The Dud Avocado (16 page)

He just laughed. “Yeah,” he said, “I never knew what hit me.…”

Gently he disentangled himself and helped me out of the taxi. He took me to a nearby café and fed me three cups of coffee. Then, with the same gentleness, he guided me through the afternoon’s rehearsal. Which means he
does
care for me after all, I thought happily, as I sprinted out of the theater that evening. At just that moment I noticed a great beast of a car in robin’s egg blue, ug—ug, squatting all over the entrance. I slowed down and looked inside. La Contessa, of course.

We were rehearsing in earnest. I suppose it’s an admission of something or other, but it was the first time in my life—my gosh, the last time too, come to think of it—that I had ever felt any esprit de corps. Just as the Hard Core was the first group I wouldn’t have minded joining if they’d been a club (which of course they weren’t, good night, that was the whole
point
of them), this cast and crew was the first I’d ever felt that we’re-all-in-this-together-Harry-England-and-St.-George sort of stuff about.

Actually I wasn’t seeing the Hard Core at this time. As a matter of fact Larry had forbidden me to, but he needn’t have bothered. I’d have avoided them anyway. To have got all tangled up with them at this point might have broken the spell, and I wanted to stay spellbound; I thought we band of brothers were absolutely the cat’s pajamas. I was jealous of our solidarity and looked upon the outside world with the same mixture of indifference
and contempt that is probably felt by the inmates of some well-run looney bin.

I soon realized that one of the most important things to find while working in theater was someone to giggle with. To find someone to giggle with I place just below finding someone to flirt with and just above the ability to knit. Those are the only three things to do while waiting to go on. Oh, crosswords of course, if you can bear them. Anything else breaks the spell.

In Blair Perrins I had found an ideal giggling partner, and when I look back with nostalgia it is largely because of him. To begin with his romantic (there is no other word for it) struggle for existence thrilled me to the bottom of my hitherto all too sheltered core. There’s plenty to be said for the theory that giving money to a beggar only encourages poverty; certainly without the small donations that I and others felt obliged to contribute from time to time, the epic battle of Blair versus No Visible Means of Support would have ended long ago. Blair would have had to pull himself together, go home, find a steady job, and we would have been deprived of a pleasure that I for one would have been more than sorry to be deprived of. And it was awful too, in a way, I suppose, that it took so little to keep him going— especially now that he was getting rehearsal pay, which for everyone else was cigarette money. He literally kept himself alive by his own burning sense of humor. He was a kind of monk without an Order.

“Blair,
where did
you sleep last night?” I asked him one day at lunch.

“The staircase of the Etats-Unis. Why?”

“There’s a very strange odor about you. Dank, musty. I don’t know——” I almost said “dirty.”

“I used to think that was the smell of Russia, but now I know it is the smell of poverty the world over,” guffawed Mrs. Wire good-naturedly. She was our rich Patron of the Arts, on whose money the company was largely operating.

I started to look shocked, but Blair just threw back his head and roared, at the same time helping himself generously to my bread (it was a very cheap restaurant and every item was separate), and sprinkling it liberally with his bottle of Lea and
Perrins Sauce. He always carried this bottle around with him. It was one of the familiar bulges in his suit. The trouser knees. were two others, and the elbows two more. The reason for the bottle was partly to prove his anglophilism (it was supplied to him free by some English friends who worked at the British Embassy), partly because the food he ate was of such inferior quality that it couldn’t help being improved by the sharp disguising taste of Worcester sauce, and partly, I am sure—in many ways he was the most childish of us all—because he shared a name in common with that distinguished label: the Original and
Genuine
Worcestershire Sauce manufactured at their factory in Worcester, England.

Blair and I spent most of the lunch time arguing. It generally began with Saroyan. Blair thought Saroyan was a marshmallow. I thought Saroyan was a writer who had written me a large and lovely part in the little one-act Prison Drama we were doing, and I also thought I was not going to be able to get on stage to do it with a straight face if Blair didn’t stop his parodies of the Saroyan Style. He always managed to goad me into a rage where I’d find myself hotly defending Saroyan as a stark realist and demanding to know just what the hell Blair knew about jail
anyway
, since he’d never even seen the inside of one as I had (by then I really believed that Jim and I had spent the night behind bars), and then I’d exclaim triumphantly, “Well I can tell you this play is just how people
do
behave in those circumstances— that’s life.” “That’s not life,” he would reply irritably, “that’s Saroyan.’’ And somehow this led us directly into our argument over the Method. You know, the Stanislavsky Method; working for realism through improvisations and sense memory, and emotional recall and all that sort of—oh well, never mind, a lot of technical stuff. I was devoted to it. Anyway, if there was anything Blair was more contemptuous of than Saroyan it was the Method. Noel Coward himself couldn’t have been more contemptuous. Nevertheless, along about this time, Blair began treating us to his homemade improvisations. The third play we were doing, the one by Shaw, had a butler in it—one of those announcing and handing-things-around butlers—and Blair was it. He would call upon us, those of us not in or connected with the
play, at the end of each rehearsal, to guess what the new improvisation was about. “What was I being today?” he would ask.

“I don’t know. Some sort of dope fiend I suppose.”

“Your friend Crazy Eyes asking people to dance with him.”

Once he was Groucho Marx breathing lecherously into the women’s bosoms. Once he played it blind, once lame and once drunk. The game caught on; it had tremendous popularity, and then one day he went too far. It was Katharine Cornell being goosed as she went around with the sandwiches, an improvisation full of tiny leaps into the air and gracious acknowledgments—really one of his best—but both the performance and the audience’s reaction finally ripped the scales off Larry’s eyes. He gave Blair a bawling out that lasted twenty minutes, then turned on us and ordered us out for the rest of the rehearsals. I crept back into the wings to watch the next one. This butler of Blair’s, rigid with impertinence, would have been fired on the spot. “What was
that
supposed to be?” I whispered to him when he came off. “That was me!” he snapped, and strode away.

At the lunch break once, one of the actors asked Larry for a couple of days off to do some filming. “What are they paying you?” he asked and when the actor told him he said: “Go back and ask for twice as much.” The actor stalled and Larry became furious. I’d never seen him in such a rage before—not even over Blair. “Are you crazy?” he barked at the actor. “They’re robbing you. Go back and ask for twice as much or I won’t release you. Never undersell yourself unless you want everyone else to. How many years did you go to acting school?” “Two.” “Well, that was your investment in your profession, now you’ve got to get your investment back.” “Yeah,” said the boy, “but acting’s something I
like
to do. I just can’t get over being paid for doing what I like.” “Get over it,” was Larry’s command, and that was the end of the conversation.

I couldn’t believe my ears. It was the first time I’d ever heard Larry mention money. Larry and money. I could write an essay on that. I remembered the conversation I’d had with Teddy that evening at the Ritz, when he asked me what Larry did for money and the thought had sprung so quickly into my mind: Larry needs money. I felt it again, I felt it, I always felt it and I
couldn’t say why. Certainly not from outward appearances, clothes and so on. But some days, for instance, he might say carelessly to the owner of the café at lunch time, “I’m not hungry now. I’ll just have a peach and peel it for me like a good girl, will you?” and in a second I would be wondering whether it was out of necessity or caprice.

When we all sat around moaning and groaning about how expensive Paris was—and we did, it was one of our favorite conversations—he simply switched off. You could actually see it boring him. And the few times that we dined alone together, at the end of our meal there was none of the usual leaping up from the chair as though shot through with an arrow, yelling Wow! or similar Indian war whoops, which most of my friends felt de rigueur in heralding the arrival of the bill. I was grateful to him for that, and yet it was impossible to say just why, but it was always a
relief
to find out that he had the money to cover it. Did it mean he was going without breakfast next morning, or what? And it was crazy to feel like this, because sometimes you could see he was just rolling in the stuff.

“Are you a gambler?” I asked him finally.

“There isn’t anything you do in life that isn’t a gamble, Gorce,” he replied.

“But do you gamble?” I insisted.

“In a way. In a way.” He looked at me oddly.

It just defeated me. I could guess and guess and guess about Larry and still not get anywhere. It all led down a blind alley.

At first I had him sliced like a pie into thirds: one-third High Living (Soldier of fortune, gambler, womanizer); one-third Low-living (preoccupation with “real” world, anti-phony, anti-tourist, anti-lounge lizard, pro-student, pro-worker, on elaborate terms of equality with waiters, etc.); and one-third Serious Artist (all the qualities of a good director plus a positive genius for making people do what he wanted them to). But later on, when he showed me with great reluctance and humility his fiercely penned poetry, I had to reslice him into fourths, and the last fourth—I hate to say it (I will though)—was Corn, pure Corn. Maybe it didn’t add up. Or maybe it didn’t add up to much, but to me the charm of his toughness, deviltry and elusiveness was fatal.

To take the first part of him, the womanizer, it seemed like the thing he had about money, to be all mixed up with his pride. The Contessa came around, and not only the Contessa, some pretty fancy women came by, and yet I couldn’t figure out what he specifically liked about them. Variety seemed to be the only rule. There was something impersonal in the way he treated them. I could see he didn’t love any of them, that he didn’t even particularly like them; he—I don’t know
what
he them’d.

And then, toward the end of rehearsals, I suddenly stopped being jealous. I could tell by certain things, the way I’d catch him looking at me, the way he’d stopped his maddening pretense that I was an abstract type going through abstract experiences, and make some personal remark to try to find out how important Teddy and Jim were in my life, that he was going to get around to
me
soon. The question was when.

I was wearing a dark red corduroy skirt and a blue-and-white-striped shirt one day. I remember that because he’d kept on looking at me until I asked him what was the matter. He laughed. “You look so—” he closed his eyes a moment and smiled slowly, “—so vital,” he said finally, and then “Sorry about that evening at Visconti’s. I shouldn’t have goofed off like that. Should have stayed on with you. Should have taken you home.”

“Yes, you should have.”

“Have I lost the chance?”

“I don’t know.”

“When will you?”

“Urn. Opening Night?”

“Right. Opening Night. Don’t forget, Gorce.”

“Oh, I won’t.”

Larry and Fame; I was now approaching the two things I wanted most in the world with breakneck speed. The only trouble was that toward the first, my inclination was to rush headlong, full-steam ahead, and from the other—the Ordeal—to hold back forever.

The theater was ice-cold, and as I slumped and quivered in my slip in the dressing room trying to keep my hands steady
enough to put my eye make-up on, I wondered how on earth I’d gotten there in the first place. It was all supposed to be a joke, wasn’t it? It was all supposed to stop long before it actually happened, wasn’t it? I wasn’t really supposed to get out there in front of a bunch of strangers and make a fool of myself, didn’t God know that? I took a deep breath and watched it come out in a frozen puff. That’s going to look great on stage, I thought, especially in the love scenes.

“Half an hour.” The distant clangor of the Assistant Stage-Manager’s voice coming along the upstairs corridors was entirely unnerving. Must she bellow like that? All my esprit de corps slipped quietly away. Every man for himself and swim while the shore’s still in sight. What use would I have been to them anyway? I couldn’t even remember my lines. I began shaking all over. I just made it to the John before becoming violently sick. The spasms were of such excruciating pain that I thought I was going to die then and there, leaning ignobly over the bowl. Everything had come up and yet I was still wracked with contractions. Entrails next, I told myself.

“Twenty minutes.” That voice again. O.K., I thought, this is it. And I waited. Perversely enough nothing happened. I lay on the floor for about five minutes. My cold sweat seemed to have encouraged my circulation, and I felt healthy and in a curious state that I could only describe as “optimistic.” I began to tingle rather than tremble, and some of my lines came back to me. “We are now entering the old manic phase,” I told myself, calmly enough, until I realized I’d said it out loud. Then I picked myself up off the floor.

When Larry came into my dressing room to wish me luck I was almost able to match his confidence, except that my words came out all funny. “And good luck too to you too!” I heard myself replying.

“Five minutes,” roared the Assistant Stage-Manager. What on earth could I have ever liked about that girl anyway, I wondered. Who hired her in the first place? She obviously didn’t know her job, going around scaring people to death like that. I’d speak to Larry about it later.