Foreign Affairs

by Alison Lurie

  What walker shall his mean ambition fix

  On the false lustre of a coach and six?

  O rather give me sweet content on foot,

  Wrapped in my virtue, and a good surtout!

  In a vain search for sweet content, Fred has tramped half over London. Unless it rains hard, he also runs two miles every morning in Kensington Gardens, pounding along past dripping empty benches and gnarled bare trees, under a dark or dappled sky. While his lungs fill with damp chill air and the thin smoke of his breath steams away, he asks himself what the hell he is doing here, alone in this cold, unpleasant city. This evening, however, an icy sleet is falling, and Fred is expected for dinner in Hampstead; even Gay, he decided, wouldn’t have walked so far in weather like this.

  Most of the other people on the Underground platform are not gazing at the advertisements, but—more or less covertly—at Fred Turner. They are wondering if they haven’t seen him somewhere before, maybe in some film or on the telly. A miniskirted billing clerk thinks he looks exactly like the hero on the cover of The Secret of Rosewyn, one of her favorite Gothics. A grammar-school teacher, collapsed on a bench with a bulging string bag, believes she saw him in Love’s Labour’s Lost at Stratford last summer, in one of the main supporting roles. The manager of a small menswear shop, professionally noting the transatlantic cut of Fred’s duffel coat, wonders if he was in that American detective series his kids always watch. None of Fred’s fellow passengers connect him with a comedy or a game show: something in the tense set of his broad shoulders, the angle of his jaw, and the way the dark arches of his eyebrows are drawn together precludes these associations.

  Fred is not embarrassed by this attention. He is used to it, regards it as normal, doesn’t in fact realize that few other humans are gazed at so often or so intensely. Since babyhood his appearance has attracted admiration, and often comment. It was soon clear that he had inherited his mother’s brunette, lushly romantic good looks: her thick wavy dark hair, her wide-set cilia-fringed brown eyes (“wasted on a boy,” many remarked). If anything, Fred is less conscious of being observed now than he was at home, for the polite British are taught as children that it is rude to stare, and have learnt to disguise their public curiosity. They are also taught not to speak to strangers; and as yet no citizen has broken this rule in Fred’s case—though two Canadians stopped him on the street last week to ask if he wasn’t the guy that fought the giant man-eating extraterrestrial cabbage in The Thing from Beyond.

  Fred Turner knows, of course, that he is a handsome, athletic-looking young man, the type that directors employ to battle carnivorous vegetables. It would be going too far to say that he has never derived any satisfaction from this fact, but he has often wished that his appearance was less striking. He has the features, and the physique, of an Edwardian hero: classically sculptured, over-finished, like the men in Charles Dana Gibson’s drawings. If he had lived before World War II, he might have been more grateful for his looks; but since then it has not been fashionable for Anglo-Saxon men to be handsome in this style unless they are homosexual. For modern straight tastes his chin is too firmly rounded and cleft, his carriage too erect, his hair too wavy, and his eyelashes much too long.

  Were Fred in fact an actor his appearance might be an asset. But he has no histrionic ability or ambition; and in his profession beauty is a considerable handicap, as he has been made to realize over the last five years. While he was in school there was no problem. Boys are allowed to be handsome, as long as that is not their only asset, and Fred was an all-round achiever: energetic, outgoing, good at both lessons and games; the sort of child teachers naturally favor. Later he became the kind of prep-school boy who is elected class president and the kind of undergraduate and graduate student who is described in letters of recommendation as “incidentally, also a most attractive young man.”

  The real disadvantages of Fred’s appearance did not surface until he began to teach. As anyone who has been to college knows, most professors are not especially strong or beautiful; and though they may appreciate or at least forgive these qualities in their students they do not much care for them in their peers. If Fred had been in Theater Arts or Painting and Design, he might not have stood out so from his colleagues or had so much trouble with them. In English, his appearance was held against him: he was suspected, quite unfairly, of being vain, self-centered, unintellectual, and unserious.

  Fred’s looks also interfered with his teaching. In his first term as a TA at least a third of his female students, and one or two of the males as well, developed crushes on him. When he called on these students they went all woozy and breathless and became quite incapable of concentrating on the topic of discussion. They hung round him after class, followed him to his office, leant over his desk in tight sweaters or shirts open nearly to the waist, clutched his arm in mute appeal, and in some cases openly declared their passion either in notes or in person (“I just think about you all the time, it’s really screwing up my head”). But Fred had no wish to sleep with ten screwed-up freshmen, or even with one carefully selected well-balanced freshman. He wasn’t attracted to puppy fat and unformed minds; and though in a couple of cases he was tempted, he had a strong sense of professional ethics. He also suspected correctly that if he fell and was found out he might be in serious professional trouble.

  During that first year of teaching, Fred learnt to put more social distance between himself and his students; for one thing, though with irritation and regret, he stopped asking them to call him Fred. As time passed, the emotional and sexual pressure moderated—especially after he had met a woman whose appearance and temperament kept him fully occupied. But he still feels uncomfortable in the classroom. It bothers him to be “Professor Turner,” to have to maintain at all times a cool distance from his students, a dry manner, to give up hope of achieving the warm, relaxed, but in no way steamy and loose pedagogic climate enjoyed by his less-attractive colleagues. Time will solve his problem, but not for perhaps a quarter of a century, which from the perspective of twenty-eight might as well be forever. Meanwhile he has to put up with the belief of students that he is cold and formal—a belief promulgated every fall in the student-published Confidential Guide to Courses.

  At the moment these academic difficulties are far from Fred’s mind, which is fixed, as it has been intermittently for the past two months, on the collapse of his marriage. Before that, he had assumed that his wife Ruth, known to him as Roo, would be coming abroad with him. They had prepared for the trip together, read books, studied maps, consulted all their friends—Roo even more excited by their plans than he was.

  But a domestic storm had blown up: thunder, lightning, and a torrential downpour of tears. Just before Christmas Fred and Roo parted in a cloudy, electrically charged atmosphere for what was announced to their friends and relatives as a “trial separation.” Privately Fred suspects that the trial is already over, the verdict Guilty, and the sentence on their marriage Death.

  No good thinking about it, going over the bad memories of a bad time. Roo is not here and she won’t ever be here. She hasn’t answered either of his brief but carefully composed, neutrally friendly letters, and she probably isn’t going to. Fred is alone for five months in a London empty of joy and meaning, where a cold drizzly rain seems to fall perpetually both within and without. He is more steadily miserable than he has ever been in his life.

  He had come here prepared, even without Roo, to have an intense, vivid experience of the city of John Gay—and of Johnson, Fielding, Hogarth, and many more. Dutifully and mechanically, he has gone alone on foot to the places he and she had planned to visit together: St. Paul’s, London Bridge, Dr. Johnson’s house, and the rest. But everything he saw looked false and empty: façades of cardboard brick and stone, hollow, without meaning. Physically he is in London, but emotionally he remains in Corinth, in a part of his life that’s ceased to exist. He is living in the historic past, as he had planned and hoped to do—but not in eighteenth-century Lond
on. Instead he inhabits a more recent, private, and dismal era of his own history.

  But Fred doesn’t believe that there is no real and desirable London. That city exists: he dwelt there for six months as a child of ten, and last week he revisited it. Though some of its landmarks have vanished, those that remain shimmer with meaning and presence as if benignly radioactive. The house his family once lived in is gone; the jungly, catacombed, sunken bomb-site where he and his grammar-school friends played Nazis and Allies or Cops and Villains has been built over with council flats. But there is the sweetshop on the corner, thick with the odor of anise, cinnamon drops, and slabs of milk chocolate; there are the wide, shallow, unevenly worn stone steps in the passageway beside the church where Freddy (as he was then known) often stopped on his way home to eat shiny twisted black ropes of licorice from a paper bag and read Beano comics, unable to postpone either pleasure.

  Across the road is the surgery to which Freddy was carried by his father when he fell off his bike, where an old-lady doctor with chopped-off white hair put three prickly black stitches in his chin and called him a “brave handsome Yankee lad”—giving him, he realizes now, not only an encomium but an identity. The name on the brass plate is unfamiliar, but the heavy door with its stained-glass panel of haloed tomatoes is intact, and still seems to be a sign that this house is a kind of church—though now he knows the glass to be Art Nouveau and the holy tomatoes pomegranates. For a few hundred feet along one road in Kensington, Fred’s senses and his sensibility function supernormally; everywhere else London remains cold, dim, flat, and flavorless.

  He doesn’t blame his inability to have an authentic experience of the city entirely on the loss of Roo. Partly he attributes it to tourist disorientation; he has noticed the same reaction in other Americans who have recently arrived, and back home he has seen it in friends and relatives returned from abroad. The main problem is, he thinks, that visitors to a foreign country are allowed the full use of only two of their five senses. Sight is permitted—hence the term “sightseeing.” The sense of taste is also encouraged, and even takes on a weird, almost sexual importance: consumption of the native food and drink becomes a highly charged event, a proof that you were “really there.”

  But hearing in the full sense is blocked. Intelligible foreign sounds are limited to the voices of waiters, shopkeepers, professional guides, and hotel clerks—plus snatches of dubiously “native” music. Even in Britain, accent, intonation, and vocabulary are often unfamiliar; tourists do not recognize many of the noises they hear, and they speak mostly to functionaries. The sense of smell still operates; but it is likely to be baffled or disgusted by many foreign odors. Above all, the sense of touch is frustrated; visible or invisible Keep Off signs appear on almost everything and everyone.

  Two senses aren’t enough for contact with the world, and as a result places visited as a tourist tend to be experienced as blurry silent areas spotted with flashes of light. A window box bursting with purple-veined white crocuses; the shouting, anger-gorged red face of a taxi driver; a handful of hot fish-and-chips wrapped in the News of the World—these rare moments of sensation stand out in Fred’s memory of the past month like colored snapshots against the gray blotting-paper of an old photograph album. Appropriately—for what tourists take home are, typically, snapshots.

  Tourists also bring back special meretricious objects called “souvenirs”—which as the word suggests are not so much actual things as embodied memories; and like all memories somewhat exaggerated and distorted. Souvenirs have little in common with anything actually made for and used by the natives—who’s ever seen a real Greek woman in a headscarf bordered by fake tinny gold coins, or a French fisherman wearing the kind of Authentic Fisherman’s Smock sold in tourist shops? But these false symbolic objects are meant to indemnify the tourist for having been, for weeks or months, cut off from an authentic experience of the world, from physical contact with other human beings—

  Yeh, that’s where it’s at. If Roo were here, he wouldn’t be having these theories, probably. His state of mind is unnatural, the grayness of London projection. What he probably ought to do is find someone who would not replace Roo or make him forget her—that’s impossible—but distract him and warm him.

  Preceded by a rush of chilly air, a hollow roar, the inbound Underground train arrives. It is more than half empty, for it’s after six in the evening and most travelers are on their way home to the suburbs. Several of the people in the car glance with interest at Fred as he sits down. Directly across from him a pretty young woman in a dark-green wool cape gives him a half smile as their eyes meet, and then looks down at her book. Here, and not for the first time, is a good example of what Fred probably needs in London, but he doesn’t feel able to do anything about it.

  Two things stand in the way of his taking any useful action. One is inexperience. Unlike most moderately attractive or positively unattractive men, Fred has never learnt to pick up women. He has never had to learn, because since he was very young there have always been plenty of females among his acquaintance who were ready, even eager, to know him better. It wasn’t his looks alone that interested them, but his high spirits, his good manners, his casual and modest skill in sports, his excellent but never arrogant intelligence. All he has ever had to do, really, is indicate a choice.

  Even now, when his spirits are so low, there is no doubt that Fred could pick up women if he tried—that any initial awkwardness would be overlooked by most of those he might approach. But there is another and worse problem. Every woman or girl Fred sees in London has something wrong with her: she is not Roo. He knows it’s stupid and counterproductive to go on feeling this way about somebody who has cut you out of her life, to go on remembering and fantasizing As his childhood friend Roberto Frank said once, all you get from carrying a torch is sore fingers.

  If Roberto were here now, instead of teaching French in Wisconsin, he would advise Fred to move in on the girl in the green cape and try to score tonight. As far back as junior high Roberto had begun recommending casual sex as a panacea. “What you need is a good fast fuck,” he would declare when any chum complained of being bummed out because of a cold, a sprained ankle, too much homework, unsympathetic parents, a bike or a car on the fritz—or any sort of jealousy, infidelity, or sexual reluctance on the part of a current steady. Since then, Roberto has collected women as he once collected baseball cards, always preferring quantity to quality: in grade school he once traded Mickey Mantle to Fred for three obscure and inept Red Sox. It is his contention that the world is full of good-looking horny women who are interested in a no-strings relationship. “I’m not saying you have to sweet-talk them or pull a fast one. When I meet a mama who turns me on, I lay it on the line. If she doesn’t want to play by those rules, okay; so long, no hard feelings.” Fred doesn’t agree. In his experience, no matter what is said in the preliminary negotiations, there are always strings. After even one or two dates he often felt like a tomcat entangled in an emotional ball of red yarn.

  Yeh, Fred thinks, but maybe Roberto is right in a way, maybe if he could meet somebody—

  The train stops at Tottenham Court Road. Fred gets off to change to the Northern Line, and so does the young woman in the green cape; he notices that she has been reading Joseph Conrad’s Chance. He quickens his pace, for he is a Conrad fan; then, uncertain of what he’s going to say to her, slows down. The young woman gives him a regretful backward glance as she turns toward the stairs to the southbound platform.

  An opening remark has formed in Fred’s mind, and he starts to follow her in order to deliver it; but then he remembers that he is supposed to be on his way to supper in Hampstead with Joe and Debby Vogeler, who will take it badly if he doesn’t turn up. The Vogelers, who were in graduate school with him, are the only people of his own age he knows in London, and their continued good will is therefore important. Fred’s other acquaintances here consist of several middle-aged friends of his parents, and a member of his own departmen
t: an aging spinster named Virginia Miner who is also on leave and working in the British Museum. Toward the former he feels a polite obligation, but no social enthusiasm; in the case of Professor Miner his instinct is toward avoidance. Although she has never had a serious conversation with him on any topic, Professor Miner will presently vote on whether Fred is allowed to stay on at the University or cast into outer joblessness. She is known to be eccentric and touchy, and is also a devout Anglophile. In any encounter Fred probably has more of a chance of alienating her than of pleasing her; and if he admits his depression and his dislike of London and of the British Museum, her opinion of him, whatever it may be now, will sink. On top of all this, he doesn’t know whether he should address her as Professor Miner, Miss Miner, Ms. Miner, Virginia, or Vinnie. In order to avoid offense, he accepted her invitation to a “drinks party” later this week, but he plans to call up and say he is sick—no, he corrects himself, ill—to say you are sick in this country means you are about to vomit.

  Another reason for not disappointing Joe and Debby is that they will give him a free dinner—and since Debby is a competent if unimaginative cook, a good one. For the first time in his life, Fred is broke. He hadn’t known how expensive London would be, or how long it would take his salary checks to clear. The flat he and Roo had rented by mail costs too much for one person, and he has never learnt to cook. At first he ate out, in cheaper and cheaper restaurants and pubs, to the detriment of his budget and digestion; now he exists mainly on bread and cheese, canned beans, soup, boiled eggs, and paper cartons of orange juice. If his financial situation gets desperate, he can cable or write his parents for money, but this will suggest a childish improvidence. After all, for Christ’s sake, he is nearly twenty-nine and has a Ph.D.