The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [43]
Out on the terrasse chauffée, hordes of French—sometimes as many as eight or nine together—arranged themselves comfortably around small tables, talked a lot and drank a very little. The French more than anyone—the French alone—have mastered the fine art of sweating out a drink. I’ve seen them time and again in that café, hat, coat, gloves and scarves to the eyebrows, sitting in attitudes of imminent departure—and sitting there all night, the same stemmed glass before them. The Americans and Scandinavians (and there were quite a number of Scandinavians—this café seemed to run to Swedish mountaineers, Danish Princes, and Finnish remittance men) dressed for the Select as for a ski hut. Bradley Slater had been coming in every morning for two years in a checkered wool shirt, G.I. pants and ski boots, copies of Time Magazine and the Herald Tribune tucked under his arm. Here he would sit quite happily until lunch time, immersed in his reading, getting through a fresh Herald Tribune each day because it was a daily, but conscientiously devoting the full seven days to each issue of Time as that after all was a weekly. After lunch he retired to his hotel to rest, rising refreshed from his afternoon nap to have a leisurely bath and shave, and showing up spruce and sparkling for his five-thirty reappearance at the Select, where he remained until closing time.
The waiters at the Select comported themselves with that slightly theatrical mixture of charm, complicity and contempt that one would expect from servants in Hell. All you had to do was sit there at the beginning of an evening, feeling pristine and crisp, combed and scented, and order your very first drink (it could be something as innocent as a lemonade), for them to indicate by the slightest flicker of their merry eyes that they were aware as you that you were taking the fatal step down the road to ruin. By merely clattering up the used cups and saucers onto their trays, flicking their napkins over the table, the better to clear the stage for disaster, and repeating your order precisely as given, they could predict for you the whole miracle that was going to take place four hours later when you—the now transformed, tousled, shiny, vague-eyed you—would emerge, talking the most utter balderdash, spilling beans of shattering truths or equally shattering lies, singing with friends, fighting with strangers, promising favors, promising love, scrambling into bed and clambering out again … all this they could predict for you as relentlessly as any Delphic Oracle, while at the same time it all struck them as so irresistibly funny they couldn’t help chuckling.
Whether you looked upon the Ancient as a crusty old poet-philosopher or simply as a dirty old man with a heart as big as a stone, you had to admit, by God, that he actually got along with these waiters. Maybe because it was true that they helped him with all the hard words in his translations of Virginia Woolf into French, or maybe because he was in league with the Devil as well, but the fact remained that he bullied them incessantly and they indulged his every whim.
When we came in that night he was already there at his table. A large formidable figure with his gray hair en brosse and his left hand