The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [99]
Larry and Missy are still vaguely fighting. Larry: Larry the Cipher. El Ciphero. What makes him tick? I still don’t know. It’s a hopeless passion, but I’d still take one Larry for a hundred anyone elses. He belongs to my club, I think. Les Compliqués.
No word from Jim and I guess I didn’t expect any. I guess it’s all for the best. I guess that’s that.
Slept late, late, late this morning, and I’m going into Biarritz this afternoon to get my hair done. Finally. I’m going to have it dyed silvery blonde, very pale, very subdued, because of my great sorrow. Then we are all going on the town tonight to celebrate the end of our movie careers—and the beginning of Bax’s.
July 1-2. Somewhere between
Monday and Tuesday. Late late late.
Our lives seem to be developing along the lines of Greek Tragedy—star-crossed and pursued by Furies. I’m not exaggerating. We ran into some old sparring partners tonight and it turned out to be a head-on collision. And here I am early in the morning again so charged up by all the clash-crashing I can’t possibly get to sleep.
As a rule I’m rather fond of excitement. Raw, rollicking, riveting and toute cette sorte de crap, it has a way of forcing me out of myself and at the same time dragging me back in that I find truly exhilarating. On the whole I should say it’s a fine thing; a stepping-up thing, a leading-to-action-at-last sort of thing. But is it an end in itself, I begin to wonder. I mean couldn’t one have enough of it—or, to put it more plaintively—can’t it have enough of me? I wish it would stop hovering over me like some privately commissioned thunderbolt.
When I recall the peace and harmony of the first part of the evening (a million miles away by now) it all seems such a shame. We were having such a good time. Old war-scarred veterans that: we’d become by then, we had very nearly mastered the art of being together for over a certain length of time without slitting one another’s throats. We were not only on to one another’s foops and foibles, we were actually attempting to use this knowledge to smooth things over rather than hot them up, which was the usual game. Or—I don’t know—maybe we were just in a good mood.
Anyway, in preparation for the celebration Missy had washed and ironed and even sewn a button on Larry’s shirt. And Larry had let Missy take her time getting ready. He held her bag for her and smiled indulgently while she wandered back and forth around the room collecting the things she needed to put in it. He even went so far as to get down on his hands and knees to look for a stray handkerchief. He wrenched open the doors of the old Citroen for her and creaked them shut behind her. He helped her up and down stairs as gingerly as if she were a basket of eggs. We had, in short, returned to the loving couple of our Middle Period.
Bax, for his part, had at last shed his irritating is-this-really-such-a-good-idea-how-will-we-all-feel-in-the-morning-someone’s-got-to-apply-the-financial-brakes commonsense attitude, and his attempts at frivolity were positively touching. Mac the Whack also came along, transformed beyond recognition by his three weeks of regular anxiety-free sponge-free meals, and was happily and lavishly throwing around his own not very hard-earned pelf. As for me, I was concentrating on Bax like a mad thing. I was determined to concentrate on him if it killed me. And he was being so foolishly, transparently grateful, it really was worth it. “Let him think you’re leading him on,” I told myself severely. “Lead him on. What’s the difference? He’s leaving soon anyway.”
It was a wonderful warm summer’s night. Presque parfaite. Everything in the sky that could be was out: Northern lights, Southern lights, milky ways, moons, planets, stars, shooting stars, whole galaxies of solar systems winking and twinkling eons away in their own heavens. Uncle Roger would have gone out of his mind.
As we drove off I remember looking back at the old villa with affection. We