The Dud Avocado (33 page)

I held her in my arms. “Judy darling, please. That’s all that’s happened. Honestly I’ll tell you more about it next time.”

“Oh,” she said. “Oh,” with that heartbreaking dying fall, and she sank listlessly back into the pillow. No one was ever going to tell her enough.

I was sitting in the car with Jim. I’d stopped crying. “I’ve only made her worse, haven’t I?” I said.

“I don’t think so. In any case we couldn’t have stopped her. She was determined to see you.”

“Why didn’t you tell me she was so sick before I got there? It’s not fair.”

“I’m sorry. They told me not to upset you before you came. They were afraid it might have a bad effect on her if you knew.”

“But I don’t know. What is it? How bad is she? You’ve got to tell me.”

“It’s a bronchial condition. She had a slight case of T.B. when she was fourteen and they made the mistake of collapsing her lung when it wasn’t that bad, and it festered. It’s been spreading poison through her system ever since. Then, too, she’s taken so much aureomycin and penicillin in the past, they’re afraid she’s beginning to get drug-resistant. They’re operating at the end of the week to remove her lung.”

“Is she in much pain?”

He paused. There was a little muscle running along the side of his jaw and I noticed it twitching. It was the only indication of the strain he was under. “She’s very brave,” he said. “The only thing that frightens her … the only time she breaks down … is when she dreams of drowning. She’s afraid of drowning in her own blood.”

“Drowning in her own blood?”

“If her good lung should suddenly fill with blood she’d choke to death.” His muscle twitched spasmodically.

“Jim, she’ll be all right after the operation. I know she will.”

“She’ll be an invalid for life.”

We drove along the Seine.

“You knew about her before you got married?” I asked him after a while.

“I’ve always known about her. Haven’t you?”

“I suppose so, in a way. I guess I just never bothered to find out. I’m glad she has you. I know everything’s going to be all right.”

“I love her. It won’t make any difference.”

“And I’m glad you never answered my letter.”

“What letter?”

“The one I wrote to you in Florence.”

“I never received any letters from you in Florence. Why?”

I looked at him. He wasn’t lying. Did I actually mail it? Did I stamp it? Did I address it properly? In the confused state of my emotions at the time a million things might have happened.

“Never mind, it wasn’t important. All the same, I’m glad you never got it.” He put me down in Montparnasse and I scribbled down my new address. “Will you leave a message at this hotel when I can see her again?”

“I’ll get in touch with you after the operation.”

“Good luck,” I said, and walked quickly away.

I
WALKED AROUND PARIS
for four days, trying to decide whether to give myself up at the American Embassy or just lie back and wait for Larry to get me. For there wasn’t a shadow of a doubt in my mind that he was in Paris by now, tracking me
down. That was logic. I’d insured that by my smart-aleck phone call to him at the railway station. The thing to decide was what scared me most—the American Embassy and what would happen when Larry counter-charged me with selling him the passport, or Larry himself and what would happen when he caught up with me. I walked and walked until my shoes gave out, and then I bought a pair of moccasins and went on walking. I stayed as far away from Montparnasse as possible, avoiding everyone I knew and eating in restaurants I didn’t know. I sat in strange cafés. I went into practically every cinema I passed. I slept—or tried to—at my new hotel. The routine became fixed: Toss all night. Wait for the cinemas to open. Go in. Sleep in cinema. Lunch. Walk. Talk to myself. American Express (no word from Uncle Roger—obviously something was very wrong at that end). Another cinema. Back to the hotel. Go mad.

Every night great stinging welts would rise and burn all over my body, causing me to squirm and wriggle in an agony of itching. My nerves, I thought desperately, they can’t take it much longer. I’m cracking. Then in my mind I would start off on the dreary trek to the Embassy. Fear and revenge would get me one third of the way. Moral principles another third. And then I’d get stuck. Either I’d imagine myself sent to jail as an accessory to the crime or I’d be shot for treason. Sometimes I would allow myself to believe I might be pardoned, and then the thought of
actually
betraying someone I
actually
knew would start me sliding back again. And all the time my skin was getting rawer and rawer from my scratching and my reasoning fuzzier and fuzzier from lack of sleep.

It’s not real, I’d say over and over again. It
can’t
be real. Judy lying in the hospital, probably dying. Larry pimping and thieving and beating up girls. Me in jail. How did it happen? We’re all nice people.

And then the evening of the fourth day I knew—just like that —I knew quite calmly and without any fuss that I was going to the Embassy the next day. I was tired of waiting, that was all. I was bored. I made up my mind as I walked into the cinema. The film had already started. It was a good film and I gave it my undivided attention. When it was over I walked out and
looked up at the marquee.
Le Jour Se Lève
was the title. “Amen to that,” I said. “And now for a good night’s sleep.”

To my surprise the itching started up almost as soon as I got into bed, and more fiercely than ever before. Only this time, instead of tossing and turning and grinding and winding, I sat up quickly and turned on the lights. Bed bugs. The little bastards, slap-happy from their all-night blood feasts, were at last too bloated to crawl back into the mattress fast enough.

I slept on the floor for the rest of the night. I slept until noon. Then I went into a great big comfortable restaurant and ordered an enormous lunch. My Last Meal. There was a worm crawling lazily around my salad.

God, how I hated Paris! Paris was one big flea bag. Everything in Paris moved if you looked at it long enough. There were tiny bugs working their way into the baskets of ferns on the wall and a million flies buzzing around my table. In fact, all those shrewd, flashing glances, upon which the Parisian’s reputation as a wit is almost entirely based, are motivated by nothing more than his weary, steady need to keep on the bug-hunt.

I lit a Gauloise to calm myself, and suddenly out of the corner of my eye saw an ant inching toward me on the table. Down went my thumb and brutally I ground it into the tablecloth. Then, slowly lifting my finger, I saw that I had crushed the life out of a piece of cigarette tobacco.

I left the restaurant without finishing my coffee and went straight to the Embassy.

As I started to go through the gates I was stopped by a sentry. “Hey! Hey, Sally Jay, when’d you get back?”

I looked dumbly at the soldier who’d spoken to me. I peered under his helmet. “My God! Hugo McCarthy. Mac! I didn’t even recognize you without the mustache. What in the world are you doing in that get-up? What’s the gag?”

“No gag at all,” he told me proudly. “I’m in training. I’m landing a big P.R.O. job at SHAPE in a couple of months. Assigned to guard-duty till then.”

“You’re
kidding.
”

“I should hope not. Never more serious in my life. Say, Sally Jay, I’m glad I ran into you. Missy and I—hah—Missy and I are
getting married soon. You’ll have to come to the party. We found a peach of an apartment right near here. Just around the corner. The rue Boissy d’Anglas—d’you know it? It’s not very big—just a room and a kitchen, but it’s wonderfully furnished-cocktail bar and all that. Very snappy. Some big-shot Italian diplomat had it before, so you can imagine. Anyway, it’ll suit us fine for a start.”

“You and Missy!”

“Yeah. You know your pal Keevil gave her a pretty rough time, that bastard, but she’s O.K. now. How is the old snake, by the way?”

“Oh fine, fine. I mean I guess. I haven’t seen—but listen,
hoiv
did this all
happen?
I mean.…”

“Oh—oh,” he said, suddenly stiffening to attention. “Brass hats. Run along, little girl. See your later.”

So I ran along. And force of habit found me outside American Express. So I went in.

There was a letter from Uncle Roger. I held it in my hand awhile, breaking into one of the cold sweats that had formed such an integral part of my temperature in recent days, and then I tore it open and read it:

Dear Sally Jay,

That one generation cannot ever (
ever
) understand any other in spite of common ancestry and language and what have you is axiomatic. Your problems aren’t ours in any sense and you will have to deal with them in different ways. I strongly support conventional maxims about youth standing on its own feet, sowing its own oats, and reaping its own whirlwind (if there is one thing my generation knew nothing about it was moral agriculture), and I believe you should be allowed to work things out with as little meddling from the outside as possible. But every so often an unlikely chain of events or a special curiosity about a rare specimen does draw me, does really draw me, toward trying to understand someone about whom I am by definition ignorant.

In short, and in short words—how did you do it?
How did such a cognizant young woman as yourself manage to get involved in what I cannot help (much as I hate so-called “value-judgments”) calling a deeply unsavory scandal, the details of which will no doubt erupt Etna-high and rock the Press back on what are aptly known as its heels? I dislike hortation, but I advise you to wonder, as calmly as possible, why it happened; for I am sure it need not have. Attribute this curiosity on my part, perhaps, to the Hydrogen bomb, which has revived my moribund affection for the fellow creatures with whom I share what remains of the pure air of this remarkable planet.

And speaking of this, I must inform you of a great change that has taken place in my own special spheres of interest. For the approach of atomic destruction, coinciding with the approach of my own end, has quixotically returned me to earth after all my years of star-gazing. In brief, I have swapped the telescope for the microscope. And how fascinating is life down under there! I am embarking on a really splendid collection of insects. I have already a very fine ant community, a first-class beehive, and a most romantic corner of rare cobwebs which I call my Spidery. You must come and see it some day—by which time I hope to have expanded it considerably.

But I mustn’t wander too far afield—especially as it has just occurred to me (a sure sign of old age you will say) that this letter has been started back to front, and that it is possible, even likely, that you have not been made aware of certain recent events. I must enlighten you at once. I must indeed.

Receiving your letter last month, I rang up Frank Carson in Washington and after a bit of delving he was able to inform mie (rather humorously, I thought at the time) that your passport was perhaps the most famous passport lost last year. Your steady bombardment of letters to the Department was a source of considerable entertainment to the civil servants, not as devoid of wit as you apparently imagined, and Frank assured me the general feeling being that by then you had been sufficiently chastised for your carelessness, a new one was shortly to be issued.

The next thing that happened was the arrival of Frank Carson on my doorstep in a state of considerable agitation—indeed, one almost matching my own, for I had just trained my microscope on a really interesting nymph of a cimex lectularius (dismissed so contemptuously by most entomologists as flat, ill-smelling, blood-sucking insects infesting beds—indeed my late friend C. F. Metcalf went so far as to call them “loathsome pests” in his otherwise excellent book, but I assure you, they are creatures of far more subtle and fascinationg habits), and was watching it at work, when Frank burst in. He announced without preamble that your passport had been discovered, or rather accounted for, and then went on to relate the circumstances.

It had been used to admit a somewhat reckless (perhaps I should say feckless) young French girl to these shores. She turned up at the Police Station late one night, at the end of her rope, begging to be returned to Paris. It was finally established that she had entered this country illegally. Upon arrival her passport was immediately removed from her by the vice-racketeers into whose hands she had been directed, and who thereby gained what they expected to be a permanent hold on her. Fortunately, however, the diabolical scheme backfired. For the initial offer both to supply the passport and arrange the trip had been presented to the young lady in terms so disingenuous—to say the least—that, as a professional dancer of some ambition, she soon began to resent what she had been led to believe was merely a temporary sideline (i.e. being a prostitute) turning into a full-time career. Her back to the wall, she eventually took the only sensible way out and gave herself up to the police.

The originator and executor of this scheme was a man named Larry Keefer, or Keeble (no doubt you can supply me with his exact name), and they were able through her evidence of dates and places and so forth, to identify the passport in question as yours. That was all the information Frank had at the moment, except that wheels were being put in motion for the arrest of the man in question. But as you may
imagine, it left me with little stomach for returning to the study of my bedbug.

Two days ago Frank came around with further news. Keefer had been apprehended in France in the company of a young woman driving northward toward Paris. Questioned about your passport, he coolly explained that he had been instructed by you to pass it on to some mysterious persons and that, having no idea what the whole thing was about, had merely done so as a favor. Confronted with the French girl’s statement, he began breaking down, but it was the girl in the car—his tootsie, or patsy, or whatever the current term is— that broke the case wide open. She had been under the impression until then that she was his sole employee, so to speak, and in a frenzy of jealous rage turned against him and began regaling the police with her own story. In the midst of these further revelations Keefer panicked. He started the car up and tried to make his getaway. The girl grabbed the wheel, wrenched it violently and smashed the car into the nearest ditch. They are both in the hospital now, and he is suffering from severe injuries that will prevent him from standing trial for some time.