The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [13]
The next thing I knew I was ankle deep in martinis at the Ritz Bar, and he was calling me Sally Jay and I was calling him Teddy.
I sighed nostalgically, drained my coffee to the grounds, and unrolled l’addition from the tight little scroll in my hand. If I was going to break off with Teddy it wouldn’t do at all to remember those early days and what fun they’d been. After all, he was madly attractive dans sa façon. No question. Was I being wise or merely rash? Oh dear. By now I was completely uncertain. Two of les boys flitted past. They certainly wore their jeans with a difference. One of the differences between Saint-Germain and Montparnasse, I decided, was that Saint-Germain was queerer. And that was the only decision I seemed likely to make for the time being.
TWO
SIX O’CLOCK THAT evening found me back at my hotel, exhausted from an enervating battle fought and lost over my laundry. I had the books of plays, though. That much had been accomplished. Three were on the table beside me and one, appropriately enough, was open in my hand.
There was a knock on my door. I called out for whoever it was to come in and Judy’s head, wiggling on its long stem of a neck, poked itself into the doorway. “Oh, I hope I’m not interrupting you,” she said, backing out as soon as she noticed the book in my hand. Judy lived in my hotel. She was just seventeen, and what she was doing in Paris was supposedly chaperoning her younger brother, a fully fledged concert pianist of fifteen, who was studying there with one of the leading teachers. In view of their combined and startling innocence, however, this was a rather useless arrangement. Their last name was Galache, and they were the issue with which the highly unlikely union of a Quaker woman from Philadelphia and a dreadfully dashing Spaniard (now, alas, dead) had been blessed. Naturally their upbringing, up to this point, had been strict and very sheltered.
“No, of course you’re not interrupting me,” I said. “Come in. Sit down, my child. There is almost no time in the world when I wouldn’t want to see you.”
Judy was so different from me that it was really ludicrous. Whereas I was hell-bent for living, she was content, at least for the time being, to leave all that to others. Just as long as she could hear all about it. She really was funny about this. Folded every which way on the floor, looking like Bambi—all eyes and legs and no chin—she would listen for ages and ages with rapt attention to absolutely any drivel that you happened to be talking. It was unbelievable.
“And then what did you do?” she would ask with real avidity at the end of a dreary, over-long and absolutely pointless anecdote.
“So, then I simply left.”
“But where did you go?”
“Back to the dance.”
“And then what?”
“I began dancing.”
“And then what?”
“Why, that’s all.”
“But what did he do then?”
“Oh Judy, please. That’s all, I said.”
“Oh,” she would sigh, resigning herself to the inevitable, but unable to conceal her disappointment. And this “oh” always escaped with the most heartbreaking, dying fall.
Ridiculous as the idea may have been for her bluestocking mother to send brother and sister over alone like this, the fact was that Judy was protected as much by her curiosity as by her innocence. And then there was this other thing about her, too. You know all that razzle-dazzle about people being born in Original Sin and all that rot? Well, maybe it’s rot and maybe it isn’t. I mean I wouldn’t slit my throat from ear to ear, just because I’d found out for sure that most people are. But she wasn’t. That was the thing. She simply wasn’t. I’m positive of that.
She was terrifically excited at this moment because she’d just been to see the paintings of a young artist called Jim Breit. He was, she explained to me, one of the Hard Core. The Hard Core was what we called a group of rugged individuals who circled around an old satyr, a sort of archetypal poet-painter nicknamed the Ancient, and made their headquarters in the