The Dud Avocado (9 page)

All at once I rolled over onto my side. For no reason at all, I was in the middle of a black depression. I turned off the lights and lay back in the darkness, tired but wide-awake, sleepy but unsleepy, too sleepy to read, not sleepy enough to sleep, my eyelids pinned back from my eyes, my spine rigid. I remained like this for I don’t know how long until I became aware of something else that was furthering my discomfort. I was beginning to be hungry. In no time at all, I was ravenous. Cursing myself for having forgotten to eat supper, I turned on the lights and looked at my clock. One o’clock in the morning. This made me at once more hungry and more tired. The hunger won. I rolled up my pajamas legs, pinning them with the safety pins I found on a skirt, put on my raincoat and went out.

At the corner of my street I could see the lights of the new nightclub that Shugie Jackson, the colored singer, had just opened. She was a friend of mine and I was dying to see what it was like inside. Sternly I drove myself past it, past the statue of Balzac in his bathrobe (presumably unable to sleep either), past the Rotonde where I could hear the strains of the Hard Core at their carousing. I bunched my fists into my pockets and dashed across the street. At last safely past the other temptations of Dôme and Coupole, I came upon a tiny, steamy, all-night café which still had up its last year’s decorations. Snowballs, Santa Clauses and champagne bottles were painted on the glass doors and windows in honor of their New Year’s Eve Réveillon and to commemorate the Quatorze Juillet, red, white and blue streamers hung from the light fixtures on the ceiling. The joint, even at this late hour, was jumping. I sat down at one of the few empty tables, and ordered a hot chocolate and a croque-mon-sieur, reflecting moodily that cheese would probably give me bad dreams if I ever did get to sleep. Slowly, I realized that my table was becoming the focal point of attention. A lot of men began hovering around, looking me over rather carefully, not to say boldly. Two of them came right over and thrust cigarettes at me. It was the way they were
thrust
, rather than offered, that suddenly made me come to.

When the third man strode up, I told him to go to hell and leave me alone. Instead, he sat down next to me and asked me what I thought I was doing there in that case and a lot of other stuff which, thank goodness, my limited knowledge of argot prevented me from understanding. Desperately, I looked around for help. Everyone was minding his own business. I saw that there wasn’t another woman at a table who wasn’t a prostitute. My friend sat on, glowering at me suspiciously. Instinctively, my hand flew up to my coat collar. I clutched it close to me protectively. When I discovered that it was already buttoned, I tore my hand away in anger and the button, of course, came away. So the coat flew open and there I was—unmasked in my striped pajamas. Oh
killing
stuff really, haw, haw, haw. That’s what I mean about being appropriately dressed. My clothes. I mean, is it:
worth it?
I ask myself.

The old boy at last had my number. “Merde, ces fous Américains,” he mumbled to himself disgustedly, and spat on the floor. Then he left. But I stuck it out. As a point of honor, and also because I was starving. I assumed, in turn, my most haughtily aristocratic, my most toothily intellectual, and finally, my just plain most humble expressions. None of them made the slightest difference. I was still the greatest phony of them all—the unavailable prostitute.

In an atmosphere of open hostility, I gobbled up my sandwich and hot chocolate as fast as I could; the hot chocolate burning my tongue, a revelation burning my soul. I had always assumed that a certain sense of
identity
would be strong enough within me to communicate itself to others. I now saw this assumption was false. Tout simplement, in a tarts’ bar, I looked like a tart. I tried to cheer myself up by thinking that after all this was really a very good thing for an actress. But it was depressing, anyway. Not so much the thing of looking like a prostitute. I mean, except for the inconvenience of the moment, I found
that
rather thrilling, but the whole episode was forcing me to remember something that I’m always trying to forget and that is, that in a
library
as well, I’m always being taken for a librarian. No kidding. My last Christmas in New York, I had an English paper to write over the vacation, and there was this public library I used to go to, and no matter
where
I sat, people were always coming up to me and asking me where such and such a book was. They were furious too, when I didn’t know. It was eerie. I began to feel that I actually
was
a librarian. The wood growing into my soul and stuff. I suppose I am rather an intellectual.

I left the café and walked down the empty street, keeping close to the buildings, hiding in their shadows. I didn’t want any more trouble.

In the hush of the night, I reached the Dôme, dark, chill, and still, tucked away for the night. The chairs and tables were piled up against the entrance, and the awning folded away; they had literally rolled up the sidewalks. So that’s what it meant, I thought, to roll up the sidewalks. I began turning this over in my mind, again and again, in that obsessive way that told me
sleep was near, when all at once two quarreling voices pierced the air.

“Like hell I will!”

“Like hell you will! You’ll do exactly what I tell you.”

“Go — yourself.” A female voice, American and very sullen. I hadn’t heard the phrase since I left college.

“Thanks, I’d love to. Just tell me how,” was the snappy comeback: as good as any, it seemed to me. I made a note of it.

The footsteps kept approaching. They would be upon me any moment. I cowered behind the nearest pyramid of chairs, and from this vantage point, watched the night cough up its second revelation.…

There under the light of the street lamps, the disembodied voices revealed themselves as belonging to Larry—Larry and a girl. I held my breath, and crept farther into the chairs. When I peered out again, the girl was leaning against a chestnut tree, swaying a little and tugging at something around her neck. As the necklace broke and the pearls, catching the light, went spilling onto the pavement, bouncing along the street and into the grating around the chestnut tree, she began giggling wildly; it was an absolutely frightening sound. She made no attempt to recover her pearls.

“Let ‘em go, let ‘em go,” she quavered through her giggles. “Girl I shared the cabin with coming over said never, never wear pearls when you travel. Said pearls are for tears. Well, I’m traveling, you bastard. I’m traveling …” and giggles turned to sobs.

Larry was tender, comforting her. “There now. Please. That’s a good kid. Now, baby, don’t upset yourself. Wait a minute.” He disappeared out of my sight, on all fours, I imagined looking for the pearls. “There now,” he said after a while. “That’s all I can find now. Come along. Let’s get some sleep. You want to look your best when you meet those people tomorrow.”

She jerked away from him. “Let’s get it straight once and for all, you bastard. I’m not working while I’m over here.”

She had moved farther away from him, into the light, and now I got my first good look at her face. It was another jolt. A big one. To my astonishment the girl with Larry was that ravishing model Lila, the one that was always coming up to visit
him on the week ends in Summer Stock. She didn’t look very ravishing just then, though, out there in the lamplight at three in the morning, tear-stained and so much the worse for liquor. She looked a mess, in fact. I felt sorry for her. She seemed so sad and a long way from home.

“Be your age,” Larry was saying. “You can’t stay in Europe without working, who do you think I am? And it’s not so easy to
get
work over here. Believe me. I worked damn hard to get these people interested in you. How can you run out like that? I tell you there are hundreds of good-looking babes around. American too. It’s coals to Newcastle.”

“I came to see some bright lights,” she whimpered. “Now that I’ve got this chance to go to Biarritz, I’m going whether you come or not. It’s all paid for. This guy … Aw Larry, I’m young. I just want to have some fun.”

“O.K. I give up. Go to Biarritz, for Christ’s sake and have fun. You manage your own life, you do it so well. You’ll end up back in Sheldon, Iowa. You’ll end up in the gutter. I don’t care. But don’t come back to me. I’ve tried to straighten you out for the last time. Come on. I’ll take you back to your hotel.” He began to look for a cab along the boulevard.

She followed him. “Oh baby, don’t be angry,” I heard her say. “You’re not jealous?”

“Jealous, no; just sore that I wasted all this time and trouble.”

“I’ll be back in a month.”

He’d found a cab by then. “Don’t tell me about it. I’ve washed my hands of you. Hurry up, get in.”

“Don’t bother, I’ll find my own way.”

“Oh, get in,” he said wearily, “you don’t even know how to pronounce the name of your hotel.”

I shut my eyes, and when I opened them again, the cab had gone. I stayed crouched there for a while, trying to make sense out of the little slice of life I’d just witnessed. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t dig the relationship, for one thing. Anyway, she was off to Biarritz, so I wouldn’t have to worry about it for a whole month. Meanwhile.…

Making sure the coast was clear, I dodged back to my hotel. I was dead tired and fell immediately into a dreamless sleep.

R
ETURNING FROM REHEARSALS
one evening about two weeks later, I arrived in my room just in time to catch the telephone ringing. There at the other end, purring away into my receiver, fur all over his smile, was Teddy Visconti—God rot his blackened heart, the Machiavellian Monster. Only of course I didn’t know any of this at the time. All I knew then was that I had to think for a moment to remember who he was.

I was rather cool to Teddy at first. I hadn’t recalled our previous encounter with much pleasure, and I couldn’t imagine ever really wanting to see him again. Systematically he set to work disarming me. Beginning with his congratulations on my good fortune (he’d read an item about the American Theater in the
Herald Tribune)
, and his best wishes for my success, he went on to sweep the floor with himself for his disgraceful, unspeakable and totally unjustified behavior at our last meeting. By the time he had waltzed into a heady tirade on the saintliness of allowing bygones to be bygones and finished up with a passionate proposal of eternal devotion (along strictly platonic lines), I was pretty well softened up.

But the
main
purpose of his call, said our wily old gift-bearing Greek, sailing to his climax, the main purpose was to wonder whether we, that is
both
of us, Larry and myself
of course
, would be kind enough to allow him to arrange a small dinner party in our honor that Saturday—a sort of send-off to our joint venture. It was, in fact, simply the only way he could think up to secure my forgiveness. I couldn’t refuse—could I? It would be too unkind. He would be giving it at his old apartment, the one I knew in the Boissy d’Anglas—he was moving out, it held too many memories for him, but he had specially secured the landlord’s
permission to stay on that week end if he had the party. He knew that the whole thing was ridiculously sentimental, of course, but that was the way he was, and what could he do? My head was spinning by now from all this rich, powerful prose, and apart from everything else I looked forward to the chance of spending an evening with Larry on a basis other than professional. So into the trap I marched, eyes shining, mouth open, ears flapping. I do remember thinking it all a bit odd, somehow, after I’d hung up. That’s the story of my life. Someone’s behavior strikes me as a bit odd and the next thing I know all hell breaks loose. I don’t always understand other people’s motives. I will repeat that for my own benefit, if you don’t mind. I don’t always understand other people’s motives. I wonder why? I’m very bright really. For instance, Doctor Long gave me an A in Seventeenth Centch. Eng. Poetry at college, and he was known to be one of the toughest professors we had. He’d been teaching there for eight years, and he’d never given anyone above a B plus. But he gave me an A. A straight A too—not minus.

“So
that’s
the plot,” said Larry when I told him on our way over to the party exactly who Teddy was. “I’ll be damned. You had me thinking this was some official diplomatic function we were gracing. Some project of the Italian government. I don’t know what I thought.…” He paused for a moment to consider, crossed his legs, jiggled his foot and sent the air hissing through his teeth. It made him seem more like a steam engine than ever. “Come clean, Gorce,” he said finally. “I smell a rat here somewhere. I remember this type Visconti. He’s the one you were going to die without—isn’t he? So what am I doing here? Maybe some kind of bait? Come on, you can level with me. Who am
I?
The jealous rival? Heavy father? Let’s have it.”

His analysis of the situation was so staggeringly wrong, I could only shake my head in wonder. I had been terrifically excited when Larry accepted the invitation. I had counted on the sight of an impressive discarded lover like Teddy, in an atmosphere drenched and scorched with his hopeless passion, to stimulate Larry’s interest in me. I wore for the occasion an evening
dress limp with sophistication, and an expression to match—or so I hoped.

“As long as he doesn’t decide to take a pot shot at me,” Larry went on. “These Corsican bandits are a hot-blooded bunch you know. They don’t stand for no messin’ around with their wim-menfolk.”

“Larry, you haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. In the first place he’s a Florentine nobleman, not a Chicago gangster. In the second place I swear there is absolutely
nothing
between Teddy and myself any more. It’s all over. I haven’t even seen him for a month. Poor thing,” I sighed gently, reminiscently, trying to slip us into the mood. “I’m afraid he didn’t take it very well when I threw him over. As a matter of fact, it all happened on the very day that I ran into you at the Dupont— it just—just …” And I completely lost track of what I was going to say. Somehow the word “Dupont” made the whole incident with Larry come flooding back, and I simply couldn’t follow any other train of thought. “What were we talking about?” I had to ask. He was wating for me to go on.