The Dud Avocado (8 page)

“Howling hailstones!” I exclaimed. I let that out quite unconsciously. Fie really had knocked me for a loop. “But what about your
wife?
” I asked when I could.

“I haven’t got one,” he said.

“You haven’t got one.” The room was spinning. “What d’you
mean
, you haven’t got a wife?” What did he mean, he didn’t have a wife? He probably didn’t have a mistress either.

“Listen, Teddy, you said you had one. You definitely said you did. You
must
have one.” I was beside myself. Even he was taken aback at my vehemence.

“Yes, I had one. But she is gone.”

“What happened to her? Where
is
she?” I accused him. I was ready to try him for murder.

“She left me.” He put the ice cube into the glass and the glass onto the coffee table and sat down heavily. “She left me about three weeks ago,” he continued. “She has gone back to Rome. She will try to get an annulment. I think she may be able to. We have not been able to have children.”

When the smoke cleared away and I was getting used to yet another one of the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, there was a new Teddy sitting there beside me—a new Alfredo if you like. This was the first time in all the while I’d known him that he was confiding in me instead of elaborately concealing his
private life, and the revelations in those few words changed everything. Suddenly I remembered the desperate look he’d given me that morning when I joshed him about successfully leading three lives. The homme fatal, fond and foolish as the pose had been from time to time, was gone forever; the bourgeois manque sat firmly in his place. Looking at him there I knew I would never again see the foolish philanderer, the conscious charmer. Instead he had become permanently one half of a
family
. I saw them together, he and his wife, round a dinner table: silent, dreary and childless.

I tried to pity him. It was just about the saddest thing on earth really, and certainly I should have shown some compassion. But there is no point in telling this at all if I don’t tell the truth, and the truth was that now that I felt I
completely
understood him, I completely despised him. From my standpoint what he had just told me was just about the worst thing he could have said to me. The main trouble with being an homme fatal, the really,
really
crux of the matter was one was so entirely dependent on every single prop. Take one away and the whole structure collapses like a house of cards. If his
wife
doesn’t want him,
I
certainly don’t, was my way of putting it.

I think he actually had forgotten me for the moment, thinking about her, for he seemed a long way away when I next spoke.

“What about your mistress?” I had asked.

“Yes,” he said nodding vaguely, a million miles away.

“Your mistress. Why don’t you marry her?”

He shook his head. “She is too old,” he said. “It is too late for her to have children.”

Crash went another prop. Boy, this really wasn’t one of his days. He just couldn’t put a foot right. It was a situation all too familiar to me, this business of setting off on the wrong foot and doggedly remaining there. Only I’d never watched it from the outside before. It was fascinating. Poor bastard, it should have made me want to reach out and yank him onto the other foot. It should have given me a fellow feeling. But it didn’t.

Eventually we both became aware that I hadn’t answered his
original question. I think we both knew the answer. It was just a matter of how I was going to phrase it.

Basically I am a Space person, especially when up against it, and now I began hopping all over the room from corner to corner.

“Well,” I said finally, over by the bookshelves. “Well, I’m awfully sorry to hear about all this—I mean your—” I was over by the window by now. “I mean I didn’t dream that you’d be so easily.…” Back to the mantel. “Oh, hell. Of course I can’t marry you. It never occurred to me you’d ever want to. I just thought you’d be the ideal teacher to—you know, the ideal person to sharpen the old teeth on,” I finished, drifting back to the arm of the sofa and bending over him to see if he understood.

“I see,” he murmured sadly into the floor. “I see. You were using me.”

“Hey, do you know that’s just what I
thought
you’d say?” I exclaimed excitedly.

“Ah, so?” This didn’t cheer him up any.

“But we were using each other!” I said triumphantly.

At this he turned and looked up at me shrewdly. “Using each other,” he mused. Suddenly his manner changed. It became brisk, businesslike and determined.

“Yes, that is it, of course,” he said, and he swung three-quarters round and crushed out his cigarette.

“Now see here, Miss Gorce—” he began masterfully, but instantly realized he would be spoiling his effect by having to look up at me on that sofa arm. Abandoning this position forthwith he began complaining about my name. “Gorce,” he said, staring into the middle distance and shaking his head in wonder. “Gorce! You Americans.…” (People really
do
say You Americans, by the way.) “Nevertheless, charming, enchanting Miss Gorce, please do not be offended if I tell you that you still have much to learn. You may find it amusing now, at your age in life, to be this—this—ragamuffin—but it will not always be so. You will understand what I mean when I take you to Florence to meet my family. You should know that we are one of the oldest families there—and one of the proudest. Ah yes—I know you Americans like to sneer at background, but wait—after you are among us
for a while you will soon discover how barbaric most of your compatriots will appear to you, and you will realize how important it is. That is something I can do for you.”

“Why that’s great, man,” I said. “That sounds just great. But why pick on li’l ole me?”

“Because you are not stupid,” he replied gravely. “You can learn. You could become a remarkable woman some day. And you are young and obviously healthy. I am sure I do not have to tell you how proud I am as well of the name and how I wish to see it continued.”

I don’t know why, but somehow that gave me pause. “Tell me something,” I asked him, “tell me exactly how we would live. This isn’t just idle curiosity. It’s difficult to explain, but I just somehow feel that I never really
have
lived; that I never really will live—exist or whatever—in the sense that other people do. It drives me crazy. I was terribly aware of it all those nights waiting for you in the Ritz bar looking around at what seemed to be real grown-up lives. I just find everybody else’s life surrounded by plate glass. I mean I’d like to break through it just once and actually touch one.”

He smiled. “Well, my dear, I am afraid those lives at the Ritz will have to remain under plate glass for a while. You see, most of the money was my wife’s. As you may know, the Diplomatic Service does not pay very well even in its highest positions. Oh, we shouldn’t starve. I have good prospects and good contacts, while you as an American would be invaluable should we be transferred over there. An excellent post. The living allowance is double that of any other place. And you will have some money of your own, of course, will you not? Surely this uncle of yours will supply you with the equivalent of what we call in Europe a dowry?” He said this perfectly seriously, and then broke off, puzzled to find me roaring with laughter.

I howled and howled. In fact, I fell off the arm and into the sofa almost on top of him. “Oh, no, no, no,” I gasped. “This is too much.”

“What is it?” he asked. He was getting worried.

I tried to tell him three times and each time I collapsed. I finally pulled myself together.

“Please forgive me, but I’ve never had to change my mind so often at such short notice in my whole life. It’s quite breathtaking. You see, first I thought you wanted my body, then I thought you wanted my love, then my
life
even, happily-ever-after and all that sort of thing, and now it turns out it is merely my money. Oh, Teddy, darling, thank you, thank you.” I was practically sobbing.

“For what?” he asked patiently.

“For restoring my cynicism. I was too young to lose it.”

He laughed at that and I laughed. We both laughed. We shared a moment of mutual omniscience; we had each other’s number.

“Delicious,” he murmured. “My dear, you are delicious. There is no one quite like you.” And we smiled at each other.

Now here is what gets me. With anybody else I know, it would have all ended in a lot of civilized laughter and exchanges of everlasting friendships. But not with me. I may be carping but I don’t seem to be let off anything; if a bad time is to be had, I
have
it.

So what happened was, he stood up and took me by the shoulders and the next thing I knew, instead of being chastely kissed on the forehead and decorously wished a good night, I was being savagely pressed against his chest and peremptorily ordered to get into bed.

“Hey, wait a minute,” I protested. “Now just take it easy——” And in less time than it takes to tell we were at it tooth and claw. Or rather I was at it tooth and claw. He was growing violent and it was becoming harder and harder to defend myself. The strange thing was that we were still more or less
laughing
through all this, until suddenly as his hand, ice-cold like that damned ice cube, slid under my dress, I panicked and bit him very hard on the nearest available piece of flesh. It turned out to be his ear.

To my amazement, and no doubt his credit, he didn’t cry out in pain. He fell softly against me for a moment, his arms limp at his side, and then he straightened up. He appeared to be thinking, at least that’s what I could have sworn, but before I knew what was happening he had struck me across the face. Then,
cool as a cucumber, he walked toward the door and held it open for me.

I didn’t quite see why I, who had done nothing wrong, so to speak, who at any rate most certainly hadn’t started all this, should wind up crushed and disheveled, with a torn dress, a burning cheek and lipstick all over my face, while he, the real culprit, was suavely ushering me out, and I strove to correct this injustice.

“Now that you’re free,” I said on my way to the door, “you must come to America. I’m sure you can fortune-hunt on a much larger scale there than you’ve been able to over here. Only you’d better start quickly before you turn into just another dirty old man.”

The blow commonly described as below the belt really went home. “You little slut, get out,” he shouted, his face all awry, “and take care. Nobody insults me like that and gets away with it. You will see. I can promise you.”

With these words singing in my ears as I felt my way down the stairs, too discouraged to find the minuteries, I reflected wearily that it was not easy to be a Woman in these stirring times. I said it then and I say it now: it just isn’t our century.

A
FTER ALL THAT
, getting down to work seemed like a pretty good idea.

Frankly, there didn’t seem to be too much else left to do. “Fame is the spur,” I kept saying to myself, “that the something something doth raise, dot, dot, to scorn delights and live laborious days,” though not entirely truthfully, for I knew that the thought of Larry was as much a spur to me as fame.

The day my laundry came back, I took out all my clothes and spread them around the room for Judy and me to look at. I was determined that for once, for just once in my life, when I went to those readings, I would be wearing the “right” thing. The right thing in this case had to be something general; something that wouldn’t type me. To my chagrin, I found all my clothes stubbornly resisting this desired neutrality, splitting themselves resolutely up into three categories: Tyrolean Peasant, Bar Girl, and Dreaded Librarian. It looked hopeless. Fortunately, I did have a black cotton skirt, and Judy, by some coincidence, had a black cotton blouse with a white collar. So, the problem at last solved, I climbed happily into the outfit, and pranced off in the direction of the theater.

I had assumed the readings to have started the week before. My strategy was to give them seven days grace to stew around in, and then, very over-the-shoulder, off-the-shoulder, daintily treading all over everybody’s toes, in I would waft, impress the hell out of them, and win the day. But when I got to the theater, it turned out, quite unexpectedly, to be empty. I finally managed to uncover one of those mysterious old women, who inhabit deserted buildings in France like mice, and who, under my relentless inquisition, was forced to confess, not only that it was a theater, but that it was going to open up soon for some company to begin its casting. Wrenching the exact day and time from her unwilling lips, I returned chez moi, carefully hung up my neutral clothes to preserve them, and held my breath for three days.

And so it came about, that, instead of drifting over to the theater in that casual off-handed manner planned, I was actually camping on its doorstep when Larry arrived. And a good thing too. The competition was fierce.

I won’t drag you through the quarter-finals, the semifinals and the finals. The only relevant question is, did I or didn’t I. And the answer, in a word, is Yes! In two words really, Yes, Yes! Because I read so brilliantly, not to say inspiredly, that I came out with
two
roles. In the first, the Saroyan one, a waif who sweeps out the jail, and in the second, the Williams one, a batty prostitute.

“We’ll get you a wig to wear for the first one,” said Larry, “but I want you to use your own hair, or whatever that stuff is you’ve got on the top of your head now, for the other, Pinkie.” Then he said, quite seriously, “You more than surprise me, screwball. I had no idea you were good.”

I could have died of happiness. I went back to Montparnasse and flung myself into a celebration which lasted two nights and from which it took me three days to recover.

The night before we went into rehearsal, I was determined to get to bed early. When I got into my bath, I was singing. Gradually, deliciously, I could feel myself relaxing. In a sudsy dream I floated off, unknitting, unknotting, unraveling. I was so sleepy I could hardly put my pajamas on and get into bed. I curled up into the pillows and was just dozing off when I noticed that the script that we were going to start off with was by the bedside table. I thought it might be a good idea to have one last look at it, making a few notes along the way if necessary. Five seconds later, I was crawling under the desk looking for my pencil. When I retrieved it, I saw that it was broken. I tried using my eyebrow pencil, but it was impossible to read my writing. I finally got a razor blade, sharpened the pencil, popped back into bed again, and recurled myself into the pillows. The script was opened, the pencil poised.