The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [35]
I crossed my eyes and sighed heavily. “Oh God,” I said into my plate.
A scream of joy pierced the silence. The Contessa had just seen the light. She was now rushing in to enlighten my country cousin.
“But it is the custom!” she exclaimed, all sparkling. “It was for your taste, don’t you see?”
John leaned forward and awarded her his first smile of the evening. “Not for my taste,” said the dumb bastard, grinning away fatuously.
The Contessa shrieked.
It wasn’t until the meat course, however, that John really became uncorked. You could see that his two weeks in Europe spent talking mostly to his silent, adoring wife had crystallized a lot of ideas that he was just bursting to try out on a larger group. Presidential candidates, Senatorial investigations, juvenile delinquency—he held firm views on all of them, views which needless to say he was entirely willing to share with one and all, and if the thought ever struck him that there might possibly be people at the table who were uninformed or even just plain uninterested in these peculiarly American problems, it never slowed the steady flow nor quelled the mighty roar.
“John is a parlor white” I murmured to no one in particular— to no one at all, as it turned out. For worse, far worse to me than John’s assaults on my ears, the primary sounds so to speak, were the secondary ones: the gigglings, whisperings and chokings of Larry and the Contessa across the table, too intimate to break into, too murmured to penetrate. For a woman with as piercing a shriek as the one the Contessa normally employed for her conversation, her soft register was remarkable. It required every ounce of my agonized concentration to decipher one-tenth of the words. She was apparently inviting Larry to a gas chamber. “It will be enormous,” she whispered. “Oh yes, I intend to kill off a-very-one. Hundreds of them. Oh, three or four hundred at least. Do come. In some minutes now I will give you the address.”
I caught Larry’s eye just then. He flashed me a brilliant traitor’s smile; a gash of teeth and two wiggles of his eyebrows. I had to laugh. It was the first time that evening that I hadn’t felt like killing myself. Stick with me, I begged him with my eyes. See me through, I love you and I’ll make it all up later. I promise. But even as I telegraphed the message, I felt myself losing contact. He’d slipped away from me and gone back to the enemy.
From the sense of great distance that the wine was beginning to produce in me, I thought John looked rather peculiar. He seemed flushed and trembling, and his voice sounded shaky. I tried to concentrate on what he was saying. He had somehow got himself all tangled up in a question of Constitutional Law and was frantically trying to wrestle his way out, struggling and gasping like some half-strangled gray-flanneled Laocoön. So there actually were some people crazy enough to want to amend any old Article of the Constitution just to solve a couple of stupid problems, were there? Well by God, he wasn’t one of them! He’d fight to the last ditch before he’d see them get away with anything