The Dud Avocado (23 page)

Now that I’ve thought about it a bit, I realize that even under ideal circumstances (if there is such a thing in traveling) I do not travel very well. For someone who likes to get around as much as I do, I really travel quite badly. Planes frighten me, boats bore me, trains make me dirty, cars make me car-sick. And practically nothing can equal the critical dismay with which I first greet the sight of new places.

Hated France when I first got over here. Got on the train at Le Havre, and looked out of the window and thought it looked so exactly like America, I wanted to cry. The scenery flying past, the hills and barns and cows, were just the sort of things you keep coming across through a train window in the States. The Untrained Eye, I told myself, training it enough to see that all the signs were written in French, at the same time letting the untrained nose get its first exotic whiff of garlic from my traveling companions, and the untrained stomach its first attack of French dysentery. But still, these were the only differences. I asked myself finally what exactly did I expect France to look like? No answer.

I hate plans. Hate even listening to people telling me about theirs. Plans spoil suspense, I say. Don’t believe in looking where I’m going. But that first day, trapped in the train speeding toward the complete unknown, it did just strike me as the teeniest weeniest bit careless that for all my insatiable longings and dreamings and pinings to get here, I knew nothing more concrete about my beloved France than what was painted on the screen in my nursery: children playing with hoops in the Bois de Boulogne.

And if the French countryside failed to impress me, boy, my first glimpse of Paris failed even more easily. Succeeded, I mean. Succeeded in not impressing me. I found an American Express man at the Gare and asked him to give me the name of a hotel and he directed me to one called the Hôtel Lord Palmerston. Lord Palmerston! Real French. Real French comme ambiance aussi. It’s probably the only perfect replica of a Victorian mausoleum still standing in Paris. There were a couple of busts of Victoria and Albert in the lobby, and it was full of dusty red plush and ancient frock-coated hotel retainers whose ambition was, if not actually to displease you, at least to depress you. Chamber pots everywhere and brass beds that sank and rocked when you lay down on them and floors that sloped away sharply when you tried walking on them. Just what I needed after six days on a boat and one on a train: pitching beds and lurching floors. Deathly ill for first fifty-two hours. Finally had my life saved by un petit médecin du pays working wonders with magic vials of brown fluid.

So I recovered and lived to see the Champs Élysées.

And the rest is history. But the moral is I should have been prepared. I probably could have been prepared but for this terrible, tragic flaw in my character.

So here I am at it again. Poor old Gorce, c’est toujours la même histoire.

On the other hand, if I always knew what I was going to do, would I do it? Would I have left Paris and Jim like that to go goofing off in a broken-down Citroen in the company of two lovers and a stranger, Michelins in hand, all eyes to the front trying to guess at the next good cheap restaurant and the next good cheap room? And believe me, at sixty miles an hour, they’re plenty hard to guess at.

I suppose I was kind of disagreeable on the trip down. I complained steadily. At first I tried to stop myself and then I didn’t try to stop myself. And then I couldn’t. Of course I was encouraged by the others. Since it was only by my consenting to come along in the first place that we were there at all, they naturally felt I ought to be the honored guest. And by God, honored guest I was determined to be. The sweeter they got the
more difficult I became. I took it out on Larry especially. Once, after we’d spent hours trying to disentangle ourselves from some large industrial town, entirely on account of his faulty map-reading, I let loose on him such a volley of abuse that he just kind of sat there with a stunned smile on his face, not knowing what hit him. I almost felt sorry for him.

About Bax. If there’s one thing that hasn’t been misrepresented about this trip, it’s Bax’s good looks. He does look exactly as described. He
is
a rugged, handsome Canadian. A great big broad-shouldered ruffly black-haired crinkly brown-eyed Canadian. Clean-cut. The great Outdoor Boy.

I think he just hasn’t got the imagination to look any different. He’s what they call a Natural Leader. You can see him as a kid becoming the Chief of his Camp Fire Group or some such because everybody thought he looked as if he should.

We treat each other like a couple of minor United Nations officials, Bax and I. Very protocol, very wary.

We ran into a snag our very first night out. It was early evening, and we were just coming up to some mournful little town, one of Nature’s Airports—Dax, or Digne, or something (we’d argued so much about the route I’ve forgotten which)—when we were stopped by the police. The next section of the main road was being closed down for retarring.

“Great,” I said to Larry, quick as a flash. “Just great. Christ.”

Larry parked the car on the side of the road and went into town to see what was going on. When he returned he was terribly excited: “Say, the whole town’s turned out en fête to watch them fix the road. I’ve never seen anything like it. Man, you can have your Pamplona Ferias and your Bordeaux Vendanges. This is it! How many people do you know can say they’ve seen an honest-to-God local
Tar
Festival?”

This was supposed to cheer me up. I said it was an experience I would gladly forego, but he made us get out of the car and have a drink at a café on one side of the street, so we could see what he was talking about.

We asked the waiter how long he thought it would be before the road was open. He said about four hours. Too late to try to hit the next town. So then we asked him if he knew of a good
cheap hotel there, and he said all the hotels on
our
side of the street were full up. The only one left was on the other side.

So we were stuck.

We were all dead tired, our hair stiff with dust, our bodies aching from the inactivity of a long day’s drive. Missy and I went to wash up in one of those outhouse-chickenhouses and nearly fainted dead away from the smell.

Then we had a really lousy meal at the café and sat around and watched and waited. The town really seemed to go mad over the tarring. They were all there all right, lined up on both sides of the street—priests, peasants, police, the works. It was mad.

What with one thing and another it was about one o’clock du matin before the road was crossable and the crowd had finally dispersed and the town settled back into its Dignity (or Daxiness) and we were finally able to fall into the hotel whose dank and dismal beds we’d been so desperately awaiting.

Anyway, next day over the mountains, through the valleys and down to the sea. Bayonne, Biarritz, Bidart, Guétary, et nous voilà à St. Jean.

It’s a perfect villa. A heavenly villa, a bougainvillaea villa on top of a hill, with boxwood hedges and stone jars full of geranium plants and terraced gardens growing wild in the back. Roses and gladioli and morning glories. And zinnias and cannas and an indescribably blue flower called plumbago. Pine trees and oleanders and mimosa. Birdbaths. And stone steps leading down to the sea.

“O.K., Gorce, start grousing about this,” said Larry as we drove up the driveway. “It’s still raining,” I pointed out. Which was true.

We left our bags in the car and went inside to explore. It’s a large airy villa with the calm fresh feeling of summer houses. It has stone floors and long French windows. We wandered through, opening doors and peering out of windows, trying to decide which bedrooms each of us wanted.

Mine has a balcony and looks out onto the sea. Every night I stand there watching the lights along the shore glisten and twinkle in the rain.

“It’s cold,” I said, when we met downstairs again in the large
living room. “Let’s have a drink to warm up.” There was another reason why I wanted one. My own private celebration. A few minutes before, alone in my bedroom, it had burst upon me that for the first time in my life I was in a house—actually in a whole house—without a single grownup! I felt I could have walked on air. On water I mean. I couldn’t possibly have explained to the others what it was all about, this exaggerated sense of liberty. Frequently, walking down the streets in Paris alone, I’ve suddenly come upon myself in a store window grinning foolishly away at the thought that no one in the world knew where I was at just that moment.

But Bax said no, we couldn’t have a drink just then; there wasn’t time and there wasn’t anything in the house either. Said we could have some wine at lunch if we liked. Said he’d been making a list of the things we needed. Asked who wanted to go shopping with him then. He was very fair about it all, true-blue leader that he is. Said he didn’t want to seem to be pushing us around, but didn’t we think that the smoothest way to get things organized was for us to go on a rotating schedule of chores? Two of us doing the shopping, two the cooking, and two the cleaning, was the way he saw it. But there was no hurry, he said. We could talk it over at lunch.

This was the last straw.

“You mean we haven’t even got a cook or a housekeeper around the place?” I moaned, the joy of freedom promptly evaporating. “I’ll go shopping with you, Bax,” I said grimly. “I’ve got a telegram to send.”

Larry muttered, “Spare us,” under his breath, and they all three exchanged glances.

I saw that I’d gone too far.

“Bax and I are getting the provisions, they’ll be too heavy for you girls today,” said Larry decisively. “You can do the lunch. Get yourselves unpacked while we’re away.
Un
packed,” he added, looking at me. “And none of your tricks, Gorce.”

They went out and got the supplies. And we unpacked. And Bax chopped wood and built us a fire. And then we had lunch. And after that we started teaching Missy how to play bridge.

That night, when we were ready to go to bed, we all bor
rowed warm sweaters from Bax and filled the clay hot-water bottles we’d found in the kitchen and took them to bed with us, where we slept under the rugs of our bedroom floors.

One thing about the four of us: you never know who’s going down next. The morning after we arrived, for instance, I came waltzing in to breakfast determined to be a good sport and make the best of it, rain and all, and who should be deep in the sulks but Missy. So now it was up to us three—the new us three—to pull
her
out of them.

When we were doing the washing up together that evening I finally asked her point-blank what was eating her.

So then she asked me point-blank if I’d ever been to bed with a man. I blinked and said what did she want to know for and had
she?

She said no.

This surprised me. She looked like such a voluptuous sexpot, with her blonde hair falling all over her face, and her slow, melting movements. She kicked off her shoes and sat on a kitchen stool wiggling her toes, sucking on a plum, and staring at the floor in an embarrassed kind of way. You could see she wasn’t lying.

I asked her again why she wanted to know about me and she said she wanted my advice. She said she didn’t know what to do about Larry.

I asked her how she felt about him.

She said she thought he was real nice. She said she thought she was really in love with him, but she wondered if he wouldn’t lose respect for her if she gave in to him. I said, what made her think
that?
And she said her mother.

I said if I were her I’d jump in first and decide whether he was losing respect for me or not afterwards, but she said she knew her mother would jes’
die
if she ever found out. She said Southern mothers were very strict with their children and made them go to church every Sunday at home.

So I asked her what her mother thought she was doing right now, and she said oh, that house parties were different. They were perfectly all right. She’d been on dozens of them in the
South. Only Southern boys
understood
Southern girls. They understood you could do everything
but
.

So then I said, well, if she had all these qualms about it maybe she’d better not, and she said but the trouble was she
wanted
to.

What a world, I thought. Nothing but sex as far as the eye can see.

My own feelings were getting pretty mixed-up.

I love Larry, I really do. I love him no matter what. But all this was nothing to do with me. You can tell from seeing them together that nothing’s going to stop what’s supposed to happen from happening. Besides, he’s already told me that he’s in love with her, so I’ve more or less got used to it.

However,
one
of the things I thought was, that if they did start to have a real affair, maybe I’d be able to get over him.

On the other hand, there are plenty of reasons why I hope they don’t. One of them is Bax.

I don’t like the way he’s looking at me.

I’d made it quite clear to Larry when I said I’d come along, that Bax wasn’t to get any ideas about me. And Larry had said, no, absolutely not, he’d straightened him out first thing. But I still don’t like the way Bax is looking at me. And the atmosphere around those two, Larry and Missy, is so heavily charged with sex
now
, I can imagine what it’ll be like
afterward
—and I mean for me and Bax as well.

The Lovers keep having little showdowns, followed by periods of heavy necking, followed by more showdowns, and so on. And then Larry goes off to his lousy poetry and painting, and Missy goes off to her room to suck on her plums, and Bax goes off to his wood to start chopping it, and that’s what’s been going on here for the past five days in the rain.

May 7
Tuesday

Rain.

Missy is trying to make a Southern gentleman out of Larry. She won’t get out of the car unless he opens it for her, and she won’t get into it unless he does, and we all stand around in the
rain waiting for him to make up his mind. The doors of the car have got stuck with the damp and it’s like trying to get in and out of a safe, anyway.