The Dud Avocado (6 page)

Always before in my past, at a school or country club dance, the jewelry was worn with a smile, so to speak, the implication being that it was really on borrowed time—or at the most, Daddy’s birthday present. And this was true not just of the young girls but of their mothers as well. I mean it always looked as if
their
mothers had loaned or left them the stuff, or as if their husbands had diffidently kicked through with the donation. Not so with those at the Ritz. Ho, no. These were no mere jewels of indulgent relatives. These had been acquired in some much more serious, mysterious and complete way.

Thus was I reflecting, standing there at the entrance of the bar that night, looking around for Teddy and painfully conscious of myself again. I was still wearing the evening dress I had on when I’d met Larry that morning and the funny thing about it was that, even though twelve hours had elapsed since then, it still wasn’t particularly appropriate. I mean I really felt I could expect it to be correct attire at
some
point of the day—like a watch that has stopped, eventually just happening to have its hands pointing to the right time. I can’t understand it. I have quite a lot of clothes and go to quite a lot of places. I never actually seem to be wearing the right things at the right time, though. You’d think the law of averages.… Oh well. It’s all very discouraging. Nevertheless this dress that I had on at the time, I encouraged myself, wasn’t actually
unbecoming
. It was a sort of blue and silver and of course I’d taken off the red leather belt and was wearing the proper belt—which pleased me as well. It was one of the few I hadn’t lost.

Very jeune fille I was, jewelless and all (the pearl necklace that I’d lost had been given to me, as a matter of fact, by Uncle Roger), and as full of safety pins as ever. I probably had one safety pin to every two of those gorgeous creatures’ tiny, gleaming, well-sewn, well-hidden hooks-and-eyes. But what the hell, I told myself, it wasn’t as if I were
one
of them or even competing with them, for heaven’s sake, I was merely a disinterested
spectator at the Banquet of Life. The scientist dropping into the zoo at feeding time. That is what I told myself.

I looked around. Teddy had said he was going to be on time and I saw that he was as good as his word. He was over by a corner, and when he spotted me, he stood up and began waving his hands in short, choppy, excited gestures, trying to attract my attention. At the same time he gave me the impression that he was
standing on his toes
. All this unconfined joy was deeply unsettling. I was experiencing that terrifying thing of suddenly seeing someone you know terribly well as if for the first time. Even his name seemed to be forming itself in my mind for the first time, and I thought what an utterly dopey name it
was
for a man of forty, the name of what they used to refer to in the newspapers as “a playboy.” He was a large, neat compact man with a smooth olive complexion, well-groomed sort of tan-colored hair, a sensuous mobile mouth and large white teeth; impressive enough, but let’s face it, there was nothing—well—
spontaneous
about his looks, if you know what I mean. I mean he had none of Larry’s careless, lazy, crazy animal grace. There he was over in the corner, flashing away this charming, ingratiating smile that I’d never even remembered
seeing
on him before, and then he began to rub his hands together. For no reason at all, I was suddenly reminded of Charlie Chaplin. Oh Christ, I thought, what have I let myself in for? I could feel myself working up into a large-scale panic and I tried to clamp down on it before it: rode away with me. I will
not
have his blood on my hands. I will
not
have his blood on my hands, I kept repeating over and over again. This calmed me down a bit and I managed to zigzag my way through all the gorgeous women over to his table. He could have bought me their clothes and their jewels and their lives, I supposed, but the hell with the Ritz—what I wanted was to live among us artists.

“Well, well. I see you did get here first after all,” I said upon arriving at his table, feeling ages older than he.

“Yes,” he murmured, bending down over me, attempting to kiss my hand and only just succeeding, as it was offering its usual
resistance at the wrist. “I thought it would please you,” he said, and he gave a sigh at the whole homme-dumondeness of having to please women. We sat down. He snapped his fingers imperiously at the waiter in that undemocratic manner that could still make me want to die of shame, and ordered, without consulting me, two champagne cocktails. I hate champagne more than anything in the world next to Seven-Up.

“What are we celebrating?” I asked at the same time as he said: “I think a celebration is called for.…”

“I must tell you something,” I blurted out, just as he began: “Because I have something important to ask you.…”

I had intended letting him down gently when we got back to his apartment. You know, telling him how I thought it was all a great mistake for me to get involved with a married man, how it might become too serious, how I might even go off the rails, how he might spoil me forever for anyone else—all very touching and flattering and
crippling
one hoped, but now, what with all this loose talk flying around, I could see that if I didn’t take the plunge immediately I wasn’t going to get a word in edgeways, and maybe I’d lose my nerve and would never get it over with. At the same time I had this mad notion that if I wasn’t back in my hotel room and studying all those plays in two minutes flat I wasn’t ever going to see Larry again.

“Now look, Teddy,” I said, interrupting him, “you may as well tell me what’s on your mind here and now because I’m
not
going back to your place tonight or ever again.”

This unfortunately coincided with his saying: “But I can’t talk about it here. Will you please come back to the apartment where we can discuss it?”

It looked as if I were going to spend the rest of the night one line ahead of the dialogue and this brought on one of my fits of nervous laughter. Especially since I couldn’t help remembering a similar situation. It occurred at the beginning of our affair when, in my eagerness to get things rolling, when the thought of sleeping with someone occupied the entire area of my brain, not to say my body, twenty-four hours a day, I had said to him, it just sort of slipped out: “I am
not
going to bed with you
tonight
, you know,” and Teddy had replied in honest bewilderment, “I
was thinking of asking you, but I haven’t
yet
” I have this awful tendency to jump the gun.

Anyhow he managed to get us out of this particular conversational snarl by saying “Very well then,” and waiting for me to go on. So I finally pulled myself together and took the plunge feeling a sort of drowning-on-air sensation as I went, my whole life whistling past.

“I’m sorry, Teddy, but I can’t see you again. I know it’s going to sound totally and completely insane but it’s just that I am madly in love with this boy. You know, Larry, the one you saw me with today at the Dupont. And so I don’t think I ought to see you any more.”

I have no idea how he took all this, for the simple reason that I kept my head well down, eyes on the potato chips the whole time I was talking, and for quite a while after that. Also I’m not exactly sure what he
said
, either, because my own words kept thundering back into my ears like waves crashing against the shore. But I think he must have said, “You’re not serious,” or something like that. Something expressing incredulity.

“I am,” I replied. “No kidding. I mean I’m in love for the first time in my life. I’ve been meaning to tell you about it but the opportunity just never seemed to come up.”

“I see,” he said, and then after a while: “How long have you known this man?”

“Oh, ages really. Like I told you this morning, I knew him in the States first, you see. But we really didn’t get to know each other well, that is—um-until—oh—just about two weeks ago.” I pulled those weeks out of thin air.

“Ah-ha. Yes. I could see something was going wrong with us just around then,” he said, incredibly enough. “I am afraid you are not very good at deceiving or even concealing things, my dear.” And I could feel, positively
feel
his satisfaction at being “right” overcoming for the moment his chagrin at what he was hearing.

I nodded with relief and sneaked a quick look at him. It seemed to me that he was looking pretty composed, though a bit green. Was this possibly going to be easier than I thought? Hot
dog. Mentally I was already over the hills and far away. Back at the old homestead.

But he went on to say, “Nevertheless, my dear, I must try to make you change your mind about all this. Since you have decided so dramatically that it is to be all over between us, since you will not even come back to the apartment with me to discuss it calmly, I must try to say what I have to here. It is most difficult, I assure you, but most important to your future. You are making a grave mistake, my dear. I know. You see you are still, forgive me, very young—a mere child——”

I felt my attention wandering off. It generally does at the phrase “mere child.” It generally wanders off to see if it can’t find some really lurid thought that would shock the pants off the other person, if he only knew. Teddy was saying something about how when he first met me he thought I was just another wild Indian American (his words not mine), but that actually I wasn’t.
That
, apparently, was the trouble with me. The trouble with me was.… So then I perked up the old ears and started listening carefully as I always do when anybody is about to say anything unpleasant.

“I must admit it to you now,” he said, “though I think you may have suspected it at the time, that I was a bit shocked and a bit, yes a bit displeased when I discovered that you were a virgin. This being the case, you should not have behaved the way you did when we first met, so—forgive me—so almost like a guttersnipe. It was not proper. I saw of course that you were very young, but your whole manner was so dégagé, so sophisticated, so cynical, so—” Here he broke off and shook his head in despair, as if the exact word would eternally escape him, but he managed to catch it just in time, “—so
debauched
, even. And yet—” this next thought amused him so much he had to laugh right out loud as he said it, “—and yet like all your countrywomen, so profoundly inexperienced.”

The fact that this was probably true did not prevent me from noticing that Europeans can never resist a dig at America when at a sexual disadvantage with one of its “countrywomen.”

Suffer him his little sally, I was counseling myself. After all he
is
going to lose you in the end. But I did get mad all the same.
I probably shouldn’t have. He’d probably said things like that to me a million times before. But I did. I was just so terribly jumpy at this point. A bundle of nerves. The thing was, I was afraid he was in love with me. Seriously. And I didn’t want to hurt him, you see. I wanted to pick a fight with him.

So I sneered and said, trying to make it sound very tough: “Listen, Buster, don’t give me any of that bull. There’s only one reason you were so teed off with me when you found out that I was a virgin. You just couldn’t bear the thought of
any
woman deceiving you on
any
grounds. Even those. Don’t kid yourself, mon vieux. It was just a matter of pride.”

“It is always a matter of pride.” He said it very mildly, with a sort of shrug in his voice. I tore myself away from the potato chips and finally took a good look at him. I was right the first time, he did seem perfectly composed.

There was a pause and suddenly he leaned forward, shoulders hunched, head to one side, in a manner that I saw was meant to be at once jaunty and serious, and said: “I wish to ask you something. In your answer a lot can depend. Please make an effort to reply with honesty.”

Thinking this the very last way to worm the truth out of me I squirmed and tried to look co-operative. I said, “O.K. Shoot,” and made guns of my fingers. I noticed that he looked pained, but he went on:

“Exactly why, since you were a virgin,
did
you acquiesce to me so easily in the first place? Why me, since it is all too clear you were not in the very slightest in love with me? It is most unusual. Why? Be honest now.” And he looked me first in one eye and then the other, very quickly, as if to catch out any deception that might be lurking there.

“Why? Oh, Holy Cow!” I groaned.

“
Please
not to use these ridiculous expressions,” he exploded in exasperation. “I have never heard any other Americans use them except those—what do you call them—those cartoon animals. Mickey Mouse.”

“Micky Mice,” I said firmly.

“What?” he demanded irritably.

“Nothing. Sorry.” But really I was quite pleased with myself.
I had at last provoked him to some kind of temperamental display and if I could just ride in on that, building it up to the sharp exchange of words and some offended dignity on my part, I’d be sailing out of the Ritz in no time.

Incidentally I haven’t the faintest idea why I do talk the way I do. I probably didn’t do it in America. After all, I hardly ever read the funny papers as a child or anything like that. Maybe I just assumed it in Paris for whatever is the opposite of protective coloring: for
war paint
, I guess.

Whatever unpleasantness I had hoped was brewing seemed to have blown over. “You haven’t answered my question,” he said gently.

It was a good chance. At first I thought I’d let him have it about being so impressed with his wife and mistress. I knew that would go over like a lead balloon, but as I’m every kind of coward I also knew I wouldn’t be able to bear his mighty fallen crest. Then I thought of the obvious thing, which was simply that I’d never really met a man-of-the-world before, and when I did it struck me that he was just the one who would be best qualified to teach me—oh, you know what. But somehow that stuck in the old throat as well. He’d say I’d been using him. Which was true. Well, hell, we’d been using each other, I could have said—and honestly too, I did it because I thought I’d like his body, but even though I didn’t know one thing about men I knew that wouldn’t do. Too something or other.