The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [48]
“The film,” whispered his wife.
“Oh yeah, this film. Well, it’s like I say, it’s very—well, it’s competent, it’s professional, it doesn’t make any real comment, it’s—well, not clever so much as adroit. I don’t mean it’s unedifying, it’s just not uplifting. Not that there’s anything unattractive in not being uplifting, but, well, you know what I mean … it’s … um, it’s … cursory.”
At my side Beard Bubbly breathed fervently at the sheer beauty of it all. That was another thing about the Hard Core, though maybe not the nicest. They went all out for satire. They not only suffered fools, they suffered them gladly. And I mean they sought them out; they tracked them down. Only they had to be really big ones. They were as irresistibly drawn to the real nuts, as the Saint-Germainians to the real operators. Bill Blauer, for instance, they had immediately rejected as being not far enough out, but my cousin John—now he would have truly thrilled them. I kind of saw what they meant in a way. Sometimes the only thing in the world that doesn’t bore me, is listening to bores. Sometimes.
Blair Perrins was the actor I liked best in our company. I mean I liked him, not his acting, which could be dreadful. When he had been told by enough people that he looked just like Alec Guinness, he went off to Europe to wait until he was old enough to play all of Mr. Guinness’ roles. The question was whether age or starvation would overtake him first. For three perilous years on the Left Bank he had eked out what to anyone else would have been a wretched and intolerably chancy existence: bits of dubbing, broadcasting, and filming were interspersed with long stretches of absolutely nothing. I have never known anyone with less money and less visible means of getting hold of it. He had slept around everywhere, from the floors of friends’ studios, to the Metro. There were days when he had literally no money at all, and after a string of such days he would go to the blood bank and sell his blood. More often than not he spent this money on tickets to the ballet. He was into all of us for at least a thousand francs apiece. To me he seemed like some Special Mordant. A bitter, blithe and unconsciously pathetic version of a jeune Cocteau from Greenwich Village. The thing about him, though, was that he thought he was in theater for Art, whereas he was really in it for laughs. He was especially good at snuffing out the Big Bores, whom he tracked down like a pig after truffles. Doric, in fact, was one of his discoveries. Now, however, he was tiring of Doric. He went over to the next table, bummed a cigarette off Big Ben Nelson, and I could hear him starting on his vituperative account of a certain road production of A Streetcar Named Desire, his last job in the States. Big Ben listened kindly to the intemperate judgments passed on these unknown, defenseless actors, sucking on a cube of sugar, his big paw curled around his lait chaud. Big Ben could afford to be benign; only three weeks ago he had solved his own acute economic problem neatly by sleeping with his landlady on Saturday nights.
“Advance passionately toward me,” I said to Jim suddenly.
“What?”
“Engage me in violent conversation.”
“What’ll I say?”
“Don’t you dance?”
“No. Why?”
“I think Crazy Eyes is about to come this way. I noticed he’s just had an enormous bagarre with the dancing girl and he’s zigging his eyes in my direction.”
“I thought you liked him.”
“Are you insane? It was just to get rid of Bill Blauer. Incidentally why didn’t you get him off me—Bill, I mean? You should have, you know. Technically I was ‘with’ you, wasn’t I?”
“I thought you liked him too.”
“Oh please. Cut it out.”
“Well