invited us to the room, I – enchanted, timidly trudged after the young passion.

Elena Nikolaevna, as well as in the morning, remained herself. But this is the uniqueness of this woman: no effort to be yourself at the top, inaccessible to many, even in the moment of highest tension. If I had dared to suspect two women of rivalry, even her youth, which gave odds to the tricks of experience, would not have saved Nelia in my eyes.

How did she do that? Very simply! She showed mother nature her tongue in the mirror, winked, and remained what nature had made her: perfect.

From inattentively read books and cheesy productions I absorbed the strange idea of small talk: revived mannequins with sugary smiles are exchanged word stamps. And the table chatter of guys of my circle usually ended cuddling with the owner «s urinal.

Kurushina was talking absolutely ordinary, in my opinion, things, but, fascinated by her charm, demure Nelya, an hour told her the story of his life from his childhood to the commercial store of her father and half an hour later the women are about something whispered, on a smoke break in the kitchen.

I hung around after them and felt myself like a nothing.

Who did you want to seduce, to whom thought to steal into the soul, evil excellent student yard universities? I looked at Elena Nikolaevna and laughed at myself evil, maliciously, with mockery. That’s when the bastard in me plaintively squeaked, fluttered and subsided, releasing a poisonous slime.

I already saw the only friend at the bottom of the glass, strong alcohol muddied the mind, but kept the memory. I wish I could forget that night, the month. And would not moaned on the inside soul is so sweet and hurts from the toothed memories.

I’ve pretty drunk. Then I put Nelia in a taxi and by some miracle returned to the right entrance. The girl’s voice drummed into the tightly clogged barrel of my mind: «She is lonely, because the people of her circle to have forgotten her. And such as we she does not understand. She loves you like a son. She talked about you a lot!»

Then I climbed the stairs to the fourth floor and, buried in knees, howled, licking sickly-bitter tears from the corners of mouth. I loved her. And was quite soberly measuring the insurmountable distance between the island and the mainland, which will never connect.

11

I was blowing my nose bitterly on the steps in front of my first love’s apartment, crushed by an unnatural feeling: the mother is the same age as my beloved woman. And just a minute ago I saw off a pretty girl. My girlfriend! I saw off the girl indifferent, like yesterday’s rainy day. Who else if not she would have laughed evil at a daffy lover.