The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [18]
“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