Juice by Stephen Becker Read Free Book Online Page B

luxuriant.”
    Sebastian smiled broadly; his eyes sparkled.
    Mrs. Newbery smiled. Davis caught his breath; he seemed to glitter at her. He was six feet three and dark; he was always intense; his concentration upon her was almost palpable. He wore a dark gray suit which had once been sharkskin and had then, Mrs. Newbery would have said, been Davisized: walked in, sat in, slept in, cleaned, pressed, impregnated with dust, rain, smog, coffee, spirits, ashes, until it was now simply exhausted cloth. With it he wore a light gray shirt, the collar slightly open; the effect was optimistically completed by a bright-yellow foulard tie spattered with muddy red diamonds. His hair was a mixed black-and-gray, his skin tanned, his eyes pouched, his nose long and straight (it gave him a look of intensity and confidence), his mouth sensitive, his jaw long (it gave him the look of a predatory carnivore). His eyes were a deep and expressive brown. In another face they might have been weak, beseeching eyes; in Davis’ face they were almost hypnotically compelling.
    Mrs. Newbery was also dark: black hair, tanned skin, blue eyes. Her face was a beautiful face; men would want her or not, but they would not deny her beauty. Davis, whose idea of beauty had been flexible and generous, more realistic than abstract, had taken her face now as his gauge of perfection and had set about trying to explain beauty. His answers were unsatisfactory: Mrs. Newbery was more than the sum of her parts. Davis was a lawyer, a trial lawyer; his mind was analytic and his tastes esoteric. In the presence of what he considered completion, perfection, virtual flawlessness, the unfragmented woman, he was helpless. But not, of course, speechless.
    â€œWhich is all right,” he went on, recovering, “as long as it’s man to man, or—” with a slight ironic bow—“man to woman. But movable type has standardized—which is to say, has made accessible to those who don’t come by it naturally and have no feeling for its proper use—even flattery, so that the serious seduttore, the artist in human communication, the maestro of the honeyed or stinging word, finds that his sharpest, most finely wrought creations have either been staled by a previous and similar, but awkward and inferior, utterance or been appropriated by the generality. The man who first said, humbly, when ordered out by an irate and overpuritanical matron, ‘Your command is my wish,’ had a good line—”
    â€œWho was it?” Mrs. Newbery asked.
    â€œJohn James Davis,” he said. “Thank you, my dear. I have since seen the remark in three magazines and a gossip column, attributed to two film stars rapidly approaching geriatric impotence, a screen writer whose distaste for women is notorious, and, of all things, a former United States Senator, long deceased, who was alleged to have flung—flung, mind you, which would have been brutally tasteless—the words at the wife of a President of the United States, also long deceased. In eighteenth-century France—early eighteenth, of course, movable type existed, but its uses had not yet been so thoroughly perverted. The attribution would have been just and correct. I would have been named chevalier, Sieur Jean-Jacques, sans peur et sans reproche ; all salons Would have been open to me. Louis the Fifteenth would have fed me twice a week.”
    â€œI don’t think it was very funny,” she said.
    â€œYou’re a woman,” he said. “The outrage strikes you, but not the spirit.”
    â€œYou see,” she said to Sebastian. “In his moments of white heat the truth escapes him. I am stupid, or at least he believes it. Belle, mais pas spirituelle, I believe Louis the Fifteenth would have said.”
    â€œShucks,” Davis said, and then, with irritation: “May I interrupt for a moment?”
    â€œI’m terribly sorry,” she said.
    â€œMy point