Free The Jewel Box by Anna Davis Page A

contrived a situation in which the focus is absolutely on you, and in which I’m forced to be diminutive and servile. Why on earth should I be flattered by that?”
    “Well, that’s one way of looking at it. Maybe I just wanted to see you again. Are you going to tell me your real name now?”
    Without replying, she began searching about in her bag for her notebook and pen, producing them with a flourish.
    “All right, then.” He sighed. “But don’t you find this kind of combat a little wearying?”
    “Poor Dexter. Are you terribly weary?” She flipped open the notebook.
    He shook his head. “Miss Sharp, this isn’t how it’s going to work.”
    “Isn’t it?”
    “No.” He reached across the table and took the notebook and pen out of her hands. Joe, the waiter, had come across while they were talking, and was standing beside them.
    “Good evening, Mr. O’Connell. Miss Sharp. May I be so bold as to suggest you share the Chateaubriand? It comes with potatoes and green beans.”
    “Sounds perfect,” said O’Connell. “And bring us a bottle of red, would you, Joe? Your selection—make it a really good one.”
    “Excuse me,” said Grace. “Do I have any say whatsoever in this?”
    “No. You’re to be diminutive and servile, remember? We’ll have it medium rare, Joe. And would you be so kind as to look after these, please?” He handed over Grace’s notebook and pen.
    “Now,” he continued, as the waiter disappeared, “if you won’t tell me your name, could you at least tell me something interesting about yourself?”
    “Such as?”
    “Such as, the reason you haven’t married.”

    [From “Diamond Sharp Meets Dexter O’Connell”]
    “Writers are ugly,” O’Connell announces, over a leathery Chateaubriand at Tour Eiffel. (Sorry, Mr. Stulik, but it was leathery. Your chef should stop making allowances for the bien-cuit English, and reacquaint himself with the Cuisine Française. The potatoes, conversely, were slightly underdone. Forgivable in the case of certain other vegetables, but in a potato?) “We do nasty things to people in novels,” O’Connell says. “We watch them carefully, and then we twist them into the shapes that suit our purposes. They end up like reflections in fairground mirrors. Writing is a cruel business.”
    I ask him if this was true of the creation of Veronique in The Vision , whether O’Connell’s first and original flapper was a horribly distorted version of someone he’d once known.
    “Of course,” he says. “She was a girl I was in love with—a girl who broke my heart. There was much more passion in The Vision than in anything else I’ve written. That’s why it’s my best novel. It was horrible passion, of course. Hatred, even. But it was passion, all the same.”
    I ask what’s become of the girl who broke his heart.
    He shrugs. “It doesn’t matter anymore.” His face, when he says this, is more ugly than handsome.
    “I don’t believe that nobody’s asked you.” O’Connell forked a pile of beans into his mouth without bothering to cut them up.
    “It’s of no concern to me whether you believe it or not. It’s the truth.” Grace was struggling with her beef. Her mouth was terribly dry, no matter how much wine she drank. She could barely swallow and felt she must be chewing and chewing, like a cow, having to swill each troublesome mouthful down with yet more wine. She hated being so nervous.
    O’Connell seemed determined to pursue this to its bitter end. “There must be somebody. What about your editor? Sedgwick, isn’t it?”
    “We’re just friends.”
    “Do you think he sees it that way?”
    “I don’t know. So long as he keeps his feelings to himself, I don’t have to think about it.”
    A smile that worked only the bottom half of O’Connell’s face, leaving his eyes untouched. “I’ve seen you together, don’t forget. You should have heard the change in his voice when I told him I wanted you to interview me.”
    “Well, if