The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [46]
I retreated to my table as quickly as possible, but now that I’d started to think about Larry I couldn’t stop. I felt resless and unconcentrated. I was anxious to get going when the exodus started. Or—I don’t know—maybe I started it. We were a restless mob that night. We were looking for a mood. We went in four cars: Jim’s Renault, the pink popcorn van, the Ancient’s two-seater motorcycle, and a big open Stutz Bearcat that Zop-zop’s buddy had found for Dave Beckenfield. Four cars in search of a mood.
It was a beautiful night; warm and clear and quick. I seemed to get warmer and quicker as it went on; I seemed to be melting as I burned faster, like a candle.
First we went to the Coq Rouge for the Cabaret, and then we went to the Vieux Colombier for the Dixieland, but we didn’t stay very long at either.
Then we went up to Montmartre and hung around there for a while and ate some bright red frankfurters with sauerkraut, “les yanquis,” that were being sold on the sidewalks. I was starving and they tasted heavenly. I ate five.
Bill Blauer was still with us. I pretended not to notice.
Then we went back to Montparnasse. The spiral was starting. We went to the Canne à Sucre, and the O.K., and the Villa Villa, and that cloudy one next door, where we could almost see the nude show from where we stood at the bar, and that was where we started dancing. In spite of all my efforts to evade him, Bill Blaah had been inching closer toward me all evening. Now he asked me to dance. I had to say yes, but I was going out of my mind, I hated him so. I hated him for being so goddam insensitive—he must have known I didn’t want to be with him, I’d made no bones about it. I hated him for looking upon Paris as a picnic ground and us as a bunch of monkeys on a string. “Say, do you do this every night?” he asked me brightly as we whirled around. Maybe we did and maybe we didn’t, but I hated his idea that we planned it. These things just happen.
The next two things that happened, though, were entirely planned and entirely related. First, I accepted the invitation of that Mediterranean, the one who I’d mistaken earlier on for Larry, and who I’d been noticing as Blaah was dragging me around the floor—“Crazy Eyes” as we came to think of him—to dance, and second, we finally shook Blaah.
I organized it. I knew it would outrage and discourage him for good to see me going off with an apache type, so I made damn sure that Crazy Eyes asked me, and yet I hated him too. For opposite reasons.
I hated Blaah because he was trying to get into our world; and I hated Crazy Eyes because I didn’t want to get into his. I mean I was afraid of him. His jiving was out-of-this-world—but it stuck out a mile that he’d hit your head against a stone fireplace if he felt like it. I’m a real phony, one of those half-baked hot-house plants we’re growing nowadays, instead of the honest-to-God two-fisted women we should be, and, neurotic that I am, I shrink like mad from the criminal type. If anyone comes at me with a club, I duck, brother, I duck. And then I run. So I was a little nervous about having this cat think I was leading him on. The outdoors is fraught with danger.
Anyway, we danced a whole set, and at the end of it, to my great relief, he let me go. He gave me those crazy eyes again, but I decided they came with the face.
Then we went on to the Hôtel Etats-Unis, where we usually ended up. The Etats-Unis was run (to use too strong a word) by a group of Resistance Poles, and it was here that at least