The Dud Avocado (11 page)

We had barely seated ourselves at the dinner table, had barely time to grasp what he was up to, when out from his breast
pocket flew a
pad and pencil
. These he placed purposefully on the table, and with a brief apology to the others for “talking shop” turned to Teddy. It was about the Italian government’s new agricultural reform program that he was concerned. Would the Senor mind giving him a recap, so he could revaluate what he was going to rewrite? For instance, what was the
first
most important thing about it? And the second? And the third? … That was the soup course.

At the fish, the wine reminded him of a funny thing that happened to him the other day at the hotel. It seems that lunching with his wife, he’d suddenly decided to have a little bottle of vino. He meant, dammit, he’d been watching everyone, even the children, having wine with
their
meals every day, hadn’t he? Well sir, he ordered some, and Christ, as he’d be the first to admit, he didn’t pretend to know one bottle from another over here, so he left it for the waiter to decide. But this waiter— wait’ll you hear—this waiter turned out to be a real meatball. You know what happened? This—this
French
waiter mind you, began pouring the vino into
John’s
glass first! How about that? Well, he’d stopped him, of course.
Ladies
first, he’d pointed out, and in his limited French he’d chewed out that sad sack plenty— the poor guy had a face
yea
long when he was finished, he felt a little sorry for him, the way he just stood there you could see he didn’t
know
any better—but if there was one thing John could
not
stand, dammit, it was impoliteness to women.

I crossed my eyes and sighed heavily. “Oh God,” I said into my plate.

A scream of joy pierced the silence. The Contessa had just seen the light. She was now rushing in to enlighten my country cousin.

“But it is the custom!” she exclaimed, all sparkling. “It was for your
taste
, don’t you see?”

John leaned forward and awarded her his first smile of the evening. “Not for
my
taste,” said the dumb bastard, grinning away fatuously.

The Contessa shrieked.

It wasn’t until the meat course, however, that John really became uncorked. You could see that his two weeks in Europe
spent talking mostly to his silent, adoring wife had crystallized a lot of ideas that he was just bursting to try out on a larger group. Presidential candidates, Senatorial investigations, juvenile delinquency—he held firm views on all of them, views which needless to say he was entirely willing to share with one and all, and if the thought ever struck him that there might possibly be people at the table who were uninformed or even just plain uninterested in these peculiarly American problems, it never slowed the steady flow nor quelled the mighty roar.

“John is a parlor
white
” I murmured to no one in particular— to no one at
all
, as it turned out. For worse, far worse to me than John’s assaults on my ears, the primary sounds so to speak, were the secondary ones: the gigglings, whisperings and chokings of Larry and the Contessa across the table, too intimate to break into, too murmured to penetrate. For a woman with as piercing a shriek as the one the Contessa normally employed for her conversation, her soft register was remarkable. It required every ounce of my agonized concentration to decipher one-tenth of the words. She was apparently inviting Larry to a gas chamber. “It will be enormous,” she whispered. “Oh yes, I intend to kill off
a-very-one
. Hundreds of them. Oh, three or four hundred at least. Do come. In some minutes now I will give you the address.”

I caught Larry’s eye just then. He flashed me a brilliant traitor’s smile; a gash of teeth and two wiggles of his eyebrows. I had to laugh. It was the first time that evening that I hadn’t felt like killing myself. Stick with me, I begged him with my eyes. See me through, I love you and I’ll make it all up later. I promise. But even as I telegraphed the message, I felt myself losing contact. He’d slipped away from me and gone back to the enemy.

From the sense of great distance that the wine was beginning to produce in me, I thought John looked rather peculiar. He seemed flushed and trembling, and his voice sounded shaky. I tried to concentrate on what he was saying. He had somehow got himself all tangled up in a question of Constitutional Law and was frantically trying to wrestle his way out, struggling and gasping like some half-strangled gray-flanneled Laocoön. So
there actually
were
some people crazy enough to want to amend any old Article of the Constitution just to solve a couple of stupid problems, were there? Well by God,
he
wasn’t one of them! He’d fight to the last ditch before he’d see them get away with anything like that! The veins were coming out on his forehead and a savage rallying note began to exhilarate his prose. He was standing up now. “I’ll go along with the Founding Fathers!” he shouted, suddenly banging his fists on the table, and triumphantly subsided.

There was a small silence after which Teddy made some soothing remarks and the whispering, giggling and choking started up all over again. I just barely caught, “Mon Dieu, mais c’est pénible tout ça—un véritable bag-of-wind, n’est-ce pas?” It fell so lightly on the ears it seemed to be hummed, but it was enough for me. Enough was enough for me.

I had been lumped together all this time with my fool cousin, placed “on his side,” so to speak, by accident of blood, nationality and the seating arrangements. It was an error I intended to rectify. It was dessert now, and I was deserting. He was just heading into a fresh topic—admittedly not one which he found as controversial as the last, but equally dull and equally mysterious.

“
Will
you shut up and
eat, for God’s sake!
” It was my voice all right and the words were mine, too, only somehow the delivery seemed more forceful than expected. I was pained and shocked by its brutality.

As for John, he just gawped at me “Huh?”

“Eat!” I repeated. “Just …
eat!
” I was still badly out of control, almost in tears.

“Oh.” Blinking like an owl, he turned and stared bewilderedly down at his plate. Then, like a good child, he picked up his spoon and began shoveling in the food.

In the really
big
silence that followed I had plenty of time to perceive the extent of my failure. It was complete. I was tied far more tightly to John now than before my outburst, the force of which had even loosened his wife from her moorings. The giggling had stopped altogether, and nobody tried any rescue work.

Larry was the first to speak. He finished his souffle, wiped his
mouth and announced that he was going to leave. He had to be up very early the next day, he said, for a talk with his set-designer. He gave me another of his traitor smiles—roguish and piratical—only this one betraying me.

Hurriedly I pushed back my chair and clumsily rose to my feet. At the same time I heard the Contessa murmuring, “I’ll drive you home, dear boy. I have a car outside.…”

“No, it’s too much trouble,” I mumbled thickly. “We’ll find a taxi.” With everyone staring at me I stumbled back over my chair.

“Now don’t you worry about my little cousin, Contessa. You two just run along.
We’ll
look after her,” said the good-natured voice at my side. To my horror, John, having made a miraculous recovery, was genially speeding the parting guests. He had his arm on my shoulder. “We’re not letting you off as easily as
that
, S. J.,” he said, playfully pummeling away at it. “Gosh, I know darned well I’ve been talking my head off this evening, but I’m going on the listening end as of right now. I’ve got a million and one questions stored up to fire at you. Woman’s angle stuff. Food. Fashions …” he looked at me suddenly and lost his train of thought, “Say, what the heck have you been doing with yourself anyway? I very nearly didn’t recognize you when you came in...”

I didn’t struggle. I remember thinking at the time that it was funny my not struggling. I’d had a lot of wine during the dinner and yet I knew this couldn’t entirely explain my listlessness.…

It was the door that did it finally—that door. When Teddy went to show them the way downstairs (those same stairs I had run down so dispiritedly—his threats still ringing in my ears— not a month and a half ago), he left the door ajar. John was probably still talking; I didn’t hear him. I couldn’t take my eyes away from that door. It seemed to be undergoing some sort of transformation, turning into a person—a personality, rather—a sort of automation butler, wooden and grotesque, with a very strong but not immediately definable attitude toward me. That doorknob … it was definitely making a gesture. It was showing me out! The door wants me to go, I thought crazily. And then I pulled myself together. It was typical of my lunacy to ascribe
surrealist motives to a door when the only fact to be grasped was that it was
still open
. And the voices, though growing fainter, could
still be heard
. If I wanted so much to go—if everything I wanted in the whole world was on the other side of that door, why didn’t I just go? What was stopping me from barreling past it (I wouldn’t even have to touch it), from shouting
Hey, wait for me!
and sliding down the banisters after them? What kept me frozen there in a despair composed equally of impotent rage and a strange reluctance to shatter some exquisite but invisible structure, neither the shape nor purpose of which was apparent to me? In a word, what the hell was going on?

All this time the answer was coming at me slowly through the door. Teddy was in the room now, he was going to shut that door, shut me away from Larry forever. It’ll be hard to shut, I thought in a panic, looking at its lock, one of those very complicated French ones. And then suddenly— Don’t let him fumble! Don’t let the door bang and fly open and bang and fly open again. Oh, kill it instantly, I found myself praying. I needn’t have worried. He was not likely to bungle the final flourish. He put one hand on the brass thingamajig, the other on the doorknob, and with one clean click the door flew shut.

With the same clean click the bomb exploded in the pit of my stomach. It sent cold water oozing through my veins, trickled damply into my wet palms, and finally shot its vital message up to my fuddled brain. At last the villain was unmasked. At last the Wild West caption: “Cousin John ties Sally Jay’s hands while the Contessa makes off with Larry” could be credited to its rightful author—not Fate, nor Just-my-Luck, but none other than that fine Italian artist Alfredo Visconti.

It was his feeling for economy I admired most. Obviously a tan of Sartre’s
Huis Clos
, he had gone to no unnecessary expense or complication to achieve his effects, simply following the Master’s formula of collecting together a few carefully selected souls and watching them torture one another … or rather, I realized with a start, watching them torture me. Florentine revenge was apparently every bit as effective as Corsican. I looked upon him with a new respect.

“Well now,” said Teddy, and no matter how hard he tried,
that silly shameful victorious smile
would
come creeping back over his face. “Well, now—shall we all have a brandy?”

John frowned. “Say, we’d better be pushing on, S. J. Come to think of it, it
is
pretty late.” Heavy drinking always discouraged him. A frivolity he couldn’t possibly control tended to take hold of people then. “I thought maybe we’d go for a nice quiet drive around some park here while you told me all about …” he yawned. “Anyway, there’s no hurry. I’ve still got a week left. C’mon men.” Dody Gorce rose obediently.

Teddy, on his way to the brandy, stopped dead in his tracks and looked at John. “Oh no, really must you go?” The feebleness of the protest and the relief on his face produced an effect so much less than charming that it made me tingle all over. For Teddy to be uncharming was as unthinkable as for John to be uninquisitive. Then, too, the circumstances of his triumph seemed to demand our detention. Surely he was going to allow himself the luxury of a little gloating, of playing the innocent, of at least seeing how I was taking it.

He looked tired. A sudden vision of how much it must have cost him in wear and tear, in sheer skull-cracking boredom, to cultivate John for the purpose of this evening, illuminated my thoughts. A flow of vindictiveness warmed my body, sending the blood pounding back through my veins. So Hell was other people, was it? Well, Teddy wasn’t the only one who could borrow a page from Sartre. He was going to find out just what Hell old John-boy could be. Yessiree, I thought proudly, my cousin John is a two-edged sword; he cuts both ways. I had just remembered something that could be of the utmost importance if used correctly; I had just remembered Teddy’s Special Project.

“John, I think you’re being really horrible, eating and running like this,” I said. “I haven’t seen Teddy for ages, so let’s have a nightcap at least.” I turned eagerly to Teddy. “Gosh, I haven’t had a chance to say one single word to you all night, Teddy. Tell me absolutely all about absolutely everything you’ve been up to—gulp—I mean of course your work—golly, I do hope they’re not working you to death.…” “As friendly as a puppy,” was the phrase I had in mind, but it put him right on guard. The look he gave me, full of suspicion, told me that. I decided
not to notice. “No kidding, Teddy, it’s just great seeing you again, and what a
mad
coincidence bumping into John at the whatsit.”

“The Agricultural Commission for European Aid, Soil Erosion Division,” John said quickly. He’d been shifting restlessly from one foot to another, but saying the magic words settled him back in his chair again.

“But
what
a mad coincidence. I mean what on earth were you doing there, Teddy?”

“What do you mean what was he doing there?” John turned to Teddy and laughed. He had no sense of humor but he just couldn’t help laughing at other people’s stupidity. It was such an unpleasant sound I looked over at Dody. She sat on quiet and contented. She seemed to have some invisible knitting in her lap. “My gosh,” John went on, shaking his head at me sadly, “that’s just what I can’t get over. If the recently graduated college alumna can’t turn her trained brain to some intelligent awareness of our responsibilities in World Affairs, we’re going to foul up our leadership like England did, as sure as God made little green apples. Read the papers, gal. Find out what it’s all about.”