The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [118]
“Pool-table cloth,” he told me, preening himself a little. “It’s the only material that comes in this special color. D’you like it?”
“I love it,” I said, stringing a bracelet of popcorn around his sleeve. “I wonder what makes you dress like this.”
“Brio. Panache. I believe in them.” He waved his cigarette airily and I noticed he held it between the third and fourth fingers instead of the usual second and third. It looked wonderful.
Max’s personality was beginning to emerge. Easy and flamboyant. Peacock. What a frenzy I must have been in not to have felt its impact before. Or had Stefan’s even wilder flamboyance overshadowed it?
In any case, I had never been on such an intimate footing with a Famous Person before, and what surprised me most was how quickly, beneath the stark realities of the baize-green suit and the aura of fame, the really legendary figure was emerging; under that pale green shirt beat a truly original heart.
He talked about photography with passion. “I must be the only photographer in the world who ever began taking pictures without the aid of a camera.” He said that even as a child picking up his pencil for the first time, the only sets of ground-configural patterns that presented themselves to him visually were geared to photography; he’d start right in drawing photographs. He said the only trouble was that his family absolutely forbade him a camera. Anything connected with films and the film world— and they lumped photography under that general heading—was mysteriously but strictly taboo. However, he’d somehow managed to get himself a camera and a darkroom, and in no time at all the walls of the Café Venezia, the center of schoolboy Bohemia in Leeds, were covered with his weekly exhibitions. When he began to win prizes in the local newspapers, it all came out, of course, but by then it was too late for his family to do anything about it.
He had also, from a very early age, been in heated correspondence with the great Spanish photographer Bernardo Ruiz, and hearing one day that Ruiz was in London, he went to a store and bought himself a blood-colored suit which, he felt, would cut the suitable sophisticated swath in London (and which fortunately he was able to get cheap, as it had been ordered and abandoned by a clarinetist whose outfit had gone broke), hopped on the next train and, photographs spilling in every direction, baited the Great Man in the lobby of his hotel. “I imagine,” said Max, “it was the unexpectedness of my appearance as well as its bizarreness (I was very thin at the time) that disarmed Ruiz sufficiently to take me on. In any case, I traveled with him for two and a half years and he taught me everything he knew. And so,” he finished, “I shook the dust of Yorkshire off my shoes forever.”
I had to laugh. “I can just see you then,” I said.
He looked at me for a moment. “But can you see Leeds?”
I shook my head.
“It’s not so funny,” he said. “It was a narrow escape. I’ll show you pictures of it sometime. The humdrum glum carried to its sub-human level. Sunday night in the Methodist church. You won’t feel like laughing. You’ll cry your eyes out.”
He tried to flip a cigarette nonchalantly into his mouth like what’s-his-name in the movies, but he missed. I didn’t feel like laughing. A shadow had fallen across us, like suddenly coming upon a hunchback in a hopefully colored tie or an unsuccessful actor with dyed bright hair in the middle of a sunny day.
“I feel like crying now,” I said.
“Do you? Do you? Oh my darling!” He took my hand and kissed it. We looked at each other for a long, long time. “I know what,” he said. “I’ll give you two dollars if you can cry now. Two dollars if you can cry in one minute flat.”
“Fifteen seconds,” he said, looking at his watch fifteen seconds later. “Not bad.”
“Now you,” I said.
“Look at me.” He had tears in his eyes already.
“What were you thinking?”
“I was thinking,” I said,