The Dud Avocado (21 page)

B
UT DON’T THINK
life was all passports and acting. More and more there was Jim Breit—though to this day I cannot understand what on earth he saw in me, except, of course, my bones, or my surface textures, or whatever else he happened to be painting at the time. In fact, if he ever writes his memoirs, I shall probably appear as The Girl on the Boulevard Montparnasse, or the Floradora Girl, or something like that. I mean he didn’t exactly altogether approve of me. Not that he ever said anything about it. The worst thing he ever said to me—and that was not until a whole lot later—was that I was impure. I had to admit that if anyone ever had the right to say it, he did. For he was pure all right; as pure as the driven Mobile for which he eventually gave up representational painting.

“I suppose for a girl of your sophisticated tastes—” was the way he always started off sentences, teasing me about the gay, mad, theatrical whirl, or my friendship with Blair Perrins (whom he found chi-chi and affected), or my tenuous connection with the International Set (the King of Lithuania, who revealed himself to be only a Roumanian Count, turned up one night as a Stage-door Johnny and went glooming all over me at a supper party). I mean Jim thought I was pretty wild. Yessuh, deep, deep down—although you would never have got him to say it in Paris—he thought I was
fast
. He also disapproved of the color of my hair. He thought it was just plain silly.

In a way he was the most abstract person I’ve ever met. That sounds wrong, it sounds as if I meant he was a philosopher or absent-minded. “Plastically sensual,” which sounds like God knows what, would be closer. What I mean is, when he went to see a film he was so busy looking at the chiaroscuro he never saw the actors, and when he went to my theater, he came out talking about my elbows.

“Well, how did you like it?” I asked him.

“Wonderful! I really saw your elbows for the first time. Those stage lights give your body a whole different perspective. I must come back.”

Practically every inanimate object his eye fell on gave him pleasure; a rusty tin can that had been run over by a car, a hole in a cake of kitchen soap worn smooth by his constantly cleaning paintbrushes in it, or the wildly colored woolen blanket thrown over his divan.

He was a country boy. That was it. Actually he came from Wilmington, Delaware; but he was a country boy, nevertheless. I’m sure there are some people, some basic country types, who bring the whole countryside into wherever they’re living as easily as some city types do the same thing the other way around. At least he could. And in Paris: the Paris that I had hitherto seen alternately as the rich man’s plaything, the craftsman’s tool, the artist’s anguish, and the world’s largest champagne factory, he managed to turn into a country village. His studio, unpromisingly wedged into the heart of the Boulevard Raspail, somehow became
his farmhouse; the Select his General Store; and the dear old Ancient, the Crackerbarrel Sage.

I spent deep, peaceful afternoons there in that farmhouse-studio, posing for him throughout the long, cold winter with the rain outside and the fragrant warmth of glowing wood-fires burning and mixing into exhilarating smells of turpentine, canvas, and oil paints. Gradually it began to seem rather an anti-climax just to get back into all my clothes after lying around with them off for so long, and I found I was staying longer and longer in my dressing gown after the painting session was over, while the light faded, the firelight flickered, and we sat drinking white wine.

“Oh God. You’re so beautiful.” He said it in such an absolutely heartfelt way that I knew he was no longer being abstract. He leaned forward and for the first time I felt his breath on me. He smelled like new-mown hay. I kept my eyes level with his and waited … when his face came too close for me to see it clearly I closed them and let him kiss me. “Let’s go … let’s go.…” he whispered.

The trouble was of course that what Jim really,
ideally
needed at that point was some nice, simple, outdoor, bohemian girl; brown-haired and with rain in it. As I said, I don’t know
what
he saw in me, but then I don’t know what on earth I saw in him either, for that matter. It seemed incredible that I, who had spent all this time in Paris, adrift, so to speak, in an uncharted ocean of raging passions, should be knocked over by so small a wave. And yet he was, I suppose, my first real relationship.

The disagreement we always had—quarrel would be too strong a word—was about my refusing to go and live with him, move in with him under his roof. There’d always seemed to me something so dirty-sweatered and dirndl-skirted about living with a man you’re not married to. I mean it was too intensely domestic for one thing; the next thing you knew you were darning socks and cooking. And to be quite honest there were some phone calls I wouldn’t have wanted to take with him in the room and some that frankly, I couldn’t.

But Jim was a bundle of virtues. He was sweet, he was sensitive, he was intelligent; he was humorous and solid; he was simple
and straightforward. He was good around the house, he
liked
to fix doorknobs and electric switches, and he knew all about his car. He was polite and he was stable (paradoxically I was most attracted to his stability—it intrigued me as much as anything), he was—let’s see, have I left anything out? … Gaiety. Nope. He wasn’t gay. But what he was most deadly earnest about was his art. He was constantly trying to “purify” it. And Judy was right. He
was a
good painter. I felt it personally from being around his paintings so much. Most paintings just disappear off the wall for me after a while, but these were paintings you wanted to have. And a lot of art dealers felt that way about it too. He exhibited rarely—at the Salon d’Automne and a few others, but he wouldn’t sell anything yet; he felt he wasn’t ready.

“What’s the matter?” he asked me one night after the theater.

“Nothing.”

“Yes there is.”

“I want to go to the Ritz,” I said, already uneasy at the suggestion.

There was panic in his voice. “Why? What do you want to do that for?”

“Because I feel the need to sin. Quelle façon de parler.”

“To
sin?
”

“Oh God.” How to explain? “I don’t mean it like that. I mean … oh.… Luxe … satins and silks … leopardskins and peacocks’ tongues. Silk—that’s what I want rubbing against me. I feel so woolen all the time.”

A pause for the struggle with his soul, and then reluctantly “O.K., I’ll take you there——”

“No,” I said sadly. “No, it’s no good. It wouldn’t be any fun. You couldn’t afford it. I only like spending rich people’s money.”

We went on eating in silence.

“I’ve got to tell you something,” he said finally. “I haven’t been honest with you. I
am
rich. In fact, my father is
very
rich. One of the richest men in Delaware.…”

This was so much like something out of the
Student Prince
that I started to laugh, but when I looked at his grief-stricken face I had to stop.

“Du Pont?” I asked gently.

He nodded miserably.

“The
President?
”

He smiled wanly. “No, it’s not that bad. I mean he’s on the Board. I’m … running away from it. I’m trying to live it down.”

I looked at his checked wool shirt (one of three), his muddy shoes with flapping soles, and his Army ducks, and nothing could stop the twinge of annoyance snaking around my stomach. How typical, I thought irritably. But of course it all made sense now, it all fitted in; his unwillingess to sell his paintings yet, and his determination to live like everyone else on the Left Bank. What worried and depressed him more than anything, he confided in me, quite seriously, was that when he’d told his family of his decision to go abroad and paint, having two other sons they hadn’t taken it too badly. He would have felt much safer being cut off without a penny. And I suppose there
was
some kind of rough logic in his assumption that to begin being an artist, you had to live like most artists begin living.

At any rate I felt sorry for him and I said, “Never mind, I don’t care about the Ritz. Really I don’t. Let’s go to the Select.”

Gosh he was funny about his money. All very rich people are, I suppose. Suspicious, afraid of being used, afraid they’re not being loved for themselves and all that. But Jim was funny in his own special way. For instance, while he would gladly have bought me six dozen dry martinis in a row at one of the Left Bank cafés, the Deux Magots, let’s say (and they would have cost exactly what they did at the Crillon), or a trip around the world on a tramp steamer, or every bit of equipment needed for a ski trip or underwater fishing, I could never have got out of him a single fur, or a single jewel, or a jar of fresh caviar.

You couldn’t blame him in a way; he just wasn’t the type, I mean he was small and mild and serious and utterly unlike all the grandeur and pomp and splendor that attaches itself to great wealth. He stretched his own canvases and he drank beer and his car was a baby Renault. But it wasn’t out of meanness. I mean he paid for all the meals that we had together and willingly “loaned” me money at the end of each month when I went broke, which I seemed to be doing more and more. And for a
very curious reason. Before Judy left, she’d told me about the sales that all the big French fashion houses have during the winter, and she gave me cards to all of them. So there I was secretly going around buying glamorous, slinky French models like crazy, and all they did was just droop about in my wardrobe.

Winter rained itself into spring. Those plays I was in finally ran out of audiences and the theater closed down. Now that Jim and I were seen around more and more in public, it became obvious to the Hard Core that we were “going together.” They approved. Not that they were ever, of course, so crude as to betray it by word or gesture; but they approved. They approved of both of us; and they approved of people whom they approved of choosing their lovers from other people they approved of within the circle. White of ’em.

As a stamp of
their
approval, other young couples began having us to dinner. It was just at the time (and it may still be, for all I know), when the Aubergine, or Fried Egg-Plant school of cooking was getting such a grip on beginners’ cuisines, and I remember very few dinners without that harmless but insipid vegetable staring up at me from the main dish, often quite unadorned except for a sliver of melted cheese on top.

Still, I might not be so testy about those meals today if I could have just got around to
eating
them. But the amount of jumping up and down required on the part of both hosts and guests to get the meal assembled and in eating order kept my stomach in a constant turmoil. It had rather the same effect on the conversation, which settled down only after the last dish had been cleared away and we women were busy at the sink washing up. For the female guest, the washing up was then followed by a sort of Homage to the Household Gods, rites which involved unqualified and highly vocal admiration of everything in sight. After that we were allowed to listen to the menfolk for a while and after that it was bedtime.

Jim always enjoyed these dinners immensely. He loved arguing Art Theory, and never more so than with Ray de Wald, the Popcorn King Abstractionist, who was something of a nut.

“We must have the de Walds to dinner
here
next time,” said

Jim to me one afternoon after we’d spent a week end in their windswept hut just off the coast of Brittany.

“Why can’t we take them out?”

“It’s not the same.”

“What about the cooking?”

“What do you mean what about the cooking?”

“I mean I can’t cook.”

“You can’t cook … why, good Lord, Sally Jay, I thought every girl knew how to cook.” He looked at me, his little Floradora Girl, and gave me a wry sort of some-women-are-made-for-only-one-thing smile. Then he shook his head hopelessly.

“Marion de Wald cooks,” he said grimly. “She does all the cooking and looks after two kids as well.”

I tried to remember one minute that whole week end when Marion and I weren’t either feeding people, or clearing up from doing it, or preparing to do it again. And presumably she never stopped doing it. But I couldn’t quite see why just because she did, I should. I mean, here was I practically fresh out of the egg, everything was so new to me, and here was everybody telling me to stop
driftingy
and start living in this world; telling me to start cooking, and sewing, and cleaning, and I don’t know what. Taking care of my grandchildren.

I sat in the studio lost in thought, watching the evening get darker and darker and colder and colder, unable to move. Finally I roused myself and went to look for Jim. I found him wandering aimlessly around the kitchen, peering every now and again into one of the empty cupboards, hoping as if by some miracle to find that particular one filled.

“What is it, Jim?” He looked so forlorn.

“I’ve … I’ve already
invited
them to dinner on Thursday.”

I took a deep breath.

“O.K.” I said. “Which is the stove and how do you light it?”

Shopping for food in Paris, as I soon discovered—but not soon enough—called into play words I’d never even heard before, much less used; a dish towel, a bottle opener, a can of anything, a pound of anything—all the weights and measures, I hadn’t any idea how to ask for them. It was so different from the simple
“Colgates, s’il vous plait,” or “Est-ce que vous avez d’autre espèce de savon aujourd’hui?” that I was used to.

Any moron can cook a steak, I kept saying to myself, as I went about my work in the kitchen early Thursday evening. I was not only going to give them something to get their teeth into, but I was going to serve it to them all by myself.

Everybody was terribly kind and co-operative at dinner and it took all four of us ceaselessly moiling and toiling from kitchen to studio and back again to organize and consume a simple meal of soup, steak and onions, peas and potatoes and salad. And even then the process was simplified by my just leaving the loaf of bread, just simply forgetting it and leaving it at the bottom of the shopping bag. Coffee was Nescafé, and at the end I said to Marion as I was about to drop, “Let’s for heaven’s sake leave the dishes, the woman who comes in can do them tomorrow.”