The Dud Avocado (35 page)

He had also, from a very early age, been in heated correspondence with the great Spanish photographer Bernardo Ruiz, and hearing one day that Ruiz was in London, he went to a store and
bought himself a blood-colored suit which, he felt, would cut the suitable sophisticated swath in London (and which fortunately he was able to get cheap, as it had been ordered and abandoned by a clarinetist whose outfit had gone broke), hopped on the next train and, photographs spilling in every direction, baited the Great Man in the lobby of his hotel. “I imagine,” said Max, “it was the unexpectedness of my appearance as well as its bizarreness (I was very thin at the time) that disarmed Ruiz sufficiently to take me on. In any case, I traveled with him for two and a half years and he taught me everything he knew. And so,” he finished, “I shook the dust of Yorkshire off my shoes forever.”

I had to laugh. “I can just see you then,” I said.

He looked at me for a moment. “But can you see Leeds?”

I shook my head.

“It’s not so funny,” he said. “It was a narrow escape. I’ll show you pictures of it sometime. The humdrum glum carried to its sub-human level. Sunday night in the Methodist church. You won’t feel like laughing. You’ll cry your eyes out.”

He tried to flip a cigarette nonchalantly into his mouth like what’s-his-name in the movies, but he missed. I didn’t feel like laughing. A shadow had fallen across us, like suddenly coming upon a hunchback in a hopefully colored tie or an unsuccessful actor with dyed bright hair in the middle of a sunny day.

“I feel like crying now,” I said.

“Do you?
Do
you? Oh my darling!” He took my hand and kissed it. We looked at each other for a long, long time. “I know what,” he said. “I’ll give you two dollars if you can cry now. Two dollars if you can cry in one minute flat.”

“Fifteen seconds,” he said, looking at his watch fifteen seconds later. “Not bad.”

“Now you,” I said.

“Look at me.” He had tears in his eyes already.

“What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking,” I said, “that I’m happy. Now I’m happy. That’s all.” It didn’t even occur to me to lie. “What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking: suppose I’d been right about her and she had
been pregnant. Suppose she had died under the knife—or had got so desperate she killed herself.” He was perfectly serious. “Sally Jay,” he said earnestly, “promise me,
promise
me you’ll never try to kill yourself.”

“Oh I promise, I promise,” I assured him, stretching lazily, feeling utterly euphoric. “The world is wide, wide, wide, and I am young, young, young, and we’re all going to live forever!”

We were very hungry but we didn’t want to leave, so we ate there. We had chicken sandwiches; boy, the chicken of the century. Dry, wry, and tender, the dryness sort of rubbing against your tongue on soft, bouncy white bread with slivers of juicy wet pickles. Then we had some very salty potato chips and some olives stuffed with pimentos and some Indian nuts and some tiny pearl onions and some more popcorn. Then we washed the whole thing down with iced martinis and finished up with large cups of strong black coffee and cigarettes. One of my really great meals.

I don’t know what time it was when we went into the bar, but it was dark when we came out. We went to a movie and he kissed me for the first time. We kissed right through it. Coming to life in a movie house on West Fourth Street is an apotheosis I’d have to leave to one of those mad seventeenth-century mystics like Herbert or Vaughan to do justice to. It’s the
end
.

“Now let’s kiss somewhere else,” said Max.

I couldn’t stop singing to myself in the taxi—that heavenly tune about taking a chance on love. It’s terribly embarrassing and it’s always happening to me: the words of a song will suddenly exactly echo my inner feelings and out they come. Like that awful time I kept filling in pauses of a hard-luck story someone was giving me with the Judy Garland song about the road getting rougher and lonelier and tougher. Couldn’t stop myself. Could have died the way it just kept coming out.

I could have died now, but for another reason. It was all going much too fast. It was all wrong. I was falling back into all my awful old ways and all the awful old things were going to happen to me all awful over again. Stop the taxi! Take me home … I have to catch a train … I thought vaguely of saying. You’ll
worry about it later, I promised myself. You’ll be sorry. Oh you will, you will.

Not that anyone could have guessed from the limp, humming form that remained in Max’s arms that there was any kind of a battle raging around inside.

But it turned out that all he meant was a night club.

It was one of those casual ones. The kind where the musicians are playing as much to amuse themselves as anyone there and you’re not expected to stop talking or drinking or anything else you’ve been doing while they’re on. The music seeps through. They give you a good strong shot of bourbon and some soda and a glass swizzle stick to poke in the holes of the ice cubes, and leave you alone. I kept writing “Max” on the table with mine.

We danced and kissed through the jazz. It was cool and hot and blue. Midnight blue. Blue smoke. Blues.

After that we sat on quietly for a while. Max wore a look of bony concentration. He was thinking.

“Look here,” he said finally. “Let’s go back to my place, I want to talk to you. I’ll tell you quite frankly right now that I very much want to sleep with you tonight, but if you turn me down it’s not important. I’ll ask you every day for the next five years and you can turn me down every day for the next five years—no, wait a minute—every day for the next
year
” he smilingly corrected himself. “You wouldn’t be so cruel as to hold out longer than that, would you? You see I really do want you, Sally Jay. Come on, let’s get the bill. As a matter of fact I live right down the street.”

I’ll bet you do, Buster, I thought, quickly collecting my wits. I felt cool as a cucumber. I crossed out the “M” I’d started with my swizzle stick. “But you’re going to Japan in a couple of weeks, aren’t you?” I pointed out quietly.

“My God!” He ran his hand through his hair. “Oh my God, of course I am. See what you do to me? I’d forgotten completely about it.”

I’ll bet you have, Buster, I thought. It was worse than disappointing; it was downright insulting.
As a matter of fact I live right down the street
.… Oh help. Take me out, coach.

“Tell me something,” I asked him. “How long have you been in town this time?”

“A few days.”

Oh really, it was too easy. Roving photographer, with a sailor’s mentality and about a million light-years of sexual experience under his belt, blows into town on the lookout for a quick lay. Picks up girl whose picture (along with how many others?) coincidentally happens to be in his pocket, throws in a little soft soap and expects—and gets—her eating out of his hand in a few hours.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Have I said something wrong? Tell me.”

“It’s nothing. I’ve just got to go to the John.”

“… If he’d just put it to me straight,” I was muttering to myself all over the John, “if only he hadn’t felt obliged to make such a song and dance about it, it wouldn’t have been so bad. I mean, sure I was all ready to go right to his place with him after the movies, but that would have been a blow to my pride, not my intelligence. My intelligence. Ha!” Boy, I was learning fast. What did he care about all that? I was just a girl like any other girl, and that you-can-turn-me-down-every-day-for-the-next-five-years routine was a solid gold winner in any repertoire.

Two girls came into the washroom and started talking.

“You gonna let him take you home? He’s an awful wolf, you know.”

“Sure,” shrugged the other. “I should say no to life?”

Yeh, yeh, I thought. Great, oh, great. Zop, zop, and all dot. De Village don’t say no to life; jazz don’t say no to life; but dis baby do. Right now. Cause it hurts too much. And I can’t take it no more.

But when I came out and started back toward our table my heart lurched up around my throat and damn near choked me to death. I was so frightened I almost blacked out. Max had disappeared. Just disappeared. Vanished. I mean he just wasn’t there. When I looked again I saw that there was somebody there —a man with sort of short dark hair and a bony face—and that he was sitting in approximately the same place that Max had been—but it wasn’t Max. Logic insisted that of course it was:
there was the fat man, who I remembered sitting next to me against the wall, now sitting next to the space I’d made between him and Max. But the ground-configural patterns of Max’s face had shifted so violently that I didn’t even recognize him. I mean I
did
recognize him but I couldn’t accept the face as belonging to Max. It wasn’t a face, really. It was kind of an unprotected skull full of dark shadows. The wounded skull of a young boy staring at me through troubled eyes. It was frightening.

Well, I thought, wrong again, Gorce. You’ve gone and guessed wrong again. Now what?

“I’m sorry. I didn’t recognize you for a moment,” I said as I came up to the table. It was the wrong thing to say.

“How did you finally identify me, by my clothing?” he asked stonily.

“Oh no. No. It’s just that I suppose I haven’t got used to your face.”

That was the wrong thing to say too.

“Well, at least you didn’t wander off into the street like the last rime in Paris. I suppose that’s something. Or don’t you remember? Come on. I’m taking you home.”

We had reached a really gorgeous impasse.

We arrived outside my hotel in silence. Neither of us made a move to get out of the taxi.

“Aren’t you going to invite me in for a nightcap?” he asked finally. “I won’t bite.”

“I can’t!” I wailed. “It’s a girl’s hotel. No men allowed in the rooms.”

“Oh yes, of course. Naturally. I’d forgotten that one.”

“Couldn’t we … have a nightcap at
your
place?” I asked desperately.

“If you like.”

Grimly he gave the address to the taxi driver, but when the cab started up again he slumped back into the seat, flung one leg over the other, and, rubbing his ankle with his hand let out a sigh of relief. Out of the corner of his eye he caught me looking at him and he smiled sheepishly. We began to laugh.

“You own the whole house?” I asked, impressed, when we
stopped outside the brownstone front on the little street of the jazz club.

“Yes, it’s all mine. I bought it with my first billion,” he said, letting us in. “I thought it would be a good idea. Roots and storage. Mainly storage, as it’s turned out. I only live in a couple of rooms. Step over those boxes and come in.”

We went into what I suppose you could call the living room. It was very comfortable and cozy, with deep sofas and records piled everywhere, but it was a bit odd. There was a large gnarled petrified tree stump growing in the middle of the room with a tree seat running around it, and the bust of a Roman Emperor standing in a corner with a brown felt hat on. Halfway up one wall hung a delicately carved gilt chair.

He put on some records and sat down next to me. “We’ve been having some kind of misunderstanding,” he said. “Would you mind telling me what it was all about?”

I told him I’d got sore because I thought he was handing me a line with all that five-year stuff. “I mean you didn’t have to say that to get me to come here,” I said. “I would have anyway.”

“You mean you didn’t believe me?”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter——”

“Miss Gorce,” he said rising. “You have the faith of a flea.”

“Oh, please don’t go away.” I said miserably. “I want to believe you. I
do
believe you. Really. Please.”

“Give me your lipstick.” I handed it to him and he went over to the fireplace and drew a large heart in the mirror above it, with the initials M.R. and S.J.G. inside. Underneath he wrote in large letters “I love Sally Jay.” “There, you have it in writing. Now do you believe me?”

“Oh yes!”

“Then come over here and kiss me.” He was sitting down again.

“Hmmm—that’s very interesting, I must say,” he said a little while later.

“What is?”

“What you just did.”

“What?”

“You just took off your earrings.”

“I
did?
” I stared at them on the coffee table, surprised. “Good Lord, I did it quite unconsciously.”

He moved a little closer. “You know what that means, don’t you,” he murmured into my ear.

I said yes. I said I did.

“Where are you going to love me?” I asked him faintly.

“On a bed for a start,” he said, helping me up.

“Oh good.”

I sat up in the bed, naked under the sheets, and watched him get undressed. It was as if I’d never seen a man getting undressed before and come to think of it, I guess I hadn’t. The others must have just kind of shed their clothes or peeled them off in a lump. I don’t know. Anyway I’d never noticed. But Max undressed expertly. Methodically. And I’d never in my life seen anything as sensuous as the unhurried grace with which his knowing hands flew over his body, stripping it of its clothes. Fascinated, hardly daring to breathe, I watched him undo his tie in two clean sweeping movements—downwards to loosen it, sideways to slide it off—and then go on to his shirt, his slim fingers slipping each tiny button through its hole with one deft twist. He sat on the edge of the bed. He pulled off his shoes. He put his socks inside them, placing them neatly together at the foot of the bed. He rose and went over to a chest of drawers, his back to me, and carefully began emptying the contents of his trouser pockets. I felt suddenly very warm. I sank back into the pillow overwhelmed by my own scent, the last few drops of eau de cologne I’d splashed on that morning. I heard the jazz from the club playing faintly down the street, and the thought that of all the people there that night I would be the only one to find out what Max actually kept in his trouser pockets was unbearably thrilling. I sat up watching tensely: Keys. Money (silver in one pile, paper in another). A handkerchief. A baby screwdriver with a cork stuck through it. Two dead flashbulbs. A pair of new shoelaces. A packet of new razor blades. Finally, catching sight of me through the dresser mirror, he slowly drew out—one from each pocket—my earrings, and smiling at me through the glass, arranged them, like fallen angels, one on each side, to encom
pass a space the exact width of my face. Then he took off his trousers.