Love of the Last Tycoon: The Authorized Text (No Series) Read Online Free Page A

backward out of the corner of his mouth.
    Stahr folded my hand over the ring, stood up and addressed Wylie.
    “Come up to the bridal suite,” he said. “See you later, Cecilia.”
    Before they went out of hearing, I heard Wylie’s question: “Did you open Schwartz’s note?” And Stahr:
    “Not yet.”
    I must be slow, for only then did I realize that Stahr was Mr. Smith.
    Afterwards Wylie told me what was in the note. Written by the headlights of the taxi, it was almost illegible.
    “Dear Monroe, You are the best of them all I have always admired your mentality so when you turn against me I know it’s no use! I must be no good and am not going to continue the journey let me warn you once again look out! I know.
    “Your friend
    M ANNY .”
    Stahr read it twice, and raised his hand to the morning stubble on his chin.
    “He’s a nervous wreck,” he said. “There’s nothing to be done—absolutely nothing. I’m sorry I was short with him—but I don’t like a man to approach me telling me it’s for my sake.”
    “Maybe it was,” said Wylie.
    “It’s poor technique.”
    “I’d fall for it,” said Wylie. “I’m vain as a woman. If anybody pretends to be interested in me, I’ll ask for more. I like advice.”
    Stahr shook his head distastefully. Wylie kept on ribbing him—he was one of those to whom this privilege was permitted.
    “You fall for some kinds of flattery,” he said. “This ‘little Napoleon stuff.’”
    “It makes me sick,” said Stahr, “but it’s not as bad as some man trying to help you.”
    “If you don’t like advice, why do you pay me? ”
    “That’s a question of merchandise,” said Stahr. “I’m a merchant. I want to buy what’s in your mind.”
    “You’re no merchant,” said Wylie. “I knew a lot of them when I was a publicity man, and I agree with Charles Francis Adams.”
    “What did he say?”
    “He knew them all—Gould, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Astor—and he said there wasn’t one he’d care to meet again in the hereafter. Well—they haven’t improved since then, and that’s why I say you’re no merchant.”
    “Adams was probably a sourbelly,” said Stahr. “He wanted to be head man himself, but he didn’t have the judgment or else the character.”
    “He had brains,” said Wylie rather tartly.
    “It takes more than brains. You writers and artists poop out and get all mixed up, and somebody has to come in and straighten you out.” He shrugged his shoulders. “You seem to take things so personally, hating people and worshipping them—always thinking people are so important—especially yourselves. You just ask to be kicked around. I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it—on the inside.”
    He broke off.
    “What did I say to Schwartz in the airport? Do you remember—exactly?”
    “You said, ‘Whatever you’re after, the answer is No!’”
    Stahr was silent.
    “He was sunk,” said Wylie, “but I laughed him out of it. We took Billy Brady’s daughter for a ride.”
    Stahr rang for the stewardess.
    “That pilot,” he said, “would he mind if I sat up in front with him awhile?”
    “That’s against the rules, Mr. Smith.”
    “Ask him to step in here a minute when he’s free.”
    Stahr sat up front all afternoon. While we slid off the endless desert and over the table-lands, dyed with many colors like the white sands we dyed with colors when I was a child. Then in the late afternoon, the peaks themselves—the Mountains of the Frozen Saw—slid under our propellers and we were close to home.
    When I wasn’t dozing I was thinking that I wanted to marry Stahr, that I wanted to make him love me. Oh, the conceit! What on earth did I have to offer? But I didn’t think like that then. I had the pride of young women, which draws its strength from such sublime thoughts as “I’m as good as she is.” For my purposes I was just as beautiful as the great beauties who must have inevitably thrown