The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [4]
So far so good, I told myself. They neither one had the slightest, smallest, remotest connection with me. Then a thought caught me sharply.
“And the Disorganized?” I asked rather nervously.
“The Disorganized?” He considered me carefully for a moment, narrowing his eyes.
“Your cigarette’s gone out,” he said finally. “You have to smoke this kind, you know, they won’t smoke themselves.” He lit it for me again and blew out the match without once taking his eyes off my decolletage, which was slipping quite badly. I gave it a tug and he resumed the discourse.
“Yes. The Disorganized. They get split into two groups as well. First of all the Sly One. The idea is to see Europe casually, you know, sort of vaguely, out of the corner of the eye. All Baedekers and Michelins and museum catalogues immediately discarded as too boring and too corny. Who wants to see a pile of old stones anyway? The general ‘feel’ of the country is what she’s after. It’s even a struggle to get her to look at a map of the city she’s in so she’ll know where the hell she is, and actually it’s a useless one since this type is constitutionally incapable of reading a map and has no sense of direction to begin with. But, as I say, she’s the sly one—the ‘Oh, look, that’s the Louvre over there, isn’t it? I think I’ll drop in for a second. I’m rather hot. We’d better get out of the sun anyway …’ or ‘Tuileries did you say? That sure strikes a bell. Aren’t those flowers pretty over there? Now haven’t I heard something about it in connection with the —what was it—French Revolution? Oh yes, of course that’s it. Thank you, hon.’”
I laughed—a jolly laugh—to show I was with him.
“The funny thing,” he continued, “is, scratch the sly one and out comes the real fanatic, and what begins with ‘Gosh, I can never remember whether Romanesque was before or after Gothic’ leads to secret pamphlet readings and stained-glass studyings, and ends up in wild aesthetic discussions of the relative values of the two towers at Chartres. Then all restraint is thrown to the wind and anything really old enough is greeted with animal cries of anguish at its beauty. In the final stage small discriminating lists appear about her person—but they only contain, you may be damn sure, the good, the pure and the truly worthwhile.”
Larry paused, took a small, discriminating sip of his St. Raphael, and puffed happily away at his cigarette.
I swallowed the last of my Pernod, folded my arms seductively on the sticky table and took a long pull on my own French cigarette. It had gone out, of course. I hid it from Larry but he hadn’t noticed. He was lost in reverie.
Blushingly I recalled a night not so long before when I had suddenly fallen in love with the Place de Furstenberg in the moonlight. I had actually—Oh Lord—I had actually kissed one of the stones at the fountain, I remembered, flung my shoes off, and executed a crazy drunken dance.
The September sun was blazing down on us and the second Pernod was beginning to have a pleasant soporific effect on me. A couple of street Arabs came up and listlessly began to try selling us silver jewelry and rugs. After a while they drifted away. I began studying Larry closely. The mat of auburn hair curling to his skull, the gray-green eyes now so blank and far away, the delicate scar running down the pale skin of his forehead, the well-shaped nose covered with a faint spray of freckles, and his large mouth so gently curved, all contributed to give his face, especially in repose, a look of sappy sweetness that was sharply at odds with—and yet at the same time enhanced—his tough, wise-guy manner. Maybe because I had been out very late the night before and was not able