The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [30]
Making sure the coast was clear, I dodged back to my hotel. I was dead tired and fell immediately into a dreamless sleep.
FIVE
RETURNING FROM REHEARSALS one evening about two weeks later, I arrived in my room just in time to catch the telephone ringing. There at the other end, purring away into my receiver, fur all over his smile, was Teddy Visconti—God rot his blackened heart, the Machiavellian Monster. Only of course I didn’t know any of this at the time. All I knew then was that I had to think for a moment to remember who he was.
I was rather cool to Teddy at first. I hadn’t recalled our previous encounter with much pleasure, and I couldn’t imagine ever really wanting to see him again. Systematically he set to work disarming me. Beginning with his congratulations on my good fortune (he’d read an item about the American Theater in the Herald Tribune), and his best wishes for my success, he went on to sweep the floor with himself for his disgraceful, unspeakable and totally unjustified behavior at our last meeting. By the time he had waltzed into a heady tirade on the saintliness of allowing bygones to be bygones and finished up with a passionate proposal of eternal devotion (along strictly platonic lines), I was pretty well softened up.
But the main purpose of his call, said our wily old gift-bearing Greek, sailing to his climax, the main purpose was to wonder whether we, that is both of us, Larry and myself of course, would be kind enough to allow him to arrange a small dinner party in our honor that Saturday—a sort of send-off to our joint venture. It was, in fact, simply the only way he could think up to secure my forgiveness. I couldn’t refuse—could I? It would be too unkind. He would be giving it at his old apartment, the one I knew in the Boissy d’Anglas—he was moving out, it held too many memories for him, but he had specially secured the landlord’s permission to stay on that week end if he had the party. He knew that the whole thing was ridiculously sentimental, of course, but that was the way he was, and what could he do? My head was spinning by now from all this rich, powerful prose, and apart from everything else I looked forward to the chance of spending an evening with Larry on a basis other than professional. So into the trap I marched, eyes shining, mouth open, ears flapping. I do remember thinking it all a bit odd, somehow, after I’d hung up. That’s the story of my life. Someone’s behavior strikes me as a bit odd and the next thing I know all hell breaks loose. I don’t always understand other people’s motives. I will repeat that for my own benefit, if you don’t mind. I don’t always understand other people’s motives. I wonder why? I’m very bright really. For instance, Doctor Long gave me an A in Seventeenth Centch. Eng. Poetry at college, and he was known to be one of the toughest professors we had. He’d been teaching there for eight years, and he’d never given anyone above a B plus. But he gave me an A. A straight A too—not minus.
“So that’s the plot,” said Larry when I told him on our way over to the party exactly who Teddy was. “I’ll be damned. You had me thinking this was some official diplomatic function we were gracing. Some project of the Italian government. I don’t know what I thought.…” He paused for a moment to consider, crossed his legs, jiggled his foot and sent the air hissing through his teeth. It made him seem more like a steam engine than ever. “Come clean, Gorce,” he said finally. “I smell a rat here somewhere. I remember this type Visconti. He’s the one you were going to die without—isn’t he? So what am I doing here? Maybe some kind of bait? Come on, you can level with me. Who am I? The jealous rival? Heavy father? Let’s have it.”
His analysis of the situation was so staggeringly