The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [31]
“As long as he doesn’t decide to take a pot shot at me,” Larry went on. “These Corsican bandits are a hot-blooded bunch you know. They don’t stand for no messin’ around with their wim-menfolk.”
“Larry, you haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. In the first place he’s a Florentine nobleman, not a Chicago gangster. In the second place I swear there is absolutely nothing between Teddy and myself any more. It’s all over. I haven’t even seen him for a month. Poor thing,” I sighed gently, reminiscently, trying to slip us into the mood. “I’m afraid he didn’t take it very well when I threw him over. As a matter of fact, it all happened on the very day that I ran into you at the Dupont— it just—just …” And I completely lost track of what I was going to say. Somehow the word “Dupont” made the whole incident with Larry come flooding back, and I simply couldn’t follow any other train of thought. “What were we talking about?” I had to ask. He was wating for me to go on.
“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,