The Dud Avocado (10 page)

“This man you call Teddy.”

“Oh. Well forget it. Anyway, I took your advice, didn’t I?”

“My advice?”

“Yes. Stay away from married men, you said. Except as it turns out, he’s not married now—although he
was
. He wanted to marry me in fact. It’s all very complicated. Look. He just called me up a couple of days ago out of the blue and asked us both to dinner. That’s all. Really. I don’t know why. I guess he was just being nice.” We had arrived.

“I wonder,” said Larry suspiciously as we got out of the taxi. That’s what kills me.
He
was the suspicious one, not me.

Teddy had told me it was to be a party of six. He had not lied. Six we were. Six exactly. I wonder if I can give you the picture.

The first thing that loomed into view, almost knocking Teddy down in his rush to get at me, was my loathsome cousin John Roger Gorce. John was a real, earnest, enthusiastic, gee-whiz tail-wagging prig of an American, with the shortest crew cut and the thickest horn rims ever to accompany their owner through four ceaseless interrogating years of Harvard. Behind
these spectacles blinked eyes that gawped and stared insensitively at anything not absolutely commonplace to the right side of the five-block area on which he had built his house in Wichita, Kansas.

He was blocking the passageway now, jamming us up against the door.

“Hee-Haw! Hee-Haw!” he bellowed suddenly into my face, his hands flapping by his ears, his nose twitching, his large teeth thrust forward in a really startlingly successful donkey imitation. “Hee-Haw!”

Larry, caught off guard by this bizarre salute, cringed against the door. But I had been tensed for it. It had a very simple, very embarrassing explanation. It was the way John used to make me laugh when I was three and he was eight. Since then it had become his inevitable, unvarying greeting to me whenever I was unlucky enough to get within braying distance. Now he folded his arms and rocked back and forth in satisfaction. He wasn’t smiling. He didn’t have to
smile
to convey his self-satisfaction. He didn’t have to do anything.

“Well, S. J.,” he said, addressing me quietly and firmly and almost as an equal, “guess this must be a pretty good surprise for you, what say gal?” He was sort of rubbing his back against the wall as he spoke, making himself more comfortable, savoring his triumph. Drearily I conceded defeat. It was true that he was probably the one and only person in the whole world that I would wish at all times and in all places (and especially then) to avoid, but short of magic this was at the moment impossible. The thing that got me though—the thing that really, really
got
me was that revolting appellation “S. J.” I mean that beat everything, that did. It just showed you; the joke was supposed to be on
him
for Christ’s sake. It too had infantile origins. Even as a little boy, John had been so impressed by the J. P.’s and P. T.’s and F. D. R.’s by which the Big Wheels were designated in newspapers, that he took to initialing his baby cousin, both in his private conversations with her, and in his references to her with others, simply because this made him feel that he actually was hitting it off with some hot shot—tycoon to tycoon. He confessed this one day to his father, quite matter-of-factly, almost
proudly, and Big John, who had always got a lot of simple-minded pleasure from the tiny monster he’d produced, when he was able to stop laughing and pick himself up off the floor, told it at once around the family. In no time it became the family joke. Only John never saw anything funny about it. Nor was he in the least abashed by its constant retelling. Nor, dammit, did he ever stop initialing me.

“Why John, what on earth are you doing here?” I asked him finally. And actually I was quite curious to know. The last time I’d been trapped by him, I’d been let in on what he really thought of hitherto responsible American Youth high-tailing it out of the States first chance they got, wasting their time bumming around Europe. He thought it was darned
disheartening
. Where were we going to get our key-thinking elite from anyway? He thought
they
ought to be forming the core of our key-thinking elite. He thought
they
should be solving the vital postwar social and economic problems of the Civic Community, not leaving it in the hands of people without the benefit of the fine up-to-date basic training the American University was now offering its students in its contemporary curriculums. That was what he thought.

His brow puckered earnestly at my question. “I had a helluva wrestle with my soul, S. J., to see if I
should
take this trip,” he confessed frankly, “but I finally decided that the Rag really did need some decent on-the-spot reporting of just how Uncle Sam is letting all his good gray taxpayers’ money be spent over here.” That was what he’d decided.

Good old John Roger (the Roger was for our mutual uncle, the really rich one), I swear I don’t know where he got it all from. His father, except for his overdeveloped sense of humor, was a terrific guy. He ran a newspaper in St. Louis, and as part of his tireless practical joking (or maybe just to get young John off his neck), had bought him, upon graduation, a tiny toy newspaper in Wichita to play with. I am sure its daily editorials kept Big John floor-bound and howling, but John junior, as is the case with so many of our great men, had no sense of humor at all, and the Wichita Wrangle, or whatever it was called, gave him a Mission along with his folie de grandeur.

“Course,” he went on, not giving us an inch more space to breathe in up there against the door, “I wouldn’t have dreamed of coming if this important Conference weren’t getting under way. I know darned well I haven’t given myself very long in these three weeks to cover it—not anything commensurate with its importance—but it’s all I’m going to be able to spare. Hell …” he let out a sharp little staccato bark to warn me of the approaching joke, “… somebody’s got to mind the store back home.” You could see his mind suddenly four thousand miles away, worrying over some vital, burning domestic issue—like the contraceptives that had been turning up recently in the bomb-proof shelters of that five-block area.…

“Anyhoo,” he shook himself and honored us again with his complete presence, “anyhoo, when we went for briefing last week at a meeting of the Soil Erosion Committee of the ACFEA.…”

“The
what?
”

John was always very patient with me.

“The Agricultural Commission for European Aid has been meeting for the past two weeks right here under your very nose, for heaven’s sake, S. J.,” he explained to me, not unkindly, “and the problems of Kansas as you know being mainly agricultural, naturally my Rag’s main interest is going to be focused on the developments of this project. Anyhoo—at this particular meeting there was a question I wanted to ask—I wasn’t quite sure of the protocol, so I introduced myself …” (John was always wanting to ask questions and introduce himself. He couldn’t even go to the men’s room of a Pennsylvania Railroad coach without asking a question and introducing himself. He was a real man from Mars, that boy, he even looked like one.) “… so I introduced myself to the person sitting on my left. And who should it be but Senor Visconti here.” He turned to indicate whom he meant, at last acknowledging the presence of someone else in the room. “He’s been terribly helpful to me ever since—and darned if he didn’t know my baby cousin—so—well, hell, here we are! Say, nobody in America seems to have your correct address …” a slight frown clouded his smooth brow at the thought of such inefficiency.

“I moved,” I said, pushing him aside (we’d have been there all
night if I hadn’t), and then, composing myself, I introduced Larry to John; Larry to Teddy; and much to her surprise, Larry to John’s wife, who now came drifting toward us.

I think Dody Gorce was
always
greatly surprised at each new discovery of her separate identity. Not one of those wives who have to glance spasmodically at their husbands before speaking; she simply never took her eyes off him at all if she could help it. When politeness demanded she tear herself away to acknowledge an introduction, she wasted no time in returning to her permanent resting place.

“Mais c’est formidable ces deux cousins, n’est-ce pas? On voit immediatement la ressemblance!” shrilled a voice behind us and, swinging around in a fury to confront whoever had delivered this malicious slander, I got my first look at the Contessa.

What with one thing and another I was to see quite a lot of this woman, but I’ll be damned if I can tell you to this day much about her. For instance, I haven’t the slightest idea what her name was or her nationality for that matter. (She could have been German or Austrian or Liechtensteinian for all I knew.) The reason for this was that apart from “Hello” and “Good-by,” she never at any time addressed a single other word in my direction, and she wouldn’t if I met her now, I’ll bet. It was a matter of the strictest principle with her never to talk to a woman younger than herself.

In describing her, on the one hand, and being completely, absolutely, scrupulously,
unnecessarily
fair, one couldn’t give her more than forty-two years of age, nor less than a pleasant face, a rosy complexion, and a good though rather full-blown figure. Handsome I suppose her friends would call her. And maybe not only her friends. Her best feature was her butter-blonde hair which she wore short, parted low and softly waving. She knew how to dress. She had on something stark and simple, and made up for it by plastering the rest of herself with plenty of those devastating Ritz jewels. She was a sort of female Teddy—well-cared-for in that mature European way—with a faint, only faint suggestion of outdoors—of going skiing, rather than skiing: a man’s woman; almost a man’s man, really, with all her hearty camaraderie. A tough cookie, a real oeuf dur. I remember somebody
once very carefully explaining to me about her title, a Holy Roman Empire one, they said, transmitted only through the female line, and I remember thinking then how perfectly this accounted for her Amazonian tactics.

If you want to know what I really thought of her—I thought she was a great, affected, mindless, maudlin, screeching cow. And Christ! was she sure of herself. She took meeting
me
quietly enough (there was a dreadful,
dreadful
moment I never want to think about again when John jogged me and stage-whispered an impressed “
Contessa
” for everybody’s benefit), but, boy, she nearly went out of her mind when she came to Larry. The minute Teddy got his
name
out her head flew back and her eyes started from their sockets. You would have thought she’d been waiting all her life for this chance. She wheeled on Teddy, clutching her priceless pearls as if to fling them to the ground in challenge, and every inch of her body stiffened with disbelief. Then the dam burst and she began babbling in some long-forgotten English tongue.

“But I refuse to believe this, Teddy, you frightful rascal. What a leg-pull I must say! This chap Larry Keevil? Don’t be daft. I never heard such nonsense. I shan’t listen to another word. No really I shan’t.”

“Why nonsense?” asked Larry, really bewildered.

“But you are far too young,” she murmured, suddenly all soft and wondering. It was like watching an early Dietrich film. “I had heard you were a young chap—everyone
comments
that— but as young as this? Well,
really
. You are a brave one, oh yes you are, bringing us here the English-speaking Theater in its original! One is frightfully interested in these things—there has always been such a need for it. And such failures. I could tell you—but they lacked vitality just simply. And youth. I see that now. Do you know Jimee Fowler and his bunch? Well, stay clear of them, they are up to no good, I promise. What a row they are kicking up all the time. Such a carry-on, always
tickled pink
. Don’t pay them any attention, you must promise me. Oh, I know all about them! Oh yes. I know a-very-thing about them, please understand. Back in ’49 it was quite another horse, I assure you.
Such
an attractive little theater in Montmartre.
Such personable young men. Oh, I remember them
intimately
. Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Curtis and that terribly nice young man Mr. Bartlett …” and lots more of the same—whatever it was.

I flashed a look of amusement at Larry which, to my astonishment, never landed. Quite unself-consciously—quite unconsciously, you might say, her arm curling into his, the Contessa had maneuvered him over to a corner where they sat laughing and chatting together, and from that moment on, a sense of helplessness, of being strangled to death by cobwebs, never left me. On the face of it there was nothing to grasp. A silly middle-aged woman was shrilling confidences into my escort’s ear, all of which could be heard in the next room and none of which couldn’t be shouted from the rooftops, for that matter. “The South of France
at that time of year
, dear boy?”—a gasp of disbelief, a hand to the breast to still the priceless jewel set quivering by the palpitations of an incredulous heart—“but … but … it would be
disastrous
. But simply impossible, you know … so full of humans and hotels of a-very description. Such a hullabaloo, I can’t tell you. And the English. I don’t know
what!
A glance at the sun and they become
crazy
people, you know …” while the rest of us, as on a spit, were being slowly roasted to death with boredom by Cousin John. There was nothing, one might say, that couldn’t have happened before or that wouldn’t happen again. Nothing to upset me as much as it did. And yet there was this awful feeling of impending doom that I couldn’t shake off—of ruthless, inscrutable and hostile forces at work. And it was only much later on that I realized that if John’s conversation hadn’t been anaesthetizing my brain, I would have caught on much sooner. Even so I doubt if it would have made any difference. I think from the minute I walked through Teddy’s door that night my goose was cooked. The cast was assembled and the die was cast.

But to get on.

As I was saying—crushed, confused, dazed, I was certainly not at my best that evening. John, on the other hand, was in top form—by which I mean he was worse than ever.