The Dud Avocado (28 page)

“I say, steady on,” murmured Plinn-Jones.

“Don’t desert me now,” commanded Angela, tugging at me hard. “I’ve absolutely exhausted my Spanish and I’m getting so cross I could scream. Why are they all being so piggy? Why are they making such a disgusting fuss over me with you right here under their noses with your lovely naturally blonde hair—” (it was greenish-orange that day) “—and petite figure——”

I, too, had come to the end of my tether. “Horses for courses,” I replied, and pulled away.

“Well, don’t bite my head off,” she sniffed. “I can’t do anything about it can I?”

I got into the Citroen, Larry and Bax following. Larry was driving.

“O.K., Keevil, suppose you tell me what the hell all that was about?”

He shrugged. “The Bullfighter liked you. They wanted some
one to help him with his English. You wanted a part. It follows.”

“Oh sure, everything follows,” I said bitterly. I was filled with disgust. I saw us for what we really were: beggars and toadies and false pretenders. “That may be your way of doing things, but it sure as hell isn’t mine. Don’t mix me up in your schemes. Look Larry,
just stop pimping for me
, will you!”

There was a shocked silence. I looked at his face. It had turned green under the yellow arc lights. That meant he was dead white.

“Easy, Gorce, easy,” he warned me quietly.

Bax put his hand on my shoulder and said miserably, “Apologize to him, Sally Jay. I’m sure he was only trying to help you.”

I felt bad but I wouldn’t back down. I’d had too terrible a time that night. “Don’t help me,” I said over and over again. “Just don’t anyone help me.” And I curled up into a corner to lick my wounds.

June 14
Friday

W
ELL, WE’RE MOVIE
extras now, Larry, Missy and I. That’s where all that sharp operating landed us.

Not Bax, of course. Bax is different. He’s the fair-haired boy, having passed his screen test (which consisted mostly of having him jump off the recaptured fishing vessel and swim around the ocean for a while—it’s an outdoor picture) with flying colors. They’ve given him the part of the best friend of the hero, who, in turn, is the best friend of the Bullfighter, which, you’d think, would make Bax a bit removed from the central action. But it doesn’t. He saves their lives on practically every other page of the script.

It is a period picture, after all. I’m not sure what period, though, and I still can’t figure out what a bullfighter is doing in it at all. I suppose he
is
a Period Bullfighter.

The reason Missy is an Extra is because she didn’t want to be left alone all day, and the reason Larry is, is because he still thinks he can pick up some pointers on how to make a film, and the reason
I
am is—God knows. Because this is really for the dogs, this is. We get 1,800 francs a day, rock bottom minimum, and have to be down on the Quai, ready in make-up and costumes, by seven o’clock every morning. And we can’t goof off; we’ve been signed on for three weeks. I’m afraid I shall be looking back on this whole episode as yet another example of what my total and abysmal ignorance always gets me into.

When we realized that all we were going to get were jobs as Extras, it seemed pointless to keep
the film secret from McCarthy, so the day before we started working, we took him along to the warehouse to meet the Casting Director. Wheero happened to be there at the time and their eyes happened to fall upon one another, and they went into a Recognition Scene—Mac and the Wheer—that was worthy of Euripides. Apparently they’d known each other back in Mac’s Spanish Period when he was running around posing for the Englishman’s book. And so, Angela’s nerves having proved unequal to the strain (“… unfortunately that sexy little villa to which he’s retired to prepare himself for his taxing little role is jammed tightly between Route Nationale Dix and the French Railway, making it quite the
noisiest
, not to say
shakiest
house I’ve ever been in. It was really the effect on one’s intestines as much as anything else …”), who do you think is teaching my darling Wheero zee Engleesh? None other than that picturesque and alluring old lunatic Hugo McCarthy. For this he gets twice as much money as we do and three times as much social prestige. We are the lowest of the low; the untouchables. Not that we see much of them any more.

El Wheero works in the afternoon in the Studio along with Bax and the other principals, and when they do come down to the waterfront they stay on the boat—except for Bax, who keeps diving in. We work mornings only, from seven till one, because the film is in technicolor and the sun registers differently on celluloid in the morning and in the afternoon. Or something.

The fact is, we don’t see much of
anything
any more, dammit.

That includes the cameras. They’re too far away.

We stagger blindly out of bed every morning, go down to one of the warehouses, and put on our moldy old costumes.

I seem to be some kind of tart, judging by my Hogarthian tatters. I needn’t have worried about my hair, either. It’s all hidden under a hideous cap. But the French girls working on the picture
kill
me. It’s never too early for them to begin flirting. From the minute they get into a chair to be made up by the make-up men, the eyes start flashing, the hips rolling, the lips inviting, and you suddenly realize that whereas before you always thought of a film set as peopled with people, it is, in fact, peopled with
men
.

As I say, we can’t see the cameras and I’m beginning to think the cameras can’t see us. Not us, personally. At least the American Director, a tough old monster, can’t. He picks up his megaphone and shouts at Stefan “O.K., get those bastards moving, will ya!” and Stefan, way down amongst us, all tricked out in his directing outfit, beret, red shirt and scarf, picks up his megaphone and calls out “Allez, allez, avancez mes enfants! Mais allez-y! Soyez gentils.…”

What we are doing is, we are in the market place, see? Among a lot of stalls, see? We are supposed to be buying—or selling— they haven’t told us which—and just generally fouleing around. The second morning we arrived starving to death and realized there was nothing actually edible on all those stalls. Not an orange. Just a lot of stinking fish and a gigantic octopus some real fishermen had caught the night before.

In the beginning, while I, eager beaver that I am, was practically buying and selling in the
water
in an effort to get near the fishing vessel (that’s where the cameras are) Missy was backing away from it as fast as possible. She eventually found herself on one of the balconies of a row of houses facing the waterfront. There she struck up an acquaintance with a very nice woman, a painter, who owns the house to which the balcony is attached
and who happened to be looking out the window at the time. She invited Missy in for croissants and coffee. When I heard about this I promptly lost my ambition, and now I join Missy in her coffee break. This lasts quite a long time each day (the woman likes to show us her work), so I shouldn’t be at all surprised if we’ve missed several shots altogether.

It all goes at such a snail’s pace. A maximum of two shots a morning, with a minmum of three takes to each. Poor Larry is exhausted. He is in the foreground, tying up the boat.

We are luckier than most, having our balcony hideout. All the other Extras, local French and mostly old men, have taken to wandering into the bistros that dot the waterfront as soon as they’re opened. By eleven o’clock yesterday the foule had thinned out so much, they had to comb all the bars and rout them out. Now there is talk of posting spies at strategic points.

Bax has started working in earnest. Not just in and out of the water, but around the Studio too. I promised to help him with his lines, but there’s no need to. He never has more than one, or at the most, three a day.

It’s a funny thing about Bax. At first I felt terrifically guilty about him. I mean it seemed that of all of us he’d got the rawest end of the deal. He’d been tricked into both taking the test and taking the part under the assumption that he might be helping us out. And now he’s stuck with it. But, as the days go by, the thing I’ve been noticing is that he doesn’t seem to mind at all. Of course I wouldn’t expect a Canadian ex-diving champ to mind any of that water stuff, but he enjoys the Studio part equally well. He’s become great pals with the French Still-Cameraman, who also has a Rolleiflex and gives him all sorts of pointers on how to use it. He was terribly impressed to hear that Cartier-Bresson had started his photographic career in films. He doesn’t even mind the eternal waiting around. “It’s not so bad,” he says, “kind of peaceful.” And it gives him a chance to study the lighting setup. He doesn’t much like gadding about all night and he doesn’t much mind getting up in the morning. In short he has the perfect temperament.

Larry minds terribly not being In Charge, and Missy obviously
minds terribly what it’s doing to their love life. She’s gone back to the old Plantation stance, and started that business of sulking around her room again with a bowl of fruit, and last night, for no reason at all, she went out with Mac. I am so punchy trying to arrange my life around the seven-to-one schedule, that I don’t know whether I’m coming or going. I find that it leaves me two possibilities for the rest of the day—either to go to sleep in the afternoon and then be raring to go all night and dead again in the morning, or to try staying awake, puttering around, in the afternoon, and get my second wind
anyway
by evening, so that I don’t get any sleep at all. I’ve lost practically all my sun-tan and my mind wanders so I hardly know what I’m thinking.… I can’t finish this, I’ve forgotten what I was about to say … something about Jim.…

Oh yes. I wonder if he’s got to Florence yet. I wrote to him but I haven’t heard.

June 21
Friday

Spent the first half of the week waving hello (or good-by) to the fishing vessel. They didn’t say which; they just said wave.

Missy and I still in and out of our friend’s balcony.

Spent the last half of the week in a Tavern sequence. They actually took the cameras off the boat and got us all inside one of the bistros and shot the scenes there. It was a rare sight. The French Extras were drunk every day.

June 25
Tuesday

We have taken to the hills without explanation. Mules and things. Something about stolen treasure. I may be wrong. Also they’ve issued us with new costumes. Spanish, I think.

Bax and I have been kissing each other occasionally and holding hands. He hasn’t forced the issue yet, but I suppose I’m leading him on. I feel I should draw the line soon. I’d like to, only I don’t know how. To tell the truth I’ve never drawn it.

June 27
Thursday. 3:00 A.M.

Have been crying steadily ever since two o’clock this afternoon when I came back and found Jim’s letter waiting for me.

I sat down and replied to it immediately, tears splashing all over the pages and my hands trembling. I sealed it and sent it without even rereading it. It’ll probably make me curl up and die in a couple of days but I can’t help that.

Here is a mystery: it’s a phony letter all right but there’s nothing phony about my grief. This
has
been the worst day of my life. So far.

Jim is getting married. He’s marrying Judy in one week’s time.

He wrote me all about it. They ran into each other his very first day in Florence and he knew at once that he’d loved her all the time. “… She doesn’t know about us—about you and me—and I didn’t think I ought to mention it.”
Mention
it! That killed me. I’m no more to him than that—a
mention
.

What the hell is the matter with me anyway? Why have I written that
monstrously
awful letter begging him not to go through with it, swearing black and blue I’ve never loved anyone but him, that I only came down here in the first place to test us?

I mean—
lies
. Nothing but lies.

And yet I
know
I wouldn’t get that letter out of the mailbox even if I could. Nor will I write him another canceling the first. My grief is too real, and my tears, and my pain. Someone quite independent of myself has taken control; I can only obey. It’s no good saying over and over again, “But you didn’t want him … you didn’t want him.…” It’s worse than no good. I mean it makes the whole thing worse, because now I
do
want him.

I can see him so clearly. Yesterday I might have said I’ve forgotten what he looks like; today I’m cursed with total recall His light-blue eyes filled with tenderness and his mouth curled into a quiet smile; how many times have I looked up from his pillow to find him gazing down at me in that certain way?

The hardest thing to accept is that I could have been so wrong about him, that I could have guessed so wrong. The whole
time I’ve been down here he’s been in the back of my mind as the one person in the world I could count on. I was the unfaithful one. Those two letters he wrote me—I keep reading and rereading them—they
are
sincere, I don’t care what’s happened, I
know
they are. Well then, how to explain his change of heart in so short a space? The Jim I knew was incapable of erratic behavior.

Have we all gone mad or something? On top of everything else, what I’m really afraid of is that he
may
reconsider. What on earth would I do then? I don’t really want to marry him. Do I?

And I like Judy so much. I like her better than any girl I’ve ever met. And I know they are right for each other. They are The Innocents. And me—I suppose I’m the Sophisticate. Anyway, that’s what Jim thinks. “A girl of your sophisticated tastes…” he used to say to me all the time. It’s so unfair. How I hate that word. It means shallow and superficial and God knows there’s no one in the world who’s more a slave to her passions than I am. Complicated, or rather what the French mean by “compliqué” would be closer. Les Compliqués: Los Complicados: that’s the only club I’ll ever belong to—though not by choice. I may not have been born into it, but I became a member at a very early age. A life-member.