The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [9]
You know how it is. Some people can hack and hack away at you and nothing happens at all and then someone else just touches you lightly on the arm and you come … yes, I mean that’s what happened. I mean I came.
I remember looking down at the table and seeing my fingers clinging and curling around his. I remember being quite aware of this but at the same time quite unable to stop myself. Then I put his hand up to my cheek and caressed his knuckles with my mouth. A split second suspended itself into infinity in the air while my heart pounded furiously and I kept kissing and kissing his knuckles. And then it was over.
I jerked my head back sharply. I tried to pull my hand away from his. He held on tightly. His voice was very close to me, mocking and smooth. “Why you little fraud.” Very softly, very clearly. “You shabby little fraud. You’ll die when he goes, will you? Now how do I know you’ve been lying?” He was quite simply torturing me.
My eyes dug a hole in the table, unfortunately not large enough to crawl into. “You don’t know——” I began but the whole thing was too much for me. There was one moment while I counted the seconds and then I resigned myself. With a sigh I forced myself to look at him and he looked back at me hard and down and through and I yielded up without a struggle my badly kept secret.
“Isn’t it awful?” I said, my voice faltering into a miserably insincere little giggle.
He held his head on one side. He was, I could see, overwhelmingly puzzled. And so, in a word, was I. Had playing with fire for so long without getting burned heated me up for this almost spontaneous combustion? Why, why, why, was the question burning in his face. As there was no reason that I could figure out, he wasn’t going to get an answer. And maybe he didn’t really want one anyway. At any rate he let go of my hand. And his motor started up again. The implications of these acts should have made me feel worse but somehow they cooled me down, and I reached around for my tattered cloak of carelessness. I said casually, “I saw this stinking little Art film last night. All about the simple life on a barge up and down the Seine. How about that? Not a bad idea.” I was really talking to myself. In times of stress when I’m not coming out of things too well the simple life has a tremendous appeal for me. Picking strawberries off a deserted wind-swept coast on the Atlantic Ocean when I was seven is an image I frequently and yearningly return to.
We began talking of other things. Although I had been the one to make such a fool of myself I was the calmer. It was Larry who was flapping about, searching for conversation.
At one point I noticed his eyes had found their way back to my bosom again. “I think that dress needs something or other around the neck, you know,” he was saying helpfully. “Haven’t you got anything?”
“I had a pearl necklace,” I answered, by now really wishing he would go. “I lost it or something. Anyway it’s gone. The hell with it.”
“What a shame. It wasn’t real, I hope?” he asked with a sympathy he couldn’t feel.
“As a matter of fact it was. Who cares? The hell with it,” I said. I was really getting annoyed at the trivial turn in the conversation.
“Oh come now,” he persisted. “You don’t often lose things, do you?”
“All the time,” I said defiantly, wondering how long we were going to toss this around. “I don’t like possessions. I travel light so I can make my getaway.” Bitterly I was thinking that he was going to incorporate this, too, in his tourist research. O.K. O.K. I was it all right. I was practically the prototype. Getting drunk, having affairs, losing money, losing jewelry, losing God knows what. Whoopee, twenty-three skidoo, and Oh you kid!
“You don’t give a damn, do you?” he said finally.
“No. I don’t.”
A long pause. “Gorce, I’ll tell you something. You know what? You’ve got to stop all this drifting. You’ve got brains and looks and talent. Things could really