Foreign Affairs

by Alison Lurie

  “Have some more chocolate pie,” Debby says.

  “No thanks.”

  “It doesn’t taste right, does it?” A vertical dent appears in Debby’s round face, between her nearly invisible eyebrows.

  “No, it was great, it’s just that—”

  “The crust is different, I think,” says Joe, delivering this opinion with his usual philosophical detachment.

  “Yeh, it’s kind of soggy,” Debby agrees. “And the filling’s much too sweet. Those were the wrong kind of cookies, and I couldn’t get real baking chocolate in any of the stores. But that’s how it is with everything here, you know?”

  Fred does not answer. He should know by now, since Debby and Joe have spent most of the evening telling him, describing with warm indignation (Debby) or ironic resignation (Joe) their disillusion with England in general and London in particular. After making a big effort for over a month they have given up on the whole scene. They are also really pissed off at themselves for having been dumb enough to come here on leave from the adjacent Southern California colleges at which they teach, with a year-old baby on top of everything. They were warned, but they had been brainwashed by their admiration for British literature (Debby) and British philosophy (Joe). Why hadn’t they listened to their friends? they keep asking each other. Why hadn’t they gone to Italy or to Greece, or even stayed home in Claremont, for God’s sake? Britain might have been great in the past, all right, but in their opinion modern London sucks.

  “For instance, the way they are in the stores. That man at the grocery was really disagreeable, as if I’d insulted him or something by saying he ought to carry unsweetened baking chocolate, and he was glad he’d never heard of it.”

  “They’re in collusion. That’s what we decided,” Joe says. “They meet once a week in some local pub. ‘Okay, let’s get those dumb young American professors,’ they say, ‘the ones who were so bloody pleased with themselves for being in London.’” He laughs, then blows his nose.

  “That’s why the plumber didn’t come when our kitchen sink clogged up. He refused to say when he could get here, or if he would ever even come at all.”

  “Or like today, that woman at the dry cleaners. She looked at my pants as if they had a smell. ‘No, sir, we couldn’t do anything with those oily spots, one pound ten please.’” Joe’s imitation of a phony-refined British accent is marred by a natural tin ear and a bad cold.

  “It’s so ugly, that’s what I think I mind the most,” Debby says. “Everything’s so gray and damp, and of course all the modern buildings are absolutely hideous. And they put up public housing and hamburger restaurants and billboards right in the middle of the most beautiful old streets. What’s happened to their aesthetic sense?”

  “Frozen out of them,” her husband says. Joe, a native of California, is thin, narrow-chested, and easily chilled; he has been ill ever since he arrived in London and sometimes sick as well. At first he tried to ignore the whole thing, he tells Fred while Debby is below in the dark, damp kitchen making coffee. Then he went to bed and waited for four days to feel better; finally, despairing of recovery, he got up again. At present he has a fever, a headache, a sore throat, a cough, and blocked sinuses. What he wants most is to go upstairs, lie down, and pass out; but he is a student and professor of philosophy and a natural stoic. Debby and their baby Jakie also have colds.

  “The real downer is the climate,” says Joe, hauling on the ropes of the dumbwaiter in response to his wife’s shout. “They probably fix that too.”

  “When I think what the weather’s like right now in Claremont!” Debby exclaims a moment later, pouring coffee. “It makes me feel really stupid and cheated. Well, hell, we were cheated. You know, maybe I told you before”—she has—“we rented this house by mail; the agent sent us a photograph and description. The morning we got here, off the plane, Flask Walk was so pretty: the sun was shining for once, and when the taxi stopped it looked just like the picture, only better because it was in color, a perfect Georgian cottage. And I thought well, damn it, it’s really worth all that rent and plane fare and those eight hellish hours with Jakie on the plane. And then we went inside, and the back of the house wasn’t there, like it had been sliced off. Of course the real estate agent hadn’t said anything about that.” The Vogeler’s house is on a sharp-angled corner; it consists of a basement kitchen, a sitting room, and two bedrooms, one above the other. Each room is narrowly triangular, the shape of a piece of pie cut far less generously than those Debby has just served.

  “‘Drawing room eighteen by twelve feet at best,’ the description said,” she goes on. “I thought that meant not counting the baseboards or the closets or something. And this awful plastic furniture, squeezed into the corners. And of course there wasn’t any garden. It made me feel kind of dizzy and kind of crazy, all at the same time. I just burst out crying, and then of course Jakie started bawling too, the way babies do when you’re upset.”

  “We were totally disoriented, no kidding,” Joe admits. “Partly jet lag, I guess. Only it’s been nearly six weeks, and we’re not recovered.”

  “I know what you mean.” Fred holds out his cup for more coffee. “I get the weird idea sometimes that I’m not really in London; that this place isn’t London, it’s some kind of imitation.”

  “That’s just how we felt when we first got here.” Debby leans forward, her square-cut brown hair swinging. “Especially every time we went to look at something, say Westminster Abbey or the Houses of Parliament or whatever. They were always smaller than we expected, and overrun with busloads of American and French and German and Japanese tourists. So we decided, the hell with it.”

  “Of course that’s inevitable anywhere,” her husband explains. “Tourism is a self-degrading process, kind of like oxidation of iron.” Joe has a fondness for scientific metaphor, the precipitate of undergraduate years as a biochemistry major. “Some place is designated a sight because it’s typical or symbolic—it stands for the ideal Britain. So hundreds of tourists go there, and then of course all they see is other tourists.”

  “And when you get to a sight it probably doesn’t look right anyhow,” Debby adds, “because you’ve already seen a prettied-up picture of it, taken on some bright summer day with all the tour buses and candy-wrappers and cigarette butts swept away. So the real place seems kind of dirty and shabby in comparison. We’ve just about given up sightseeing. Well, at least it prevents distractions.”

  “Right,” Joe says. “And if you don’t go looking at things, in a climate like this, you’re bound to write a lot. Nothing else to do but play with the baby or watch TV—Hey, what time is it?”

  “Nearly eight,” Debby says Joe unfolds his long legs and goes to turn on the rented television set that has been installed in the pointed end of the pie-shaped sitting room.

  As they move their chairs round and wait with the sound off for this week’s episode of a BBC serial based on a James novel, Fred considers putting forth his own ideas about tourism, but decides against it, realizing that his most important point doesn’t apply to the Vogelers, neither of whom—as their juxtaposition on the ugly sofa demonstrates—is deprived of the sense of touch.

  Joe turns up the sound, and a minor-key theme announces the start of the program. Fred, who has missed the earlier episodes, watches with less than his whole attention. Gloomily, he compares the Vogelers’ situation with his own. They have each other and their baby, and apparently they are getting some writing done, whereas his work on John Gay in the British Museum (now referred to by Roo as the BM or Bowel Movement) is going very badly.

  Fred is active, energetic, impatient of confinement. When he’s in a library he likes to range through the stacks finding the books he wants, and coming across others he hadn’t known about. In the BM he is forbidden to enter the stacks; he can’t always get what he wants, and he can never get what he doesn’t know he needs. Often he has to wait up to four hours for the constipated digestive system of the ancient library to disg
orge a pathetic few of the volumes whose numbers he has copied from the complex, unwieldy catalogue. And even when they arrive all is far from well. Fred is used to working in a study of his own, away from noise and distraction. Now he is surrounded by other readers, many of them eccentric or even possibly insane, to judge by their appearance and mannerisms—filling dusty volumes with multicolored paper slips, tapping with their fingers or feet, mumbling to themselves, conversing in nervous whispers, coughing and blowing their noses in a contagious way.

  He also likes to spread out at work, and to move around; at home his notes covered two tables and a bed in the spare room, and books lay open on the carpet. In the BM his tall, muscular frame is cramped into a chair at a narrow section of desk between two other scholars or lunatics and their encroaching heaps of volumes, in an ill-ventilated hall full of identical radiating seats constructed on the same plan as the model prisons designed by Victorian moral philosophers.

  Fred is convinced that the BM is having a baleful effect on his work. In order to write decently about John Gay he must (to quote his subject) “take the road.” He must be able to “rove like the bee,” to bring together not only literary criticism and dramatic history but folklore, musicology, and the annals of eighteenth-century crime. Crouched over whatever books he has managed to get that day, in this huge stuffy scholarly prison, it is no wonder the sentences he strains to produce are cramped and heavy. Again and again he rises to consult the catalogue unnecessarily, or to pace about the room. Glimpses of those habitual readers he now knows by sight, or in a few cases is acquainted with, depress him further. Often either Joe or Debby Vogeler is there, steadily grinding away; they went through graduate school together and have a scrupulously egalitarian partnership, sharing the care of little Jakie. The Vogelers are untroubled by working conditions in the Bowel Movement. As he passes, whichever one of them is present is apt to glance up and smile rather patronizingly. Too bad Fred never learnt to concentrate, he can sense them thinking.

  The closing theme of the program comes on; the faces of its hero and heroine are frozen between a background of lush Edwardian architecture and a foreground of television credits.

  “Well,” Fred says, rising. “I guess I’d better—”

  “Hey, don’t go yet,” Joe snuffles.

  “Stay and tell us some news. Uh, how is Ruth?” Debby or her husband ask this question at weekly intervals, alternating as if by prearrangement.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t heard from her,” he replies for the fourth time.

  “Still haven’t heard, huh.” Behind this seemingly neutral comment and Debby’s neutral question Fred senses hostility. His friends do not know Roo very well or like her very much. On both occasions when they met they had made evident efforts to know and like her, but—as with London—these efforts had not succeeded.

  “She was never really right for you,” Debby says, breaking a three-year silence. “We always saw that.”

  “Yeh,” Joe agrees. “I mean, she was obviously a decent person. But she was always in overdrive.”

  “Those photographs of hers. They were so kind of frantic and weird. And she seemed awful immature compared to you.” Roo, admittedly, is four years younger than Debby and three years younger than Joe and Fred.

  “She just wasn’t on the same wavelength.”

  “Evidently not.” Fred picks up that morning’s Guardian from the plastic imitation-oak coffee table.

  “Listen. Don’t let it get you down,” Joe instructs him.

  “Yeh, that’s easy to say,” he replies, turning the pages of the newspaper without seeing them.

  “You made a mistake, that’s all,” Debby says. “Anybody can do that; even you.”

  “Right,” Joe agrees.

  “You know, I’m still really sorry it didn’t work out for you and Carissa,” his wife murmurs. “I’ve always liked her so much. And you know she’s really brilliant.”

  “She has a fine mind,” Joe says.

  “Mmf,” Fred utters, noticing that Carissa is described in the present tense, whereas Roo by implication not only has a mediocre or coarse mind but has ceased to exist.

  “She’s a unique person,” Debby goes on.

  A unique person is exactly what Carissa is not, Fred thinks. She is a conventional, frightened academic: intelligent, granted; but forever anxious to seem even more intelligent. Whereas Roo—

  “Let’s not talk about it, all right?” he says abruptly.

  “Oh, God. I’m sorry—”

  “Hey, we didn’t mean—”

  It takes Fred nearly ten minutes to convince his friends that he is not really offended, understands their concern, enjoyed dinner, and is looking forward to seeing them again.

  As he strides up Flask Walk toward the Underground station through the cold, misty night, Fred’s mood is one of angry discomfort. When things have gone wrong it is no consolation to hear that your friends expected it all along and could have told you so if they hadn’t been so polite.

  He doesn’t condemn the Vogelers for their opinion, since when he himself met Roo he also would have said they weren’t on the same wavelength, though in fact the signals she broadcast made him hum like a stereo amplifier. Everything about her seemed to send out an electrical pulse: not only the full round breasts under the orange SOLAR ENERGY T-shirt, but the wide liquid eyes, the flushed tanned skin, and the long braided cable of copper-brown hair from which wiry filaments escaped in every direction.

  Their meeting took place during Fred’s second month at Corinth University, at a reception for a visiting lecturer. Roo attended because she had been assigned to take a photograph for the local paper, and Fred because of his admiration for the views of the speaker—which she emphatically did not share, and said so. Their initial impressions of each other were unfavorable, even scornful. Complete polarization was avoided by the discovery of a mutual interest: Roo had been out horseback riding earlier that afternoon, and hadn’t bothered to change; and when Fred learnt that her jodphurs and high waxed boots were functional rather than—or as well as—theatrical, his hostility relaxed. When Roo, with what he would soon come to recognize as her characteristic impulsiveness masked by a deadpan manner, said that if he wanted to go riding with her that weekend he could, he accepted enthusiastically. Roo, as she told him later, was slower to come around. “I was like blown away, I wanted to make it with you so much; but all the time my superego was saying Hey, whoa, wait a minute, this is an uptight woolly liberal professor type, probably a real pig in disguise; all you’ll get from him is grief, baby.”

  Turning off the High Street, Fred plunges into Hampstead Tube Station, buys a ticket to Notting Hill Gate, and enters an ancient iron lift decorated with advertising posters of half-naked young women. As it descends into the cold, damp shaft, so he descends, against his will, into naked memories.

  October, over three years ago. He and Roo, whom he had known for three days, were lying in an abandoned apple orchard above her mother’s and stepfather’s farm, while their two horses tore at the long tough autumn grass in a nearby meadow.

  “You know something?” Roo said, turning on her side so that sunlight and shadow flowed over her warm tanned skin as they do over ripe hayfields on a partly cloudy day. “It’s a lie that when your childhood fantasies come true it’s always a letdown.”

  “Did you use to imagine a scene like this?” Fred did not move, but lay on his back looking past the interlaced limbs of the trees into a sky the burning blue of a gas flame.

  “Oh yeh. Some day my prince will come, all that sappy stuff. From about age seven.”

  “That young?”

  “Sure. I never heard of the latency period till I got to college. I was always trying to get the little boys I knew to play doctor, but mostly they weren’t all that interested. Of course my ideas about what would happen after the prince came were pretty out of focus. I could visualize the scenery all right, and the way the guy would look riding out of the woods, just about e
xactly like you, only of course at first he was seven years old.”

  “Was that when you learnt to ride, when you were seven?”

  “No. Not seriously anyhow.” Roo sat up. Her thick dark-russet braid (the same hue, he had realized earlier, as her horse Shara’s coat) had come undone during their recent struggles. Now it spread down her back, uncoiling as if with an inner volition. “I was wild to, but I didn’t get much chance, except for a couple weeks in the summer at day camp. I didn’t really learn till I was thirteen, after Ma met Bernie. What about you?”

  “I don’t know exactly. One of the first things I remember is being put up on a pony at my grandfather’s: it seemed miles high, and broad as a sofa. I was two or three, I guess.”

  “Lucky bastard.” Roo made a fist and hit him playfully, but not lightly. “I would’ve given anything—I was crazy for horses when I was a kid, and so were most of my friends. We were a little nuts about it really.”

  “Yeh, I knew girls like that. Funny social phenomenon. I always thought it must be a reaction against this mechanized world—women maybe mind that more than men do, even as kids.”

  “Some women.” Roo shrugged. “Then there’s also the Freudian explanation, but personally I think that’s all crap. I never imagined I was making it with a horse; I thought I was a horse. It was the same for the rest of us, I’m positive. Y’know there were two kinds of little girls in my elementary school: the goody-two-shoes types who liked pretty clothes and baking cookies and playing with dolls; and then me and my friends who wanted to run around outside in old jeans and sneakers and get dirty and were crazy about horses. The way I figure it, it was sort of identification with energy and strength and freedom. Wanting to be a different kind of female than everybody wanted us to be.”

  “I remember those good little girls,” Fred said. “They were no use for anything.” He pulled Roo down toward him. “Ahh.”