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don’t suppose there is anything on earth to compare with a French student café in the late morning. You couldn’t possibly reproduce the same numbers, noise, and intensity anywhere else without producing a riot as well.
“Basically,” he began, “the tourist can be divided into two categories. The Organized—the Disorganized. Under the Organized you find two distinct types: first, the Eager-Beaver-Culture-Vulture with the list ten yards long, who just manages to get it all crossed off before she collapses of aesthetic indigestion each night and has to be carried back to her hotel; and second, the cool suave Sophisticate who comes gliding over gracefully, calmly, and indifferently. But don’t be fooled by the indifference. This babe is determined to maintain her incorruptible standards of cleanliness and efficiency
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“Yes. The Disorganized. They get split into two groups as well. First of all the Sly One. The idea is to see Europe casually, you know, sort of vaguely, out of the corner of the eye.
The general ‘feel’ of the country is what she’s after. It’s even a struggle to get her to look at a map of the city she’s in so she’ll know where the hell she is, and actually it’s a useless one since this type is constitutionally incapable of reading a map and has no sense of direction to begin with.
“The funny thing,” he continued, “is, scratch the sly one and out comes the real fanatic, and what begins with ‘Gosh, I can never remember whether Romanesque was before or after Gothic’ leads to secret pamphlet readings and stained-glass studyings, and ends up in wild aesthetic discussions of the relative values of the two towers at Chartres. Then all restraint is thrown to the wind and anything really old enough is greeted with animal cries of anguish at its beauty. In the final stage small discriminating lists appear about her person—but they only contain, you
Blushingly I recalled a night not so long before when I had suddenly fallen in love with the Place de Furstenberg in the moonlight. I had actually—Oh Lord—I had actually kissed one of the stones at the fountain, I remembered, flung my shoes off, and executed a crazy drunken dance.
Just seems so from the violence of the reaction. Anyhow it’s her first time free and her first time across and, by golly, she goes native in a way the natives never had the stamina to go.
Some people think it’s those stand-up toilets they have here—you know, the ones with the iron footprints you’re supposed to straddle. After the shock of that kind of plumbing something snaps in the American girl and she’s off.
“the only male tourists are the ones loping around after their wives. A tourist is a she all right,”
I had a sinister premonition of how embarrassing an homme fatal could be when his charms are no longer fatal to you.
You know how it is. Some people can hack and hack away at you and nothing happens at all and then someone else just touches you lightly on the arm and you come . . . yes, I mean that’s what happened. I mean I came.
My eyes dug a hole in the table, unfortunately not large enough to crawl into.
In times of stress when I’m not coming out of things too well the simple life has a tremendous appeal for me.
“What a shame. It wasn’t real, I hope?” he asked with a sympathy he couldn’t feel.
“Try. There must be some reason for your ambulatory urges.”
I wonder what you will try to conquer? Europe, I suppose, since our family seems to be going backwards.”
A rowdy bunch on the whole, they were most of them so violently individualistic as to be practically interchangeable. For instance, there was a pair of identical blue-bereted brown beards, and although each of them had markedly different personalities—one boring and pompous, the other gay and positively skittish—Beard Boring and Beard Bubbly, in fact—I found myself avoiding them both, as I was never sure which was which.
Though still hot with the vanished sun, the dusk, with its suggestion of autumn and nights drawing in, sent shivers of excitement up and down my spine.
After twenty minutes of this soul-searching, or rather tail-chasing, and after reaching the same conclusion over and over, with the same lack of conviction, I left the window and began pacing around the room. When I felt
he wasn’t unaware of his power, he certainly wasn’t bored by it either.
I sat down rather shaken, all sorts of things rattling along the corridors of my mind.
Here beautiful women, their hair dyed gorgeous colors, squashed soft, pale furs into golden chairs, crunched diamonds around glasses of iced drink, jammed bright lipsticked cigarettes into their mouths, and exhaled a heady perfume, while high above them the crystal chandeliers sparkled and tinkled in accompaniment.
I felt my attention wandering off. It generally does at the phrase “mere child.” It generally wanders off to see if it can’t find some really lurid thought that would shock the pants off the other person, if he only knew.
“That is the answer I would expect of a midinette,” he began “or, as you would say—of a bobsy-soxer . . . .” There are few things as tenuous as a Latin’s grasp of the American Idiom.
It occurred to me that this was the second time that day that I’d been cautioned against
drifting. Three times and I’d get a parking ticket.
except of course me, but then as we know I am totally incomprehensible to everyone including myself.
That’s my answer to the question what is your strongest emotion, if you ever want to ask me: Curiosity, old bean. Curiosity every time.
The moment was duly noted and marked down as savagely thrilling to my twisted soul.
I mean how can Life be so contrary to—never mind Art—just to general information and what’s called Common Knowledge?
We arrived in full sail, Teddy fumbling with every latchkey in sight and me racing from minuterie to minuterie to keep the stairs in a blaze of 40-watt bulbs.
The main trouble with being an homme fatal, the really, really crux of the matter was one was so entirely dependent on every single prop.
It was a situation all too familiar to me, this business of setting off on the wrong foot and doggedly remaining there.
“For restoring my cynicism. I was too young to lose it.”
I may be carping but I don’t seem to be let off anything; if a bad time is to be had, I have it.
I reflected wearily that it was not easy to be a Woman in these stirring times. I said it then and I say it now: it just isn’t our century.
I assumed, in turn, my most haughtily aristocratic, my most toothily intellectual, and finally, my just plain most humble expressions.
I gobbled up my sandwich and hot chocolate as fast as I could; the hot chocolate burning my tongue, a revelation burning my soul. I had always assumed that a certain sense of identity would be strong enough within me to communicate itself to others. I now saw this assumption was false. Tout simplement, in a tarts’ bar, I looked like a tart.
So into the trap I marched, eyes shining, mouth open, ears flapping.
That’s the story of my life. Someone’s behavior strikes me as a bit odd and the next thing I know all hell breaks loose.
I wore for the occasion an evening dress limp with sophistication, and an expression to match—or so I hoped.
Where were we going to get our key-thinking elite from anyway? He thought they ought to be forming the core of our key-thinking elite. He thought they should be solving the vital postwar social and economic problems of the Civic Community, not leaving it in the hands of people without the benefit of the fine up-to-date basic training the American University was now offering its students in its contemporary curriculums. That was what he thought.
(John was always wanting to ask questions and introduce himself. He couldn’t even go to the men’s room of a Pennsylvania Railroad coach without asking a question and introducing himself. He was a real man from Mars, that boy, he even looked like one.)
What kept me frozen there in a despair composed equally of impotent rage and a strange reluctance to shatter some exquisite but invisible structure, neither the shape nor purpose of which was apparent to me? In a word, what the hell was going on?
So Hell was other people, was it?
The vehemence of my moral indignation surprised me. Was I beginning to have standards and principles, and, oh dear, scruples? What were they, and what would I do with them, and how much were they going to get in my way?
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.
