The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [107]
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