The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [33]
“I moved,” I said, pushing him aside (we’d have been there all night if I hadn’t), and then, composing myself, I introduced Larry to John; Larry to Teddy; and much to her surprise, Larry to John’s wife, who now came drifting toward us.
I think Dody Gorce was always greatly surprised at each new discovery of her separate identity. Not one of those wives who have to glance spasmodically at their husbands before speaking; she simply never took her eyes off him at all if she could help it. When politeness demanded she tear herself away to acknowledge an introduction, she wasted no time in returning to her permanent resting place.
“Mais c’est formidable ces deux cousins, n’est-ce pas? On voit immediatement la ressemblance!” shrilled a voice behind us and, swinging around in a fury to confront whoever had delivered this malicious slander, I got my first look at the Contessa.
What with one thing and another I was to see quite a lot of this woman, but I’ll be damned if I can tell you to this day much about her. For instance, I haven’t the slightest idea what her name was or her nationality for that matter. (She could have been German or Austrian or Liechtensteinian for all I knew.) The reason for this was that apart from “Hello” and “Good-by,” she never at any time addressed a single other word in my direction, and she wouldn’t if I met her now, I’ll bet. It was a matter of the strictest principle with her never to talk to a woman younger than herself.
In describing her, on the one hand, and being completely, absolutely, scrupulously, unnecessarily fair, one couldn’t give her more than forty-two years of age, nor less than a pleasant face, a rosy complexion, and a good though rather full-blown figure. Handsome I suppose her friends would call her. And maybe not only her friends. Her best feature was her butter-blonde hair which she wore short, parted low and softly waving. She knew how to dress. She had on something stark and simple, and made up for it by plastering the rest of herself with plenty of those devastating Ritz jewels. She was a sort of female Teddy—well-cared-for in that mature European way—with a faint, only faint suggestion of outdoors—of going skiing, rather than skiing: a man’s woman; almost a man’s man, really, with all her hearty camaraderie. A tough cookie, a real oeuf dur. I remember somebody once very carefully explaining to me about her title, a Holy Roman Empire one, they said, transmitted only through the female line, and I remember thinking then how perfectly this accounted for her Amazonian tactics.
If you want to know what I really thought of her—I thought she was a great, affected, mindless, maudlin, screeching cow. And Christ! was she sure of herself. She took meeting me quietly enough (there was a dreadful, dreadful moment I never want to think about again when John jogged me and stage-whispered an impressed “Contessa” for everybody’s benefit), but, boy, she nearly went out of her mind when she came to Larry. The minute Teddy got his name out her head flew back and her eyes started from their sockets. You would have thought she’d been waiting all her life for this chance. She wheeled on Teddy, clutching her priceless pearls as if to fling them to the ground