The Dud Avocado (24 page)

Then she says would he mind running upstairs and getting her coat for her, and he says, yes, he would mind very much, and then we all have to wait around again until he thinks better of it and goes up and gets it.

Then she says just a second, if we’re going into town she has to comb her hair, and she wanders upstairs in slow motion and stays there for about an hour combing it. Or putting on lipstick. Or just looking at herself in the mirror.

Then we go out to this cheap restaurant that we’ve found in town and Larry gets even with her by flirting with the waitresses in a way that would cause a sailor from Marseilles to blush, and Missy just gets more and more plantation, and magnolia, and Southern belle. Then we all go back and play bridge.

Missy won’t play with Larry any more. She’s jes’ not used to being spoken to like that, merely because she forgot what trumps wuh. So I play with her, and Larry plays with Bax, and as bridge has an insidious way of getting under your skin by the time the evening’s over we’re lined up solidly against each other; boys against girls.

Even Bax has begun to crack under the strain, and lets go with a few sharp retorts from time to time. But so far, poor jerk, he’s always at the opposite end, trying to pull one or the other of us out of our frantic gloom.

May 8
Wednesday

Today was something of a miracle, I suppose.

It began unpromisingly enough with the usual steady rain and bickering around the breakfast table, but suddenly, by lunch time, it became apparent that Larry and Missy were getting along for a change. They were in one of their sexy moods, which lasted right through the meal and afterward as they lay around the living room kissing each other and holding hands all over the place.

Bax went off to chop wood, and I went upstairs to my room and picked up the oblong rug off the floor and flung myself on the bed and took a nap.

I dreamed vividly of Jim.

Woke up at seven feeling rotten; rotten in the stomach and in the throat. Heavy, leaden, out of tune. Looked out of the balcony window at the lights in the harbor.

Raining gently.

If it doesn’t stop I shall go mad.

We ask the people in the shops every day when they think the rainy season will be over. They shrug. Now they’re getting quite excitable when we ask them. What can they do about it anyway?

There was another bridge game this evening. But obviously something
has
happened. Missy and Larry played together.

May 9
Thursday

Have been watching our house
chat
for some days now, a real phony if I ever saw one. Noticed him hanging around the garden the first couple of days we got here making sure we were staying on. Then one morning—he must have waited hours for us to get up—he came barreling over to the back door just as Bax and I got to the kitchen, wriggled in through the screen door and deposited a token mouse at our feet. Bax threw the mouse away and the
chat
went right back and retrieved it. A much-used mouse. We threw it in the garbage pail and gave the
chat
some milk. He seemed to like it just so-so. All right, nothing to go mad over—all right for a start you know, but not really what he was accustomed to from the house. I don’t know how he managed to convey his fairly complicated chain of reactions, but he did. Let us know he was strictly a filet mignon and strawberries scraps
chat
. We did the best we could for him and he finally went away. Next morning he was back again without the mouse, but I think he’s got it back anyway. The mouse seems to have disappeared from the garbage pail—not that I’ve examined it too closely.

So like it or not we now have this house
chat
all over the place
making it clear in no uncertain terms what he likes and doesn’t. He rewards our cooking efforts by hanging around
inside
the house—we can’t keep him out, he knows the place so much better than we do, probably owns it—making exaggeratedly hammy and wholly unconvincing but totally
unnerving
leaps into the air to indicate “mousing.” There aren’t any mice here except for his. But then I don’t think he’s really a
cat
either.

He was gone yesterday.

I think he leaps out of bed in the morning, zips himself into his old fur cat-coat, gets the mouse out from the box under his bed and goes to work in the area.

If he comes into my room I shall scream.

Saw something funny today that I got a big kick out of. I mean it made me laugh and laugh.

The
chat
was looking longingly at this stupid little sparrow perched on one of the stone jars and he finally made a melodramatic lunge at it and this idiot bird flew himself smack into a telephone wire. I mean he must have been flying for years, he ought to know his way around the air by now.

Hate birds. Hate cats too. Wish every bird would meet every cat and then every cat meet every dog. Don’t like dogs much, either.

May 11
Saturday

Still raining.

Larry and Missy just don’t appear any more, except occasionally for meals.

Here is the story of Bax’s life: he was born in Canada. He was raised in Canada. He went to Toronto University and has never been out of Canada before. He doesn’t know what he wants to do, but would like it to be something artistic.

May 12
Sunday

Bax loves everything in Europe, he says, because it’s so old. Look at those walls, look at that door, he keeps saying when we
drive around the old village. He’s crazy about their texture. He keeps taking pictures with his new Rolleiflex in the pouring rain. Perhaps, he says, he’ll become a photographer.

Larry is painting Missy now. Looks about like what you’d expect it to. This Master of all Arts kick he’s on isn’t coming off at all.

Jim now.…

Started to write to Jim the other day. Couldn’t think of anything to say so I tore it up. But I think maybe I do really love him. If I still love him as much in a couple of days I’m going to phone him and tell him I’m coming back to Paris.

May 13
Monday

Rain.

Breaking point.

May 17
Friday

On Monday the 13th, thirteen days after our arrival, at exactly 9
P.M.
(the grandfather clock in the hall had just struck), I was staring wildly at the carcass of a chicken we’d eaten for dinner and I suddenly went berserk.

I picked up the carcass and threw it across the room at the cat (hit him too), and then I bit the top off a pear and flung it against a wall like a hand grenade, and then I kicked over Larry’s easel. I noticed them all standing well back watching me uneasily, more in sorrow than in anger sort of thing, and this annoyed me so much that I broke a couple of plates as well. Then I started to laugh. So then they all got really worried and Larry shoved me
down into a chair, pinning my arms tightly to my sides, and asked me what the hell was the matter.

I said I wanted to get the hell out of there and he said they all did and that we’d get out just as soon as it stopped raining and I said, “And
then
what are we going to do?” And he said we were going to do exactly what everybody else did on vacation—go down to the beach and swim and sunbathe and take it easy and I looked at each of them and said, “Is that
all
you want to do?”

Larry: Yes.

Missy: Yes.

Bax: Yes.

Me: No ! ! !

So they all asked me what
did
I want to do, and I said I didn’t know—gaiety, laughter, song-and-dance, shoes in the air. And they asked me what that meant and I said, “Oh, just have a
good time.
” And they said how, and I said I didn’t know exactly but brother, not like this.

So then Larry said, “Christ, the trouble with you, Gorce, is that you’ve got no inner peace.” So I said,
he
was a fine one to talk. I said it was all right for him to have inner peace, in the circumstances, but what about me? I could go drown myself for all he cared. And then I lost my temper and said that he’d got me into this and he was damn well going to get me out of it. So then he turned wearily to Bax and said, “O.K. Take her to Biarritz. Give her the bright lights.” And Bax said quickly sure, sure, he’d be glad to, anything, anything, and I felt like such a fool, but anyway I went upstairs and got out of my jeans and put on a dress.

Then Bax and I drove over to Biarritz; and we almost didn’t get into the Casino because I hadn’t got a passport. We finally signed a paper both swearing that I was over twenty-one and they let us through.

I’d never gambled before.

Christ, it’s boring. I don’t know what I thought it would be like, but I thought it would at least be more convivial. I mean you just sit there putting down chips and nobody speaks to anybody else. I played roulette because that was the only one I could understand. I lost all the time. Bax, standing around making all kinds of disapproving noises, only had the effect of egging me on to further disasters. So now I’ve lost my whole allowance for this month and will have to ask Bax for money every time I want to buy something, even if it’s only something cheap like sun-tan oil.

Yes! Sun-tan oil! That’s what I said. Because—miracle of miracles—the sun has finally come out.

I can’t help feeling that it’s entirely due to
me
that our luck has broken. I mean the whole episode at the Casino had such a discouraging effect on Bax that he just wanted to slouch on back to the villa as quickly as possible. But now that I’d really
really
hit rock bottom I found myself full of bounce.

So I talked him into taking me to a night club and we found this divinely sympathique little cave, all barrels and dripping candlewax, called the Club de Caveau. It was practically empty when we came in, and the proprietor, a gnarled little Englishman who’s lived in France so long he speaks Cockney with a French accent, was terribly sweet to us. Asked us who we were and what we were doing down there, and so on. Promised us that the rain would stop the next day (it did). Said it was off season, of course, so nothing much was going on for the time being, except for a couple of American battleships anchored off the coast for maneuvers, and an Anglo-American-Franco-Spanish company, who was setting up to shoot a film about a Bullfighter right near us in a little village. He said the Co-ordinating Director and the Art Director came into the club every night along about this time and as I was an actress, he’d sort of see that I got to meet them if I liked. I almost fell off the bar stool for joy.

Sure enough, dead on schedule, who should come rolling into the place but the Art Director (Italian) and the Co-ordinating Director (Hungarian) of this Anglo-American-Franco-Spanish film company. Gosh, they were nice. The Co-ordinating Director especially—Stefan Something-or-other—is a great charmboat in a twinkling, gray-haired, pink and paunchy way. I just love sexy fat men. I really do. They make me feel so—oh gosh I don’t know—so feminine. Anyway, he’s a real jazzy kid, this Stefan. Full of beans. And we hit it off right away. Almost before we’d maneuvered ourselves into position, he said he was sure there’d be something in the film for both Bax and me. Bax said firmly that I was the one that acted, not him, but Stefan wouldn’t hear of it. He said naw, we were
both
to come down to the village in exactly ten days time to meet the Casting Director, and he’d have it all sewn up for us. Made us promise we would. He uses
this mock-American accent, makes fun of himself and everyone the whole time, but I know he means it about the movie. Anyway, I’m going to show up. “I’m crazy about these two kids here. A couple of real sweet youngsters,” he confided to the proprietor through his cigar. Then he bought us a few rounds of drinks. I felt great, just great. On top of the world.

All at once we had an invasion of the American Navy. Then things really started moving. They were in terrific form. The little French jazz band started playing (they turned out to be not half-bad, really très zazou) and as I was practically the only girl there, I danced with all the sailors.

If anyone had put it to me an hour before that I would suddenly find myself in the midst of a bunch of exquisitely mannered seamen whose whole purpose in life was to request the pleasure of my company for the next dance, or see to it that I was constantly supplied with cigarettes and lights and ash trays and pretty compliments, I would have been frankly incredulous (only I wouldn’t have used that phrase). But the boys, before coming ashore that day, had apparently been given one of the stiffest chewings-out in their naval careers about behavior becoming to the uniform and a long list of do’s and don’ts relating to their treatment of civilians, with the result that I might have been at one of those gracious Southern Balls Missy’s always going on about, with all those well-brought-up Southu’n genne’lmen in full chivalric flower. Which just shows you.

Isn’t it funny, I had so
definitely
planned to write Jim when I got back that night. In fact the letter had been forming itself in my mind the whole way out to Biarritz. But when we did get back it was five o’clock in the morning and I just flopped into bed. And when I woke up the next afternoon the sun was out and I’d forgotten every word of it.

Now we eat breakfast every day in our bathing suits on the patio, the early morning air pungent with aromatic smells of food and flowers, and the coffee tasting of the sun.

I sit on for hours afterward staring idly at the snails clinging to knife-blade leaves growing in our garden. Sometimes I pick them off. They make a sucking noise and there’s a small round wet spot where they sat. Are they eating the leaves or just bal
ancing on them? Everything shimmers and hums around me— the sun and the sand and the sea—a pale sky high above and gravel crunching under foot—breezes blowing butterflies.

The sun burns through the iron garden chairs and insects fall into my coffee cup and try to crawl out. I get dizzy and close my eyes and open them again on the rest of the garden—mimosa and large tousled magenta roses with bright red buds, orange gladioli, a pine tree dead as if strangled by the morning glory vines climbing up it, its long tan needles blowing in the soft warm wind like hair.