The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [47]
The impromptu jazz bands that found themselves there together at night ranged from professional to inadequate, and went on as long as there was a leg to stand on. Good or bad, they were always danced to by a pretty, abandoned, but not very accomplished young dancer who made up in pep what she lacked in poise. No matter what the music did, she did the same wild mono-dance. I say “mono” because it looked as if there was supposed to be some other people to it—a man, or a corps de ballet, or something. Also she couldn’t seem to decide whether she wanted to be a dancer or whore.
“Je vais partir pour l’Amérique,” she would confide to us earnestly, breathless from her recent exertions on the dance floor. “Une amie de Martha Graham m’a vue danser ici, et elle m’a dit que ce soit tout arrangé. Malheureusement, il me manque d’argent jusqu’à présent … et …” sloefully her eyes would wander off to rest on Zop-zop, undisputedly the big success with the girls in the quartier, and he would return the look coolly and enigmatically.
“I may be twenty years too late, but at least I know it, you twerps,” said Dave Beckenfield, who always got surly when he felt his beloved Stutz Bearcat under attack. Dave, a Fulbright, was also, as he never let us forget, an ex-newspaperman and a lot older and wiser than all of us. In fact, so strongly did he feel that it was his special mission to inform the Hard Core that whatever they were doing, they were doing it a couple of decades too late, that he never let them out of his sight. Everywhere they went, he went, spraying the area first with his disillusion: it was twenty years too late for Paris, twenty years too late for Spain.…
But for me, who this time last year, like those poor Smith and Sweet Briar fish, had to be “in” before midnight, but could now stay “out” forever, it didn’t feel twenty years too late at all. It felt great, just great: I wanted to shout for joy and crow with glee.
Much later on.…
“Now don’t give me a hard time.” It was Beard Boring. “Just answer me my question. Are you a Catholic, a real Catholic, or not? Because if you’re not, bud, if you’re just trying to get a rise out of me, so help me, I’ll poke you in the jaw.”
“What the hell’s the matter with you, I said I was, didn’t I?”
“O.K., O.K., so I’ll believe you. O.K. So just let me tell you a thing or two about that darling church of yours, and I speak from experience because——”
“Mais tais-toi done. Je veux écouter la musique. Ah, c’est pas drôle ça. Vas-y. Tu commences à m’emmerder un peu.” It was the mono-dancer quarreling with Crazy Eyes, who’d just turned up.
The boys in the corner, very d’après Hemingway, one of them even named Cohen, had just returned from Spain with Beckenfield, where they were almost tossed into jail for throwing cushions in the ring during a good bullfight. They were holding a small audience of friends spellbound with one of them the bull and the rest executing a series of passes around him.
“The mystique is pretty—well, fairly—well, comparatively—sophisticated, in that the good people—I say the good people but you know what I mean—aren’t sentimentalized—they come off just as badly as the bad people.” Doric Steegmeyer, Resident Bore of the Hôtel Etats-Unis, was holding forth on the latest gangster film. Around him, enthralled, sat his wife, his fellow intellectuals, Beard Bubbly and Blair Perrins (an actor in our company), and the Englishman-and-dog combination from the Select, who had wandered in starry-eyed from the night.
“It’s just that the mystique of brutality runs right through —well, it doesn’t run, but it’s there. It’s like that G.I. we knew who went AWOL in the war—” he turned slowly to the Englishman. “AWOL, A, W, O, L,” he repeated clearly for his benefit. “Do you have it? I mean of course you have it, but do you say AWOL. A, W, O, L—you don’t mind my asking?”
The Englishman nodded vigorously, managing to