The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [37]
All this time the answer was coming at me slowly through the door. Teddy was in the room now, he was going to shut that door, shut me away from Larry forever. It’ll be hard to shut, I thought in a panic, looking at its lock, one of those very complicated French ones. And then suddenly— Don’t let him fumble! Don’t let the door bang and fly open and bang and fly open again. Oh, kill it instantly, I found myself praying. I needn’t have worried. He was not likely to bungle the final flourish. He put one hand on the brass thingamajig, the other on the doorknob, and with one clean click the door flew shut.
With the same clean click the bomb exploded in the pit of my stomach. It sent cold water oozing through my veins, trickled damply into my wet palms, and finally shot its vital message up to my fuddled brain. At last the villain was unmasked. At last the Wild West caption: “Cousin John ties Sally Jay’s hands while the Contessa makes off with Larry” could be credited to its rightful author—not Fate, nor Just-my-Luck, but none other than that fine Italian artist Alfredo Visconti.
It was his feeling for economy I admired most. Obviously a tan of Sartre’s Huis Clos, he had gone to no unnecessary expense or complication to achieve his effects, simply following the Master’s formula of collecting together a few carefully selected souls and watching them torture one another … or rather, I realized with a start, watching them torture me. Florentine revenge was apparently every bit as effective as Corsican. I looked upon him with a new respect.
“Well now,” said Teddy, and no matter how hard he tried, that silly shameful victorious smile would come creeping back over his face. “Well, now—shall we all have a brandy?”
John frowned. “Say, we’d better be pushing on, S. J. Come to think of it, it is pretty late.” Heavy drinking always discouraged him. A frivolity he couldn’t possibly control tended to take hold of people then. “I thought maybe we’d go for a nice quiet drive around some park here while you told me all about …” he yawned. “Anyway, there’s no hurry. I’ve still got a week left. C’mon men.” Dody Gorce rose obediently.
Teddy, on his way to the brandy, stopped dead in his tracks and looked at John. “Oh no, really must you go?” The feebleness of the protest and the relief on his face produced an effect so much less than charming that it made me tingle all over. For Teddy to be uncharming was as unthinkable as for John to be uninquisitive. Then, too, the circumstances of his triumph seemed to demand our detention. Surely he was going to allow himself the luxury of a little gloating, of playing the innocent, of at least seeing how I was taking it.
He looked tired. A sudden vision of how much it must have cost him in wear and tear, in sheer skull-cracking boredom, to cultivate John for the purpose of this evening, illuminated my thoughts. A flow of vindictiveness warmed my body, sending the blood pounding back through my veins. So Hell was other people, was it? Well, Teddy wasn’t the only one who could borrow a page from Sartre. He was going to find out just what Hell old John-boy could be. Yessiree, I thought proudly, my cousin John is a two-edged sword; he cuts both ways. I had just remembered something that could be of the utmost importance if used correctly; I had just remembered Teddy’s Special Project.
“John, I think you’re being really horrible, eating and