The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [97]
I can see him so clearly. Yesterday I might have said I’ve forgotten what he looks like; today I’m cursed with total recall His light-blue eyes filled with tenderness and his mouth curled into a quiet smile; how many times have I looked up from his pillow to find him gazing down at me in that certain way?
The hardest thing to accept is that I could have been so wrong about him, that I could have guessed so wrong. The whole time I’ve been down here he’s been in the back of my mind as the one person in the world I could count on. I was the unfaithful one. Those two letters he wrote me—I keep reading and rereading them—they are sincere, I don’t care what’s happened, I know they are. Well then, how to explain his change of heart in so short a space? The Jim I knew was incapable of erratic behavior.
Have we all gone mad or something? On top of everything else, what I’m really afraid of is that he may reconsider. What on earth would I do then? I don’t really want to marry him. Do I?
And I like Judy so much. I like her better than any girl I’ve ever met. And I know they are right for each other. They are The Innocents. And me—I suppose I’m the Sophisticate. Anyway, that’s what Jim thinks. “A girl of your sophisticated tastes…” he used to say to me all the time. It’s so unfair. How I hate that word. It means shallow and superficial and God knows there’s no one in the world who’s more a slave to her passions than I am. Complicated, or rather what the French mean by “compliqué” would be closer. Les Compliqués: Los Complicados: that’s the only club I’ll ever belong to—though not by choice. I may not have been born into it, but I became a member at a very early age. A life-member.
So why cry? Why carry on like this?
When did all those nightmares begin? My mind keeps going back to that Christmas vacation, sophomore year, when I had an English paper to write and spent most of my time in the Public Library. People kept mistaking me for a librarian. They kept coming up to me and asking me for books and things. I thought it was maybe because I didn’t wear hats and at first I was merely annoyed. Then I became frightened. I somehow became obsessed with the idea that the reason they kept mistaking me for a librarian was because that’s what I really was meant to be, and instinctively they knew it. It was sheer fantasy, of course. I mean they probably asked dozens of other people as well and I just didn’t notice. But it started to prey upon my mind. Then I began having this nightmare. Actually I have it so often I’ve even given it a name. It’s called the Dreaded Librarian Dream.
It’s all very vague. It takes place in sort of a vast hall, in the center of which sits a girl behind a desk, or rather a circular counter, which completely surrounds her. It’s funny about that desk: I’ve seen it somewhere before, I know I have, although it’s quite unlike any desk I’ve ever seen in a library. Anyway, the closer I get to this girl, the older she becomes, until she turns into a middle-aged spinster librarian. Then I see that it’s me. People keep coming up to her from every direction asking her for books. They are all going somewhere. In fact it isn’t a library at all, it’s more like a station. Everyone is in a hurry. They are all going somewhere except me. I’m trapped. One of the worst aspects of this dream is that from the very first time I dreamed it I’ve known, within the nightmare, so to speak, that it was one I’ve had before—an old, old nightmare of long ago. That gives it its special ageless, timeless, hopeless quality. When I awaken from it my space urge is upon me stronger than ever.
It was this space kick that made me leave Jim in the first place. It’s this space kick that’s going to turn me into the spinster