Love of the Last Tycoon: The Authorized Text (No Series) by F. Scott Fitzgerald Page B

a shame, he admitted—gross, commercial, to be deplored. He had originated it—a fact that he did not mention.
    When they had gone, Miss Doolan came in triumphant.
    “Mr. Stahr, the lady with the belt is on the phone.”
    Stahr walked into his office alone and sat down behind his desk and picked up the phone with a great sinking of his stomach. He did not know what he wanted. He had not thought about the matter as he had thought about the matter of Pete Zavras. At first he had only wanted to know if they were “professional” people, if the woman was an actress who had got herself up to look like Minna, as he had once had a young actress made up like Claudette Colbert and photographed her from the same angles.
    “Hello,” he said.
    “Hello.”
    As he searched the short, rather surprised word for a vibration of last night, the feeling of terror began to steal over him, and he choked it off with an effort of will.
    “Well—you were hard to find,” he said. “ Smith —and you moved here recently. That was all we had. And a silver belt.”
    “Oh, yes,” the voice said, still uneasy, unpoised, “I had on a silver belt last night.”
    Now, where from here?
    “Who are you?” the voice said, with a touch of flurried bourgeois dignity.
    “My name is Monroe Stahr,” he said.
    A pause. It was a name that never appeared on the screen, and she seemed to have trouble placing it.
    “Oh, yes—yes. You were the husband of Minna Davis.”
    “Yes.”
    Was it a trick? As the whole vision of last night came back to him—the very skin with that peculiar radiance as if phosphorus had touched it—he thought whether it might not be a trick to reach him from somewhere. Not Minna and yet Minna. The curtains blew suddenly into the room, the papers whispered on his desk, and his heart cringed faintly at the intense reality of the day outside his window. If he could go out now this way, what would happen if he saw her again—the starry veiled expression, the mouth strongly formed for poor brave human laughter.
    “I’d like to see you. Would you like to come to the studio?”
    Again the hesitancy—then a blank refusal.
    “Oh, I don’t think I ought to. I’m awfully sorry.”
    This last was purely formal, a brush-off, a final axe. Ordinary skin-deep vanity came to Stahr’s aid, adding persuasion to his urgency.
    “I’d like to see you,” he said. “There’s a reason.”
    “Well—I’m afraid that—–”
    “Could I come and see you?”
    A pause again, not from hesitation, he felt, but to assemble her answer.
    “There’s something you don’t know,” she said finally.
    “Oh, you’re probably married,” he was impatient. “It has nothing to do with that. I asked you to come here openly, bring your husband if you have one.”
    “It’s—it’s quite impossible.”
    “Why?”
    “I feel silly even talking to you, but your secretary insisted—I thought I’d dropped something in the flood last night and you’d found it.”
    “I want very much to see you for five minutes.”
    “To put me in the movies?”
    “That wasn’t my idea.”
    There was such a long pause that he thought he had offended her.
    “Where could I meet you?” she asked unexpectedly.
    “Here? At your house?”
    “No—somewhere outside.”
    Suddenly Stahr could think of no place. His own house—a restaurant? Where did people meet?—a house of assignation, a cocktail bar?
    “I’ll meet you somewhere at nine o’clock,” she said.
    “That’s impossible, I’m afraid.”
    “Then never mind.”
    “All right, then, nine o’clock, but can we make it near here? There’s a drug-store on Wilshire—–”
     
    It was a quarter to six. There were two men outside who had come every day at this time only to be postponed. This was an hour of fatigue—the men’s business was not so important that it must be seen to, nor so insignificant that it could be ignored. So he postponed it again and sat motionless at his desk for a moment,