Read Online Flash and Filigree by Terry Southern - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Terry Southern
Ads: Link
in a matter-of-fact voice, still smiling, his head to one side. And he reached in his shirt pocket to take out what might have been two tickets to a school concert. But the truth was, that ever since his unexpected laugh, displeasure on the girl’s face had grown so fiercely that now, when she raised her head, she was so obviously near to tearful outrage that he hesitated, and asked, in real sympathy: “What’s the matter?” Whereas Babs, perhaps mistaking, or rightly taking, this for pity, said furiously, straight at where his eyes lay smoked in mystery behind the offensive glass, “Nothing’s the matter with ME! What’s the matter with YOU?” And so saying, she turned abruptly and, leaving Ralph Edwards agape at the counter, marched down the hall, no longer tearful, but shocked into numbness by the kind of profound surprise that can border on, but never quite touch, revelation: that is to say, that her memory now was not the image of the young man left agape at the counter, but rather of the sun-ambered blonde who still smiled easily from behind the cream-colored wheel of the yellow convertible.
Chapter VII
T HE NEW L OS A NGELES County Records Building was constructed after a design by Raoul Krishna, which the artist made in 1936, when he was living in Salt Lake City. The original blueprint had been drawn up and entered for competition at the Texas Centennial, where, had it been placed, it would have become one of the permanent exposition buildings of the State Park Fair Grounds in Dallas. With its failure there, however, the artist revised the drawing, and where the main façade had originally been fashioned to meet the requirements of opening in wide descent onto the State Park Esplanade, introduced, instead, a level, domed cloister with eight converging approaches. And in this form, the plan was submitted, during the next few years, to various competitions in the United States and Europe, occasionally receiving some secondary acclaim. In 1940, it came to the attention of the first woman member of the Los Angeles Board of City Planning. An extremely active and popular person, the wife of an influential citizen, she was herself a patron of the arts and, in fact, so much so of this particular artist that she presented his plan to the Board. It was accepted in the summer of 1940 and, following one major alteration (where the original had called for a gigantic, self-supporting dome-roof—which, because of the earth tremors in the Los Angeles area, was held inadvisable—a more conventional type roof-structure was submitted) the work was begun, and the building completed on Christmas Eve Day of that year. It was an immense structure, made almost entirely of plaster-stone, and at a cost of about two million dollars.
Dr. Eichner scarcely knew this building. Although he had passed it in his automobile a number of times, and, from being well-read, knew its history, civic functions and so forth, it was his habit to give almost no visual attention to things that were not immediately and vitally pertinent. Yet, it must be said, that once a thing did become pertinent, he had an amazing faculty for absorbing it wholly. A case in point was his behavior toward Music. When he went to the opera, for example, it was not without having first made himself closely familiar with the life of the composer and, so far as possible, the principal singers. And while he had no particular taste for music or drama, during the presentation he scrupulously followed a libretto and score, the margins of which he filled with comments about the performance, always in the language of its presentation. For this purpose, he had once learned Italian in six hours.
Thus it was that on the eve of his convocation to the Grand Jury Hearing, he had spent the entire evening in the Public Library making himself knowledgeable of the Grand Jury process, points of law, the names, lives and personalities of the judges, prosecutors, and other city and county
Chapter VII
T HE NEW L OS A NGELES County Records Building was constructed after a design by Raoul Krishna, which the artist made in 1936, when he was living in Salt Lake City. The original blueprint had been drawn up and entered for competition at the Texas Centennial, where, had it been placed, it would have become one of the permanent exposition buildings of the State Park Fair Grounds in Dallas. With its failure there, however, the artist revised the drawing, and where the main façade had originally been fashioned to meet the requirements of opening in wide descent onto the State Park Esplanade, introduced, instead, a level, domed cloister with eight converging approaches. And in this form, the plan was submitted, during the next few years, to various competitions in the United States and Europe, occasionally receiving some secondary acclaim. In 1940, it came to the attention of the first woman member of the Los Angeles Board of City Planning. An extremely active and popular person, the wife of an influential citizen, she was herself a patron of the arts and, in fact, so much so of this particular artist that she presented his plan to the Board. It was accepted in the summer of 1940 and, following one major alteration (where the original had called for a gigantic, self-supporting dome-roof—which, because of the earth tremors in the Los Angeles area, was held inadvisable—a more conventional type roof-structure was submitted) the work was begun, and the building completed on Christmas Eve Day of that year. It was an immense structure, made almost entirely of plaster-stone, and at a cost of about two million dollars.
Dr. Eichner scarcely knew this building. Although he had passed it in his automobile a number of times, and, from being well-read, knew its history, civic functions and so forth, it was his habit to give almost no visual attention to things that were not immediately and vitally pertinent. Yet, it must be said, that once a thing did become pertinent, he had an amazing faculty for absorbing it wholly. A case in point was his behavior toward Music. When he went to the opera, for example, it was not without having first made himself closely familiar with the life of the composer and, so far as possible, the principal singers. And while he had no particular taste for music or drama, during the presentation he scrupulously followed a libretto and score, the margins of which he filled with comments about the performance, always in the language of its presentation. For this purpose, he had once learned Italian in six hours.
Thus it was that on the eve of his convocation to the Grand Jury Hearing, he had spent the entire evening in the Public Library making himself knowledgeable of the Grand Jury process, points of law, the names, lives and personalities of the judges, prosecutors, and other city and county
Similar Books
