The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [20]
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.
There are, I know (it was in our philosophy course in college), at least a hundred different reasons why some particular event takes place. So I thrashed about again trying to find some other truth and in the instant that it flashed through my head, I think I got as close to my raison d’etre as I ever have. At least I’d never put it to myself so clearly.
“I only did it,” I said, “now this is going to be the truth, Teddy, I only did it because it seemed to be the glamorous thing to do at the time. It was my ideal of glamour.”
Nothing changed in his face, but I could see from the way he kind of switched off and the light went out of his eyes and his eyelids fluttered downwards listlessly, and from the way one hand slid from the table and began aimlessly rubbing his knee, that for two cents he’d abandon the whole project. But the strength and tenacity that had placed him where he was, high in the Diplomatic Corps, refused to desert him in his hour of need, and after a moment or so of resolute breathing he started lecturing me on the error of my ways.
“That is the answer I would expect of a midinette,” he began “or, as you would say—of a bobsy-soxer.…” There are few things as tenuous as a Latin’s grasp of the American Idiom.
I interrupted him. “Yes, sir,” I said. “That’s me, kiddo. Just a bobby-soxer at heart.”
So he gave up. And in a way I kind of gave up myself. I gave up wondering if anyone was ever going to understand me at all. If I was ever going to understand myself even. Why was it so difficult anyway? Was I some kind of a nut or something? Don