The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [84]
We said we weren’t. I asked him what he thought Maugham had against him.
He became even more aggrieved. “That’s just it. Nothing. Not a goddam thing. Hadn’t even seen me! Wouldn’t see me. Always sent someone out to say he wasn’t in. Goddammit, I knew he was there. I know where they all are,” he added gloomily.
“What about Françoise Sagan?”
“Been in Paris for the past two months,” he replied promptly. He brooded for a moment. “Anyway, I don’t think she writes my type of novel. Do you think she could use me?”
“Why not?”
“Yeah. Well maybe. I’ll wait and see if she turns up here this summer.”
He flung himself on the sand beside us and asked us where we all came from, and we asked him where he was from and he said New York, originally. He’d been away five years. “Don’t get me wrong, though, I’m no remittance man,” he said. “I’d go back again like a shot except I’m afraid to, if you want to know the truth. You know what I’m afraid of? I’m afraid of getting killed back there. I’m not kidding. I mean really killed. Shot. Mugged. Beat up. You’ve no idea what it’s like now. You’re walking down the street minding your own business and the next thing you know someone’s come up from behind and slugged you. Taken your wallet. Even if you don’t have a thing in it they give you a going-over just for the hell of it. Ask my mother. She lives there. She’s got the whole apartment wired for sound. Has to call the police every time she wants to open the window. I’m not kidding. I don’t want to go back to that, no thanks.” He turned suddenly to Bax. “You finished with that sandwich, Bud?”
“I’ve got an idea,” I said. “What about trying the movies? There’s a film …” but Larry shot me a warning look and I shut up.
“Movies? What movie?” asked Hugo. He’d been lying two away from me on the beach next to Missy, but he sprang up when he heard this and landed with a bound at my side, kicking sand all over my face.
“Sally Jay’s got hold of some rumor that they’re shooting a film here sometime this summer. She’s kind of stage-struck,” Larry explained to him, with a deprecating smile, while I tried to get the sand out of my mouth.
“Yeah? Yeah? Where is this outfit?”
“Over in San Sebastian, we hear.”
He thought it over a minute. “I may hitch on down tomorrow.”
“No hurry,” said Larry. “We heard they won’t be ready for at least a month. You know how long it takes these things to get set up.”
We finally parted, promising to meet him again the next day, same time same place.
Tonight at supper I asked Larry what the big idea was of giving poor old McCarthy the double-cross about the film company. I said except for his mustaches I thought he wasn’t at all bad-looking. So Larry sighed and shook his head and gave me one of his when-are-you-going-to-wise-up looks, and started off as though he were speaking to a two-year-old, with it’s like this see, and I’ll explain slowly, and so forth. He said if I’m really serious about getting a part in the film tomorrow (am I!), the easiest way to louse it up would be to turn up with a hundred other people climbing on our backs trying to horn in. Then Bax said if that was the case he’d be perfectly willing to let Hugo go in his place, but Larry said no, definitely not. He wanted Bax to go as planned. We’ll all of us go, he said. But we’ll go just by ourselves.
“What do you mean all of us?” asked Missy, deeply offended. She said she had no intention of becoming a Movie Star. She said her mother would jes’ die if she ever saw her daughter on the screen in front of all those people in a public movie house, and Larry raised his eyebrows and said her mother had a lot to learn about her