Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

435 страница из 1457

“You used to be entertaining before you started to write,” he continued. “Now you save any idea that you think would do to print.”

Existence had settled back to an ambitionless normality. They had decided that with economy they could still afford the apartment, which Tom, with the domesticity of an elderly cat, had grown fond of. The old English hunting prints on the wall were Tom’s, and the large tapestry by courtesy, a relic of decadent days in college, and the great profusion of orphaned candlesticks and the carved Louis XV chair in which no one could sit more than a minute without acute spinal disorders—Tom claimed that this was because one was sitting in the lap of Montespan’s wraith—at any rate, it was Tom’s furniture that decided them to stay.

They went out very little: to an occasional play, or to dinner at the Ritz or the Princeton Club. With prohibition the great rendevous [rendezvous] had received their death wounds; no longer could one wander to the Biltmore bar at twelve or five and find congenial spirits, and both Tom and Amory had outgrown the passion for dancing with mid-Western or New Jersey debbies at the Club-de-Vingt (surnamed the “Club de Gink”) or the Plaza Rose Room—besides even that required several cocktails “to come down to the intellectual level of the women present,” as Amory had once put it to a horrified matron.