"The Dud Avacado" [.]

[fiefoe]

Part two of the book takes diary form, which recalls "Gentleman Prefer Blondes".  To our heroine, the turning point was the loss of her passport. 'B.P. Before Passport. Was I going to have to gauge everything that way for the rest of my life?'

<Her romantic travails took an amazing turn in the last 30 pages of the book:>

• 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.
• I had a sinister premonition of how embarrassing an homme fatal could be when his charms are no longer fatal to you.
• A split second suspended itself into infinity in the air while my heart pounded furiously and I kept kissing and kissing his knuckles. And then /it/ was over.
• At first I had him sliced like a pie into thirds: one-third High Living (Solider of fortune, gambler, womanizer); one-thrid Low-living (preoccupation with "real" world, anti-phony, anti-tourist,.. on elaborate terms of equality with waiters, etc.); and one-third Serious Artist.
  
• Now that I felt I completely understood him, I completely despised him. .. 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.
• "I knew this: you don't have to sleep with anyone to get them to rent you a villa. You don't have to do anything. You just have to be. I've been around and I know who does and who doesn't."
• We kissed right through it. Coming to life in a movie house on West Fourth Street is an apotheosis I'd have to leave to one of those mad seventeenth-century mystics like Herbert of Vaughan to do justice to. It's the end.
  

    It was as if I'd never seen a man getting undressed before and come to think of it, I guess I hadn't. But Max undressed expertly. Methodically. And I'd never in my life seen anything as sensuous as the unhurried grace with which his knowing hands flew over his body, stripping it of its clothes. Fascinated, hardly daring to breathe, I watched him undo his tie in two clean sweeping movements - downwards to loosen it, sideways to slide it off.. the thought that of all the people there that night I would be the only one to find out what Max actually kept in his trouser pockets was unbearably thrilling.

From the afterword:
__ the most unsympathetic of all ailments: a bad back
__ Ernest Hemingway said to me. "I liked your book. I liked they way your characters all speak differently." And then added, "My characters all sounds the same because I never listen."
__ Cyril Connolly

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