The Dud Avocado (29 page)

So why cry? Why carry on like this?

When did all those nightmares begin? My mind keeps going back to that Christmas vacation, sophomore year, when I had an English paper to write and spent most of my time in the Public Library. People kept mistaking me for a librarian. They kept coming up to me and asking me for books and things. I thought it was maybe because I didn’t wear hats and at first I was merely annoyed. Then I became frightened. I somehow became obsessed with the idea that the reason they kept mistaking me for a librarian was because that’s what I really was meant to be, and instinctively they knew it. It was sheer fantasy, of course. I mean they probably asked dozens of other people as well and I just didn’t notice. But it started to prey upon my mind. Then I began having this nightmare. Actually I have it so often I’ve even given it a name. It’s called the Dreaded Librarian Dream.

It’s all very vague. It takes place in sort of a vast hall, in the
center of which sits a girl behind a desk, or rather a circular counter, which completely surrounds her. It’s funny about that desk: I’ve seen it somewhere before, I know I have, although it’s quite unlike any desk I’ve ever seen in a library. Anyway, the closer I get to this girl, the older she becomes, until she turns into a middle-aged spinster librarian. Then I see that it’s
me
. People keep coming up to her from every direction asking her for books. They are all going somewhere. In fact it isn’t a library at all, it’s more like a station. Everyone is in a hurry. They are all going somewhere except me. I’m trapped. One of the worst aspects of this dream is that from the very first time I dreamed it I’ve known,
within
the nightmare, so to speak, that it was one I’ve had before—an old, old nightmare of long ago. That gives it its special ageless, timeless, hopeless quality. When I awaken from it my space urge is upon me stronger than ever.

It was this space kick that made me leave Jim in the first place. It’s this space kick that’s going to turn me into the spinster librarian if I don’t stop.

Oh God, there’ve been so many people since I came to Paris. Teddy and Larry and Claude and Jim. Bax and Wheero and dozens and dozens of casuals. I’m so tired. What happens when your curiosity just suddenly gives out? When the will and the energy snap and it all seems so once-over-again? What’s going to happen to me five years from now, when I wake in the night (or can’t sleep in the first place, like now), take a deep breath to start all over again, and find that I’ve no breath left? When I start running again and find I can’t even put one foot in front of the other? Then, from outer space, that librarian who is going to be me, who
is
me, that dreaded librarian from outer space who is always waiting for me, always ready to pounce, is going to take over. And I’ll be cooked. If I don’t stop it.

Stop it!

I wish I could get away from here.

Ah’ll pack mah tru-hunk,
A-and make mah getaway.…

I got my allowance for June last week, so there’s nothing to stop me.

July 1
Monday

D
IDN’T LEAVE LAST
week end after all. Decided it would be silly to run out on them with only one more day’s shooting to complete. And I’ve got to hand it to them, they finished right on schedule. As a matter of fact now that it’s over, I’m kind of sorry it is.

I met a wonderful old man with a donkey last week on the hills. I first noticed him because he looked so authentic fouleing around, and that’s the hardest thing in the world to do. I mean most people look like exactly what they are, like people who’ve been hired to put on funny costumes and mill around a while. But this little old guy really had the knack. He somehow managed not to make his aimlessness pointless. Un vrai artist.

I noticed him the first take on Monday morning. He nodded to me as we passed each other on the hill and I suddenly found myself in another world. And what’s more I knew what I was doing there. I had suddenly become a young maiden from the village below and I was going over the hills to visit my sick grandmother. (Little Red Ridinghood. Must have been the basket they gave me.) And I knew what he was doing there too. He was the Itinerant Tinker—whatever that means. Anyway, after the take we fell to talking, Tinker and I, and he told me he’s been making a living for years now, he and his donkey, hiring themselves out to the various movie companies. He was so old and gentle. I hope he wasn’t a great Comedie Frangaise actor fallen upon old age.

I learned something from him, I hope. Lesson
I
: No matter what you do you’ve got to try to do it well. Otherwise it’s un
bearable. Those first weeks on the film wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d only realized that.

I’ve been thinking. How many things have I ever done well in my life? Done
really
well? Done wholly with all my attention and concentration focused on the doing? None. Not school. Not college. Not Teddy. Not Jim. Not this.

Concentrate, Gorce.

(I have an attention-span of about two minutes long.)

Perhaps I ought to concentrate on Bax. He’s really the most interesting person of us all now—or at any rate he’s in the most interesting position. A month ago he found himself being dragged unwillingly into this movie deal and now apparently he’s such hot-stuff, Hollywood’s sent for him in a hurry. They want him there by the end of the month. He’s going, too. And what’s more, he’s happy about it. It’s merely a matter of accepting this new responsibility as calmly and seriously as he accepted the leadership of the Sea Scout troop or the Camp Fire group or the organizing of us in this villa. Shows great strength of character, I’m sure. And yet I go through the motions of kissing him a million miles away.

The film unit is folding now. Mac’s job is over. The rest of the bullfighting sequences are going to be shot in Spain in the bullring and for that Wheero doesn’t need any English.

Stefan surprised me by coming around to say good-by to me— me personally—today. He’s going back to Paris to co-ordinate things there. He gave me his card and told me to look him up. Said he might be able to help me get a job in the French Cinema. Said they showed more imagination in casting. Pinched me and left.

Larry and Missy are still vaguely fighting. Larry: Larry the Cipher. El Ciphero. What makes him tick? I still don’t know. It’s a hopeless passion, but I’d still take one Larry for a hundred anyone elses. He belongs to my club, I think. Les Compliqués.

No word from Jim and I guess I didn’t expect any. I guess it’s all for the best. I guess that’s that.

Slept late, late, late this morning, and I’m going into Biarritz this afternoon to get my hair done. Finally. I’m going to have it dyed silvery blonde, very pale, very subdued, because of my
great sorrow. Then we are all going on the town tonight to celebrate the end of our movie careers—and the beginning of Bax’s.

July 1-2. Somewhere between
Monday and Tuesday. Late late late.

Our lives seem to be developing along the lines of Greek Tragedy—star-crossed and pursued by Furies. I’m not exaggerating. We ran into some old sparring partners tonight and it turned out to be a head-on collision. And here I am early in the morning again so charged up by all the clash-crashing I can’t possibly get to sleep.

As a rule I’m rather fond of excitement. Raw, rollicking, riveting and toute cette sorte de crap, it has a way of forcing me out of myself and at the same time dragging me back in that I find truly exhilarating. On the whole I should say it’s a fine thing; a stepping-up thing, a leading-to-action-at-last sort of thing. But is it an end in itself, I begin to wonder. I mean couldn’t one have enough of it—or, to put it more plaintively—can’t
it
have enough of me? I wish it would stop hovering over me like some privately commissioned thunderbolt.

When I recall the peace and harmony of the first part of the evening (a million miles away by now) it all seems such a shame. We were having such a good time. Old war-scarred veterans that: we’d become by then, we had very nearly mastered the art of being together for over a certain length of time without slitting one another’s throats. We were not only on to one another’s foops and foibles, we were actually attempting to use this knowledge to smooth things over rather than hot them up, which was the usual game. Or—I don’t know—maybe we were just in a good mood.

Anyway, in preparation for the celebration Missy had washed and ironed and even sewn a button on Larry’s shirt. And Larry had let Missy take her time getting ready. He held her bag for her and smiled indulgently while she wandered back and forth around the room collecting the things she needed to put in it. He even went so far as to get down on his hands and knees to look for a stray handkerchief. He wrenched open the doors of
the old Citroen for her and creaked them shut behind her. He helped her up and down stairs as gingerly as if she were a basket of eggs. We had, in short, returned to the loving couple of our Middle Period.

Bax, for his part, had at last shed his irritating is-this-really-such-a-good-idea-how-will-we-all-feel-in-the-morning-someone’s-got-to-apply-the-financial-brakes commonsense attitude, and his attempts at frivolity were positively touching. Mac the Whack also came along, transformed beyond recognition by his three weeks of regular anxiety-free sponge-free meals, and was happily and lavishly throwing around his own not very hard-earned pelf. As for me, I was concentrating on Bax like a mad thing. I was determined to concentrate on him if it killed me. And he was being so foolishly, transparently grateful, it really was worth it. “Let him think you’re leading him on,” I told myself severely. “Lead him on. What’s the difference? He’s leaving soon anyway.”

It was a wonderful warm summer’s night. Presque parfaite. Everything in the sky that could be was out: Northern lights, Southern lights, milky ways, moons, planets, stars, shooting stars, whole galaxies of solar systems winking and twinkling eons away in their own heavens. Uncle Roger would have gone out of his mind.

As we drove off I remember looking back at the old villa with affection. We hadn’t done so badly. We’d made friends of one another, made jokes of one another, had even—for better or worse—made things happen to one another. We were still young and gay and carefree. We had lived there all alone for two whole months without it burning down.

It was impossible to resist such a night. No one tried. Peace and harmony, as I said, prevailed throughout a ludicrously happy, ludicrously expensive meal at the Relais de Something near Hendaye. Then we went back to the Club de Caveau, where we’d first met Stefan and where, you might say, it all began. The little Englishman there remembered us kindly. Further celebration. Then we drove up to Béhobie to that other bar and I found I was so mellow I was even able to think about Wheero with hardly a twinge of bitterness.

Then we went up to that great suave hotel on top of Ascain (three star, crossed forks, crossed eyes, the works), and cavorted among the dead dummies.

Then we decided to drop into the Spanish flamenco boite. The lights were down when we got there and the singing and dancing had begun. Undistracted by Wheero, Angela, and the whole hideous holocaust of that other night, I found myself really concentrating on the flamenco. The dancers were very young and supple and sensuous, and the singers, passionately declaiming what the young folk were up to, middle-aged and fat and richly experienced. The contrast was delicious. Sexy beyond words—beyond
wahrds
, as Angela would say.

I was interested to discover I could be so roused by a floor show. I was beginning to think there must be something wrong with me. I mean I simply don’t know what to do about a Nude Show. I just can’t seem to behave naturally in front of them. The thing is, I don’t get much of a charge out of them in the first place, so any act I put on is bound to be a phony. But I still haven’t discovered what you’re supposed to do. I mean if you stare straight ahead with a bright smile pasted across your face you’re being a prig, and if you look at it critically and say “They’re really not so hot are they?” you’re being jealous, and if you fling yourself into it and say “Oh, golly, doesn’t
she
have a lovely body” someone looks at you very peculiarly and says “Hmm. You like
her
do you? That’s
very
interesting,” and if you just relax and look bored, you’ve committed the greatest crime of all; like looking bored at a bullfight, I imagine. So it was wonderful not to have to worry about whether I was acting sufficiently moved by the flamenco. I was sufficiently moved all right; stirred to the depths of my erotic soul.

The lights went up. We all sighed and smiled and ordered ourselves another round of chartreuse. And then, just as everything was so absolutely apple-jack dandy, our old buddy-buddy the Contessa, that perennial glad rag doll, disentangled herself from the cackling crew at a nearby table and came over to us and sat down. A warm greeting to Larry, brief appraising glances at Bax and Mac, blank stares for Missy and myself, and
she was off—jabbering away at Larry exactly as if we weren’t there. Comme d’habitude. Like ole times.

“Does she write?” Mac whispered to me eagerly.

“Only on bathroom walls,” I replied in a perfectly normal tone. “No,” I corrected myself. “As a matter of fact she sculpts. Bathroom sculpture.” I’d found a word for it, anyway.

“You are making a great mistake about that girl friend of yours,” the Contessa was saying tensely to Larry. She might have been talking about me. In fact I thought she was talking about me; I wouldn’t put it past her. “One always enjoys making the acquaintance of any friend of yours, dear boy, but that girl is simply impossible. She is a Professional, no?”

“Don’t be silly,” snapped Larry with a vigor that made me want to cheer. “She’s what they call a crazy mixed-up kid. There’re millions of them. Haven’t you met any before?” I still thought they might be talking about me. “What’s the matter with her anyway?” he asked. “What did she do? I told her to look you up because she didn’t know anyone in Paris and I thought you might help her.” (Naïve, oh Larry, Larry, naïve.)