The Dud Avocado (32 page)

“Gosh!” I was really overcome. I mean he’s one of the world’s top photographers.

“Fine,” said Stefan. “Now that it’s settled, let’s have a little drink first. What’ll it be?” But before I could open my mouth he said “No! Wait a minute. Let me mix you something. My own speciality.” I looked over at the impressive array of bottles at the bar and nodded eagerly.

He turned his back to us and for a while worked swiftly and expertly, mixing an elaborate cocktail. My mouth was watering. Finally he handed it to me with a flourish. “Taste it,” he said.

I tasted it. “It’s delicious.”

“Not too strong?”

“Perfect.”

“Good.” He turned back to the bar again and poured out two more glasses. I looked over at Max, puzzled. “There’s no liquor in it,” I whispered.

Max was delighted. “Of course not,” he said. “Once a Hungarian—Thank you, Stefan. Lovely drink.”

Dear Stefan. He was so proud of himself. He didn’t for a moment doubt he was getting away with it. What a wonderful evening it could have been if only it had happened a year before. B.P. Before Passport. Was I going to have to gauge everything that way for the rest of my life?

Max took hundreds and hundreds of pictures of me and afterward we went out to dinner. We went to the Scheherazade or Monseigneurs, one of those expensive violin places. Stefan was expansive. Everyone knew him there.

“Champagne,” he said. “First of all champagne.” When the champagne came he took a sip of it. He was just about to accept it when he happened to catch my eye. “No,” he said. “It’s flat. Send it back.”

The proprietor arrived. “What’s all this, Gogo?”

“We don’t like the champagne,” said Stefan grandly.

The proprietor tasted it. “Don’t be silly,” he said, slapping his old friend on the back. “It’s exquisite.”

“Ah well.” Stefan took it philosophically. “It’s not like his old place in Vienna.”

Max laughed. “Hungarians don’t like each other, they
understand
each other.”

“Don’t: be disrespectful,” said Stefan crossly.

We looked at the menu. “Hah! Avocados,” he said, brightening. “How I love them. Cheer up, my little avocado,” he said to me, pinching my hand. “You know, these American girls are just like avocados. What do you think, am I right, Max? Who ever even heard of an avocado sixty years ago? Yes, that’s what we’re growing nowadays.” His avocado arrived and he looked at it lovingly. “The Typical American Girl,” he said, addressing it. “A hard center with the tender meat all wrapped up in a shiny casing.” He began eating it. “How I love them,” he murmured greedily. “So green—so eternally green.” He winked at me.

“Stefan, please.…”

“No, it’s true. And I will tell you something really extraordinary, rnes enfants. Do you know that you can take the stones of these luscious fruits, put them in water—just plain water, mind
you—anywhere, any place in the world, and in three months up comes a sturdy little plant full of green leaves? That is their sturdy little souls bursting into bloom/’ he finished off, well satisfied with his analogy.

“Well, this one isn’t going to burst into bloom,” I said morosely, putting my nose in my drink. “What you’ve got here is a dead one.”

“A what? A dud one?”

I took my face out of the glass. “No, dead. Dead. Oh, forget it.”

Max raised his glass and smiled at me. “The dud avocado,” he said, proposing the toast.

It was a party and I desperately wanted to be happy and I couldn’t. So I drank and drank and drank and naturally I got very drunk. I behaved disgracefully. After the second course I tried balancing my glass on my little finger. Twice it fell off and I caught it just before it hit the carpet. Then my legs got pins and needles and fell asleep on me. I tried to stamp them back to life; a difficult and dangerous maneuver at best, under a table. Dessert had just arrived and in a magnificent tour de force I managed to overturn it on everything except my dress. Then my eyes went out of focus. The only way I could bring them back in again was by concentrating on my shoes, wiggling them about. Then my shoes fell off. I began singing quietly to myself “Plaster-board for housing, ta turn ta turn Ta” to the tune of Fascinating Rhythm. Finally I got up and went to the Ladies Room. I looked at myself in the mirror and went out onto the street. I tried walking. Max was beside me.

He sobered me up at the Royal Saint-Germain with aspirin and slow spoonfuls of onion soup.

“There’s a reason for all this,” I kept saying to him over and over again. But I’d forgotten it.

“You’re running away from some man, aren’t you?” Max asked me gently.

Yes, that was it, I thought fuzzily. I was running away from Larry and when he caught up with me he was going to beat me up and if I’d squealed he was going to kill me.

“I can’t tell you about it. I can’t tell you about.…”

“Never mind,” said Max. “I think I understand. I’d better take you back to your hotel so you can get some sleep.”

We got back to my hotel and the concierge said there was a message for me. I nearly fainted dead away. I had to read it three times before I could understand it. It was from Jim Breit. He’d heard I was back. Judy was in the hospital and wanted to see me. He’d pick me up at ten the next morning.

“You must think me the great neurotic of all time,” I said to Max, not really caring at this point. “But I can’t stay here tonight. You’ve got to find me another hotel.” Boy, when you’re really worried it’s first things first. You don’t let yourself get all bogged down with gentillesse and politesse and tout ça. One thing was clear, I wasn’t going to spend another night at that hotel waiting for Larry to catch up with me.

You apparently don’t need anything to get into a hotel in Paris except a passport. I was turned down five times. Eventually we found one so seedy it didn’t even have a reception desk. That suited me fine. The more hidden the better.

“I’ll be back in a month,” said Max. “I’ll send the photographs to be developed. Meanwhile, keep in touch with Stefan. I want to see you again. And—” he paused, embarrassed, “see here. I hope everything works out. But if you—if it’s a matter of money —if you should need any—tell Stefan and I’ll be glad to—that is, please don’t have any silly feelings about borrowing from me.”

My God, I thought dully as he left, he thinks I’m pregnant.

J
IM PICKED ME
up at my old hotel the next morning. I’d slept hardly at all that night and was reeling under the blow of a bad hangover. Jim looked exactly the same as he always did and this shocked and annoyed me. How could he be so callous after all I’d been through?

It wasn’t an easy meeting. I asked him how Judy was and he replied that I’d see for myself. We drove off in a strained silence. I made a few scattered remarks here and there that he didn’t even bother to answer, and then I opened my mouth a couple of times and just closed it again. Nothing seemed like a good idea. He was probably being tricky about that awful letter I’d written to him in Florence, I decided. Well, the hell with that. I had more important things to worry about. I’d just remembered that Uncle Roger would be writing me about my new passport down at the villa.

I made Jim stop at American Express while I sent off two telegrams—one to the post office nearest our villa, telling them to reroute all my mail to American Express Paris, and one to Uncle Roger giving him the same address. I felt a little safer, hiding under the anonymity of American Express.

They were waiting for us at the hospital. “It’s Miss Gorce, isn’t it?” they asked. “We’re expecting you.” Swiftly they led me into an elevator which stopped at Judy’s floor. I was already beginning to get uneasy. Flanked on either side by a doctor and a nurse, I was shown to Judy’s room. I felt myself walking faster and faster until I was almost running down the corridor.

Outside the door the doctor stopped me. “She’s very weak,” he said. “Keep her calm. Be careful not to tire her out but don’t frighten her either.”

I opened the door. Even before I could see Judy, who was blocked from my view by a screen, I was seized with a slimy terror. I had expected to find myself in a hospital room, bare, enameled, impersonal. I found myself instead in—I don’t know— a shrine—or a condemned cell. There were paintings on the walls. Jim’s paintings. Abstractions. There was a Mobile on the bureau. There was a bookcase and a chair that obviously didn’t belong to the hospital, and other details. But it was the Abstractions particularly, the unnatural juxtaposition of Abstractions on a hospital wall, that somehow stabbed me with the same sharp irrational fear I’d once felt coming suddenly across two swallows swooping around loose
inside
a house. I was shaking with fear as I approached the screen.

Judy stuffed something under her pillow and turned. Jim hadn’t changed but Judy had. Judy had changed almost beyond recognition. Her eyes were remote and withdrawn and gazed out from her wasted face at me, almost dreamily, without recognition. Finally she made an enormous effort and brought herself back. She leaned over and swallowed a pill. I felt the warm sunlight coming through the window. I forced myself to look steadily at the grotesque mortality of hair, eyebrows and teeth. I felt the earth turn.

“Judy darling, how are you?”

“I’m fine.”

“You look fine.”

“Oh, Sally Jay, what
fun!
They’ve found you. I was so afraid they wouldn’t. You went to St. Jean, didn’t you? How was it? I want to hear all about it.” Her eyes, so dead a moment ago, were blazing feverishly. “Who’d you go down with?”

I told her.

“Larry! You don’t mean Larry what’s-his-name, that wonderful boy you were so crazy about who directed you in those plays?”

“Yes.”

“How heavenly for you!”

“It was.”

“Tell me all about it. What did you do?”

“Oh.… Swam. Sunbathed. Went down to the beach. You know, what everybody else does.”

“But what did you
see?
Who did you
meet?
What
happened?
”

“Judy, let’s talk about you for a change. You’re the one that’s really had something happen to you. I mean—I mean—you’re married.”

Her eyes wandered to the Mobile on the bureau. She smiled peacefully. “Yes, isn’t it strange,” she said awesomely. “I got married. I never thought I would. I still can’t believe it. It all happened so quickly, and then getting sick again on top of it…” She broke off. “Please let’s talk about you.
Please
tell me all about it.”

I didn’t know what to do. Keep her calm, they’d said. I was only exciting her by withholding information. And all the time it was such agony being there, and looking at her, and trying to behave naturally.

I told her about El Wheero and she smiled and said, “Poor Sally Jay, and then what happened?” and I told her about our being movie extras and she laughed a little, but she wasn’t satisfied. I felt I was cheating. What did she want? A bedtime story? No, I was wrong. She wanted more than that. Judy was in danger and she knew it. She must have known it all her life, and that was why she was the way she was. My comings and goings were much more than bedtime stories to her. They were real. All the while she kept repeating “And then what happened?” what she really was saying was “Run for my life!”

Run for my life.

What made me think of that phrase? A loop in time took me back to my childhood. “Run for my life” … and then that nightmare again. It was all tied up somehow with that nightmare and that desk and that station … I had been given some task to perform. I mustn’t fail. I pulled myself together: Sally Jay, cartoon-strip animal, about to embark on another series of adventures.

“Of course I’ve been saving the best for the last,” I said.

“What is it? Oh,
what?
”

“The reason I’m back in Paris now.”

“Tell me!”

“Well. One day in the South of France I was introduced to the photographer Max Ramage.
You
know who I mean. And the next thing I knew he’d taken lots and lots of pictures of me, because he said I was the Typical American Girl. Well, of course I was flattered to death, but I forgot all about it until a week ago, when I got an urgent wire from him telling me to come to Paris. It seems the pictures had come out terribly well and he’d sent them around to
Paris-Match
and
Life Mazagine
and places like that, to see if they’d be interested in doing a spread about me on account of my being so typical and all that. And they said they certainly might be. So now it’s all in the process of being arranged. I’m meeting with the various people next week.”

“Oh no!”

“And then last night Max took me out to meet a terribly famous French film-producer.”

“Gosh, weren’t you scared?”

“Well, no. That’s the funny part. As a matter of fact I was terribly cool and poised. And he was so impressed, he’s going to commission someone to write a film script specially about me——”

“And maybe you can talk him into having Larry direct it.”

“Yes, that’s what I was hoping!”

“And then what happened?”

The nurse came in. “It’s time for your rest now,” she said gently, “you mustn’t tire yourself out.”

“Oh no, please. I’ve only just seen Sally Jay,
please
. Just another moment.” She turned to me, pleading. “And then what happened?” she repeated.

The nurse shot me a warning look. A much more warning look, that stopped me dead in my tracks and took my breath away.

Judy leaned forward and grabbed my arm. She clung to me, both hands digging into my flesh. “And then what did you do? And then what?” she insisted.

“But that’s all, Judy,” I said shakily. “We just went to a couple of night-clubs and then I went home.”

She was becoming hysterical. “And then what?” Her nails cut into my flesh. “And then what, what,
what?
”

The nurse stepped forward. “I’m afraid …” she began. Judy-moaned and flung herself against me, upsetting the bedclothes. I saw the handkerchief that she’d hidden under the pillow. It was covered with blood. I wanted to scream. She began coughing violently and I felt her relax her grip.