The Big Goodbye by Sam Wasson

Author:Sam Wasson
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Flatiron Books

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Anjelica’s eyes were as deep as the richest black oil; they told of legacy, the ages of subterranean refinement preceding her actual birth, and the long dinners at St. Clerans when, too early, her father would drill her for the benefit of his treasured guests, the likes of Sartre and Steinbeck and Pauline de Rothschild. At one dinner she testily upbraided Van Gogh. “You don’t like Van Gogh?” her father blustered. “Then name six of his paintings and tell me why you don’t like Van Gogh.” Of course she couldn’t. “Leave the room,” he commanded, “and, until you know what you’re talking about, don’t come back with your opinions to the dinner table.”

He scared her. But she clung to his leg all the way from the house to yet another car that would take him from away St. Clerans for more months of moviemaking, for it felt better, she came to believe, to fear him at home than love him from afar.

Allowing Nicholson and her father to trade laughs in the orchard, Anjelica would concede that for all Jack had of the old man, there was something in him that brought back her mother, “a certain kind of square-earthed presence,” she said, a resolve that felt to her—if he could lay off the girls—almost like permanence. That was the Jack she alone knew—and hoped for.

That Jack and Jake’s love interests, Anjelica and Evelyn Mulwray, daughters of power and paragons of class, were both fathered by John Huston and his image made for an electrically intimate “triangular offstage situation,” Nicholson said, for John Huston and for Jack.

It was less useful for Anjelica.

“So…,” her father boomed across the table to Nicholson. “I hear you’re sleeping with my daughter”—Anjelica reddened violently—“Mr. Gitts.”

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