The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [112]
“Never mind, it wasn’t important. All the same, I’m glad you never got it.” He put me down in Montparnasse and I scribbled down my new address. “Will you leave a message at this hotel when I can see her again?”
“I’ll get in touch with you after the operation.”
“Good luck,” I said, and walked quickly away.
FOUR
I WALKED AROUND PARIS for four days, trying to decide whether to give myself up at the American Embassy or just lie back and wait for Larry to get me. For there wasn’t a shadow of a doubt in my mind that he was in Paris by now, tracking me down. That was logic. I’d insured that by my smart-aleck phone call to him at the railway station. The thing to decide was what scared me most—the American Embassy and what would happen when Larry counter-charged me with selling him the passport, or Larry himself and what would happen when he caught up with me. I walked and walked until my shoes gave out, and then I bought a pair of moccasins and went on walking. I stayed as far away from Montparnasse as possible, avoiding everyone I knew and eating in restaurants I didn’t know. I sat in strange cafés. I went into practically every cinema I passed. I slept—or tried to—at my new hotel. The routine became fixed: Toss all night. Wait for the cinemas to open. Go in. Sleep in cinema. Lunch. Walk. Talk to myself. American Express (no word from Uncle Roger—obviously something was very wrong at that end). Another cinema. Back to the hotel. Go mad.
Every night great stinging welts would rise and burn all over my body, causing me to squirm and wriggle in an agony of itching. My nerves, I thought desperately, they can’t take it much longer. I’m cracking. Then in my mind I would start off on the dreary trek to the Embassy. Fear and revenge would get me one third of the way. Moral principles another third. And then I’d get stuck. Either I’d imagine myself sent to jail as an accessory to the crime or I’d be shot for treason. Sometimes I would allow myself to believe I might be pardoned, and then the thought of actually betraying someone I actually knew would start me sliding back again. And all the time my skin was getting rawer and rawer from my scratching and my reasoning fuzzier and fuzzier from lack of sleep.
It’s not real, I’d say over and over again. It can’t be real. Judy lying in the hospital, probably dying. Larry pimping and thieving and beating up girls. Me in jail. How did it happen? We’re all nice people.
And then the evening of the fourth day I knew—just like that —I knew quite calmly and without any fuss that I was going to the Embassy the next day. I was tired of waiting, that was all. I was bored. I made up my mind as I walked into the cinema. The film had already started. It was a good film and I gave it my undivided attention. When it was over I walked out and looked up at the marquee. Le Jour Se Lève was the title. “Amen to that,” I said. “And now for a good night’s sleep.”
To my surprise the itching started up almost as soon as I got into bed, and more fiercely than ever before. Only this time, instead of tossing and turning and grinding and winding, I sat up quickly and turned on the lights. Bed bugs. The little bastards, slap-happy from their all-night blood feasts, were at last too bloated to crawl back into the mattress fast enough.
I slept on the floor for the rest of the night. I slept until noon. Then I went into a great big comfortable restaurant and ordered an enormous lunch. My Last Meal. There was a worm crawling lazily around my salad.
God, how I hated Paris! Paris was one big flea bag. Everything in Paris moved if you looked at it long enough. There were tiny bugs working their way into the baskets of ferns on the wall and a million flies buzzing around my table. In fact, all those shrewd, flashing glances, upon which the Parisian’s reputation as a wit is almost entirely based, are motivated by nothing more than his weary, steady need to keep on the bug-hunt.
I lit a Gauloise to calm myself, and suddenly out of the corner of my eye saw an ant inching toward me on