The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [5]
And then, as unexpected as a hidden step, I felt myself actually stumble and fall. And there it was, I was in love with him! As simple as that.
He was the first real person I’d ever been in love with. I couldn’t get over it. What I was trying to figure out was why I had never been in love with him before. I mean I’d had plenty of chance to. I’d seen him almost daily that summer in Maine two years ago when we were both in a Summer Stock company. I had decided to be an actress at the time. Even though we were about the same age, he was already a full-fledged Equity member and I had been a mere apprentice. He was always rather nice to me in his insolent way, but there was also, I now remembered with a passing pang, an utterly ravishing girl, a model, the absolute epitome of glamour, called Lila. She used to come up at week ends to see him.
Then I heard from someone that he’d quit college the next winter and gone abroad to become a genius. I’d met him again when I first landed in Paris. He’d been very nice, bought me a drink, taken down my telephone number and never called me.
You’re a dead duck now, I told myself, as I relaxed back into my coma. You’re gone. I looked at him, smiling idly. I tried to imagine what was going on in his mind. I gave up and I thought of his tourists.
I had no trouble imagining the girl with all the Kleenex and Tampax or whatever. Cool, blonde and slender, she was only too easy to picture, but the thought of all that unruffled poise somehow had the opposite effect on my own—so I drove her away and began concentrating on the last one. What did he call her? The sly one. Here, happily, in my pleasantly drowsy state, I was able to dress up a little gray furry mouse with tail and whiskers in a black bombazine coat and bonnet. She was clutching a small discriminating list in her white-gloved claws and uttering animal squeals of anguish at the beauty of—what? The Crazy Horse Saloon? Oh dear, I really was too ignorant and too lazy to know what was on that list … something old … those Caves, I thought idly, the word conjuring up no picture whatever. Those Caves anyway, I persevered, in … southern France? No, Spain: someplace with an A. Ha! Altamira, that’s it. Yes, the Caves, I decided, framing the mouse in the doorway, or rather Caveway. Yes. They’re very old … very, very old.
“The last type,” said Larry, his voice suddenly snapping me out of my trance, his green eyes fixing me with a significant glare that made my heart lurch, “the last type is the Wild Cat. The I-am-a-Fugitive-from-the-Convent-of-the-Sacred-Heart. Not that it’s ever really the case. Just seems so from the violence of the reaction. Anyhow it’s her first time free and her first time across and, by golly, she goes native in a way the natives never had the stamina to go. Some people think it’s those stand-up toilets they have here—you know, the ones with the iron footprints you’re supposed to straddle. After the shock of that kind of plumbing something snaps in the American girl and she’s off. The desire to bathe somehow gets lost. The hell with all that, she figures. Then weird haircuts, weird hair-colors, weird clothes. Then comes drink and down, down, down. Dancing in the streets all night, braying at the moon, and waking up in a different bed each morning. Yep,” he polished off his St. Raphael with a judicious smack of his lips, “that’s the lot. Hmm,” a long studying glance, “now you, I’d say, you are going to be a combination of the last two types.”
“Why you utter bastard,” I gasped. “That’s a dirty lie,” I heard myself saying, the phrase dug up from heaven knows what depths of my childhood. Then in an effort to regain my dignity: “Really, of all the stupefying inaccurate accusations. It’s a pretty safe bet I bathe about sixty times as often as you.…” He burst out laughing. To accuse the American male of not bathing in Paris is merely to flatter him.
The Pernod was having quite a different