The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [57]
“But I am terrified of insects, especially those that fly.”
Larry kissed me on the cheek and sat me down at my dressing table. “Hurry up and put something on to receive in. Your public is waiting,” he said and left me.
When he came back a little while later I noticed for the first time that he was in his dinner jacket. The black and white was almost unbearably becoming to him. He shone and bristled and it was all I could do to stifle the impulse to stroke the back of his neck. Only then did I realize that I’d completely forgotten about my own clothes. At three o’clock in the afternoon I’d been told to go home and bathe and rest and so forth, but I’d been so nervous I’d just wandered around reciting my lines instead. Now all I had with me was what I’d been wearing then: a navy-blue suit and a crumpled white blouse. I’d been trying to take off my make-up and I felt all creamy behind the ears and in my eyes, which stung and swam from the running mascara. I felt as if I’d fallen into a pot of grease.
“Let’s go,” said Larry.
“Where to?”
“Well, first of all, the Contessa——”
“Oh, Larry.”
“Honey, I don’t like it any better than you. But what can I do? She’s gone and planned this elaborate party without consulting me. Don’t worry, we’ll cut as soon as possible——”
“But I’m so tired. I don’t want to have to wrestle with a horde of strangers. I just want to eat about a hundred million oysters and two tons of caviar and go swimming naked in champagne——”
“I don’t know about the swimming, but I’ll make damn sure you get enough of everything else you want.”
“Oh well. You win. You go ahead and apologize for my clothes, won’t you?”
I looked at myself in the mirror in despair. I thought of the evening dress I might have worn. I combed my hair and thought bitterly about my batting average for dressing inappropriately.
Why break a record? I flung a towel over the make-up on the table and left without bothering to straighten it out.
We arrived at the Contessa’s in an enormous car of snowy white. It was a sleeping car. That’s what I said. The back seat could be made up into a bed at night. It slept two. We talked about it on the way over; I mean they talked about it on the way over. We were four. There were Larry and me, the Contessa (who having said hello as I climbed into the car had already used up half her conversation to me for the evening) and the King of Lithuania, or someone like that. Just looking at him filled me with foreboding. How was I going to square up to all this, I wondered. The sensation of being so close to another human being with whom I had not one single sensation in common left me speechless. I fell to studying him. It was amazing how different even real things—a gold ring, hair oil, the cut of a coat, could be without being bizarre; the fabric of his shirt was woven of some Martian stuff; even his very skin was of another weave. Not a word was exchanged; there was at least an ocean between us. All this time the Contessa was flirting with Larry “outrageously,” as she might have put it, and with an elephantine delicacy (as she most certainly would not have), about the bed in the car. The King listened brightly and I stared at him fixedly, unable to recognize anything.
I began worrying about the transference of bravery. Only four hours earlier I’d said to myself that if I ever survived the ordeal of the first Entrance I would never be afraid again. Now it looked like far from the first fear canceling out the next one, it was actually going to multiply it.
I pulled Larry aside before we went into the drawing room. “Larry, I want to leave. It’s too harrowing. I won’t know a living soul.”
“Oh come now. There’s nothing to be frightened of. Probably just a bunch of queens.”
“Queens!”
“Queers. Fairies.”
“Hey, no kidding, all of them?”
“Well, most. Oh sure, all of them. Every last one of them. Come on, Gorce, cheer up. I promise you one thing; you’ll eat better food in here than you’ll ever be able