The Dud Avocado (31 page)

He opened his eyes, now gray with fatigue, and smiled haggardly when he saw it was me.

“Lie down beside me,” he said. I obeyed.

He took my hand. The electric current that always ran through it when he touched me started flowing again. I clamped down on it hard, producing a sensation as unpleasant as a short circuit, as deadly as the electric chair. Nevertheless I didn’t pull away.

He sighed and stretched wearily. “They’ve all gone, haven’t they? Every goddam one of them,” he said.

“Yes, it’s like
Uncle Vanya
or something. How do you know?”

“I tiptoed around this morning and poked my head into all the rooms. No one but you. Where are they?”

“Missy and Mac took the morning train to Paris yesterday, and Bax the evening plane to London on his way to California. Where’ve you been?”

“I’ve been around. Around and around. I don’t know, Gorce— all this rushing around, where does it get us? The rat race.” He propped himself up on his elbows and looked at me. “You’re still here though. You didn’t run out on me like the rest. Why?”

Because I’ve got to know the truth at last
, I thought. Only of course I didn’t say it. I drew a few circles in the sand with my free hand and said, “Well, you can’t really blame Missy for leaving, can you, when you didn’t show up all this time?”

He shook his head. “Missy ran out. I suppose I expected it.
She’s a silly, selfish girl. But the point is you didn’t. I knew I could count on you.” He squeezed my hand tenderly (in a way it was quite easy to react favorably to Larry; it was a force of habit). “How come you’re such a screwball, Gorce?”

“I don’t know.” I couldn’t think what to say. “I was alone a lot as a child.”

“Yeah. Maybe. I wonder how I got so screwed up? I don’t seem to be able to reconcile art with life, that’s my trouble.” He fell back limply on the sands. “I’ve been lying here thinking of joining some kind of yogi monastery.” I turned my head toward him. He was very near breaking down. His eyes were filled with tears. “I feel,” he said, “I think I feel differently about you than other girls, you know that? Closer. We’re more alike, I mean. You know what I mean? No. No, of course you don’t.”

“But I do, I do,” I said fervently. “We are closer, I do understand you.”

“You’re sweet. I wish I had a little sister like you. Christ, how maudlin can you get!” He smiled bitterly. “Well, they’ve all gone, or have I already said that? The French, the English, the Americans, the Spaniards. Missy, Mac, Bax——”

Now was my chance. “I think we’re well rid of them,” I said, making my voice harsh. “Especially your friend Bax. You ought to know something, Larry: they all turned against you in the end.
Especially
your friend Bax.”

“Yeah? What’d he say?”

“He actually tried to make me believe you told him I’d
sleep
with him down here! He said that was why he rented the villa in the first place. He said that was how you talked him into coming down.” I snorted. “Of course I didn’t believe him. It was so obvious from the beginning that he was jealous. He knew I preferred you to him.”

Larry was too clever to deny it outright. He couldn’t be sure just how much Bax had told me. “Now wait a minute, wait a minute,” he said. “Let’s not condemn Bax altogether. He’s a nice kid. I like him. And maybe I did say a lot of things to him I oughtn’t to. Man to man I may have intimated that you weren’t exactly a prig. I mean I may have said I thought he had a chance or something like that. You know how guys go on.
And he was good-looking and nuts about you.” He stopped for a moment. “The trouble is I can’t remember exactly what I did say: I forget. What’s the use of remembering anything? If it was unpleasant it was unpleasant and if it was pleasant it’s over.” He was sinking low again; I could hardly hear the last part. “But there’s one thing I want you to get clear, Gorce,” he said, suddenly leaning over me, and for a moment, I swear, sincere. “Whatever I may have said to Bax about you I knew this: you don’t have to sleep with
anyone
to get them to rent you a villa. You don’t have to do anything. You just have to be. I’ve been around and I know who does and who doesn’t. And Bax is no fool and he knew it as well as I do.”

It was the nicest thing that anyone had ever said to me, especially coming from someone who, as he said, ought to know. It was awful. Suddenly I wanted to drop the whole thing; but I knew, of course, that I couldn’t.

“Can you forgive me?” he asked.

“Of course I do,” I smiled at him. “I know you so much better than the others. You like being In Charge, that’s all; making things happen. Like Lila for instance. Teddy said the most awful things about you. Said you’d ruined her.…”

“Now that is nonsense,” he said vehemently. “That I do deny completely.…”

“But of course,” I said earnestly. “What Teddy didn’t realize was that: I’d actually overheard you and Lila last fall, when you were trying to make her pull herself together and start getting modeling jobs in Paris instead of coming down here—I mean if that’s trying to ruin her——”

He looked at me strangely. “Where’d you hear this?”

I made a vague gesture. “Montparnasse, Saint-Germain, somewhere. It was late. I was with a lot of people, I can’t remember.”

“Yeah,” he said wearily. “Yeah. I don’t know why I try to help her at all. I feel sorry for her, I guess, that’s it. But sometimes I’d like to kill her,” he exclaimed passionately. “I really would. Jesus, I can’t take this much longer—the drugging and drinking and all those stories she makes up about me——” Poor Larry, it was Art and Vice he was finding so hard to reconcile.

“Larry, darling,” I murmured lovingly, now that he was really
nervy (I still held his hand). “Larry, you remember after Opening Night when we went off to my hotel? There’s something that’s been troubling me about that night ever since.…”

“Yeah?” Did he stiffen a little?

“Yes, it’s been haunting me. I—I—never got around to asking you—you know, all that stuff about losing my passport and everything.…”

“What’s on your mind, Gorce?”

“Well, I don’t know how to say it exactly. It’s so embarrassing. It’s just.… What I mean is, well … why didn’t you make love to me that night?”

He might have been able to control his stiffening, but he couldn’t control his relief. His hand went limp in mine.

“Did it mean a lot to you?” he asked softly.

“More than anything in the world.”

“I’m sorry, darling. It wasn’t because I didn’t want to, you know that. I must have had a million things on my mind. We can change all that if you like.”

“I would,” I said, “I would very much.” Was he dumber than I thought or what?

“What are your plans for the rest of the summer?” he was asking me.

“I’ll go back to Paris, I guess.”

“Don’t go. Stay with me. We’ve got the house for the rest of the season and the Citroen doesn’t have to be sold till the end of summer.”

“Golly, that sounds wonderful!” I said. “Let me think about it. Let’s go swimming.” I had to get away from him quickly before he read my mind.

The rest of the day was anguish. I still don’t know how I lived through it—one minute emptying my mind to the point of blankness, and the next finding it reeling crazily about as old pieces of evidence fell freshly into place. Did he know I knew? How much did he know I knew?
What
did he know I knew? The worst of it was that part of me was still in love with him. Part of me refused to die; still hoped there was some simple, uncomplicated explanation that would clear up everything, like in movies.…

I had to get away, that was all. But how? First I thought I’d confront him and then pack my bags. Then I thought no, better the other way around. Then I thought, forget the whole thing and just slip off. When? How? He never let me out of his sight. He was wooing me. We went to some terribly famous restaurant for dinner, the Auberge de Something-or-other, and I might just as well have been chewing on a mess of wet sponges.

He drove back to the villa with his arm around me. I had some crazy idea of expiating my blockheadedness once and for all by “going through with it.” It would teach me the lesson of my lifetime. And then I found I just couldn’t.

“I’m so sleepy,” I said, when we got into the living room. “I’m so tired, I could drop.”

He put his arm around me and helped me upstairs. He led me to my bedroom door. His lips brushed my forehead and at their warm soft touch I almost flung myself in his arms. He held me by the shoulders. “I’m tired too,” he said. “We’ll start out fresh in the morning.” His green eyes looked into mine for the last time.

Later on, from my balcony window, as in a nightmare premonition, I stood and watched the grisly tableaux unfold: Lila in the moonlight, a breadknife gleaming in her hand; Larry quietly,
systematically
beating her up. When she was quite unconscious, he picked up her body and carried her off. I heard the engine of the Citroen start up.

I put on my dress and walked to the station. It took me three hours, but the man said I was in time for the morning train. Before I got on it I telephoned the villa.

“Where are you?” said Larry. “I’ve been going crazy with worry.”

“I’m just getting on the train,” I said. “I wanted to tell you that I know you stole my passport in my hotel room on Opening Night. I’m going to report it when I get back to Paris.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” the voice replied. “It’ll only get you in trouble, because I’ll say you sold it to me.”

I
ARRIVED IN PARIS
late that night and went directly to my old hotel in Montparnasse and washed. Then I went over to the Select. Most of the Hard Core were away for the summer. There were only a few stragglers left over at the table. I knew them hardly at all, but I joined them anyway. We had a few drinks and started off on the rounds when I realized I just couldn’t go on. It was a ride you could take only once. The streets and I looked at each other. “You
again!
” we jeered. They were too full of memories. Larry was right. What was the use of remembering? If it was unpleasant, it was unpleasant. If it was pleasant, it was over.

What it amounted to was that I, who had never been
anywhere
before, had suddenly been around once too often. I mean I’d felt like a
prostitute
, picking up those comparative strangers. Before, I would have eagerly sought them out for the pleasure and curiosity of meeting more and more people on my own hook. Now I had the sad little ulterior motive of trying to stave off my fear and loneliness.

What was going to happen to me, hanging around Paris like that? It was all such a terrible mess I didn’t know where to begin.

It had taken me just exactly one year on my own hook to get myself in a really serious mess I couldn’t get out of. Not that I didn’t have it coming to me. I must have known all along (but without
really
knowing—like I do about so many things) what Larry was all about. But—tiddily pum, I’d never faced it and now I was going to have to pay for it. If I reported the passport as stolen—if I reported Larry as the thief—he was going to say I’d sold it to him. And it would be easy enough to make them
believe that. After all, we’d been thick as thieves, to use the depressingly apt phrase, for quite some time. On the other hand, if I didn’t report him, I was surely breaking some kind of law and worse than that, I was allowing him to continue along his merry way. And why the hell should he, when just
thinking
about some of the things he’d done made my bowels corrode with rage: that first day at the Café Dupont, for instance, when he started pumping me about my lost pearl necklace (for that was the
exact
moment of his beginning to take an interest in me, make no mistake), trying to find out if it was real, how I’d lost it, how much I minded, what I’d done about getting it back, etc; or my stupid phone call to him after I discovered the passport missing, blithely saying I suspected everyone but him because he’d found it for me at the Queer Club
(found
it—man, he was stealing it—and because I was such a cretin, all he had to do was give it back to me and steal it all over again later on). Why should I let him get away with such things? Simple. Because I had no choice.

Paris was boiling hot and all my summer clothes were in that bedroom overlooking the garden of our villa in St. Jean de Luz. I put on the torn print dress that I’d run away in and the same shoes that had walked three hours to the station, and went off to see Stefan the next evening.

“My dear child,” he exclaimed, looking me up and down in astonishment at the doorway. “Such utter and abject poverty! You look poorer than anyone I’ve seen since I left Hungary.”

“I had to leave St. Jean in a hurry,” I mumbled. I wanted to burst into tears.

He sensed my distress. “Never mind, never mind,” he said soothingly. “It’s the same pretty little face. Come in.” And he led me inside.

I saw a tall, dark, graceful erect young man seated on the sofa. He wore a pale gray suit, a pale yellow shirt, pale gray suede shoes and his tie of peacock-blue was part of a silk bathrobe cord, at least that’s what it
looked like. A heady mixture, but somehow he brought it off. He looked gay and disarming. He looked like a dandy. He leaped up from the sofa when he saw me and we shook hands. He had long graceful hands and a warm impulsive smile.

“This is Maximilian Ramage,” said Stefan. But I knew he was famous even before I’d heard his name. He had an aura about him.

“Not the photographer?”

“Yes. Why?”

“But you’re so young! You’re—you’re just a boy,” I heard myself saying, of all corny things. It was true though. I’d imagined him much much older.

“Well that’s all right,” he said gravely, still holding on to my hand. “You’re just a girl.”

“We’re very lucky to have Max this evening,” said Stefan. “He leaves for Ceylon in the morning. I’ve asked him to take some photographs of you. You’ll need them for your work. Very important. Essential. Is that not so, Aiax? Well, what do you think? You will photograph her?”

“Definitely. Oh definitely.” An English voice. I remembered reading somewhere that he was originally English. But he’d been everywhere.