The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [42]
When we left the hospital, Jim asked me if I’d like to go out with him that evening. I made a quick guess about him, I guessed he was a damn nice kid—only a kid, of course, but at that moment he seemed infinitely preferable to the grown-ups I knew. He had these light blue eyes, and a light laugh; there was something light and attractive in everything about him, something definitely unsinister. I’d had enough excitement for the week end. Jim was just what was needed; someone I could have a few drinks with, some food, laugh, talk, and end the evening without finding myself involved in some ghastly situation I couldn’t understand, much less deal with. I accepted his invitation.
We were driving along toward Saint-Germain. Jim asked me if I wanted to stop off and have a drink there. Would I rather have a drink there, was the way he put it. I saw what he was getting at, of course. The subtle distinction between the cafés of Saint-Germain at l’heure bleue, and his own preferred watering hole, the Select in Montparnasse, was not lost on me. Saint-Germain is only five minutes away from Montparnasse, and they are both everything that is meant by “bohemian” and “left-bank,” but they are not interchangeable. Ho-ho. Far from.
The floating Saint-Germainian—and by that I mean the type of expatriate we were likely to run into, not the rooted French Intellectual who is too protectively colored to be winkled out —was cleaner, shrewder, smarter, more fashionable, more succesful, more knowing; in brief more on the make, than his Montparnassian contemporary. As one of the advertising boys enthusiastically put it, six months in the quartier was worth it just for climbing; you could really get somewhere. There was more than a whiff of the Market Place hovering over the Boulevard, and some spectacularly successful examples of the same. Avant-garde magazines springing up in this area tended to be clever excuses for the smooth, level-headed young men who ran them (who were determined to make good in other walks of life later on) to hunt for literary lions as their contributors and social lions as their patrons. The Ancient, that grand old man of the Montparnasse set, was always careful to meet his agent or publisher up there, well away from “home,” for the business drink that would settle his financial problems in the coming year.
What Jim was trying to find out by his question was if I was that sort of person. I decided for the time being that I wasn’t. I said I’d much rather go to the Select if he didn’t mind. He smiled and we drove off in that direction.
What the Montparnassians actually were like—as opposed to what they weren’t as like as—is not too easy to describe. On the whole they were a disreputable bunch of revelers, working on the assumption that every day was their birthday or some such equally weak assumption, and their virtues were largely negative.
For purposes of oversimplification I’d say they were the Select around six o’clock in the evening. If I can only do it justice. Shall I close my eyes so that it comes rushing back to me in all its pungent beauty? Actually it is the smell of the place that comes rushing back first, seizing me by the nostrils: fresh, damp and rich, a most appetizing mixture of apples and smoke, perfume and garlic, hot chocolate and wet rubber, mixed in with a smell, as the Contessa might put it, full of humans of every description. The interior of the café, a room of goodish size, was designed to satisfy every possible café desire. The counter, with its long brass foot-rail for bar-drinkers, was always propped up, even at this time of evening, by an exceedingly pickled Englishman in the company of his exceedingly sober dog. Along the walls ran a banquette upholstered in very old red plush, ideal for eavesdropping, or reading the evening papers, while the tables, generally occupied by large rowdy groups such as the Hard Core, were placed in the center of the room, thus allowing breathing space for the other customers. At one point the room