by
Elaine Dundy
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The man looking at me was in his late fifties. Stout and rumpled. Comfortably cushioned. Grey-haired, with a lock that fell across his forehead. A fleshy sensual mouth and a podgy mobile nose. A good coarse face full of robust health and a lustiness one could tell at a glance owed nothing to outdoor life. And those blue eyes—but they were exactly the colour of mine! Not taking his love-glance off me he began talking to his companion. I saw his plump well-padded paws, the fingers lying quietly together like mittens, move forward and sort of hug himself while he sat there still smiling at me as if I were the best thing he’d ever seen in his life. He looked so—what was it that gave him his irresistible charm? He looked so accessible. That was it. A great simple truth struck me with surprise: charm is availability. How had I ever thought otherwise?
Smitty got out the file and I flipped through. C. D. McKee. Cosmo Darwin McKee. Nothing at all about his early life. A few short paragraphs in which he was included in lists of academic honours conferred on him by various foreign universities while at Oxford. The war, his Generalship, meetings with Heads of Staff, etc., etc. Then a sort of social butterfly series—photographs mainly—old Porky leering out from glossy groups at Hunt Balls and deb parties and art exhibitions. I was flipping through faster when suddenly, wedged in between the Hunt Balls and his marriage to the wealthy American widow Mrs. Pauline Saegessor, and on newsprint instead of slick paper—wham—a pile of clips on the Bosworth Clute Securities case. A public scandal; a great big fat juicy business scandal. I caught my breath and studied them closely. What startled me at first was that I knew the name—Bosworth Clute. By, I suppose, a not very wild coincidence, this much married, much divorced English business tycoon was the father of one of the girls I’d been at school with. I ploughed through reams of almost incomprehensible testimony. Something about the firm being hammered on the Stock Exchange. Something about sharepushing. Something about Clute concealing his snowballing losses by using his clients’ securities without their knowledge. Something about gambling on a successful Suez action by Britain that would cause a boom in oil shares. Something about Clute being sentenced to six years in jail having been found guilty on sixteen counts of conspiracy, fraud, and false pretences involving £300,000. But what had all this to do with McKee? Oh—oh. There it was. A little bit tucked away at the end. Clute’s Board of Directors, amongst whom C. D. was singled out for special mention by the Judge. “As to General McKee I have satisfied myself that he was at no time aware of the transactions Clute was conducting though I should like to record my amazement at his lack of interest in the enterprise whether by naïveté or design and the lack of business qualifications which Clute seemed to feel appropriate to the selection of his Board of Directors on the whole and to General McKee in particular.” Hmm. Spot of trouble there.
I ordered a plain old dry martini adding that I wanted it very dry and with a twist of lemon instead of an olive to show that we Americans too can enter the gourmet ring.
C. D. ordered himself a Cinzano and we went ahead and chose our meal. I decided to start with Ogorki Demi-sel and go on to the Filet de Plie Orly while C. D. plumped for the Crème Waldeze followed by a Poulet Braconniers.
The waiter returned with our drinks and began placing them in front of us wrong way round. I’d noticed a kind of mad, satisfied gleam come into C. D.’s eye as he sat silently, watching the mistake to its completion, but nothing to prepare me for the explosion by which he let the waiter—and everyone else in the room—in on his view of the matter. “May I recommend that a little ordinary commonsense brought to your job might help you in overcoming your either real or psychological deafness, young man?” he bellowed. “Who at this table looks young enough to risk a midday martini? Who looks wise enough to choose an aperitif?” It was unexpected to say the least.
lol
“Who is it? The name of your analyst.”
Wonderful how the unexpected always throws us. I was prepared for anything but a simple question like that. I had equipped myself with all possible kinds of false identifications and labels but the name of an analyst wasn’t amongst them. It had never occurred to me that anyone would come out like that and demand the name of an analyst; it was too terribly personal. On top of the confusion I was shocked, really shocked, and I indicated as much.
“I—I don’t think I ought to tell, should I? Isn’t it sort of like breaking the Hipocratic oath? You know, like if it’s all right for me to go around blabbing his name, then it’s all right for him to go around blabbing mine. And everything about me. See what I mean?”
However, as I embarked upon her story the strangest change came over me. I discovered that it was possible to be the sort of liar who comes to believe her lies almost the instant they spring from her lips. For no sooner had I begun to talk about myself as Honey Flood than I felt myself mysteriously osmosing into her: a harrowing experience.
Try telling a story in which you behaved in a somewhat less than exemplary fashion and try telling it from the point of view of the person you behaved that way towards and try laying it on thick for the sympathy of your listener, and see if you don’t find your real self in the disagreeable position of standing by and watching you becoming an absolute fiend.
We greeted each other and he steered me expertly down the ramp alongside the train and into the exact compartment desired, where he skilfully arranged our bags and cosily settled into his seat with an air of putting on his slippers and pulling out his pipe. We were travelling First Class. There was no doubt about that. It said so on the window pane next to me and on the door to the compartment. It said so on the two glass panels on either side of the door and on the window on the other side of our corridor. Altogether it said so not less than five times.
C. D. was waiting for me at the foot of the stairs and we went into the drawing-room together. Introductions again. This time by the hostess but in the same off-hand embarrassed manner as C. D. and acknowledged, I noticed, with equal off-hand embarrassment. I began to wonder if the reason for this might not be just that: embarrassment at having to introduce anyone to anyone else in these particular charmed circles where of course Everyone was supposed to know Everyone already. Whatever the reason, I must confess they showed a remarkable lack of interest in meeting me and for my part I was able to stifle my own. There was a Mr. and Mrs. Something, a Colonel Something, a Miss Something, three growing children, an elderly Mrs. Something-Something and a couple of dogs who bounced all over me and were the friendliest souls there. [...]
C. D. appeared in the drawing-room even later than I so we had a chance for only one small exchange before going in to dinner. However, it did much to make a shambles of the meal for me.
“You’re late,” I said and then I looked at him more closely, for although brushed and combed and freshly shaved there was about him an indefinable air of chaos, a curious rumpledness about his features. “What have you been doing?” I asked.
“Using you for imagery,” he replied blandly. “Are you shocked?”
I wasn’t right away. I didn’t even get it right away. And if he hadn’t pointed up the first part of the remark by adding the second part I probably wouldn’t have. I probably would have regarded it as merely cryptic, what-the-hell. But finally I got it all right. And when I did, I felt myself go bright pink. I stared hard at my drink. “No ice,” I mumbled shakily. “How quaint. Just like they’re always telling you in those Come to Britain books.”
And so we drove, and so we arrived at his house. And there he led me unresisting up the stairs into his bedchamber where, upon his lily-white bed, in the fullness of time he did lay me.
There is a time for asterisks and a time for speaking out. I don’t know—will all this morbid introspection into my terrible itch for that randy old man reveal itself merely as an exercise in self-indulgence, a senseless waste of time? Or will it be that, having put down clearly and to my own satisfaction once and for all precisely what it was like sleeping with foxy grampa, I may finally come to understand what was going on in me? And what was making me go on like that? Maybe not. We must hope for the best. But it’s so hard. I write three words and at the fourth memory seizes me. I waste hours mooning over a situation that play it as I may could only have been resolved by disaster.
lol
Waking Monday morning at Dody’s I sat straight up in bed, my heart pounding. He was old. He was my stepfather. I hated him. And I’d enjoyed myself. Promptly I slid back down again stuffing the pillow over my face. Any combination of two would have been enough to send me under—all four was too much. Besides, I hated him but I loved him too. Yes. I know all about that sort of thing. Christ, I should, I’d heard nothing else my last two years in New York. “They have this terrific love-hate thing going,” everybody said about everybody else. “You watch, it’s going to destroy them—.” But never about me. When I took to someone I took to them, and when I took against them ditto. Mostly I felt indifference. Hmm. If you don’t mind I believe I will take this opportunity to apologize for my former fatuousness.