Maybe because I had been out very late the night before and was not able to put up my usual resistance, but… — Elaine Dundy
Maybe because I had been out very late the night before and was not able to put up my usual resistance, but it seemed to me, sitting there with the sound of his voice dying in my ears, that I could fall in love with him.
And then, as unexpected as a hidden step, I felt myself actually stumble and fall. And there it was, I was in love with him! As simple as that.
He was the first real person I’d ever been in love with. I couldn’t get over it. What I was trying to figure out was why I had never been in love with him before. I mean I’d had plenty of chance to. I’d seen him almost daily that summer in Maine two years ago when we were both in a Summer Stock company. … He was always rather nice to me in his insolent way, but there was also, I now remembered with a passing pang, an utterly ravishing girl, a model, the absolute epitome of glamour, called Lila. She used to come up at week ends to see him.
Then I heard from someone that he’d quit college the next winter and gone abroad to become a genius. I’d met him again when I first landed in Paris. He’d been very nice, bought me a drink, taken down my telephone number and never called me.
You’re a dead duck now, I told myself, as I relaxed back into my coma. You’re gone. I looked at him, smiling idly. I tried to imagine what was going on in his mind.
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Slowly his eyes left my hair and traveled downwards. This time he really took in my outfit and then that Look that I’m always encountering; that special one composed in equal parts of amusement, astonishment and horror came over his face.
I am not a moron and I can generally guess what causes this look. The trouble is, it’s always something different.
I squirmed uncomfortably, feeling his eyes bearing down on my bare shoulders and breasts.
"What the hell are you doing in the middle of the morning with an evening dress on?” he asked me finally.
"Sorry about that,” I said quickly, "but it’s all I’ve got to wear. My laundry hasn’t come back yet.”
Ridiculous as the idea may have been for her bluestocking mother to send brother and sister over alone like this, the fact was that Judy was protected as much by her curiosity as by her innocence. And then there was this other thing about her, too. You know all that razzle-dazzle about people being born in Original Sin and all that rot? Well, maybe it’s rot and maybe it isn’t. I mean I wouldn’t slit my throat from ear to ear, just because I’d found out for sure that most people are. But she wasn’t. That was the thing. She simply wasn’t. I’m positive of that.
The sun shone on: the shade of the awning vanished in the hot, white, shadowless midday. In that blaze of heat I was loving Paris as never before.
And there sitting opposite me, stretching himself luxuriously in the sun, his eyes lazily examining his half-empty drink, was Larry, the one I loved the best … sensationally uninterested.
