The Dud Avocado (17 page)

“
Places, please!
” That did it. At last I understood that this
unholy Cassandra who had been announcing the end of the world all evening in that impatient, doom-ridden voice was
doing it on purpose
. Naturally. What could I expect? She wanted to play my parts, of course. I would certainly speak to Larry about this later. I would certainly see to it that this sort of unprofessional behavior was stopped at once. It was outrageous. Either she went or I did. And then, delighted to discover that I was already thinking like a star, I went down onto the stage. The curtain rose. The lovely, warm lights were glistening on me.

Out in front the unexpected silence surprised and flattered me. I imagined there must be hundreds and thousands and millions of people quiet in the dark out there, waiting with baited breath for me, up on that stage and bathed in colored lights, to say something. I opened my mouth and—hooray—they were going to
listen
.

I suppose Larry was right. I suppose it was a pretty revolting spectacle to come into a dressing room after a show and find two of its leading players screaming abuse at each other. Especially since I was back in my slip again and sitting on the floor (I’d had such a bad attack of post-something-or-other nerves, that I couldn’t even sit on the chair), while Blair was staring starkly at himself in the mirror. It was all Blair’s fault, of course. I loved him passionately and devotedly, but I never wanted to see him again. As I said, he was in this for laughs and he never knew when to stop. I know what I’m talking about. I’ve giggled along with the best of them but dammit this just wasn’t funny. I could have killed him.

“Children, children,” said Larry, closing the door quickly behind him. “What’s all this?”

I got in first. “I should have known. Oh God. I should have
known
. Sure we have this scene together, sure I know what he’s like on stage, but this is
Tennessee Williams
, I kept telling myself and Blair
approves
of Williams so it’s going to be all right. So what does he go and do, the bastard? Oh
sure
I’ve seen him horsing around with the butler part, but that’s got nothing to do
with it, I kept telling myself. I’ve got nothing to worry about. It isn’t Saroyan, it’s
Williams
.…”

“So what
does
he do?” said Larry.

“Didn’t you see? Didn’t you see him prancing onto the stage with that
cockroach
on his lapel? He comes on with a
real
cockroach on his bathrobe and it jumps off him and starts
crawling
around the set. I nearly died of fright. I tell you if it had started to fly, play or no play, I would have just curled up and
expired
.”

“May I point out that the place is supposed to be crawling with cockroaches,” said Blair in his fruitiest voice, ponging every other word, “and that you spend the first twenty minutes of the play complaining to the landlady about them? I was merely trying to inject a little realism to help you along with your reactions. Stanislavsky himself couldn’t have done more. I was only trying to be helpful.”

“You were not. You were trying to break me up. You’ll do anything for a laugh and you know it. Where the hell did you find that cockroach anyway? It must have taken months to ferret it out.”

“In the places to which I have access they hardly need ferreting out.”

“I’m not going on tomorrow night if you’re here.”

“Oh well, if you’re going to be stuffy——”

“You’re damn tootin’ I am. I’ll report you to Equity and get you kicked out.”

“All right, all right, that’s enough,” said Larry. He turned to Blair. “Go back to your dressing room, I’ll see you later. By the way she’s right about Equity, you know. You could be kicked out for that.”

“Blair Perrins, if I ever see you again I will kill you. I’ll kill you and then I’ll kick you,” I yelled after him.

Larry picked me up off the floor and shook me until I calmed down. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself carrying on like this, screaming like a fishwife on the eve of your triumph? I was going to tell you how good you were, but now I won’t.” And then he burst out laughing. He dropped my shoulders and leaned against the wall for support and laughed and laughed.

“It’s the Old Pro in you,” he gasped, still laughing. “Hardly able to wait till she’s off stage to start bawling out the other actor.”

“But I am terrified of insects, especially those that fly.”

Larry kissed me on the cheek and sat me down at my dressing table. “Hurry up and put something on to receive in. Your public is waiting,” he said and left me.

When he came back a little while later I noticed for the first time that he was in his dinner jacket. The black and white was almost unbearably becoming to him. He shone and bristled and it was all I could do to stifle the impulse to stroke the back of his neck. Only then did I realize that I’d completely forgotten about my own clothes. At three o’clock in the afternoon I’d been told to go home and bathe and rest and so forth, but I’d been so nervous I’d just wandered around reciting my lines instead. Now all I had with me was what I’d been wearing then: a navy-blue suit and a crumpled white blouse. I’d been trying to take off my make-up and I felt all creamy behind the ears and in my eyes, which stung and swam from the running mascara. I felt as if I’d fallen into a pot of grease.

“Let’s go,” said Larry.

“Where to?”

“Well, first of all, the Contessa——”

“Oh,
Larry
.”

“Honey, I don’t like it any better than you. But what can I do? She’s gone and planned this elaborate party without consulting me. Don’t worry, we’ll cut as soon as possible——”

“But I’m so tired. I don’t want to have to wrestle with a horde of strangers. I just want to eat about a hundred million oysters and two tons of caviar and go swimming naked in champagne——”

“I don’t know about the swimming, but I’ll make damn sure you get enough of everything else you want.”

“Oh well. You win. You go ahead and apologize for my clothes, won’t you?”

I looked at myself in the mirror in despair. I thought of the evening dress I might have worn. I combed my hair and thought bitterly about my batting average for dressing inappropriately.

Why break a record? I flung a towel over the make-up on the table and left without bothering to straighten it out.

We arrived at the Contessa’s in an enormous car of snowy white. It was a sleeping car. That’s what I said. The back seat could be made up into a bed at night. It slept two. We talked about it on the way over; I mean
they
talked about it on the way over. We were four. There were Larry and me, the Contessa (who having said hello as I climbed into the car had already used up half her conversation to me for the evening) and the King of Lithuania, or someone like that. Just looking at him filled me with foreboding. How was I going to square up to all
this
, I wondered. The sensation of being so close to another human being with whom I had not one single sensation in common left me speechless. I fell to studying him. It was amazing how different even real things—a gold ring, hair oil, the cut of a coat, could be without being bizarre; the fabric of his shirt was woven of some Martian stuff; even his very skin was of another weave. Not a word was exchanged; there was at least an ocean between us. All this time the Contessa was flirting with Larry “outrageously,” as she might have put it, and with an elephantine delicacy (as she most certainly would not have), about the bed in the car. The King listened brightly and I stared at him fixedly, unable to recognize anything.

I began worrying about the transference of bravery. Only four hours earlier I’d said to myself that if I ever survived the ordeal of the first Entrance I would never be afraid again. Now it looked like far from the first fear canceling out the next one, it was actually going to multiply it.

I pulled Larry aside before we went into the drawing room. “Larry, I want to leave. It’s too harrowing. I won’t know a living soul.”

“Oh come now. There’s nothing to be frightened of. Probably just a bunch of queens.”

“Queens!”

“Queers. Fairies.”

“Hey, no kidding,
all
of them?”

“Well, most. Oh sure, all of them. Every last one of them. Come on, Gorce, cheer up. I promise you one thing; you’ll eat better food in here than you’ll ever be able to order in your life.”

We walked into the drawing room, where everyone was sitting around like a bunch of stuffed owls. Gradually they came to life. About seven of them began exchanging glances with each other, very slowly at first and then with increasing vivacity, until exchanged glances were ricocheting around the room like bullets. I waited for the contractions in my stomach to start and the familiar jangle of nerves. I found I was not only
not
receiving them, but totally unable to produce them. I really
was
too tired. A blessed calm descended upon me and I surveyed the scene like it was something through the wrong end of Uncle Roger’s telescope. When I surveyed the buffet, I headed straight for it. Larry was so right. I ate as I had never eaten before. Then I looked around. The International Set, I said to myself wonderingly.

The first to engage me in a duel of wits was an elderly American gentleman of the Southern-fried variety. He wanted to know what part of the States I was from but when I told him I’d been born in St. Louis he became violently distressed. He seemed to take it as a personal affront that I hadn’t been born in the heart of the Southland—South Carolina, for example. In fact he got so childishly querulous and wrought up about it that I suddenly realized he was batty. In one glorious non sequitur, he demanded to know exactly what I had
against
the South.

“Too much woodwork,” I answered, just for the hell of it. Why should he get a sensible answer? Unfortunately I had chosen one of those split seconds when the clouds parted and the old boy was having a brief spell of sanity.

“Woodwork?” he asked suspiciously. “What’s woodwork got to do with it? What do you mean, woodwork?” he kept on asking me over and over again—boy, it was his Moment of Truth.

I suddenly realized why I’d said it. He looked just like the woodwork teacher—Carpentry, they called it—at one of my schools. I remembered his report on me at the end of the term: “Sally Jay has done good woodwork but she should try to be
more co-operative and less vindictive. Promoted to Fourth grade.”

“I don’t know. I read it in a book somewhere, I guess. I’ve forgotten where,” I gibbered.

Luckily the clouds had already rolled back again. He shook his hoary locks and muttered something about not understanding why the young folks were permitted to go gallivantin’ around the Lord knew where nowadays without their mothers.

I said didn’t he think I was a little old to be trailing mother around with me and he said No, by golly, he did not, and I got irritated and said that maybe
he
ought to be with his mother, and then I realized that my God he was. Not far from us was an enormous mountain, about five hundred tons of insipid grandeur, covered in black velvet and topped by a fleece of white hair. One look at the two profiles was enough to convince me that they were out of the same cookie cutter. It was mothah, all right.

I backed away from him into a cluster consisting of a very famous musical-comedy actor called Rollo, a skinny old woman covered in ornaments and got up rather like a hysterical Christmas tree, and a superbly dressed, superbly indolent, superbly at home young man who was beginning, I noticed, superbly to get on Rollo’s nerves. In an evening of “firsts” I may as well mention that it was also the first Australian I had ever met.

“I think she behaved disgracefully,” complained the Australian. “I said it to her back and I’ll say it to her face.”

“I don’t know which is which,” snapped Rollo. “A woman of intarissable vapidity. Not you, my dear,” he turned to me. “My dear, you were delightful. Completely delightful.” He said it in a warm famous voice of such passionate sincerity as to be utterly indistinguishable from the real thing, and then added in a slightly lower but equally carrying tone, “But my dear, who
was
that you were supposed to be playing opposite, poor child? And I don’t know
what
to call that last set—an Obstacle Course, I think, really, don’t you? No, I mean it, you were quite marvelous. One of the seven wonders of the world, wasn’t she, everyone?”

The Christmas Tree grudged me a hideous grimace, fixing her beady eye on me like a kind of Ancient Mariness, and then turned upon Rollo with an ogle of the most vehement lechery I
have ever seen. Now that I’ve been around (hey, hey) I am no longer astonished at the lubricity of these old biddies, but at the time I just couldn’t get over it.

The party went on. There were these two young princes. They were about sixteen years old and one was blond and the other dark. They were like a couple of bear cubs. They’d been evacuated to the States during the war and spoke tough American-English instead of English-English; it sounded so funny on top of their Baltic accents. As I was an actress they immediately assumed I must be an intimate of their great friend Aly Khan, and when—to our mutual sorrow—I had to disillusion them, they smoothly switched the conversation over to the possible drugging and drinking habits of several prominent movie stars they had never met.

“Say,
you’d
be swell in the movies,” one of them exclaimed after a long interested look at me. It did just flash past my mind then that maybe
they
were the ones who ought to be home with their mothers.

People started leaving. Two men I hadn’t even met came up and kissed my hand good-by; Mother Southern and her son toddled off; more champagne was opened, and the party apparently was really on.

The two young princes took me on a tour of the house. I saw what Judy meant about the strange pieces of sculpture. In all my life I’d never seen anything so spectacularly ugly. It was one of the Contessa’s hobbies, I was told—sculpting. The dogs too, the huge ones all over the place, and the litter of puppies in the kitchen were horrible, red-eyed, long-fanged beasts of an indescrible hideosity.