Read Online Juice by Stephen Becker - Free Book Online

Amsterdam—Landauer’s eye relaxed as he talked; Davis smoked cigars with him, drank beer with him—London, Paris, Rome, Geneva, Vienna again. “At the Colonne—do you know the Colonne?” Davis nodded. “At the Colonne I had my great failure, doing the Brahms, 1908, I think, the year after Joachim died, and the audiences were not ready.”
    â€œEven now Brahms has a hard time in Paris,” Davis said. “But they like the violin concerto. Oistrakh did it in ’53. Brought the house down. But they don’t know the solo piano work.”
    â€œNeither does anyone else. Only recitals in Vienna. Your Huneker loved it. He had a good deal to say about music. When were you first in Paris?”
    Davis grinned. “In 1926. I joined the Navy very young. I had six months in the Mediterranean. You’ll be disappointed in me: I saw few concerts.”
    â€œOf course.” Landauer smiled. “And then?”
    â€œThen the Philippines, and then Panama. One thing: I learned languages. French, Italian, Spanish. I was in Panama for a year. Fell in love. She was twenty-seven, a madam, retired from active work, too old for that sort of thing. I almost married her. She was too old. What was it Fitzgerald said? ‘She was an aging but still beautiful woman of twenty-eight’? Something like that. I wish I had, sometimes. I could be drinking cold beer on a veranda, smoking this same cigar and decomposing gracefully.”
    â€œI have not read Fitzgerald,” Landauer said. “After that?”
    â€œI left the Navy after three years,” Davis said. “Intellectual pretensions. Law school. The depression. Back to Europe. A couple of years of drifting around. Then I was ready for concerts, Mozart. I wasn’t so happy with people any more, with life. You know the feeling. I had scars from fights. Once I’d thought of them as badges of honor: courage, the man who risks. Now they were stupid: man’s bestiality to man. And the poverty, I was sick of poverty, mine and everybody else’s. So I came back finally and came here. I used what I had, the languages and foreign ports and funny stories about whores and drinking and foreigners. They thought I was cute. You know the word. Cute. So one cute thing led to another, and I was a success. I was also—still am—a damn good lawyer. And here a good lawyer has spectacular clients. If he does well by them he’s rich and famous. So I’m rich and famous.”
    â€œAnd no wife,” Landauer said. “No children.”
    Davis shrugged. “Afraid, I suppose. All bachelors want to marry; all married men wish they hadn’t. It must mean something.”
    â€œBut children,” Landauer objected.
    â€œI know. I have nothing against them.” Davis shrugged again. “It happened this way. Why complain? And who’s defending whom, by the way?”
    â€œPerfectly right,” Landauer said, smiling, “although I have a right to know these things. I will tell you now about the death of a prodigy.”
    It was not a new story. The reviews were the same for three years; the war came and passed; after the war the reviews were no different. Landauer had ceased to progress. “I retired,” he said. “For five years I did not play publicly. During this time I began to compose. I also began to think. Vienna after the war was unpleasant, you know. And what made it worse was that so many tried to pretend that nothing had happened. So we were all at our worst, even I, locked away and composing. When I walked out and looked around me I saw a desolation. A true desolation, you understand? Courage had turned to greed; modesty had turned to cleverness; love had turned to self-love; sacrifice had become bargaining. The women were whores and the men liked them for it. And to me, who had been so long isolated, it was horrible. I saw at once that the virtues I had known had never been