The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [40]
Sometime in the afternoon the phone rang.
“Il y a un Monsieur Bright qui vous attend tout de suite, Mademoiselle!” My concierge shrilled impatiently in my ear, irritating me about twice as much as she usually did.
The name meant nothing to me. I barked back that there was some mistake and hung up. The phone rang again.
“Hello. Look, this is Jim Breit,” said the voice quickly, “Jim Breit—we see each other around here quite a bit—I’m a friend of Judy’s and——”
“Oh gosh, of course,” I suddenly remembered. “You’re the good painter.”
“The what?”
“Nothing. Sorry. But you want Judy, don’t you? She’s on the floor above—four—oh—five.”
“No, I want you. I’ve been looking for you all week, you’re never in. Judy’s in the hospital and she wants to see you.”
“Good Lord, what’s the matter with her?”
“Well, nothing serious. At least I don’t think so. She gets overtired, you know, and she’s supposed to go on a long concert tour with her brother soon, so it’s really more of a general checkup, she tells me. Can you come out now?”
“Well … oh, all right. O.K. Be down in a minute.”
I got dressed and went downstairs and we drove off to the American Hospital in Neuilly, practically in silence. I didn’t encourage any conversation. To tell the truth, I wasn’t too happy about making this excursion. I didn’t want to go to a hospital and cheer anyone up; I wanted to go off quietly somewhere and die.
Hospital doors open so soundlessly that Judy didn’t even hear us enter her room. When I saw her lying there, pale and listless, I became terrified. I gasped and she sat up and looked around. Now that she saw us, she seemed to spring back to life. It was extraordinary really, watching her color coming back and seeing how completely it transformed her. Reassured, I began babbling away inanely about how busy I’d been with rehearsals, how much of my time they were taking, how of course I’d have come sooner if I’d known, and on and on.
“Oh never mind, never mind,” she interrupted, bouncing up and down on the bed in her excitement. “Tell me everything that’s happened. It’s a whole week. Millions of things must have happened. Tell me about them all.” She pulled me down beside her, almost panting with anticipation.
I looked away for a moment. I was always a little embarrassed by her outbursts of curiosity. I found it difficult to believe she really followed my life with the same breathless anticipation as I did; that her interest in everyone and everything was as genuine as it was passionate. But it was genuine all right. I found out later just how genuine it was.
In any case I obviously don’t need much encouraging to talk about myself, and before I knew it (Ait came the story of last evening. And the funny thing was I don’t know whether it was the time, or the place, or just me, but now the whole thing seemed really more comic than tragic. I found I was almost enjoying myself. Also I was working up a brilliant imitation of the Contessa’s fractured English.
“But I know her,” squealed Judy suddenly, bouncing up and down on her bed again. “I know her, I know the one you mean! Listen, Sally Jay, let me tell you about it. It was the strangest thing. I think she must be mad or something. All her friends are, anyway. Do you know she had us over to lunch, my brother and I, without even knowing our names? Someone had taken her to one of Paul’s recitals and she came gushing backstage, spouting that funny English like you do, and invited us to lunch. She said she knew someone terribly important who would be terribly interested in Paul’s career, and she said for us just to write down our names and address like good children and give them to her chauffeur because she was hopeless at such things and she said for Paul to prepare a short program and that she’d send the car and then she gushed out again.…
“Have you ever seen her house? Well, it’s enormous. Full of lots of scary dogs that look as if they ought to be tied up or they’ll tear you to bits, and some of the strangest pieces