The Dud Avocado (34 page)

When he came to, he made a statement of which I have the transcript. He had this to say about you—it’s in the transcript, so I am quoting exactly. “I stole her passport. She had nothing to do with it. She didn’t even know what was going on. Tell her I’m sorry. Tell her I meant what I said about her down at the beach that day. Maybe it will explain certain aspects of my behavior Opening Night. I really liked her. Tell her next time to look where she’s going.”

Well. He may have something there in that last sentence. What do you think? Meanwhile I should be most obliged if you would drop me a line explaining how someone who is not actually deaf, dumb, blind and feeble-minded could have gotten so ignorantly involved in all this.

I note that our agreement has another few months to run. I look forward with interest to seeing you then.

Your bewildered,
Uncle Roger.

P.S. Oh yes. I had almost forgotten. Your new passport will be ready for you at the American Embassy by the end of the week. Also I have enclosed a clipping of the French girl. Perhaps you can throw some light on that subject as well. R.

I felt along the bottom of the envelope and drew out the news clipping. I stared for a long while at the picture. It was Crazy Eyes’ sister, the Mono-dancer. It really took me back.

I moved back to my old hotel.

I visited Judy. The operation had been successful, or as successful as it could be. She was weak but she was out of danger. I told her I was going to Hollywood to sign a big contract. I promised to write.

I went to the Embassy and arranged for all the details of my passport—fingerprinting, pictures and so forth. At the end of the week I plunked down the 3,000 francs for it and picked it up. Then I walked around Paris for the rest of the day and decided to get the hell out.

A
WEEK LATER
I arrived by plane in New York. I had told Judy I was going to Hollywood, and for some reason I now felt honor-bound to do so. In any case, I figured there’d be old Bax loping around the Reservation out there, and he could help me get started. So I went along to Grand Central Station and bought a train ticket to California.

It wasn’t until the train drew out with me in it that it occurred to me to wonder why I hadn’t simply continued the journey by plane. I mean it was crazy, now that I thought about it, going to all the trouble and inconvenience of getting into town when all I had to do was just hop on the next plane out West. But I couldn’t think clearly. The excitement and tension, the almost unbearable feeling of rushing headlong at my destiny as we sped toward Chicago, prevented me from even attempting to analyze my strange behavior; prevented me from trying to do anything except chase down the spooky sense of familiarity that the train ride was giving me. I kept telling myself that it was because I’d done this trip a million times before as a child, traveling back and forth from schools, visiting relatives and so forth. But it wasn’t. And not until I got off at Chicago to change stations was everything at last made clear.

I wandered slowly through the La Salle Street Station, foud-royée in the middle of the terminal. It was my nightmare station; the station I’d dreamed of so many times with such fear and pain. And the recurrent desk, that desk whose elusive familiarity had worried me so—I knew just where to look for it. It was the Traveler’s Aid Counter.…

It was nearly ten years ago. I was almost thirteen, and I’d run away from a school back East and was heading out West to become a bullfighter. I’d sold most of my clothes and jewelry and hoarded a Christmas windfall from Uncle Roger to get together enough money to buy a coach ticket to Albuquerque. I planned on hitching the rest of the way to Mexico. But somehow I’d forgotten entirely about food. By the time I hit Chicago my stomach was flat against my spine and gasping for breath. I saw the sign saying Traveler’s Aid Society and decided I was in luck. I’d just go up to it and ask for a loan. The woman at the desk—actually she probably wasn’t more than my age now, though she seemed older to my young eyes and wore her hair in a severe style that gave her a Librarian Look—disillusioned me about that immediately. She said they didn’t dole out money like that, they were really only a reference organization and if I’d answer a few questions she’d be able to tell me which charity I might be eligible for. She was very kind. I liked her at once. I
started answering her questions and the next thing I knew I’d blurted out the whole story. She listened attentively. She listened without making any “listening” faces, but I felt she was on my side. It was the first time I’d felt that about any grownup.

“Oh dear,” she said sadly at the end, shaking her head. “I’m afraid it’s a cut and dried case. You’re a runaway. The worst kind. Underage. Our rules are especially strict for underage runaways. We simply hold on to them and wire the Traveler’s Aid in the town they’ve run away from, and they provide the fare for the return and get it back later from the parents or guardians —but listen, don’t go!” she called out to me suddenly as I started backing away. “I’d like to help you, I really would,” she said. She leaned over the counter. “Why shouldn’t you be a bullfighter if you want to be? I’m sick to death of standing here day after day sending people back to places they hate, places they’ve run away from. I just can’t bear it any longer. I mean who are we to know what’s what anyway? Look, here’s a dollar. Go over to the soda fountain and have something to eat. I’ll check the timetables of the trains going West from Union Station and we’ll figure out your next move when you get back.”

When I returned she said, “Quick. Here’s fifteen dollars, it’s all I’ve got on me. Your train leaves in half an hour from Union Station and you’ve just got time to make it. I’ll help you get a taxi. We’ve got a priority and they let us jump the line.”

She left the booth and went over to pick up my bag. Then I saw what it was. She was lame. She had an ugly brace on her leg and she hobbled badly. I looked at it and looked away quickly. But not quickly enough.

“The blind leading the blind,” she said casually, acknowledging the fact, as I followed the grotesquely hobbling figure out of the station.

“But I don’t even know your name,” I said suddenly, leaning forward in the taxi. “How shall I pay you back?”

“You don’t have to pay me back,” she answered. “Good luck to you. You’re running for my life.” She slammed the cab door shut and, turning swiftly, hobbled away.

And that was why they didn’t pick me up until Albuquerque.

I stood still in the middle of the station and made the porter put down my bags. So now I’d got to the bottom of it. I’d come the full circle and suddenly I lost my space urge. The dash to California seemed so utterly puerile now. Now called for something entirely different. Now called for something drastically
un-
running away. Now called for—what? Suddenly I had it. Now called for becoming a librarian! In that way I would be laying the ghost once and for all.

Yes. I would go back to New York (surely there were more libraries there than any other place in America) and, yes, I would actually
become
a librarian.

N
OW HERE’S THE
heavy irony. So I went back to New York to become a librarian. To actually
seek out
this thing I’ve been fleeing all my life. And (here it comes): a librarian is just not that easy to become. I’d taken my lamb by the hand to the slaughter and nobody even wanted it. Apparently there’s a whole filing system and annotating system and stamping system and God knows what you have to learn before you qualify. So I finally found a little out-of-the-way, off-the-beaten-track library downtown and they let me put the books away.

So I felt I was accomplishing something.

I wrote to my mother and father explaining what had become of my passport and all, and told them not to worry if they happened to see my name mentioned in a vice trial. I said I was studying to become a librarian (not strictly true) and that I had moved into an all-girls hotel (terribly true), and that I had turned over a new leaf of responsibility, etc., etc.

They took it stoically enough—my father rather more than
my mother, no doubt because of his ecclesiastical training. And life went on. The one bright spot was my cousin John’s letter assuring me that, come what may, blood, by God, was thicker than water and he was going to do everything in his goddam power to see that my name was kept out of
his
newspaper at all costs.

The months went by and I really tried. I never got into any trouble. I never went out with any men. I never did anything wrong.

Except one day I was up on a ladder putting away some rather heavy books on the top shelf (I don’t know why they’re so smug about their system: the heaviest books always turned out to belong on the top shelves), when I happened to drop a few and they happened to conk someone on the head. A man in a baize-green-colored suit and a pale green shirt. He wore gray suède shoes.

It was Max Ramage, not that you could miss him.

He looked up to see what hit him.

“Well I’m damned. Miss Gorce—right in my own backyard. Come down at once. I’ve been looking all over for you!” he shouted up at me.

“All over
here?
” I was as stunned as if the books had hit me.

“All over the world. I just happened in here by chance. I’m going to Japan in two weeks, so I thought I’d cram a bit on it before I left. It’s my local branch. What in heaven’s name are you doing up there?”

But I was in much too much of a hurry to go into all that. There was something I had to straighten him out about immediately. Before another second flew by. I’d never been in such a hurry. I began scrambling down the ladder talking furiously the whole time.

“Listen, I’ve
got
to explain to you why I was in such a stew that night we met. I mean I
know
what you thought—only I didn’t realize you thought it until you left and by then it was too late—and anyway it wouldn’t have mattered because I still couldn’t have told you what the trouble
really
was. I mean— what I mean is—
was—
that I
wasn’t
pregnant.… Honestly I …” And then my voice trailed off into a thin line of drivel.

He smiled up at me and stretched his long arms wide apart. “Come straight into my arms!” he said. Just like that. So I stepped right down into them. He hugged me tightly and 1 swayed a little and stumbled over one of the books and that made me come to. I pulled away, embarrassed, expecting to find the whole library in an uproar, but somehow nobody was taking any notice.

“There’s something I’ve got to tell you too,” he said. “Show you, rather.” From the inside pocket of the green lining of his green jacket he drew out a handful of photographs and showed me one.

“Me,” I said wonderingly. “It’s me.”

“What’d I tell you?” he said triumphantly. “You see, I have been looking all over for you. Why the devil didn’t you keep in touch with Stefan? Never mind. Come on, we’re wasting time.” He took me by the arm and, stepping over the books, we left.

We went into a cocktail bar just off Fifth Avenue on Eighth Street. One of those suave, sexy bars, dead dark, with popcorn and air-conditioning and those divine cheese things.

“What’ll you have?” he asked. “Champagne? Have anything. Money’s no object. Look. Wads of it. Ceylon. Can’t spend it fast enough. We photographers are the New Rich.”

We had dry martinis; great wing-shaped glasses of perfumed-fire, tangy as the early morning air.

“Now,” he said. “I have to ask you three questions. How old-are you? Are you in love? And what in God’s name are you doing here?”

So I told him all about it. It was really a very long story. At the end he said “Good. Now ask me something. Anything.”

“Where did you get that suit?” I asked him.

“This one? Nice, isn’t it. Had a bitter struggle with my tailor over it. He refused to make it at first. Said the material was too soft. Said it would pick up things.”

“It has,” I said excitedly. “Look——”

“That’s it!” he said suddenly. “That’s the expression I remembered. Questing. You have the most questing profile in the whole world, Miss Gorce.”

“No, but
look,
” I insisted. “It
has
picked up something. It’s
picked up some popcorn.” There was a popcorn ball balancing on his sleeve. It reminded me of the snails in St. Jean. “What’s it made of?”

“Pool-table cloth,” he told me, preening himself a little. “It’s the only material that comes in this special color. D’you like it?”

“I love it,” I said, stringing a bracelet of popcorn around his sleeve. “I wonder what makes you dress like this.”

“Brio. Panache. I believe in them.” He waved his cigarette airily and I noticed he held it between the third and fourth fingers instead of the usual second and third. It looked wonderful.

Max’s personality was beginning to emerge. Easy and flamboyant. Peacock. What a frenzy I must have been in not to have felt its impact before. Or had Stefan’s even wilder flamboyance overshadowed it?

In any case, I had never been on such an intimate footing with a Famous Person before, and what surprised me most was how quickly, beneath the stark realities of the baize-green suit and the aura of fame, the
really
legendary figure was emerging; under that pale green shirt beat a truly original heart.

He talked about photography with passion. “I must be the only photographer in the world who ever began taking pictures
without
the aid of a camera.” He said that even as a child picking up his pencil for the first time, the only sets of ground-configural patterns that presented themselves to him visually were geared to photography; he’d start right in
drawing
photographs. He said the only trouble was that his family absolutely forbade him a camera. Anything connected with films and the film world— and they lumped photography under that general heading—was mysteriously but strictly taboo. However, he’d somehow managed to get himself a camera and a darkroom, and in no time at all the walls of the Café Venezia, the center of schoolboy Bohemia in Leeds, were covered with his weekly exhibitions. When he began to win prizes in the local newspapers, it all came out, of course, but by then it was too late for his family to do anything about it.