The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [62]
And then—oh gosh—I know all this next part by heart—I should, I’ve been over it so many times. And then I came out of the john and told Larry I’d lost my passport and he said, “No you haven’t, here it is, I found it after you left” and he took it out of his jacket and slapped it against the palm of his hand a couple of times and asked me why on earth I carried it around with me. I said because I didn’t know where to put it down. Oh Lord, just saying these words even now makes me groan with boredom, when I think how many times they’ve bounced off dead walls and deaf ears. Anyway, I said I didn’t know where to put it down because I was always losing things, even in my hotel room, or they were losing me, rather. It’s a gradual thing— I kind of slowly miss them—it’s as if they’re weaning themselves away from me. I’ve never known a fountain pen longer than a month and I’m lucky if a lipstick stays with me for three weeks. So, as I said, that was why I carried this passport around with me. Larry said, “O.K., O.K., it’s none of my business,” took my bag, dropped the passport in, clicked it shut, and handed it back to me. And that, as I was later to say about a hundred thousand million times, was the very last I ever saw of that passport.
“Well, everybody, we’re going on.”
But everybody, it seemed, was going on with us.
I turned to Larry. “Only if it’s somewhere entirely different. And without the Dead-End Kings.”
It was different all right. It was a Lesbian joint. Again, my first. But—and I can imagine how this is going to sound—it seemed, by comparison, terribly innocent, almost wholesome. To begin with, there was a jolly all-woman orchestra and a lot of rather gorgeous, slim, long-legged mannequin-looking girls floating around with urchin haircuts, dressed in torero pants. In fact, some of them did actually look like the pictures I’d seen of bullfighters. And the whole atmosphere was so much lighter and less frantic than the other one that I decided—all chauvinism aside— that women simply do look more attractive trying to imitate men than the other way around. But probably it’s just that I’m more used to girls.
We had by now, thanks to Larry, lost the gangster princes. But we had gained Boofie. This meant I’d exchanged the chance of being pummeled to death for the chance of being bored to death by the steady beat, beat of flapping gums, remorselessly forging their way back through old laundry lists.
It was an evening of firsts. But dancing with girls wasn’t one of them. I’d spent four years in college doing that, so I’m afraid I didn’t get much depraved joy dancing with what I suppose is called a Professional Woman. She didn’t even dance very well-though no worse than some of the girls at school—but dear me suz, the heavy-handed raillery that went on and on and on amongst the Set about what a dangerous vamp I was getting to be. I mean they kept splitting themselves in half laughing at what they were saying, even though it was getting less and less amusing. They were stimulating themselves to death. Well, I thought, here they are—Café Society—and how do they keep from screaming?
“How do they keep from screaming?” I asked Larry.
“O.K. Let’s blow.”
But it wasn’t as easy as that. First there was a lively scene between him and the Contessa that I had to try not to overhear (I did catch a lulu though