The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [77]
And if the French countryside failed to impress me, boy, my first glimpse of Paris failed even more easily. Succeeded, I mean. Succeeded in not impressing me. I found an American Express man at the Gare and asked him to give me the name of a hotel and he directed me to one called the Hôtel Lord Palmerston. Lord Palmerston! Real French. Real French comme ambiance aussi. It’s probably the only perfect replica of a Victorian mausoleum still standing in Paris. There were a couple of busts of Victoria and Albert in the lobby, and it was full of dusty red plush and ancient frock-coated hotel retainers whose ambition was, if not actually to displease you, at least to depress you. Chamber pots everywhere and brass beds that sank and rocked when you lay down on them and floors that sloped away sharply when you tried walking on them. Just what I needed after six days on a boat and one on a train: pitching beds and lurching floors. Deathly ill for first fifty-two hours. Finally had my life saved by un petit médecin du pays working wonders with magic vials of brown fluid.
So I recovered and lived to see the Champs Élysées.
And the rest is history. But the moral is I should have been prepared. I probably could have been prepared but for this terrible, tragic flaw in my character.
So here I am at it again. Poor old Gorce, c’est toujours la même histoire.
On the other hand, if I always knew what I was going to do, would I do it? Would I have left Paris and Jim like that to go goofing off in a broken-down Citroen in the company of two lovers and a stranger, Michelins in hand, all eyes to the front trying to guess at the next good cheap restaurant and the next good cheap room? And believe me, at sixty miles an hour, they’re plenty hard to guess at.
I suppose I was kind of disagreeable on the trip down. I complained steadily. At first I tried to stop myself and then I didn’t try to stop myself. And then I couldn’t. Of course I was encouraged by the others. Since it was only by my consenting to come along in the first place that we were there at all, they naturally felt I ought to be the honored guest. And by God, honored guest I was determined to be. The sweeter they got the more difficult I became. I took it out on Larry especially. Once, after we’d spent hours trying to disentangle ourselves from some large industrial town, entirely on account of his faulty map-reading, I let loose on him such a volley of abuse that he just kind of sat there with a stunned smile on his face, not knowing what hit him. I almost felt sorry for him.
About Bax. If there’s one thing that hasn’t been misrepresented about this trip, it’s Bax’s good looks. He does look exactly as described. He is a rugged, handsome Canadian. A great big broad-shouldered ruffly black-haired crinkly brown-eyed Canadian. Clean-cut. The great Outdoor Boy.
I think he just hasn’t got the imagination to look any different. He’s what they call a Natural Leader. You can see him as a kid becoming the Chief of his Camp Fire Group or some such because everybody thought he looked as if he should.
We treat each other like a couple of minor United Nations officials, Bax and I. Very protocol, very wary.
We ran into a snag our very first night out. It was early evening, and we were just coming up to some mournful little town, one of Nature’s Airports—Dax, or Digne, or something (we’d argued so much about the route I’ve forgotten which)—when we were stopped by the police. The next section of the main road was being closed down for retarring.
“Great,” I said to Larry, quick as a flash. “Just great. Christ.