Free The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy

and he picked that up as well. He looked at it. He started to put it into the empty glass, but some threads from the carpet had stuck to it and I could see him deciding not to. So he just held it in one of his hands. And he sighed.
    “It is most difficult,” he began, and then squared his shoulders resolutely. “Very well. This is my plan. It is that I wish to marry you. That is all. Will you marry me, Sally Jay?” He was still holding on to that ice cube. It must have been freezing his hand off. God, I can see that ice cube perfectly, carpet hairs and all.
    “Howling hailstones!” I exclaimed. I let that out quite unconsciously. Fie really had knocked me for a loop. “But what about your
wife?
” I asked when I could.
    “I haven’t got one,” he said.
    “You haven’t got one.” The room was spinning. “What d’you
mean
, you haven’t got a wife?” What did he mean, he didn’t have a wife? He probably didn’t have a mistress either.
    “Listen, Teddy, you said you had one. You definitely said you did. You
must
have one.” I was beside myself. Even he was taken aback at my vehemence.
    “Yes, I had one. But she is gone.”
    “What happened to her? Where
is
she?” I accused him. I was ready to try him for murder.
    “She left me.” He put the ice cube into the glass and the glass onto the coffee table and sat down heavily. “She left me about three weeks ago,” he continued. “She has gone back to Rome. She will try to get an annulment. I think she may be able to. We have not been able to have children.”
    When the smoke cleared away and I was getting used to yet another one of the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, there was a new Teddy sitting there beside me—a new Alfredo if you like. This was the first time in all the while I’d known him that he was confiding in me instead of elaborately concealing hisprivate life, and the revelations in those few words changed everything. Suddenly I remembered the desperate look he’d given me that morning when I joshed him about successfully leading three lives. The homme fatal, fond and foolish as the pose had been from time to time, was gone forever; the bourgeois manque sat firmly in his place. Looking at him there I knew I would never again see the foolish philanderer, the conscious charmer. Instead he had become permanently one half of a
family
. I saw them together, he and his wife, round a dinner table: silent, dreary and childless.
    I tried to pity him. It was just about the saddest thing on earth really, and certainly I should have shown some compassion. But there is no point in telling this at all if I don’t tell the truth, and the truth was that now that I felt I
completely
understood him, I completely despised him. From my standpoint what he had just told me was just about the worst thing he could have said to me. The main trouble with being an homme fatal, the really,
really
crux of the matter was one was so entirely dependent on every single prop. Take one away and the whole structure collapses like a house of cards. If his
wife
doesn’t want him,
I
certainly don’t, was my way of putting it.
    I think he actually had forgotten me for the moment, thinking about her, for he seemed a long way away when I next spoke.
    “What about your mistress?” I had asked.
    “Yes,” he said nodding vaguely, a million miles away.
    “Your mistress. Why don’t you marry her?”
    He shook his head. “She is too old,” he said. “It is too late for her to have children.”
    Crash went another prop. Boy, this really wasn’t one of his days. He just couldn’t put a foot right. It was a situation all too familiar to me, this business of setting off on the wrong foot and doggedly remaining there. Only I’d never watched it from the outside before. It was fascinating. Poor bastard, it should have made me want to reach out and yank him onto the other foot. It should have given me a fellow feeling. But it didn’t.
    Eventually we both became