the last book I ever read (Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins, excerpt eight)

from Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins:

The following summer, back at the Villa America, was one of the happiest the Murphys had spent, full of gaiety and good friends. The Benchleys came down to visit with their two boys, and so did Dorothy Parker, Donald Ogden Stewart, Ellen and Philip Barry, and several others. Honoria Murphy, then twelve, remembers looking down at the terrace from her bedroom window, seeing the flowers and the lovely food and the ladies in their beaded dresses, and thinking “how it all blended in, and how you just wanted it to last forever.” The Fitzgeralds were back again, too, like ghosts at the banquet. Torn and hounded by their personal furies, they would have been difficult company under any circumstances. But now another strain had been put on their relationship with the Murphys. Scott had decided to use Sara and Gerald as the central characters in his novel, and he was “studying” them openly. His methods were anything but subtle. “He questioned us constantly in a really intrusive and irritating way,” Murphy said. “He kept asking things like what our income really was, and how I had got into Skull and Bones, and whether Sara and I had lived together before we were married. I just couldn't take seriously the idea that he was going to write about us—somehow I couldn’t believe that anything would come of questions like that. But I certainly recall his peering at me with a sort of thin-lipped, supercilious scrutiny, as though he were trying to decide what made me tick. His questions irritated Sara a good deal. Usually, she would give him some ridiculous answer just to shut him up, but eventually the whole business became intolerable. In the middle of a dinner party one night, Sara had all she could take. ‘Scott,’ she said, ‘you think if you just ask enough questions you’ll get to know what people are like, but you won’t. You don’t really know anything at all about people.’ Scott practically turned green. He got up from the table and pointed his finger at her and said that nobody had ever dared say that to him, whereupon Sara asked if he would like her to repeat it, and she did.”