The Dud Avocado (13 page)

“Have you been listening to us all this time?”

He grinned and looked at it too. “It would have been difficult not to.”

“Well, what do
you
make of all this?”

“Not too much.” He was putting the finishing touches to his work. “You girls. You really know some birds, don’t you?” He chuckled mildly.

I was amazed. I wouldn’t have expected Judy to see the point of her story, but a man … I stared at him. He wasn’t a man, of course. He was just a child, really.

When we left the hospital, Jim asked me if I’d like to go out with him that evening. I made a quick guess about him, I guessed he was a damn nice kid—only a kid, of course, but at that moment he seemed infinitely preferable to the grown-ups I knew. He had these light blue eyes, and a light laugh; there was something light and attractive in everything about him, something definitely unsinister. I’d had enough excitement for the week end. Jim was just what was needed; someone I could have a few drinks with, some food, laugh, talk, and end the evening without finding myself involved in some ghastly situation I couldn’t understand, much less deal with. I accepted his invitation.

We were driving along toward Saint-Germain. Jim asked me if I wanted to stop off and have a drink there. Would I
rather
have a drink there, was the way he put it. I saw what he was getting at, of course. The subtle distinction between the cafés of Saint-Germain at l’heure bleue, and his own preferred watering hole, the Select in Montparnasse, was not lost on me. Saint-
Germain is only five minutes away from Montparnasse, and they are both everything that is meant by “bohemian” and “left-bank,” but they are not interchangeable. Ho-ho. Far from.

The floating Saint-Germainian—and by that I mean the type of expatriate we were likely to run into, not the rooted French Intellectual who is too protectively colored to be winkled out —was cleaner, shrewder, smarter, more fashionable, more succesful, more knowing; in brief more on the make, than his Montparnassian contemporary. As one of the advertising boys enthusiastically put it, six months in the quartier was worth it just for climbing; you could really get somewhere. There was more than a whiff of the Market Place hovering over the Boulevard, and some spectacularly successful examples of the same. Avant-garde magazines springing up in this area tended to be clever excuses for the smooth, level-headed young men who ran them (who were determined to make good in other walks of life later on) to hunt for literary lions as their contributors and social lions as their patrons. The Ancient, that grand old man of the Montparnasse set, was always careful to meet his agent or publisher up there, well away from “home,” for the business drink that would settle his financial problems in the coming year.

What Jim was trying to find out by his question was if I was
that
sort of person. I decided for the time being that I wasn’t. I said I’d much rather go to the Select if he didn’t mind. He smiled and we drove off in that direction.

What the Montparnassians actually
were
like—as opposed to what they weren’t
as like as—
is not too easy to describe. On the whole they were a disreputable bunch of revelers, working on the assumption that every day was their birthday or some such equally weak assumption, and their virtues were largely negative.

For purposes of oversimplification I’d say they were the Select around six o’clock in the evening. If I can only do it justice. Shall I close my eyes so that it comes rushing back to me in all its pungent beauty? Actually it is the smell of the place that comes rushing back first, seizing me by the nostrils: fresh, damp and rich, a most appetizing mixture of apples and smoke, perfume and garlic, hot chocolate and wet rubber, mixed in with a smell, as the Contessa might put it, full of humans of every description.
The interior of the café, a room of goodish size, was designed to satisfy every possible café desire. The counter, with its long brass foot-rail for bar-drinkers, was always propped up, even at this time of evening, by an exceedingly pickled Englishman in the company of his exceedingly sober dog. Along the walls ran a banquette upholstered in very old red plush, ideal for eavesdropping, or reading the evening papers, while the tables, generally occupied by large rowdy groups such as the Hard Core, were placed in the center of the room, thus allowing breathing space for the other customers. At one point the room took a sudden L turn, and the six or seven booths built into this partition isolated the serious lovers and chess players from the rest of us. A beautiful, twilight neon tubing shed its mellow glow on the dim, dirty mosaic-tiled floor and flickered over the rainbow-hued coiffures of the women, as many-colored as the coats they sat in, which were made of the skins of some raffish, exotic creatures, totally unknown outside the city limits. On the banquettes a lot of American spinsters sat together, talking clearly and precisely of their travels, or else read and smoked alone while having steel pots of un-American tea. It always made me sad to see that there were so many unmarried women in the world—sadder still to realize that they were largely unseen because there were so few public places they dared brave without a sense of strain.

Out on the terrasse chauffée, hordes of French—sometimes as many as eight or nine together—arranged themselves comfortably around small tables, talked a lot and drank a very little. The French more than anyone—the French
alone—
have mastered the fine art of sweating out a drink. I’ve seen them time and again in that café, hat, coat, gloves and scarves to the eyebrows, sitting in attitudes of imminent departure—and sitting there all night, the same stemmed glass before them. The Americans and Scandinavians (and there were quite a number of Scandinavians—this café seemed to run to Swedish mountaineers, Danish Princes, and Finnish remittance men) dressed for the Select as for a ski hut. Bradley Slater had been coming in every morning for two years in a checkered wool shirt, G.I. pants and ski boots, copies of
Time
Magazine and the
Herald Tribune
tucked under his
arm. Here he would sit quite happily until lunch time, immersed in his reading, getting through a fresh
Herald Tribune
each day because it was a daily, but conscientiously devoting the full seven days to each issue of
Time
as that after all was a weekly. After lunch he retired to his hotel to rest, rising refreshed from his afternoon nap to have a leisurely bath and shave, and showing up spruce and sparkling for his five-thirty reappearance at the Select, where he remained until closing time.

The waiters at the Select comported themselves with that slightly theatrical mixture of charm, complicity and contempt that one would expect from servants in Hell. All you had to do was sit there at the beginning of an evening, feeling pristine and crisp, combed and scented, and order your very first drink (it could be something as innocent as a lemonade), for them to indicate by the slightest flicker of their merry eyes that they were aware as you that you were taking the fatal step down the road to ruin. By merely clattering up the used cups and saucers onto their trays, flicking their napkins over the table, the better to clear the stage for disaster, and repeating your order precisely as given, they could predict for you the whole miracle that was going to take place four hours later when you—the now transformed, tousled, shiny, vague-eyed you—would emerge, talking the most utter balderdash, spilling beans of shattering truths or equally shattering lies, singing with friends, fighting with strangers, promising favors, promising love, scrambling into bed and clambering out again … all this they could predict for you as relentlessly as any Delphic Oracle, while at the same time it all struck them as so irresistibly funny they couldn’t help chuckling.

Whether you looked upon the Ancient as a crusty old poet-philosopher or simply as a dirty old man with a heart as big as a stone, you had to admit, by God, that he actually got along with these waiters. Maybe because it was true that they helped him with all the hard words in his translations of Virginia Woolf into French, or maybe because he was in league with the Devil as well, but the fact remained that he bullied them incessantly and they indulged his every whim.

When we came in that night he was already there at his table. A large formidable figure with his gray hair
en brosse
and his
left hand with its two missing fingers, souvenirs of some well-recalled brawl in Marseilles, clamped like a hook around his glass of beer, the Ancient always began a table. It was his one dignity. He would come into the Select and sit down, and the table would start growing around him with friends and acquaintances. Even though he knew all the people there already, he never joined a table. When he arrived they moved over to him and that was that. So it was always his table. There was quite a large group around him that evening; many of the Hard Core and, to get really technical—all the Inner Hard Core. This consisted of the owner of an advanced Art Gallery (always accompanied by an ever-new ever-green secretary), a lazy, devastatingly handsome Princeton boy who owned a Glider and said mostly nothing but “Zop, zop”; his buddy who’d found the glider for him, one of those charming, soft-voiced, gentle-mannered, international swindler types who could find you
anything;
Beard Boring and Beard Bubbly; and curiously enough, this youngster Jim. That was the inner circle. As I said before, there were lots of others who clustered around the Ancient, but somehow they weren’t held in the same esteem; they had nothing to do with the
ton
of the group; they were just so much dressing for him to lecture to, and cadge drinks from and insult.

As we came up to the table I discovered to my surprise and annoyance Bill Blauer, one of Cousin John’s roommates at Harvard, sitting there. John’s friends were like John. They had to be. I slank into a chair as far away from his as possible, trying to keep hidden behind one of the Beards, hoping Bill wouldn’t recognize me in my new hair. He did, of course, hailing me happily down the length of the table and informing me excitedly that he’d just run into Cousin John that morning, of all things.

“A Guggenheim to end all Guggenheims,” the Beard (Bubbly as it turned out) growled to me with a despairing slap of hand to brow.

I could see that Bill, who as a matter of fact was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, was making himself right at home in our little village, sitting there with this awful
expectant
air of a Rotarian in Wonderland playing over his handsome welcoming features, just the sort of expression, in fact, that you’d
expect
from a young man in Paris between terms and determined to live it up. It was really funny to see how his well-here-I-am-let’s-see-what-this-little-old-burg-and-its-natives-has-to-offer attitude was quickly caught by the natives and just as quickly resented.

He thought it was great, just great, bumping into me like that, and disregarding the fact that I had not walked in unaccompanied, invited me to go on the town with him.

“I have a date already,” I said.

“Oh, that’s all right, bring him along.” He made the invitation general. “We’ll all go along,” he said humorously.

We all ignored this, but the Ancient, after considering him for a moment or two, rose abruptly and announced that he was going to the Dôme. Obediently the waiters came running to his side. He paid and left, and following his example, we all trailed after him.

Bill Blauer, too, though I pretended not to notice.

“Sit down, you bastard, sit down!” shouted the Ancient. It was his greeting to a lanky sweat-shirted Abstractionist, who instantly complied. “See that Frog tart giving you the eye? I could tell you something about her, son, I’d decline the invitation if I were you; I’d duck. You have to watch out for these primitive types.” He grinned satanically, satisfied at the success this was having with the two Sweet Briar Exchange students who, until then, had been bravely trying to appear smooth, even though we all knew they had to be in by twelve. The more the Ancient had to drink, the fouler he got. That was the rule and this was only the beginning.

“Zop, zop.”

“Listen, Jim, about this new magazine we’re getting under way: first of all I want to make it quite clear, see, that we’re not having anything to do with all this effete chi-chi they’re trying to unload on us now.” A would-be Editor disdainfully brandished two small Paris-American magazines he’d just been sold. “I mean ours is going to be really experimental, in the true sense of the word, for Christ’s sake. These other bastards must be walking in their sleep or something. Look at this—” he flipped through the pages scornfully. “A reprint of an early Spender poem and a lousy Ugo Betti translation—Ugo Betti, for crying out loud. Listen,
you just go ahead and design us a couple of covers, we’ll pick the one we like the best, slap it on the first issue and you see if you don’t thank us till your dying day even if you don’t get a red sou for it. Boy, is it going to be a big prestige deal. We’ll work it up to a circulation of millions in New York alone. There hasn’t been a
decent
literary magazine since—what the hell was his name? You know, that husband of—what’s her name … ?”

“I’m going to start a Left Bank Magazine and call it
Anything Gauche’’’

“Very funny, ha-ha.”

“Zop, zop.”

“Listen you bums, this is no fly-by-night proposition. I tell you we’re all ready to roll. We’re getting the financing under control this very minute. Yeah, you heard me. And we didn’t have to go to any nympho Society bag for it either. Wanna know how we did it? Come on, guess how.”

“I don’t know.”

“Well guess, dammit. What does Paris need most?”

“I don’t know.”

This made the Editor furious. “Think, man, think. Here you are, you and a couple of hundred other hungry bastards like you, sitting around this bistro, knocking it back. So what happens? Maybe a little later you’ll try to scrounge up a few lousy potato chips or some such crap, but what would you really go for in a big way if they had it around, easy to get at. In machines? Come on, what?”