The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [74]
“Bax, Sawyer Baxter—the Canadian.”
“This is beginning to give me the creeps. Why didn’t he talk to me?”
“He’s shy. He won’t till he’s introduced.”
“Well, I’m too busy.”
I went over to Jim’s that night, determined to cook him a good meal and what’s more, enjoy doing it.
I made lamb chops and soup and peas and potatoes and a salad.
It was the same rat race as before, except that I remembered the bread this time.
Afterward we sat around in the studio. It was a hot night made stuffier by all the cooking. It didn’t seem so much of a farmhouse any more, without a log fire burning in the fireplace. I flung open the windows. Spring was ravishing around town, bursting and budding and blooming. It was one of those nights when the air is blood-temperature and it’s impossible to tell where you leave off and it begins. I was filled with that restlessness of vague desires. It was like the evening I stood at my window before going to the Ritz to break it off with Teddy. I wanted to go swimming. I wanted to go down to the beach and go swimming.
“Let’s go out,” I said to Jim. “Somewhere. Anywhere.”
“Do we have to? We went out last night, didn’t we? I’ve only just started to get this Mobile balanced.”
I sat down and tried to read, but I couldn’t. After ten pages I was in a state of cold fury. Read! I didn’t want to read, it was just a substitute for living. Time was running out. I’d been in Paris for almost a year now; I wanted to get moving. The disaster of my passport made me so angry I slammed the book shut. I’d give Washington one more month to come through with an answer, and then I’d get my father to tell Uncle Roger about it. Then I’d go.
Go where?
I looked at Jim, unaware of my treacherous thoughts, absorbed in the new Mobile which he was going to hang from the ceiling over his bed. His face showed his perfect contentment, Wasn’t this life as everybody else lived it? What more did I want? To anyone coming in from the outside and seeing us there like that, wouldn’t we have seemed perfectly O.K.? Absolutely apple-pie American? Unless, of course, they’d eaten the meal.
I put down the book. “I’m a little tired, Jim,” I said. “I think I’ll go on home.”
He looked up, hurt, and I could have bitten my tongue off. It was the word “home” that did it. He wanted me to think of there, the studio, as being our home.
It was seven o’clock in the morning and I’d just been awakened by loud knocking at my hotel-room door. I was frightened out of my wits; I thought it was the French police checking up on the cartes d’identité.
It was Larry, happy and excited.
“Come to the Côte d’Argent!”
“Wha-at?”
“How would you like to go to the Basque coast around Biarritz with us next week for a couple of months? Expenses paid.”
“Us?”
“Me. And Bax and Missy. Just the four of us.” Missy—Melinda May Carter—was an outsize blonde Southern belle of voluptuous proportions from New Orleans. She was studying at the Sorbonne.
“No,” I said. “Go away.”
“What can you lose?”
I thought of Jim. “Everything,” I said.
Larry sat down heavily on a chair full of my underwear and put his head in his hands. “Please,” he said. “You’ve got to come. You’ll be spoiling three people’s good time if you don’t.”
“What’s it all about?”
“We’ve been up all night talking about it. There’s a house we can rent dirt cheap just outside Biarritz—St. Jean de Luz——”
“Not the same one that——” but I stopped. I’d suddenly thought of his old girl friend Lila, and also that I wasn’t supposed to have heard that conversation between them that night outside the Dôme.
“The same one that what?”
“Nothing.”
“No what?”
“Well, the Contessa——” I lied.
“That old bag. Christ no, that’s all over. Listen, Sally Jay, I think I’m in love. For the first time. I know it, in fact—I’ll just die if I can’t take Missy away with me.” I’d never seen him like that before. I mean it was heartbreaking in a way.
“Who’s stopping you?”
“You are. It’s Bax’s party. He’s got the car and he’s going to pay the rent and his heart is set on you. He won’t go without you.”
“Don’t you have any money?” There.