The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [110]
Judy stuffed something under her pillow and turned. Jim hadn’t changed but Judy had. Judy had changed almost beyond recognition. Her eyes were remote and withdrawn and gazed out from her wasted face at me, almost dreamily, without recognition. Finally she made an enormous effort and brought herself back. She leaned over and swallowed a pill. I felt the warm sunlight coming through the window. I forced myself to look steadily at the grotesque mortality of hair, eyebrows and teeth. I felt the earth turn.
“Judy darling, how are you?”
“I’m fine.”
“You look fine.”
“Oh, Sally Jay, what fun! They’ve found you. I was so afraid they wouldn’t. You went to St. Jean, didn’t you? How was it? I want to hear all about it.” Her eyes, so dead a moment ago, were blazing feverishly. “Who’d you go down with?”
I told her.
“Larry! You don’t mean Larry what’s-his-name, that wonderful boy you were so crazy about who directed you in those plays?”
“Yes.”
“How heavenly for you!”
“It was.”
“Tell me all about it. What did you do?”
“Oh.… Swam. Sunbathed. Went down to the beach. You know, what everybody else does.”
“But what did you see? Who did you meet? What happened?”
“Judy, let’s talk about you for a change. You’re the one that’s really had something happen to you. I mean—I mean—you’re married.”
Her eyes wandered to the Mobile on the bureau. She smiled peacefully. “Yes, isn’t it strange,” she said awesomely. “I got married. I never thought I would. I still can’t believe it. It all happened so quickly, and then getting sick again on top of it…” She broke off. “Please let’s talk about you. Please tell me all about it.”
I didn’t know what to do. Keep her calm, they’d said. I was only exciting her by withholding information. And all the time it was such agony being there, and looking at her, and trying to behave naturally.
I told her about El Wheero and she smiled and said, “Poor Sally Jay, and then what happened?” and I told her about our being movie extras and she laughed a little, but she wasn’t satisfied. I felt I was cheating. What did she want? A bedtime story? No, I was wrong. She wanted more than that. Judy was in danger and she knew it. She must have known it all her life, and that was why she was the way she was. My comings and goings were much more than bedtime stories to her. They were real. All the while she kept repeating “And then what happened?” what she really was saying was “Run for my life!”
Run for my life.
What made me think of that phrase? A loop in time took me back to my childhood. “Run for my life” … and then that nightmare again. It was all tied up somehow with that nightmare and that desk and that station … I had been given some task to perform. I mustn’t fail. I pulled myself together: Sally Jay, cartoon-strip animal, about to embark on another series of adventures.
“Of course I’ve been saving the best for the last,” I said.
“What is it? Oh, what?”
“The reason I’m back in Paris now.”
“Tell me!”
“Well. One day in the South of France I was introduced to the photographer Max Ramage. You know who I mean. And the next thing I knew he’d taken lots and lots of pictures of me, because he said I was the Typical American Girl. Well, of course I was flattered to death, but I forgot all about it until a week ago, when I got an urgent wire from him telling me to come to Paris. It seems the pictures had come out terribly well and he’d sent them around to Paris-Match and Life Mazagine and places