The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [2]
Who should be standing there in front of me, in what I immediately spotted as the Left Bank uniform of the day, dark wool shirt and a pair of old Army suntans, but my old friend Larry Keevil. He was staring down at me with some alarm.
I said hello to him and added that he had frightened me, to cover any bad-tempered expression that might have been lingering on my face, but he just kept on staring dumbly at me.
“What have you been up to since … since … when the hell was it that I last saw you?” he asked finally.
Curiously enough I remembered exactly.
“It was just a week after I got here. The middle of June.”
He kept on looking at me, or rather he kept on looking over me in that surprised way, and then he shook his head and said, “Christ, Gorce, can it only be three short months?” Then he grinned. “You’ve really flung yourself into this, haven’t you?”
In a way it was exactly what I had been thinking, too, and I was on the point of saying, “Into what?” Very innocently, you know, so that he could tell me how different I was, how much I’d changed and so forth, but all at once something stopped me. I knew I would have died rather than hear his reply.
So instead I said, “Ah well, don’t we all?” which was my stock phrase when I couldn’t think of anything else to say. There was a pause and then he asked me how I was and I said fine how was he, and he said fine, and I asked him what he was doing, and he said it would take too long to tell.
It was then we both noticed we were standing right across the street from the Café Dupont, the one near the Sorbonne.
“Shall we have a quick drink?” I heard him ask, needlessly, for I was already halfway across the street in that direction.
The café was very crowded and the only place we could find was on the very edge of the pavement. We just managed to squeeze under the shade of the awning. A waiter came and took our order. Larry leaned back into the hum and buzz and brouhaha and smiled lazily. Suddenly, without quite knowing why, I found I was very glad to have run into him. And this was odd, because two Americans re-encountering each other after a certain time in a foreign land are supposed to clamber up their nearest lampposts and wait tremblingly for it all to blow over. Especially me. I’d made a vow when I got over here never to speak to anyone I’d ever known before. Yet here we were, two Americans who hadn’t really seen each other for years; here was someone from “home” who knew me when, if you like, and, instead of shambling back into the bushes like a startled rhino, I was absolutely thrilled at the whole idea.
“I like it here, don’t you?” said Larry, indicating the café with a turn of his head.
I had to admit I’d never been there before.
He smiled quizzically. “You should come more often,” he said. “It’s practically the only nontourist trap to survive on the Left Bank. It’s real” he added.
Real, I thought … whatever that meant. I looked at the Sorbonne students surging around us, the tables fairly rocking under their pounding fists and thumping elbows. The whole vast panoramic carpet seemed to be woven out of old boots, checkered wool and wild, fuzzy hair. I don’t suppose there is anything on earth to compare with a French student café in the late morning. You couldn’t possibly reproduce the same numbers, noise, and intensity anywhere else without producing a riot as well. It really was the most colorful café I’d ever been in. As a matter of fact, the most colored too; there was an especially large number of Singhalese, Arab and African students, along with those from every other country.
I suppose Larry’s “reality” in this case was based on the café’s internationality. But perhaps all cafés near a leading university have that authentic international atmosphere. At the table closest to us sat an ordinary-looking young girl with lank yellow hair and a gray-haired bespectacled middle-aged