Michael Beeson's Research

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amuck teeth lie

Amuck teeth lie

In a week. ‘So who were ya?’ “It was like a bomb went off in the living room,” I said, “and we were all suffering from shell shock from then on.” Then he pulled himself clear and sank back in his seat. “The channels to the south are cut off,” Ross said. Marcia glanced at me then. We’d spent hours together but it was as if she hadn’t really gotten a good look at me until seeing the tableau in her driveway. “No,” I said. “What do you mean, ‘You see’?” Sponer shouted. “You yourself thought she was in! Where else would she be! Of course she’s upstairs!” ‘The chandelier, Dessie. The Waterford Crystal chandelier that was commissioned to hang in this room. Where is it?’ So that’s how it is, he thought. Understand? Oh yes, I do understand. At least I’m beginning to understand. There are women one shouldn’t see again, and there are men who shouldn’t make a nuisance of themselves. Drivers, for example, if they’ve had a fling with a girl from a posh family. There are girls that one shouldn’t compromise, and others who’d gladly let themselves be arrested for a man. Those whom one shouldn’t question about what they had been up to, and others who would have it splashed all over the papers that they wanted to sacrifice themselves for you. Girls to whom one mustn’t return, and others who wait for years and to whom one doesn’t return… As I walk past the yellow Bronco, I take a quick peek in its window. The farmer’s lying on the backseat, with a russet sheepskin over him. “I’ve got to see Marie,” said Sponer, walking in. “You look good, Jude.” “Kush?” said Watts, sounding genuinely surprised to hear from me. After my fight with Karinger a year earlier, Watts and I had seen each other exactly once, at Christmas, and spoken over text only a handful of times. But when he answered the phone using my nickname, and when I responded with his last name, a kind of fold in the fabric of time occurred. Our conversation was as comfortable and easy as though Karinger, silently, were on a third line somewhere, and we were all fourteen again. “M?sieur” Sert was a personality, a character, much larger than in the painting of him. He was as munificent and immoral as a Renaissance man. He loved money, even though he was profligate. “You have to admit that Sert makes everything else seem rather drab,” Misia said to me; it was true.He was the ideal travelling companion; always good-humoured, a cicerone of weird and prodigious erudition. Each tiny bit of knowledge was balanced by another, as were his spectacular pictorial fantasies. This huge, hairy monkey, with his tinted beard, his humped back, his enormous tortoiseshell spectacles—veritable wheels—loved everything colossal. He slept in black pyjamas, never washed, and, even naked, looked as though he was wearing a fur coat, so hirsute was he; it was just as indecent. He had hair everywhere, except on his head. He guided me through museums like a faun through a familiar forest, he explained everything to my attentive ignorance, he liked to educate me, and he found in me a naturalness that he preferred to all his erudition. We would make huge detours of a hundred kilometres in search of someosteria where you could eat birds rolled in vine leaves; from Ucellos toucelli; Sert, who once upon a time had roamed around Italy on foot, by donkey, in every way imaginable, maintained that he remembered the place very well. He unfolded his maps. In the end, the restaurant was nowhere to be found. Not yet. As Hobart slapped him, Chuga erupted from the reeds, snarling, spooking Kincaid’s horse. The lieutenant reined in his mount and rode off laughing..