The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [119]
“I was thinking: suppose I’d been right about her and she had been pregnant. Suppose she had died under the knife—or had got so desperate she killed herself.” He was perfectly serious. “Sally Jay,” he said earnestly, “promise me, promise me you’ll never try to kill yourself.”
“Oh I promise, I promise,” I assured him, stretching lazily, feeling utterly euphoric. “The world is wide, wide, wide, and I am young, young, young, and we’re all going to live forever!”
We were very hungry but we didn’t want to leave, so we ate there. We had chicken sandwiches; boy, the chicken of the century. Dry, wry, and tender, the dryness sort of rubbing against your tongue on soft, bouncy white bread with slivers of juicy wet pickles. Then we had some very salty potato chips and some olives stuffed with pimentos and some Indian nuts and some tiny pearl onions and some more popcorn. Then we washed the whole thing down with iced martinis and finished up with large cups of strong black coffee and cigarettes. One of my really great meals.
I don’t know what time it was when we went into the bar, but it was dark when we came out. We went to a movie and he kissed me for the first time. We kissed right through it. Coming to life in a movie house on West Fourth Street is an apotheosis I’d have to leave to one of those mad seventeenth-century mystics like Herbert or Vaughan to do justice to. It’s the end.
“Now let’s kiss somewhere else,” said Max.
I couldn’t stop singing to myself in the taxi—that heavenly tune about taking a chance on love. It’s terribly embarrassing and it’s always happening to me: the words of a song will suddenly exactly echo my inner feelings and out they come. Like that awful time I kept filling in pauses of a hard-luck story someone was giving me with the Judy Garland song about the road getting rougher and lonelier and tougher. Couldn’t stop myself. Could have died the way it just kept coming out.
I could have died now, but for another reason. It was all going much too fast. It was all wrong. I was falling back into all my awful old ways and all the awful old things were going to happen to me all awful over again. Stop the taxi! Take me home … I have to catch a train … I thought vaguely of saying. You’ll worry about it later, I promised myself. You’ll be sorry. Oh you will, you will.
Not that anyone could have guessed from the limp, humming form that remained in Max’s arms that there was any kind of a battle raging around inside.
But it turned out that all he meant was a night club.
It was one of those casual ones. The kind where the musicians are playing as much to amuse themselves as anyone there and you’re not expected to stop talking or drinking or anything else you’ve been doing while they’re on. The music seeps through. They give you a good strong shot of bourbon and some soda and a glass swizzle stick to poke in the holes of the ice cubes, and leave you alone. I kept writing “Max” on the table with mine.
We danced and kissed through the jazz. It was cool and hot and blue. Midnight blue. Blue smoke. Blues.
After that we sat on quietly for a while. Max wore a look of bony concentration. He was thinking.
“Look here,” he said finally. “Let’s go back to my place, I want to talk to you. I’ll tell you quite frankly right now that I very much want to sleep with you tonight, but if you turn me down it’s not important. I’ll ask you every day for the next five years and you can turn me down every day for the next five years—no, wait a minute—every day for the next year” he smilingly corrected himself. “You wouldn’t be so cruel as to hold out longer than that, would you? You see I really do want you, Sally Jay. Come on, let’s get the bill. As a matter of fact I live right down the street.”
I’ll bet you do, Buster, I thought, quickly collecting my wits. I felt cool as a cucumber. I crossed out the “M” I’d started with my swizzle stick. “But you’re going to Japan in a couple of weeks, aren’t you?” I pointed out quietly.