NEW INNOCENTS ABROAD
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gressive young businessman in his early thirties, who had been so
successful in establishing a firm of his own that he was now able to
take several months off for the grand tour of Europe. Being in a
hurry to an appointment, he asked me to come along for a drink
and to meet his "traveling companion," who turned out, to my as–
tonishment, to be a woman almost twice his age. Frances, twice mar–
ried and twice divorced, had preserved at sixty all her chic, elegance,
and tremendous appetite for men. The arrangement they had worked
out suited them perfectly: she always had an escort for the low dive
where Louis could pick up his sailor and she hers. As mother and
infant son, they insisted on sharing a double room in their travels,
charming each other by the rustle and perfume of a male-female
atmosphere, which never descended however to the raw contact with
the heterosexual flesh that he could not abide, for they drew a line
at the double bed.
In
all this Louis was not in the least a bohemian
type, simply a young businessman making the grand tour in his own
grand manner. Later in the summer I heard about their stopping at a
small town in Italy, where they found that the only room available in
the hotel contained a double bed: for an hour Louis argued with the
proprietor until the latter finally dug up a cot from somewhere and
put it in the room. Since then I have lost track of them; for all I
know they may still be on their travels together, and perhaps they
have now overcome even this last barrier, and at this moment may
be sharing blissfully, but chastely, a double bed somewhere on the
Continent.
On the swank Avenue Bosquet, not far from the Eiffel Tower,
Dick and Arthur shared a very luxurious but strangely virginal
apartment. Dick was a middle-aged lawyer, a beaten-down but
very kindly little man, who had established an office in Paris be–
cause he preferred to be away from America. Arthur, his guest
for the summer, was a graduate student in French literature at one
of our big universities, a young bookish monster from whom I came
away feeling that I had not encountered a human being but a kind
of animated edition of a literary review given over entirely to the
new criticism. Arthur had fluffy tow-colored hair (that always looked
freshly washed), a perpetual gesture of two fingers smoothing a
curl at his forehead, .and a skin that naturally looked as if it wore
powder; moreover, he talked incessantly and with a rich lisp.
