The Dud Avocado (14 page)

“A couple of shrunken heads.”

“Popcorn, you fools, popcorn!” he bellowed triumphantly. “I’ll put it to you this way: just think how many cafés there are in this vast sewer we call Paris. Then think how many people there are drinking at this very moment, who want a little delicious sustenance to keep them going. Now just roll those numbers around in your mind awhile and you’ll get some idea of the business our popcorn machines are going to do. We grow the corn right here in France, pop it, install the machines and walk away with the profits. I tell you the whole thing’s just beautiful. And here’s the genius who figured the whole thing out.” He waved in the direction of the weedy Abstractionist, who came
to life at these words, acknowledged them with a modest smile of achievement, and began a scientific discourse on the planting of the crop.

“But how are you going to make France popcorn-conscious? The French won’t know whether to eat it or rub it in their hair.” This was me.

“All in good time. All in good time,” said the Editor soothingly. “We’ve already started our publicity campaign in a small way. Did you happen to notice the shocking-pink van outside? Well that’s ours. Ray” (that was the Abstractionist) “will paint the popcorn sign on tomorrow. And last week when the news of this venture slipped out prematurely—
naturally
we were powerless to prevent it—there immediately appeared in the correspondence columns of the
Herald Tribune
two letters, one for and one against. ‘This nefarious attempt of the Coca Cola Empire to extend its frontier by blasting further commercial inroads into French Cultural Tradition!’ The phrase is our learned colleague’s here,” (Beard Bubbly) “who incidentally wrote them both. Also, we were gratified to notice that the cause célèbre has already spilled over to the correspondence columns of
France-Soir
today, and who knows, if this keeps up a real letter may soon be written on the subject.”

I was beginning to get interested in all this. I mean it made a lot of sense to me. I adore popcorn, anyway. I was going to find out more about the magazine when all of a sudden, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Larry. Or thought I did. Just one of those things. I went all weak and woozy. I leaped from my chair and rushed off in his direction, a big, fat, stupid grin all over my face. It wasn’t Larry, of course, or anything like; it was one of those gruesome tricks the subconscious plays, but I was halfway across the room before I realized my mistake. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have given it another thought; ordinarily, it would rank with one of the very minor social blunders in my life, but in this case, as luck would have it, the person I mistook for Larry, sitting there in the midst of a bunch of Sinisters, turned out to be one of those drugstore-cowboy-motorcycle types, just past their first juvenile delinquency, only Mediterranean, and the look he gave me back made me want to kick him where it hurt.

I retreated to my table as quickly as possible, but now that I’d started to think about Larry I couldn’t stop. I felt resless and unconcentrated. I was anxious to get going when the exodus started. Or—I don’t know—maybe I started it. We were a restless mob that night. We were looking for a mood. We went in four cars: Jim’s Renault, the pink popcorn van, the Ancient’s two-seater motorcycle, and a big open Stutz Bearcat that Zop-zop’s buddy had found for Dave Beckenfield. Four cars in search of a mood.

It was a beautiful night; warm and clear and quick. I seemed to get warmer and quicker as it went on; I seemed to be melting as I burned faster, like a candle.

First we went to the Coq Rouge for the Cabaret, and then we went to the Vieux Colombier for the Dixieland, but we didn’t stay very long at either.

Then we went up to Montmartre and hung around there for a while and ate some bright red frankfurters with sauerkraut, “les yanquis,” that were being sold on the sidewalks. I was starving and they tasted heavenly. I ate five.

Bill Blauer was still with us. I pretended not to notice.

Then we went back to Montparnasse. The spiral was starting. We went to the Canne à Sucre, and the O.K., and the Villa Villa, and that cloudy one next door, where we could almost see the nude show from where we stood at the bar, and that was where we started dancing. In spite of all my efforts to evade him, Bill Blaah had been inching closer toward me all evening. Now he asked me to dance. I had to say yes, but I was going out of my mind, I hated him so. I hated him for being so goddam insensitive—he must have known I didn’t want to be with him, I’d made no bones about it. I hated him for looking upon Paris as a picnic ground and us as a bunch of monkeys on a string. “Say, do you do this
every
night?” he asked me brightly as we whirled around. Maybe we did and maybe we didn’t, but I hated his idea that we
planned
it. These things just happen.

The next two things that happened, though, were entirely planned and entirely related. First, I accepted the invitation of that Mediterranean, the one who I’d mistaken earlier on for Larry, and who I’d been noticing as Blaah was dragging me
around the floor—“Crazy Eyes” as we came to think of him—to dance, and second, we finally shook Blaah.

I organized it. I knew it would outrage and discourage him for good to see me going off with an apache type, so I made damn sure that Crazy Eyes asked me, and yet I hated
him
too. For opposite reasons.

I hated Blaah because he was trying to get into our world; and I hated Crazy Eyes because I didn’t want to get into his. I mean I was afraid of him. His jiving was out-of-this-world—but it stuck out a mile that he’d hit your head against a stone fireplace if he felt like it. I’m a real phony, one of those half-baked hot-house plants we’re growing nowadays, instead of the honest-to-God two-fisted women we should be, and, neurotic that I am, I shrink like mad from the criminal type. If anyone comes at me with a club, I duck, brother, I duck. And then I run. So I was a little nervous about having this cat think I was leading him on. The outdoors is fraught with danger.

Anyway, we danced a whole set, and at the end of it, to my great relief, he let me go. He gave me those crazy eyes again, but I decided they came with the face.

Then we went on to the Hôtel Etats-Unis, where we usually ended up. The Etats-Unis was run (to use too strong a word) by a group of Resistance Poles, and it was here that at least one American had torn up his passport in the heat of an evening to become a Citizen of the World. The atmosphere since then had remained full of anarchistic sparks. I loved it.

The impromptu jazz bands that found themselves there together at night ranged from professional to inadequate, and went on as long as there was a leg to stand on. Good or bad, they were always danced to by a pretty, abandoned, but not very accomplished young dancer who made up in pep what she lacked in poise. No matter what the music did, she did the same wild mono-dance. I say “mono” because it looked as if there was supposed to be some other people to it—a man, or a corps de ballet, or something. Also she couldn’t seem to decide whether she wanted to be a dancer or whore.

“Je vais partir pour l’Amérique,” she would confide to us earnestly, breathless from her recent exertions on the dance floor.
“Une amie de Martha Graham m’a vue danser ici, et elle m’a dit que ce soit tout arrangé. Malheureusement, il me manque d’argent jusqu’à présent … et …” sloefully her eyes would wander off to rest on Zop-zop, undisputedly the big success with the girls in the quartier, and he would return the look coolly and enigmatically.

“I may be twenty years too late, but at least I know it, you twerps,” said Dave Beckenfield, who always got surly when he felt his beloved Stutz Bearcat under attack. Dave, a Fulbright, was also, as he never let us forget, an ex-newspaperman and a lot older and wiser than all of us. In fact, so strongly did he feel that it was his special mission to inform the Hard Core that whatever they were doing, they were doing it a couple of decades too late, that he never let them out of his sight. Everywhere they went, he went, spraying the area first with his disillusion: it was twenty years too late for Paris, twenty years too late for Spain.…

But for me, who this time last year, like those poor Smith and Sweet Briar fish, had to be “in” before midnight, but could now stay “out” forever, it didn’t feel twenty years too late at all. It felt great, just great: I wanted to shout for joy and crow with glee.

Much later on.…

“Now don’t give me a hard time.” It was Beard Boring. “Just answer me my question. Are you a Catholic, a
real
Catholic, or not? Because if you’re not, bud, if you’re just trying to get a rise out of me, so help me, I’ll poke you in the jaw.”

“What the hell’s the matter with you, I said I
was
, didn’t I?”

“O.K., O.K., so I’ll believe you. O.K. So just let me tell you a thing or two about that darling church of yours, and I speak from experience because——”

“Mais tais-toi done. Je veux écouter la musique. Ah, c’est pas drôle ça. Vas-y. Tu commences à m’emmerder un peu.” It was the mono-dancer quarreling with Crazy Eyes, who’d just turned up.

The boys in the corner, very d’après Hemingway, one of them even named Cohen, had just returned from Spain with Beckenfield, where they were almost tossed into jail for throwing cushions in the ring during a
good
bullfight. They were holding
a small audience of friends spellbound with one of them the bull and the rest executing a series of passes around him.

“The mystique is pretty—well, fairly—well, comparatively—sophisticated, in that the good people—I say the
good
people but you know what I mean—aren’t sentimentalized—they come off just as badly as the bad people.” Doric Steegmeyer, Resident Bore of the Hôtel Etats-Unis, was holding forth on the latest gangster film. Around him, enthralled, sat his wife, his fellow intellectuals, Beard Bubbly and Blair Perrins (an actor in our company), and the Englishman-and-dog combination from the Select, who had wandered in starry-eyed from the night.

“It’s just that the mystique of brutality runs right through —well, it doesn’t run, but it’s there. It’s like that G.I. we knew who went AWOL in the war—” he turned slowly to the Englishman. “AWOL, A, W, O, L,” he repeated clearly for his benefit. “Do you have it? I mean of course you have it, but do you say AWOL. A, W, O, L—you don’t mind my asking?”

The Englishman nodded vigorously, managing to mingle total agreement with total astonishment, and though neither was exactly what was called for, they had to do, as he was obviously beyond speech. Doric’s wife said, “Yes, darling, he was AWOL,” quickly, to get him back on the track, but Doric, who had been hoping here for a chance to discuss the basic differences between American and British Army terminology, gazed around him, completely thrown.

“The film,” whispered his wife.

“Oh yeah, this film. Well, it’s like I say, it’s very—well, it’s
competent
, it’s professional, it doesn’t make any real comment, it’s—well, not
clever
so much as
adroit
. I don’t mean it’s unedifying, it’s just not uplifting. Not that there’s anything unattractive in not being uplifting, but, well, you know what I mean … it’s … um, it’s …
cursory
.”

At my side Beard Bubbly breathed fervently at the sheer beauty of it all. That was another thing about the Hard Core, though maybe not the nicest. They went all out for satire. They not only suffered fools, they suffered them gladly. And I mean they sought them out; they tracked them down. Only they had to be really big ones. They were as irresistibly drawn to the
real nuts, as the Saint-Germainians to the real operators. Bill Blauer, for instance, they had immediately rejected as being not far enough out, but my cousin John—now
he
would have truly thrilled them. I kind of saw what they meant in a way. Sometimes the only thing in the world that
doesn’t
bore me, is listening to bores. Sometimes.

Blair Perrins was the actor I liked best in our company. I mean I liked
him
, not his acting, which could be dreadful. When he had been told by enough people that he looked just like Alec Guinness, he went off to Europe to wait until he was old enough to play all of Mr. Guinness’ roles. The question was whether age or starvation would overtake him first. For three perilous years on the Left Bank he had eked out what to anyone else would have been a wretched and intolerably chancy existence: bits of dubbing, broadcasting, and filming were interspersed with long stretches of absolutely nothing. I have never known
anyone
with less money and less visible means of getting hold of it. He had slept around everywhere, from the floors of friends’ studios, to the Metro. There were days when he had literally no money at all, and after a string of such days he would go to the blood bank and sell his blood. More often than not he spent this money on tickets to the ballet. He was into all of us for at least a thousand francs apiece. To me he seemed like some Special Mordant. A bitter, blithe and unconsciously pathetic version of a jeune Cocteau from Greenwich Village. The thing about him, though, was that he thought he was in theater for Art, whereas he was really in it for laughs. He was especially good at snuffing out the Big Bores, whom he tracked down like a pig after truffles. Doric, in fact, was one of his discoveries. Now, however, he was tiring of Doric. He went over to the next table, bummed a cigarette off Big Ben Nelson, and I could hear him starting on his vituperative account of a certain road production of
A Streetcar Named Desire
, his last job in the States. Big Ben listened kindly to the intemperate judgments passed on these unknown, defenseless actors, sucking on a cube of sugar, his big paw curled around his lait chaud. Big Ben could afford to be benign; only three weeks ago he had solved his own acute economic problem neatly by sleeping with his landlady on Saturday nights.

“Advance passionately toward me,” I said to Jim suddenly.

“What?”

“Engage me in violent conversation.”

“What’ll I say?”

“Don’t you dance?”

“No. Why?”

“I think Crazy Eyes is about to come this way. I noticed he’s just had an enormous bagarre with the dancing girl and he’s zigging his eyes in my direction.”