The Dud Avocado (18 page)

“The Contessa likes to surround herself with ugliness,” I said, hoping to get a laugh, but the Yellow Prince agreed most solemnly, adding with a leer, “She has some—um—rah-ther
special
tastes.” He said it in English-English. It was not the last time I was to be led down the garden path and out through the back gate of the private lives of the Set; but it
was
the first time, and it came out of the mouths of babes, and I was really curious.

“Strange tastes like
what?
” I asked eagerly, but was rewarded only with a wise and totally un-American shrug.

“Come along, little ones, we’re all going on to Rollo’s new discovery,” caroled the Contessa, that merry madcap, coming upon us together in the kitchen and delighted at last that age had found its level.

Rollo’s new discovery turned out to be a queer club.

One of the things—one of the many, many,
many
things that fascinate me about myself—is how it is possible for me to know something without really knowing it at all. I mean I seemed to have known about queers all my life, I can’t remember when I didn’t, and I generally can guess who
is
. I mean, it’s no traumatic shock for me or anything like that to discover that so-and-so actually is one—and yet, I swear, I was flabbergasted when I saw that club. There was a style of flirting along the bar where some sailors stood waiting to be picked up, that no starlet could hope to emulate. And the droves and
droves
. I had no idea there were so many. I just had no idea.

By now I was beginning to form some generalizations about the International Set (not that I ever even found out if they were the Real Thing, I mean what standards would I have to judge them by anyway?). First of all, though very few seemed to be married at the time, they were all passionately involved with one another. This had a way of making conversation rather difficult. For instance, when one of them began talking to you it was impossible to predict which of the others was going to get sore. And the reason they got sore was that it was assumed that the one talking to you was also making a pass at you, and the reason
that
was assumed was that it was generally true. And the reason it was generally true, was that they had nothing else to talk to me about. Past parties—past and future parties, resorts in and out of season, their own lineages and those of their friends were their only real contributions to a conversation, except for the one that went “I was in America once …” and then petered out into a series of place names, so that by making a play for me I suppose they felt they were keeping their end up. Another thing about them was the way they kept inviting you places; they invited me to a different place on an average of one every five minutes, but I discovered there were two rules governing this: first, it had to be a place you’d never been to, like “What,
you’ve never seen the Blue Grotto? I must take you there on the yacht this summer”; and second, it was understood that each invitation canceled the previous one—I’ll leave you to guess what the very last one always was. It was also a great mistake to assume that in spite of all this boulevardier stuff they were really au fond homosexual—or rather I should say homosexual as we know it.

But to get back to the queer club. As Rollo led us through the long bar into the dark, highly scented night-club room, the atmosphere became electric with competition for him. He was King-Pin all right, though this fact seemed to irritate him rather than otherwise, and we were immediately shown to the choice table (on top of the piano and under the stage platform) in the crowded room.

“Faggotry here reaches almost pyrotechnical heights,” Larry whispered to me as a stream of young men ranging from ferociously grotesque to wistfully good-looking filed past to pay their respects to Rollo; some eager as young brides for us to admire their new home, some flirting so excitedly they even flirted with the women in our party by mistake. The ones I spoke to all confessed to being helplessly enraptured with the sailors at the bar, but with the desperate unreality of women admiring one another’s clothes that they wouldn’t be seen dead in.

There was a strong sea motif running through it all which surprised me at the time, though I don’t know why on earth it should. All the waiters wore striped fishermen’s jerseys, the men in uniform were mostly naval officers and sailors, and the decorations, such as they were, consisted mainly of life belts and coils of rope.

Buford Wellington, a young American, carried the sea motif further by having the face and the walk, or rather the waddle, of a seal, with fins for hands and the suggestion of web feet. He arrived at Rollo’s side flapping his flippers into Rollo’s face in a way that did nothing to improve the latter’s temper.

“Thank God you’ve come at last.
Such a
difficult time with that French crowd over there. I simply can’t make myself understood. Half of them think that I’m a snob——”

“How blind of them,” said Rollo.

“—and the other half that I’m an intellectual!”

“How deaf of them.”

Boofie Wellington, it seemed, was an old doormat that Rollo allowed in his presence from time to time because he did all the packing. It saved hiring a valet.

“Don’t sit down,” ordered Rollo as Boofie began to pull up a chair next to me. “I told you, you weren’t to come near me until you did something about those disgusting nails.”

I looked down at the soft white hands and noticed two or three enormously long fingernails on each of them.

Boofie sulked and sat down anyway. “I only grew them because you promised to take me to Greece. All the aristocracy in Greece wear their nails long, don’t they?” he asked the King of Lithuania, or whoever he was, who had fallen into a deep abstraction and didn’t answer.

“File them off by tomorrow or I’ll have you thrown out of the hotel,” said Rollo casually, in a tone that cut through Boofie like a knife through butter.

“Haven’t I seen you before?” pleaded Boofie to me, trying to recover. “I wonder who we have in common. Do you know Tanny Pop——”

“Nope.”

“I had an awful time in Venice last year,” he went on. “I was asked to leave. Some silly political scandal, bounced checks, and all that sort of thing. So I exiled myself in Ibiza. My dear, don’t. I stared at those goats for five months. I got goat-blindness. I had to be carried off to Tonjay to recover. And
then
we found so many Hollenzollens lying around the house we almost couldn’t get into it. I was combing them out of my hair all day. I knew it would happen. I told Paul it was a mistake letting them get in, in the first place. By the way, how old do you think I am? I’m thirty-two next month. I look younger, don’t I? I was Groton’s, St. Paul’s, Harvard’s and Oxford’s only remittance man in Ibiza. Do you know Peter Windsor? I met him on the street the other day and he
still
wants to know why he isn’t happy. All that money and still so unhappy. It’s that American thing you have about work, I told him. You want to make a great splash in some artistic pond and you haven’t the talent to do it, so you don’t work.
That’s
what’s making you unhappy. The puritanical commercial American success drive——”

I’d stopped fighting it by now and was rolling with the punch.

The cabaret had finally started. It was quite desperately bad. It was all so puzzling. It was as though they were deliberately setting out to debase themselves. I saw that Rollo, whose mood had been getting steadily worse, was now drunk as well. A man, more or less dressed as a woman, did a hula dance, the effect of which was impossible to describe. It couldn’t strictly be called “funny” because he was trying so tragically hard, and yet for the life of me, I couldn’t get away from the feeling that basically he was meaning to be funny after all—or horrifying—or, oh hell, I don’t know.

“It isn’t Tulip again—oh no!” groaned Rollo very loudly. “That damn Dutch queen is in every night club I go into——”

“I told you to stop calling him Tulip. His name’s Derek and you know it,” said his Australian friend, no longer suave but full of menace and very red in the face.

Rollo turned on him, speaking carefully with slow, cold contempt. “I’ll call him Tulip if I like. I think he is a tulip. I think he’s a whole
bunch
of tulips. Don’t try to get tough with me, Kangaroo. I’ll send you right back where you came from and don’t think I can’t do it.” He picked up one of the glasses and deliberately smashed it on the floor.

“Hey, Tulip,” he called out, “where’d you get that necklace? Avec ce bijou-là tu a l’air tout à fait lesbien.” Everyone laughed.

The hula dancer, Derek, motioned for the music to stop and came down-stage toward us. He was very frightened. “I am sorry you do not care for my dancing, Monsieur Rollo——”

“You’re damn right I don’t. Get off the stage. How dare you presume to be on it?” And he smashed another glass. The princes roared with laughter. They were enjoying themselves hugely.

“I wonder if we have anyone in common,” said Boofie trying me again. “Do you know Cecil——”

“I don’t know
any
Cecils.”

“She doesn’t know any Cecils,” he said wonderingly, and looked around the table for someone to share his pity.

“How many Cecils do
you
know?” he asked Larry, and with
out waiting for a reply started to play what was obviously one of his favorite games. “Let’s see, there’s Cecil Beaton, Cecil Day Lewis, Cecil Woodham-Smith.”

They were all listening to him, idly waiting, after the incident of the smashed glasses, for the next distraction.

“Cecil Rhodes,” said someone.

“Oh really—the dead ones don’t count.”

“David Cecil.”

“Groucho Cecil,” said Rollo, and made as if to stand up, but the next minute he crumpled abruptly, his head falling to the table, and passed out.

Everybody was enjoying themselves. Everyone but me and the King, who had turned quite black with melancholy.

A jazz trio started playing and one of the princes asked me to dance. Boy, Crazy Eyes had nothing on this kid! Put them in the ring together and I wouldn’t know who to place my money on. Served me right of course for even
thinking
these two baby gangsters might be queer.

I returned to the table black and blue, two buttons ripped off my blouse and mad as a wet hen. I confronted Larry. “Good-by,” I said. “Go to hell and take this whole bunch with you. Do you know what I think? I think they should be driven into the sea with
pitchforks
, like a horde of great crab things.” I gesticulated wildly, and my handbag swung out and hit something or somebody, and landed on the floor, butter-side down of course, and everything spilled out—lipstick, compact, passport, mirror. It was the Ritz all over again, except the gesture had popped the last button of my blouse as well. I stamped on the mirror in sheer temper. Then I sat down. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Everyone, I noticed, was very polite about my outburst,, which for them was merely the next item of distraction which they expected to have provided; Larry picked up my bag, put all my things back in it, handed it to me and told me to go to the Ladies Room and have the attendant sew the buttons back on my blouse, and that we’d go on as soon as I got out.

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?