The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [52]
I was now more or less in jail.
Uncle Roger, I thought, you can’t say I’m not trying.
SEVEN
IN THE END it took us all morning and Larry—and mostly Larry—to get us sprung from here. We were heading straight for Contempt of Court charges, Jim and I, when he finally arrived, and if he hadn’t by some magic fluke already known Crazy Eyes and managed to exert his strange power over him, got me to shut up (I was being the most contemptuous), found out that Jim was an artist and made him show the magistrate his sketches of me, explaining at the same time that I was a Very Important Actress in his company and that rehearsals were being held up on my account (the magistrate, like most Frenchmen, could apparently do without Americans but not without Art)— if he hadn’t done all this, I’d probably still be there yelling my head off.
All of a sudden, in the taxi on the way to the theater, I collapsed. I put my head on Larry’s shoulder and almost before I knew what was happening I had fallen fast asleep.
“Hey, zombie, wake up,” I heard him saying softly into my ear when we arrived. I stretched and stared and shook myself. I looked up and saw him smiling down at me.
“Oh Larry!” I moaned. “I know you think I was just being one of your typical tourists but it was all your fault, really.”
“My fault?”
In my drowsy-cat stage I knew it was going to be too complicated to explain, but anyway I tried. “You know—that horrible dinner party yesterday—no Saturday, when you just let yourself get dragged off by that—oh, Larry, how could you?”
He just laughed. “Yeah,” he said, “I never knew what hit me.…”
Gently he disentangled himself and helped me out of the taxi. He took me to a nearby café and fed me three cups of coffee. Then, with the same gentleness, he guided me through the afternoon’s rehearsal. Which means he does care for me after all, I thought happily, as I sprinted out of the theater that evening. At just that moment I noticed a great beast of a car in robin’s egg blue, ug—ug, squatting all over the entrance. I slowed down and looked inside. La Contessa, of course.
We were rehearsing in earnest. I suppose it’s an admission of something or other, but it was the first time in my life—my gosh, the last time too, come to think of it—that I had ever felt any esprit de corps. Just as the Hard Core was the first group I wouldn’t have minded joining if they’d been a club (which of course they weren’t, good night, that was the whole point of them), this cast and crew was the first I’d ever felt that we’re-all-in-this-together-Harry-England-and-St.-George sort of stuff about.
Actually I wasn’t seeing the Hard Core at this time. As a matter of fact Larry had forbidden me to, but he needn’t have bothered. I’d have avoided them anyway. To have got all tangled up with them at this point might have broken the spell, and I wanted to stay spellbound; I thought we band of brothers were absolutely the cat’s pajamas. I was jealous of our solidarity and looked upon the outside world with the same mixture of indifference and contempt that is probably felt by the inmates of some well-run looney bin.
I soon realized that one of the most important things to find while working in theater was someone to giggle with. To find someone to giggle with I place just below finding someone to flirt with and just above the ability to knit. Those are the only three things to do while waiting to go on. Oh, crosswords of course, if you can bear them. Anything else breaks the spell.
In Blair Perrins I had found an ideal giggling partner, and when I look back with nostalgia it is largely because of him. To begin with his romantic (there is no other word for it) struggle for existence thrilled me to the bottom of my hitherto all too sheltered core. There’s plenty to be said for the theory that giving money to a beggar only encourages