The Dud Avocado (22 page)

Marion took a few tentative turns around the place, trying to say “Oh how lovely, where did you get this?” every once in a while, but as I never knew where (not having asked Jim), and as, in any case, there were so few things to admire—no dear little rugs freshly ripped off their looms at Antwerp, or new chafing dishes from Vallauris for future egg plants—the tour wasn’t much of a success.

We were suddenly all four of us together in the talking room with nothing to talk about. The presence of women so early in the Discussion Period seemed to constrain Ray, and this was odd, because he’d talked freely and for hours on end to me at various cafés. He began prowling around the room. He picked up a wire coathanger and some string and a couple of paintbrushes and a shoe, and started making them into a Mobile, and Jim joined in.

I went home early. I had to go out to the Studio Grandcourt the next morning to do some dubbing. I did quite a bit of dubbing for this studio and now that American companies were making more and more pictures in France, hiring French bit-players and then discovering they couldn’t understand their English, it was quite a lucrative setup. The people were pleasant. In fact I was something of a heroine to the boys in the control room. The Paris winter and all the shouting I’d done on stage had lowered my voice to a husky growl which went over big
with them, accustomed as they were to having their eardrums pierced by the shrill French ingénue whose voice, even under normal circumstances, is about an octave higher than an American’s.

When I got there that morning the first thing I saw was the familiar back of Someone standing by the mike running over his lines. As I came in he turned around. It was Larry. I tested myself for symptoms (actually, they’re the same for me in all my subjunctive states of doubt, fear, and strong emotion: dizziness and shortness of breath); they were still with us. He smiled. It was no insane demonstration of delight but it sufficed; the symptoms increased.

“Come over here, Gorce,” he said without moving. “Get a load of this script. We’ve got a big love scene together.”

At the vin blanc break around eleven o’clock he said to me, “There’s a great big Canadian around the Left Bank who’s nuts about you. No kidding. He saw you at the theater and he’s been following you around ever since. He’s dying to meet you. How about it? He says you smiled at him once.”

“I smiled at him?” I sighed wearily. “I must have been smiling in my sleep. I really don’t want to know anyone else, Larry. I’m mixed up enough as it is. What does he look like? I’ve never noticed him.”

“Tall. Rugged. Very handsome.”

“Oh.”

Our eyes met for a split second and set off a tiny spark. That’s what killed me about Larry. He could get inside you so quickly when he liked. We were going to be conspirators again, I felt. Conspirators? Again? Over what?

“Nope. Sorry. Not interested.” I was firm.

The next day, out at the Studio again, Larry said: “You were standing right next to him at the Etats-Unis last night.”

“Who?”

“Bax, Sawyer Baxter—the Canadian.”

“This is beginning to give me the creeps. Why didn’t he talk to me?”

“He’s shy. He won’t till he’s introduced.”

“Well, I’m too busy.”

I went over to Jim’s that night, determined to cook him a good meal and what’s more, enjoy doing it.

I made lamb chops and soup and peas and potatoes and a salad.

It was the same rat race as before, except that I remembered the bread this time.

Afterward we sat around in the studio. It was a hot night made stuffier by all the cooking. It didn’t seem so much of a farmhouse any more, without a log fire burning in the fireplace. I flung open the windows. Spring was ravishing around town, bursting and budding and blooming. It was one of those nights when the air is blood-temperature and it’s impossible to tell where you leave off and it begins. I was filled with that restlessness of vague desires. It was like the evening I stood at my window before going to the Ritz to break it off with Teddy. I wanted to go swimming. I wanted to go down to the beach and go swimming.

“Let’s go out,” I said to Jim. “Somewhere. Anywhere.”

“Do we have to? We went out last night, didn’t we? I’ve only just started to get this Mobile balanced.”

I sat down and tried to read, but I couldn’t. After ten pages I was in a state of cold fury. Read! I didn’t want to read, it was just a substitute for living. Time was running out. I’d been in Paris for almost a year now; I wanted to get moving. The disaster of my passport made me so angry I slammed the book shut. I’d give Washington one more month to come through with an answer, and then I’d get my father to tell Uncle Roger about it. Then I’d go.

Go where?

I looked at Jim, unaware of my treacherous thoughts, absorbed in the new Mobile which he was going to hang from the ceiling over his bed. His face showed his perfect contentment, Wasn’t
this
life as everybody else lived it? What more did I want? To anyone coming in from the outside and seeing us there like that, wouldn’t we have seemed perfectly O.K.? Absolutely apple-pie American? Unless, of course, they’d eaten the meal.

I put down the book. “I’m a little tired, Jim,” I said. “I think I’ll go on home.”

He looked up, hurt, and I could have bitten my tongue off. It
was the word “home” that did it. He wanted me to think of there, the studio, as being our home.

It was seven o’clock in the morning and I’d just been awakened by loud knocking at my hotel-room door. I was frightened out of my wits; I thought it was the French police checking up on the cartes d’identité.

It was Larry, happy and excited.

“Come to the Côte d’Argent!”

“Wha-at?”

“How would you like to go to the Basque coast around Biarritz with us next week for a couple of months? Expenses paid.”

“Us?”

“Me. And Bax and Missy. Just the four of us.” Missy—Melinda May Carter—was an outsize blonde Southern belle of voluptuous proportions from New Orleans. She was studying at the Sorbonne.

“No,” I said. “Go away.”

“What can you lose?”

I thought of Jim. “Everything,” I said.

Larry sat down heavily on a chair full of my underwear and put his head in his hands. “Please,” he said. “You’ve got to come. You’ll be spoiling three people’s good time if you don’t.”

“What’s it all about?”

“We’ve been up all night talking about it. There’s a house we can rent dirt cheap just outside Biarritz—St. Jean de Luz——”

“Not the same one that——” but I stopped. I’d suddenly thought of his old girl friend Lila, and also that I wasn’t supposed to have heard that conversation between them that night outside the Dôme.

“The same one that what?”

“Nothing.”

“No
what?
”

“Well, the Contessa——” I lied.

“That old bag. Christ no, that’s all over. Listen, Sally Jay, I think I’m in love. For the first time. I know it, in fact—I’ll just
die
if I can’t take Missy away with me.” I’d never seen him like that before. I mean it was heartbreaking in a way.

“Who’s stopping you?”

“You are. It’s Bax’s party. He’s got the car and he’s going to pay the rent and his heart is set on you. He won’t go without you.”

“Don’t
you
have any money?” There. I’d asked it.

“I invested it all in sending Dertu Dubecq’s Puppet Theater on an American tour. It flopped, of course. Couldn’t even get the theater critics over there interested enough to go and see him. They all sent their second string or those ballet birds. Peasants! What the hell. It was a gamble. Let’s get back to the house party. It’s the chance of a lifetime, isn’t it? You’ve
got
to come. Missy won’t go without you either. She doesn’t think it’s a good idea to be the only girl in the house. I see her point. She likes you
terrifically
, by the way. But anyway the whole point is that Bax has got his heart set on you. You just don’t know what you do to that boy.”

“Without even
meeting
me? Tiens, tiens. I’ve never had such a dazzling effect on anybody, even in my own mind.”

“Do you want to meet him now? I’ll call him up right away.” Larry made a dash for the phone.

I stopped him. “No,” I said. “No, I don’t want to meet him until we start down there. If I’m going to do this thing at all I’m going to do it right.”

I had no idea what I’d said until Larry had; Larry and I both suddenly realized it together. I don’t know which of us was more surprised.

One of the piquant factors in this interview was that it was taking place with me in my pajamas and Larry fully dressed. This was putting me at a decided disadvantage. In fact I felt quite shy. I didn’t want to slink down under the covers—it would be emphasizing the “in bed” part of the scene too much; on the other hand, every time I sat up, I was reminded that there were several buttons missing from my pajamas. My mind went searching desperately for my dressing gown, but when the possibilities narrowed themselves to the hook which held a raincoat and a sweater as well, or the chair on which Larry was sitting, and I
realized that one of the missing buttons was the one that held my pajama pants together, I gave up.

“Please get out and let me get dressed,” I said, wondering how I was going to back down now.

“You’re coming!” he shouted. “You’re coming! You’re coming. I knew you would, you darling!”

“No I’m not,” I said desperately. “No I
can’t
, Larry. What’ll I tell Jim? You’re ruining my life,” I wailed desperately.

“You’ll never regret this, Gorce,
please
. Just for a couple of weeks. If you don’t like it you can turn right around and come back. I’ll drive you to the station myself!”

“Oh all right,
all right
. Only get out now and let me get dressed.”

“You’ll come then? Promise? Word of honor?”

I took a deep breath. “Yes.”

“Gorce,” he said solemnly, standing over me, “I’ll do anything in the world for you. Anything. Just ask me.”

“Let me get dressed,” I mumbled.

“Meet you at the Dome in half an hour. I’ll have Missy there and we can start planning. You won’t regret this.”

It was only after he left and I started getting dressed that I realized with a thud of amazement that he’d seen me with a lot less on than a pair of pajamas. “I must be losing my
mind
” I said aloud in my surprise at the unexpected turn of events.

I began combing my hair. I made a wise and soulful little moue at myself in the mirror. “Oh Jim,” I murmured softly into it, “you poor, poor fool. It’s just your luck to get mixed up with a heartless bitch like me.” I leaned closer to the glass, clouding it with my breath, and made an imprint on it with my mouth. I stood back, letting my eyes fill with tears. Then I picked up my eyebrow pencil and penciled my eyebrows into dark wings.

Then I gave myself one last challenging look and ran downstairs out and over to the Dôme to meet Larry and my change of fate.

I told Jim about it one night while he was painting me. He went right on painting.

“I suppose I can’t stop you,” he said.

“No.”

“Why are you going?”

“I don’t know.” Why was I going? For curiosity? For adventureship or friendship? For the sun or for the moon? “It’s just the way I am. Flighty. It’s only for a couple of weeks, anyway,” I added, trying to soften the blow.

He didn’t stop painting.

“What
do
you want?” he asked me finally.

My sense of bewilderment increased. “Oh … how do I know?”

“Do you want to … marry me?”

“Oh, Jim, I just don’t
know
. What about you?”

He put down his brushes and looked me straight in the face. “Yes. I’d marry you. I’d marry you to keep you.” He said it very slowly.

“Oh, Jim, I’m sorry.”

Later on, in his arms, I said sadly, “Who will you paint after I’m gone?”

“I don’t think I’ll paint people any more,” he said calmly. He gazed up at the Mobile swinging slowly over our heads. “Human beings are so impure, aren’t they? Look at that Mobile. I’ve never painted anything that’s given me as much pleasure. Look at the lines. Pure and simple and clean and perfectly balanced.”

“Will you stay in Paris this summer?”

“I don’t know. My art teacher from college is going to be in Florence. I may join him.”

“I think Judy’ll be there sometime this summer with her brother. Say hello to her for me if you see them, will you?”

“I will.…”

“Well … I suppose I ought to start packing.…”

“Good-by, then.”

I suddenly felt myself in real pain. “I love you, Jim. I really do. Isn’t that funny?”

“They shoot rapids, don’t they?”

—C
YRIL
C
ONNOLLY

May —sorry 5, 1955
Sunday

D
OWN HERE A
week—no, wait a minute, not even a whole week, now that I look at the date. Only five days. Holy cow, things must take much shorter to happen (or not to happen) than I think.

Rain sans cesse. Time heavy on the hands and even worse on the tempers.

Que diable allais-je faire dans cette galère?

Larry passes the time writing corny poetry or painting even cornier pictures. Missy sulks in her room and eats fruit all day. Can’t get near it any more for the cherry stones and plum pips. She’s getting so languid, she’s just going to melt away in rivulets. The South has brought out the Southern in her. Bax chops wood, or starts to chop wood, or has just come from chopping wood. Never without an ax. So yesterday when it was my turn to do the shopping, I went to the local bookshop and bought this enormous Diary and that’s what
I’m
going to do to keep myself from going mad.

The trip down was hell. I mean
hell
. Can’t think about it without feeling double-crossed. Things went wrong from the very beginning; from the very first crack of dawn that we started out in, with the rain, and this leaky, tricky old second-hand Citroen breaking down regularly and everyone else quarreling about
which route to take and it slowly coming through to me that in the dazzle of Larry’s enthusiasm the whole setup had been
grossly
misrepresented. Of course I probably helped things along by getting Canada all mixed up with Texas—oil wells and all that —but still, it made me furious to realize that while it was perfectly true that old Canadian Bax
was
footing the bills, the bills were going to have to be mighty modest; the flow of dough was not going to be limitless, nor the spree luxurious. Hated myself for feeling that way but felt that way. Just couldn’t help it. Anyway I was getting car-sick.