Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [29]
I tilted the stack and pulled a volume from the middle.
—Hemingway?
—Thank God. But skip ahead this time, would you Katey?
—How far?
—Anywhere but the beginning.
I turned randomly to page 104:
The fourth man, the big one, came out of the bank door as he watched, holding a Thomson gun in front of him, and as he backed out of the door the siren in the bank rose in a long breath-holding shriek and Harry saw the gun muzzle jump-jump-jump-jump and heard the bop-bop-bop-bop
—That’s more like it, Eve said.
She arranged the pillow behind her head, lay back and closed her eyes.
I read twenty-five pages out loud. Eve fell asleep after ten. I suppose I could have stopped, but I was enjoying the book. Starting on page 104 made Hemingway’s prose even more energetic than usual. Without the early chapters, all the incidents became sketches and all the dialogue innuendo. Bit characters stood on equal footing with the central subjects and positively bludgeoned them with disinterested common sense. The protagonists didn’t fight back. They seemed relieved to be freed from the tyranny of their tale. It made me want to read all of Hemingway’s books this way.
I emptied my drink and carefully set it down so as not to clink the stem against the glass of the table.
There was a white throw on the back of Eve’s couch. I draped it over her as she breathed evenly. She didn’t need to find Jesus anymore, I thought to myself; he had already come looking for her.
Over the bar hung four studies of gas stations by Stuart Davis. The only art in the room, they were painted in primary colors that contrasted nicely with the furniture. In front of the liquor bottles was another silver deco piece. This one had a little window and a dial you could turn that flipped ivory cards one over the other in the fashion of a railway station timetable. Each card had the recipe for a cocktail: Martini, Manhattan, Metropolitan—flit, flit, flit. Bamboo, Bennett, Between the Sheets—flit, flit, flit, flit. Behind the bottle of gin there were four different kinds of scotch, not one of which I could afford. I poured a glass of the oldest and wandered down the back hall.
The first room on the right was the small dining room where we used to eat. Behind that was the kitchen, well outfitted and rarely used. There were untarnished copper pots on the stove and earthenware jars for FLOUR, SUGAR, COFFEE and TEA, all filled to the brim.
Beyond the kitchen was the maid’s room. By all appearances, Tinker was still sleeping there. A sleeveless undershirt was on a chair and his razor was in the bathroom propped in a glass. Hanging over a small bookcase there was a rather primitive social realist painting. The image looked down on a freight dock where longshoremen were assembling for a protest. Two police cars had pulled up to the edge of the crowd. At the end of the dock you could just make out the words OPEN ALL NIGHT in blue neon. The painting was not without its virtues, but in the context of the apartment, I could see why it had been relegated to the maid’s room. Victims of a similar exile, the bookcase was filled with hard-boiled detective novels.
I doubled back past the kitchen, past Eve’s sleeping figure and went down the opposite hall. The first room on the left was a paneled study with a fireplace. It was half the size of my apartment.
On the desk there was another fanciful deco piece: a cigarette caddy in the shape of a race car. Each of these silver objects—the shaker, the cocktail catalog, the race car—fit nicely into the international style of the apartment. They were finely crafted like pieces of jewelry, but unmistakably masculine in purpose. And none of them were the sort of item a Tinker would buy for himself. They suggested the work of a hidden hand.
Between two bookends, there was a small selection of reference books: a thesaurus, a Latin grammar, a soon to be extremely outdated atlas. But there was also a slender volume without a title on the spine. It turned out to be a book of Washingtonia. The inscription