The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [73]
Any moron can cook a steak, I kept saying to myself, as I went about my work in the kitchen early Thursday evening. I was not only going to give them something to get their teeth into, but I was going to serve it to them all by myself.
Everybody was terribly kind and co-operative at dinner and it took all four of us ceaselessly moiling and toiling from kitchen to studio and back again to organize and consume a simple meal of soup, steak and onions, peas and potatoes and salad. And even then the process was simplified by my just leaving the loaf of bread, just simply forgetting it and leaving it at the bottom of the shopping bag. Coffee was Nescafé, and at the end I said to Marion as I was about to drop, “Let’s for heaven’s sake leave the dishes, the woman who comes in can do them tomorrow.”
Marion took a few tentative turns around the place, trying to say “Oh how lovely, where did you get this?” every once in a while, but as I never knew where (not having asked Jim), and as, in any case, there were so few things to admire—no dear little rugs freshly ripped off their looms at Antwerp, or new chafing dishes from Vallauris for future egg plants—the tour wasn’t much of a success.
We were suddenly all four of us together in the talking room with nothing to talk about. The presence of women so early in the Discussion Period seemed to constrain Ray, and this was odd, because he’d talked freely and for hours on end to me at various cafés. He began prowling around the room. He picked up a wire coathanger and some string and a couple of paintbrushes and a shoe, and started making them into a Mobile, and Jim joined in.
I went home early. I had to go out to the Studio Grandcourt the next morning to do some dubbing. I did quite a bit of dubbing for this studio and now that American companies were making more and more pictures in France, hiring French bit-players and then discovering they couldn’t understand their English, it was quite a lucrative setup. The people were pleasant. In fact I was something of a heroine to the boys in the control room. The Paris winter and all the shouting I’d done on stage had lowered my voice to a husky growl which went over big with them, accustomed as they were to having their eardrums pierced by the shrill French ingénue whose voice, even under normal circumstances, is about an octave higher than an American’s.
When I got there that morning the first thing I saw was the familiar back of Someone standing by the mike running over his lines. As I came in he turned around. It was Larry. I tested myself for symptoms (actually, they’re the same for me in all my subjunctive states of doubt, fear, and strong emotion: dizziness and shortness of breath); they were still with us. He smiled. It was no insane demonstration of delight but it sufficed; the symptoms increased.
“Come over here, Gorce,” he said without moving. “Get a load of this script. We’ve got a big love scene together.”
At the vin blanc break around eleven o’clock he said to me, “There’s a great big Canadian around the Left Bank who’s nuts about you. No kidding. He saw you at the theater and he’s been following you around ever since. He’s dying to meet you. How about it? He says you smiled at him once.”
“I smiled at him?” I sighed wearily. “I must have been smiling in my sleep. I really don’t want to know anyone else, Larry. I’m mixed up enough as it is. What does he look like? I’ve never noticed him.”
“Tall. Rugged. Very handsome.”
“Oh.”
Our eyes met for a split second and set off a tiny spark. That’s what killed me about Larry. He could get inside you so quickly when he liked. We were going to be conspirators again, I felt. Conspirators? Again? Over what?
“Nope. Sorry. Not interested.” I was firm.
The next day, out at the Studio again, Larry said: “You were standing right next to him at the Etats-Unis last night.”
“Who?