The Dud Avocado (New York Review Books Classics)

by Elaine Dundy

“They tell me you were heading down Mexico way this time. What for?” he asked me over his shoulder, apparently unable even for a minute to tear himself away from the stars, or whatever you see through a telescope in broad daylight. “I wanted to be a bullfighter,” I mumbled.

“I am in mourning for my life,” I said, still staring at my shoes, wishing they were black, at least, and wondering if he’d ever read the play.

Chekhov

For the first time he spoke to me man to man.

began floating down those Elysian Fields three inches off the ground, as easily as a Cocteau character floats through Hell.

For some people history is a Beach or a Tower or a Graveyard. For me it was this giant primordial Toyshop with all its windows gloriously ablaze.

Two of les boys flitted past. They certainly wore their jeans with a difference. One of the differences between Saint-Germain and Montparnasse, I decided, was that Saint-Germain was queerer. And that was the only decision I seemed likely to make for the time being.

A rowdy bunch on the whole, they were most of them so violently individualistic as to be practically interchangeable.

What is he—G.I., Fulbright, Guggenheim, or Rockefeller?”

We both giggled at the absurdity of knowing a Frenchman in France.

spine. I thought of sex and sin; of my body and all the men in the world who would never sleep with it.

When I felt the horns of my dilemma actually toss me into the air, I lit out of the hotel and landed in the street.

Embodied logic

The vague nymphomania I had experienced at the window returned.

I told myself that this must be part of some pathetic fallacy, whereby if you fall in love with one man, all men instantly become desirable, whether they actually are or not. But as soon as I laid eyes on the Frenchman with Judy, I realized how ridiculous this was. I didn’t need any pathetic fallacy to tell me that taken all in all—age, weight, shape and color, this was really le jacque pot!

If he wasn’t unaware of his power, he certainly wasn’t bored by it either. He looked carefully at me. I-feel-as-if-we-have-already-so-why-waste-time? the look stated unequivocally.

in his respectful attitude of “waiting.” I have even been known to fall out of the cab by reaching and pushing against the handle at the same time that he did. But this time, however, I had disciplined myself to remain quite, quite still, sitting on my hands until the door was opened for me.

fits of nervous laughter. Especially since I couldn’t help remembering a similar situation. It occurred at the beginning of our affair when, in my eagerness to get things rolling, when the thought of sleeping with someone occupied the entire area of my brain, not to say my body, twenty-four hours a day, I had said to him, it just sort of slipped out: “I am not going to bed with you tonight, you know,” and Teddy had replied in honest bewilderment, “I was thinking of asking you, but I haven’t yet” I have this awful tendency to jump the gun.

“Ah-ha. Yes. I could see something was going wrong with us just around then,” he said, incredibly enough. “I am afraid you are not very good at deceiving or even concealing things, my dear.” And I could feel, positively feel his satisfaction at being “right” overcoming for the moment his chagrin at what he was hearing.

“I only did it,” I said, “now this is going to be the truth, Teddy, I only did it because it seemed to be the glamorous thing to do at the time. It was my ideal of glamour.”

of a midinette,” he began “or, as you would say—of a bobsy-soxer . . . .” There are few things as tenuous as a Latin’s grasp of the American Idiom.

I suddenly saw him as fat, aging and silly. The phrase “Old World” flashed through my mind. He was no match for my American callowness.

It always made me sad to see that there were so many unmarried women in the world—sadder still to realize that they were largely unseen because there were so few public places they dared brave without a sense of strain.

her know. I mean I was all for it. Why not everybody change countries with everybody else?

the question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don’t we all anyway; might as well get paid for it.

lowered my voice to a husky growl which went over big with them, accustomed as they were to having their eardrums pierced by the shrill French ingénue whose voice, even under normal circumstances, is about an octave higher than an American’s.

What a world, I thought. Nothing but sex as far as the eye can see.

a gnarled little Englishman who’s lived in France so long he speaks Cockney with a French accent,