The Dud Avocado (3 page)

“I can see you’ve made quite a study of them,” I snarled scornfully.

“I get around, Gorce, I get around.”

And you, I told myself, are just one of the mob.

It was no joke being in love with Larry, I could see that now; it really hit me for the first time. The waiter had brought us fresh drinks and was pouring the water into my Pernod, and ordinarily this would have had quite a cheering effect on me—its changing color usually reminded me of chemistry sets and magic potions, but now the cloudy green liquid looked merely poisonous and the strong liquorice smell reminded me of nothing so much as a bottle of Old Grandma’s Cough Remedy, hold-your-nose-and-have-a-piece-of-chocolate-quickly-afterwards. I found that the previous drinks had turned icy cold and heavy in my stomach. I felt terribly sober and the inside of my mouth tasted sour. I sighed and picked up the chits. 120 francs.

“It’s cheap anyway,” I said, giving him the money. I sat staring at the drink, trying to get up enough courage to down it.

“What’s eating you, Gorce? Come on, let’s have it.”

His words rang out like coins in the emptiness and I suddenly noticed how still everything around us had become. The students had stopped surging and gone to lunch; the Arab venders were asleep in the sun; and the waiters, even as we watched, stopped waiting and began drifting back to their stations where they came to a standstill—or as near a standstill as they ever got— still rocking gently back and forth on their heels: heartbeats of perpetual motion gently rocking back and forth, their napkins fluttering in the breeze.

The sun shone on: the shade of the awning vanished in the hot, white, shadowless midday. In that blaze of heat I was loving Paris as never before.

And there sitting opposite me, stretching himself luxuriously in the sun, his eyes lazily examining his half-empty drink, was Larry, the one I loved the best … sensationally uninterested.

All at once I sat bolt upright and let out a yelp.

I suddenly remembered what I was doing in that arrondissement in the first place. I had been in fact on my way to the Sorbonne to meet my lover, who was attending an International Students Conference there for his Embassy. And at that very moment, as if I myself had conjured him (though I supposed I must have unconsciously registered him in the corner of my eye) he came striding along the boulevard large as life: Teddy—Alfredo Ourselli Visconti himself, looking suave and Latin and livid.

I glanced at my watch. Wow! I was just an hour too late. Then, stupidly, I tried to hide my head with my hands. It was too late, of course, and the worst of it was he had also caught me trying to hide. Being a Latin, seeing me there with a young and handsome man, he naturally put two and two together and for once in his life arrived at the right answer about me.

In a panic I knew that he must not sit down with us; if he did, he would stay and Larry would go. And that would be that. There wasn’t a moment to be lost. Without explanation, I dashed over to the street corner to intercept him.

“So I’ve caught you at last, have I?” he said, in that half-serious half-teasing man-of-the-world voice he always reserved for matters of the heart. Whatever guilt I felt vanished in my exasperation.

“We can’t all lead a triple life as successfully as you do,” I replied coolly, and saw a really desperate, haggard look come over his face. “He’s an old, old friend,” I added hastily. “He’s brought me news of home. Very important news.”

“I see,” he said stiffly. “Very well. We must talk of all this tonight. At the Ritz?”

“Yop.” He always brought out the succinct in me.

“Shall we say at eleven o’clock then, as usual?”

“Not later?” He was always up to a half an hour late.

“It may be difficult to get away,” he said, “but I shall certainly try to be on time if I can.”

He looked so pleased I could have killed him.

If I hadn’t been in such a hurry to get back to Larry, I would have told him then and there, as I’d been vaguely planning to
do for about a week, how hellishly bored I was with all his sophisticated maneuvers. It was partly out of necessity, of course, having both a wife
and
a mistress, as well as myself, that he jammed and juggled his days and nights with arranged and rearranged rendezvous. But that was not the only reason he always turned up so late. There was another one, as I suspected when he formed the habit of meeting me around eleven at the Ritz bar: it was that he simply refused to do anything in a straightforward way. He felt that his unpunctuality increased his mystery and desirability.

The unfortunate thing was that he had reckoned without my naïveté. I was honestly so thrilled at being at the Ritz in the first place that I didn’t mind how long I was kept waiting. There were so many marvelous new things to look at and so many marvelous new drinks to experiment with, sazaracs and slings and heaven knows what else, so that at first I never even noticed the passing of time. But then as the novelty wore off and I took to bringing magazines and novels along with me, I noticed how really put out he was when instead of discovering me ceaselessly scanning the horizon for him, he found me deep in
Paris-Match
.

As I hurriedly said good-by to Teddy, meekly apologizing for not meeting him at the Sorbonne, and promising to see him at the Ritz that evening, I had a sinister premonition of how embarrassing an homme fatal could be when his charms are no longer fatal to you.

I turned round to find Larry quietly taking in the scene. When he caught my eye he began grinning from ear to ear. I felt my ankles wobble under me.

“Watch out,” he shouted as I walked toward him, “you’re going to knock over that chair!”

But of course it was too late.

Larry was really enjoying himself now. He laughed and laughed when I returned. “Gorce, oh Gorce,” he chortled, neighing like a barnyard in uproar, “if you’re his mistress, and I
think
you are, you’ve skipped a grade, honey.” A waggle of his forefinger. “That’s not for first-year tourists, that’s for the second-year ones, you know.”

At this point, I now realize, there were several things I could
have done. For instance, I could have nodded sheepishly or good-naturedly, or whatever one does with “good grace.” I could have said, “Well, there you have me, I guess,” and he would have said, “Now never mind, and what was it you wanted to tell me?” and I would have said, “Nothing, forget it” and he would have replied, “Well, cheer up, see you around sometime” and he
would
have, I suppose—sometime. Our Paris, after all, was really very small. And I would have at least been spared one of the most embarrassing moments of my life. No honestly, I don’t think
anything
has embarrassed me so much since.

It’s crazy but I wonder if all the rest of it—and I mean
all
the rest of it—would have happened if our meeting had ended then and there and in that way. Who knows? But, anyway, seeing myself and the affair with Teddy suddenly through Larry’s eyes, and realizing that whatever I had done, however original I had thought of it as being before, I was only remaining strictly within the tourist pattern, and having Larry
know
this—well, at the time it was too much to bear.

To have an affair with a man, and one’s very
first
affair at that, just because he picks you up under rather romantic circumstances on the Champs Élysées, takes you to the Ritz and things, and above all, because you’re impressed with the fact that he has a wife
and
a mistress already, what could be more predictable? Tourist Second-Year Disorganized.

No, dammit, I wasn’t going to be stuffed into that category no matter what. Not in Larry’s mind anyway.

“Here’s my advice to you, and you’re old enough to give it to yourself,” Larry was saying sagely. “Stay away from married men. I mean it, stay away.”

“How
can
you think such things of me? It’s not that way at all,” I moaned. “We love each other. There’s no wife in this at all. How
could
you think such a thing of me? There’s something much worse though. A crackpot at the Italian Embassy who’s always hated Teddy. Do you know what he’s done? He’s broken into Teddy’s apartment and burned some important papers so that Teddy got into the most awful trouble and he’s been recalled! He has to leave any day now. God knows if he’ll ever be able to straighten this out. It’s torture. We can never meet except
briefly like you saw us now, and in the open, as if there were nothing to it, for fear of getting that man on to
my
trail. Lord knows how he’d use me against Teddy! All I know is that Teddy is going back to Italy and that I’ll probably never see him again.” I was getting worked up by then. “And I love him so much, Larry, I really do. What shall I do?” Lies, from beginning to end.

“You poor kid,” said Larry. He said it so nicely, so sincerely. I was absolutely staggered by the difference in his tone. I was feeling more than a little sorry for myself at this point, but I was also feeling more than a little elated at the way I had cleared myself of the dreaded tourist charge, at the same time getting rid of Teddy so neatly, or at any rate disposing of him in the near future.

“We’ve been desperate these last months. We try not to see each other but it’s no good. I’ll … I’ll die when he goes.” By now I was really moved. My eyelids stung and tears began to roll slowly down my cheeks.

“Poor kid, poor kid,” he kept repeating. How nice Larry was now. Not mocking, not bored, not restless. I looked into his eyes, soft eyes, interested and sympathetic. He gave a short little laugh of encouragement. It stirred me to my roots. I took a long heady swig of Pernod right into the hot molten sun, and brother, that was my undoing.

“Take it easy, take it easy,” he was saying. “Everything’s going to be all right.” He took my hand away from my drink and held it gently in his own. By now I was maybe drunk, I don’t know, but in such a state of uncontrolled passion that the mere touch of his hand on mine charged through my body like a thousand volts.

You know how it is. Some people can hack and hack away at you and nothing happens at all and then someone else just touches you lightly on the arm and you come … yes, I mean that’s what happened. I mean I came.

I remember looking down at the table and seeing my fingers clinging and curling around his. I remember being quite aware of this but at the same time quite unable to stop myself. Then I put his hand up to my cheek and caressed his knuckles with my
mouth. A split second suspended itself into infinity in the air while my heart pounded furiously and I kept kissing and kissing his knuckles. And then it was over.

I jerked my head back sharply. I tried to pull my hand away from his. He held on tightly. His voice was very close to me, mocking and smooth. “Why you little fraud.” Very softly, very clearly. “You shabby little fraud. You’ll die when he goes, will you? Now how do I know you’ve been lying?” He was quite simply torturing me.

My eyes dug a hole in the table, unfortunately not large enough to crawl into. “You
don’t
know——” I began but the whole thing was too much for me. There was one moment while I counted the seconds and then I resigned myself. With a sigh I forced myself to look at him and he looked back at me hard and down and through and I yielded up without a struggle my badly kept secret.

“Isn’t it awful?” I said, my voice faltering into a miserably insincere little giggle.

He held his head on one side. He was, I could see, overwhelmingly puzzled. And so, in a word, was I. Had playing with fire for so long without getting burned heated me up for this almost spontaneous combustion? Why, why,
why
, was the question burning in his face. As there was no reason that I could figure out, he wasn’t going to get an answer. And maybe he didn’t really want one anyway. At any rate he let go of my hand. And his motor started up again. The implications of these acts should have made me feel worse but somehow they cooled me down, and I reached around for my tattered cloak of carelessness. I said casually, “I saw this stinking little Art film last night. All about the simple life on a barge up and down the Seine. How about that? Not a bad idea.” I was really talking to myself. In times of stress when I’m not coming out of things too well the simple life has a tremendous appeal for me. Picking strawberries off a deserted wind-swept coast on the Atlantic Ocean when I was seven is an image I frequently and yearningly return to.

We began talking of other things. Although I had been the one to make such a fool of myself I was the calmer. It was Larry who was flapping about, searching for conversation.

At one point I noticed his eyes had found their way back to my bosom again. “I think that dress needs something or other around the neck, you know,” he was saying helpfully. “Haven’t you got anything?”

“I had a pearl necklace,” I answered, by now really wishing he would go. “I lost it or something. Anyway it’s gone. The hell with it.”

“What a shame. It wasn’t real, I hope?” he asked with a sympathy he couldn’t feel.

“As a matter of fact it was. Who cares? The hell with it,” I said. I was really getting annoyed at the trivial turn in the conversation.

“Oh come now,” he persisted. “You don’t often lose things, do you?”

“All the time,” I said defiantly, wondering how long we were going to toss this around. “I don’t like possessions. I travel light so I can make my getaway.” Bitterly I was thinking that he was going to incorporate this, too, in his tourist research. O.K. O.K. I was it all right. I was practically the prototype. Getting drunk, having affairs, losing money, losing jewelry, losing God knows what. Whoopee, twenty-three skidoo, and Oh you kid!

“You don’t give a damn, do you?” he said finally.

“No. I don’t.”

A long pause. “Gorce, I’ll tell you something. You know what? You’ve got to stop all this drifting. You’ve got brains and looks and talent. Things could really happen to you. What’s become of your acting? You weren’t bad. You’d be sensational if you could project that off-beat thing that’s you—really you. And what are you doing instead? Wasting your time bumming around with a tourist-trap Casanova!”