The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [70]
In a way he was the most abstract person I’ve ever met. That sounds wrong, it sounds as if I meant he was a philosopher or absent-minded. “Plastically sensual,” which sounds like God knows what, would be closer. What I mean is, when he went to see a film he was so busy looking at the chiaroscuro he never saw the actors, and when he went to my theater, he came out talking about my elbows.
“Well, how did you like it?” I asked him.
“Wonderful! I really saw your elbows for the first time. Those stage lights give your body a whole different perspective. I must come back.”
Practically every inanimate object his eye fell on gave him pleasure; a rusty tin can that had been run over by a car, a hole in a cake of kitchen soap worn smooth by his constantly cleaning paintbrushes in it, or the wildly colored woolen blanket thrown over his divan.
He was a country boy. That was it. Actually he came from Wilmington, Delaware; but he was a country boy, nevertheless. I’m sure there are some people, some basic country types, who bring the whole countryside into wherever they’re living as easily as some city types do the same thing the other way around. At least he could. And in Paris: the Paris that I had hitherto seen alternately as the rich man’s plaything, the craftsman’s tool, the artist’s anguish, and the world’s largest champagne factory, he managed to turn into a country village. His studio, unpromisingly wedged into the heart of the Boulevard Raspail, somehow became his farmhouse; the Select his General Store; and the dear old Ancient, the Crackerbarrel Sage.
I spent deep, peaceful afternoons there in that farmhouse-studio, posing for him throughout the long, cold winter with the rain outside and the fragrant warmth of glowing wood-fires burning and mixing into exhilarating smells of turpentine, canvas, and oil paints. Gradually it began to seem rather an anti-climax just to get back into all my clothes after lying around with them off for so long, and I found I was staying longer and longer in my dressing gown after the painting session was over, while the light faded, the firelight flickered, and we sat drinking white wine.
“Oh God. You’re so beautiful.” He said it in such an absolutely heartfelt way that I knew he was no longer being abstract. He leaned forward and for the first time I felt his breath on me. He smelled like new-mown hay. I kept my eyes level with his and waited … when his face came too close for me to see it clearly I closed them and let him kiss me. “Let’s go … let’s go.…” he whispered.
The trouble was of course that what Jim really, ideally needed at that point was some nice, simple, outdoor, bohemian girl; brown-haired and with rain in it. As I said, I don’t know what he saw in me, but then I don’t know what on earth I saw in him either, for that matter. It seemed incredible that I, who had spent all this time in Paris, adrift, so to speak, in an uncharted ocean of raging passions, should be knocked over by so small a wave. And yet he was, I suppose, my first real relationship.
The disagreement we always had—quarrel would be too strong a word—was about my refusing to go and live with him, move in with him under his roof. There’d always seemed to me something so dirty-sweatered and dirndl-skirted about living with a man you’re not married to. I mean it was too intensely domestic for one thing; the next thing you knew you were darning socks and cooking. And to be quite honest there were some phone calls I wouldn’t have wanted to take with him in the room and some that frankly, I couldn’t.
But Jim was a bundle of virtues. He was sweet, he was sensitive, he was intelligent; he was humorous and solid; he was simple and straightforward. He was good