The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [91]
She’s a handful, that babe. Bax just goggled at her. She really baffles him. He can’t figure out if she’s kidding or what. I thought I’d better come to his rescue. Besides, I don’t trust old Angela.
“Let’s dance,” I whispered to Bax. The bartender had put on some dreamy French records and I love dancing with Bax. He’s much taller than I am but it doesn’t seem to make any difference. He sort of folds himself around me and we dance so well together I don’t talk at all.
We went out on the terrace and looked down at the lights of towns far, far below, and he kissed me.
At first I couldn’t seem to keep my mind on it, but then I thought of what a picturesque and alluring spectacle we must be making, locked in each others’ arms high on a mountaintop in the moonlight, and how furious Angela would be if she could see us, and how I might be kissing a future famous movie star, and it just worked wonders. I’m a real celebrity-hound.
Just before the party broke up, Plinn-Jones gave us the name of the hotel that the Bullfighter was staying at and told us to be there by 6:30 the following Monday. “Till then,” he called out as the four of us climbed into the old Citroen for the long drive home. It passed in unbroken silence, each of us heavy with his own thoughts.
I’ll bet the only thing we were unanimously agreed upon was to stay out of their way till then.
TWO
May 28
Tuesday
MANUELO SANCHEZ, “EL WHEERO” (that may not be spelled right; it’s the first time I’ve tried) was waiting for us in the lobby of his vast hotel. The first thing that struck me about him, sitting there so gravely in the middle of his Quadrille, was the air of tragic solemnity surrounding him. The second thing was how he gleamed. He was the cleanest person I’ve ever seen. He had the cleanest ears and the cleanest hairline and his teeth matched his shirt in whiteness. His skin was burnished brown and his hair water-black.
We all shook hands, Bax, Larry and I, Wheero and his gang, and the next thing I knew I was in the chair beside him, an enormous Cadillac brochure across my knees from which I was supposed to choose the one I liked best. There must have been about five hundred cars. They all had names like horses. I finally chose Sand and Sable. El Wheero looked at it for a minute and then flipped over to the one he preferred. He asked me what I liked better about mine and I said “It’s bigger.” We laughed.
From that moment on everything changed. His tragedy vanished and my nervousness with it. He began laughing at me and I began laughing at him laughing at me and it went on like that until we reached the stage where practically everything is unbearably funny, especially if it isn’t.
“Me gustan mucho los Chestairs!” he announced, triumphantly producing a pack of American cigarettes and offering me one. We sobbed with glee. Then, as if that wasn’t funny enough he added, “Me gusta mucho whiskey.” That destroyed us.
It occurred to me vaguely that he was being quite unlike my preconceived idea of a bullfighter, but I couldn’t even remember what that was. I know I’d been worried about the language barrier. I hadn’t dreamed it would be so easy to get over. He had a vocabulary of about eighty English words and I had a Spanish vocabulary of none. But we got along like a house on fire.
Dinner was a riot. We threw pellets of bread across the table at each other and made airplanes out of the menus and sent them sailing around the dining room. Then we had a really great idea. We were going to put a pat of butter on the end of a knife and use the knife as a catapult to see if the butter would stick to the ceiling.