The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [19]
“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