The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [76]
“Do you want to … marry me?”
“Oh, Jim, I just don’t know. What about you?”
He put down his brushes and looked me straight in the face. “Yes. I’d marry you. I’d marry you to keep you.” He said it very slowly.
“Oh, Jim, I’m sorry.”
Later on, in his arms, I said sadly, “Who will you paint after I’m gone?”
“I don’t think I’ll paint people any more,” he said calmly. He gazed up at the Mobile swinging slowly over our heads. “Human beings are so impure, aren’t they? Look at that Mobile. I’ve never painted anything that’s given me as much pleasure. Look at the lines. Pure and simple and clean and perfectly balanced.”
“Will you stay in Paris this summer?”
“I don’t know. My art teacher from college is going to be in Florence. I may join him.”
“I think Judy’ll be there sometime this summer with her brother. Say hello to her for me if you see them, will you?”
“I will.…”
“Well … I suppose I ought to start packing.…”
“Good-by, then.”
I suddenly felt myself in real pain. “I love you, Jim. I really do. Isn’t that funny?”
PART TWO
“They shoot rapids, don’t they?”
—CYRIL CONNOLLY
ONE
May —sorry 5, 1955
Sunday
DOWN HERE A week—no, wait a minute, not even a whole week, now that I look at the date. Only five days. Holy cow, things must take much shorter to happen (or not to happen) than I think.
Rain sans cesse. Time heavy on the hands and even worse on the tempers.
Que diable allais-je faire dans cette galère?
Larry passes the time writing corny poetry or painting even cornier pictures. Missy sulks in her room and eats fruit all day. Can’t get near it any more for the cherry stones and plum pips. She’s getting so languid, she’s just going to melt away in rivulets. The South has brought out the Southern in her. Bax chops wood, or starts to chop wood, or has just come from chopping wood. Never without an ax. So yesterday when it was my turn to do the shopping, I went to the local bookshop and bought this enormous Diary and that’s what I’m going to do to keep myself from going mad.
The trip down was hell. I mean hell. Can’t think about it without feeling double-crossed. Things went wrong from the very beginning; from the very first crack of dawn that we started out in, with the rain, and this leaky, tricky old second-hand Citroen breaking down regularly and everyone else quarreling about which route to take and it slowly coming through to me that in the dazzle of Larry’s enthusiasm the whole setup had been grossly misrepresented. Of course I probably helped things along by getting Canada all mixed up with Texas—oil wells and all that —but still, it made me furious to realize that while it was perfectly true that old Canadian Bax was footing the bills, the bills were going to have to be mighty modest; the flow of dough was not going to be limitless, nor the spree luxurious. Hated myself for feeling that way but felt that way. Just couldn’t help it. Anyway I was getting car-sick.
Now that I’ve thought about it a bit, I realize that even under ideal circumstances (if there is such a thing in traveling) I do not travel very well. For someone who likes to get around as much as I do, I really travel quite badly. Planes frighten me, boats bore me, trains make me dirty, cars make me car-sick. And practically nothing can equal the critical dismay with which I first greet the sight of new places.
Hated France when I first got over here. Got on the train at Le Havre, and looked out of the window and thought it looked so exactly like America, I wanted to cry. The scenery flying past, the hills and barns and cows, were just the sort of things you keep coming across through a train window in the States. The Untrained Eye, I told myself, training it enough to see that all the signs were written in French, at the same time letting the untrained nose get its first exotic whiff of garlic from my traveling companions, and the untrained stomach its first attack of French dysentery. But still, these were the only differences. I asked myself finally what exactly did I expect France to look like? No answer.
I hate plans. Hate