Foreign Affairs

by Alison Lurie

  “Oh, yeh.” Turning, Mumpson gives the executives the slow rude animal stare characteristic of tourists. “I get it. A kinda advertising gimmick.”

  Vinnie, irritated, does not assent. Of course it is in a sense an “advertising gimmick;” but she has always thought of it as an agreeable tradition. She regrets having accepted Mumpson’s invitation; for one thing, if she isn’t careful she will have to listen for at least half an hour to his tourist experiences, to hear about everything he has seen, bought, and eaten, and what is wrong with his hotel.

  “I didn’t realize you were planning to be in England so long,” she says, settling herself on one of the pale-green butterfly-design metal chairs that give Fortnum’s tearoom the look of an Edwardian conservatory.

  “Yeh, wal, I wasn’t.” Chuck Mumpson peels off his plastic raincoat, revealing a brown Western-cut leather jacket trimmed with leather fringe, a shiny-looking yellow Western-cut shirt with pearlized studs instead of buttons, and a leather string tie He hangs the raincoat on an empty chair, where it continues to drip onto the crimson carpet, and sits down heavily. “Yeh, the rest of them all went home last month. But I figured once I was here, there was plenty I hadn’t seen; hell, I might as well stay on a while. I was doing the sights with this couple from Indiana I met at the hotel, but they left Monday.”

  “I’ve never seen the point of those fourteen-day tours,” Vinnie says. “If you’re going to visit England, you really should allow a month at least. If you can spare the time from your work, of course,” she adds, reminding herself that most people do not enjoy an academic schedule.

  “Yeh. Wal, no.” He blinks. “Matter of fact, I don’t have to worry about that. I’m retired.”

  “Oh, yes?” Vinnie doesn’t remember his mentioning this on the plane, but no doubt she wasn’t listening. “You retired early,” she adds, since he doesn’t look sixty-five.

  “Yeh.” Mumpson shifts about on the pale-green iron chair, which is much too small for his bulk. “That’s what they called it: an early retirement. Wasn’t my idea. I was chucked out, you could say.” He laughs in the too-loud manner of someone joining in a joke of which he is the butt.

  “Really.” Vinnie recalls articles she has read about the growing trend toward forced obsolescence among middle-aged executives, and congratulates herself on her university’s tenure system.

  “Yeh, chucked on the heap at fifty-seven,” he repeats, in case she hasn’t gotten the pun—after all, she didn’t laugh, he is probably thinking. “Okay, uh—Virginia, what’ll you have?”

  “Vinnie,” she corrects automatically, then realizes she has tacitly given Mumpson—Chuck—permission to use her first name. She would prefer Professor Miner, Ms. Miner, or even Miss, but to say so now would be intolerably rude by the informal standards of middle America.

  “Chuck” orders coffee; Vinnie tea and apricot tart. Then, wishing to divert him from, if not console him for, his professional misfortunes, she persuades him to try the trifle.

  “I’m sure there are advantages in not having to go to work every day,” she remarks brightly after the waitress has left. “For instance, you’ll have time to do many more things now.” What things? she wonders, realizing she has no idea of the probable recreations of someone like Chuck. “Travel, visit your friends, read”—Read? Is this likely?—”play golf, go fishing”—Are there any fish in Oklahoma?—”take up some hobbies—”

  “Yeh, that’s what my wife tells me. Problem is, you play golf every day, you get damn sick of it. And I don’t go in much for sports otherwise. Used to really enjoy baseball; but I’m pretty well past that now.”

  A person without inner resources who splits infinitives, Vinnie thinks. “It’s too bad your wife can’t be here with you,” she remarks.

  “Yeh, wal. Myrna’s in real estate, like I told you, and property is pretty hot now in Tulsa. She’s working her a—” Chuck, in deference to Vinnie’s—or the room’s—air of old-fashioned gentility, displaces the metaphor from below to above—“head off. Raking it in, too.” He makes a loose raking gesture with his broad freckled hand, then lets it fall heavy onto the table.

  “Really.”

  “Yeh, she’s a real powerhouse. Matter of fact, the way things are going, she’s probably just as glad not to have me hanging round home at loose ends for a while. Can’t really blame her.”

  “Mm,” says Vinnie, connecting Chuck’s loose ends in her mind with the dangling rawhide thongs of his tie, which is fastened by a vulgarly large silver-and-turquoise clasp of the sort favored by elderly ranchers and imitation ranchers in the Southwest. She too does not blame Myma for wanting him out of the house. It is also clear to her that after many days alone in what to him is a strange foreign city Chuck is determined to unburden himself to someone; but she is equally determined not to be this someone. Deliberately she steers the conversation toward neutral tourist subjects, the very subjects she had earlier planned to avoid.

  In Chuck’s opinion, London isn’t much of a place. He doesn’t mind the weather: “Nah. I like the variety. Back home it’s the same goddamn thing every day. And if you don’t water, the earth dries up hard as rock. When I first got here I couldn’t get over how damn green England is, like one of those travel posters.”

  On the other hand, he complains, the beds in his hotel are lumpy and the supply of hot water limited. English food tastes like boiled hay; if you want a half-decent meal, you have to go to some foreign restaurant. The traffic is nuts, everybody driving on the wrong side of the road; and he has a hell of a time understanding the natives, who talk English real funny. Vinnie is about to correct his linguistic error rather irritably and suggest that it is in fact we Americans who talk funny, when their tea arrives, creating a diversion.

  “Hey, what’d you say this thing was called?” Chuck points with his spoon at the tumulus of fruit, custard, jam, rum-soaked sponge cake, and whipped cream that has just appeared on the marble-topped table before him.

  “Trifle.”

  “Some trifle. It’s bigger than a banana split.” He grins and digs in. “Not bad, though. And they sure give you a spoon to match.” Vinnie, enjoying her tart, politely refrains from pointing out that in Britain dessert spoons are always of this size.

  Unlike Edwin, Chuck eats rapidly and without style, shoveling in the elaborate dessert as if it were so much alfalfa, while he continues his narration. He has seen most of the standard tourist attractions, he tells Vinnie, but none of them impressed him much. Some actually seem to have offended him—for example, the Tower of London.

  “Hell, when you get right down to it, it’s nothing but an old abandoned prison. From what the guide told us, it sounded like a lot of the historical characters they shut up in there shouldn’t have been in jail in the first place. They were good guys mostly. But they jammed them into those little stone cells about the size of a horse stall, without any heat or light to speak of. Most of them never got out again either, from what he said. They died of some sickness, or they were poisoned or choked to death or had their heads chopped off. Women and little kids too. I can’t figure out why they’re so damn proud of the place. If you’ve ever been in jail it could really give you the willies.”

  “I see what you mean,” Vinnie agrees politely, wondering if Chuck has ever been in jail.

  “And those big black ravens out in the yard, prowling around like spooks.” Chuck makes his thick hands into talons and walks them slowly across the green-veined marble. “Jailbirds, I guess you’d call them.”

  “Yes.” Vinnie smiles.

  “Where I come from, birds like that mean real bad luck. I figured maybe that’s what they put them there for, the guys that built the place. So I asked the guide, was I right.”

  “And what did he say?” Vinnie is beginning to find Chuck rather entertaining.

  “Aw, he had no idea. He didn’t know anything, he just had this spiel memorized. He showed us what he claimed was the crown jewels, we had to pay extra for that. Wal, it tur
ned out they were only copies, fakes; the jewels were colored glass. The real stuff is locked up somewhere else. Hell, anybody could see that: the crowns and all look like what guys in the Shriners or Masons would wear to some big do.”

  Vinnie laughs. “I remember thinking the same thing, years ago. Costume jewelry, I thought.”

  “Yeh, right. I complained to the guide, said he must think we were suckers, charging extra for something like that. He got real nervous and huffy; he was kind of a dope anyhow. But I have to admit he was the exception. Most of the people I’ve met here, they wouldn’t mind that kind of talk. They don’t keep telling you how great they are, how they’ve got the biggest and best of everything. They kinda make fun of themselves, even; you can see that from the newspapers.”

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  “Y’know, we’ve got a lot of boosters back in Tulsa. Smile, accentuate the positive, keep your eye on the doughnut, that kind of thing. It can get you down, ‘specially if you’re down already. Oral Roberts University, you ever hear of that?”

  “No,” says Vinnie, who has but can’t remember why.

  “Wal, it’s this college we have in Tulsa, founded by one of those TV preachers. Their idea is, if you’re a Jesus-fearing man or woman and go to church regular you’ll get ahead in life, win prizes, succeed in business, anything you want. It used to sound pretty harmless to me. You lose your job, you see the flip side of the pitch. If you aren’t producing, you’re some kind of sad Christ-forsaken weirdo. Hey, that reminds me. What I wanted to ask you in the first place.” Chuck lowers his spoon. “I got this idea from that book you lent me on the plane, about the American kid who goes back to England, where his grandfather is a duke or something. I forget the name.”

  “Little Lord Fauntleroy.”

  “Yeh. That’s right. Wal, it reminded me of my grandfather when I was a kid, when I was working on a ranch with him summers. He used to talk about how we were descended from some English lord, too.”

  “Really.”

  “I’m not kidding. Most of our ancestors back in England were just plain folks, he said, but there was one called Charles Mumpson, the same name as him and me, back around Revolutionary times, who was some kind of great lord. He lived on a big estate down in the southwestern part of the country and was a famous local character. Kind of a wise man. He didn’t sleep in his castle, my grandfather said; he stayed in a cave out in the woods. And he wore a special costume, sort of a long coat made from the fur of about a dozen different animals. He was called The Hermit of Southley, and people came from all over the countryside to see him.”

  “Really,” Vinnie says again, but with a different intonation. For the first time she feels a professional interest in Chuck Mumpson.

  “So anyway, I got the notion that while I’m here I should try and look up this guy and find out more about him and all our ancestors over here. Except I don’t know how to proceed. I went to the public library, but I couldn’t locate anything, I didn’t even know where to start. The trouble is, these dukes and knights and things have a lot of different names, sometimes three or four to a family. And there isn’t any place in that part of the country called Southley.” He grins, shrugs. “I tried to phone you, to get some help, but I must have taken down the number wrong. I got a laundry instead.”

  “Mm.” Vinnie naturally doesn’t explain that she had deliberately altered one digit of her number. “Well, there are some standard places you might look,” she says. “There’s the Society of Genealogists, for instance.”

  While Chuck writes down her suggestions, Vinnie thinks that his quest is also standard: the typical middlebrow, middleclass, nominally democratic American search for a connection with the British aristocracy—for “ancestors,” a family history, a coat of arms, a local habitation, and a noble name.

  Conventional, tiresome. But the particular details of Chuck’s family legend are intriguing to a folklorist: the eccentric lord and local sage clothed in a patchwork of furs in his woodland cave. Mad deistic philosopher? Follower of Rousseau? Herb doctor? Wizard? Or even possibly, in the local folk imagination, the incarnation of some pagan god of the forest, part beast and part man? Half-formed wraiths of a short but rather interesting article stir in her mind. It also amuses her to think of Chuck as, in a debased and transatlantic form, the final incarnation of this classic folk figure—by coincidence, from the southwestern part of his own country and dressed in assorted animal skins.

  When the bill arrives, Vinnie, as usual, insists upon paying her share. Some of her friends attribute this to feminist principles; but though Vinnie accepts their interpretation her policy well predates the women’s movement. Essentially, it reflects a deep dislike of being under obligation to anyone. Chuck protests that he owes her something anyhow for her advice; but she reminds him that he got her a ride to London on the Sun Tour bus, so they are now quits.

  “Wal. All right.” Chuck crumples up Vinnie’s pound notes in his large red fist. “You know, you remind me of a teacher I had once in fourth grade. She was real nice. She . . .”

  Vinnie listens to Chuck’s recollections without comment. It is her fate to remind almost everyone she meets of a teacher they had once.

  “Anyhow. What I wanted to say is, it looks like I’m going to be in London a while longer. Maybe we could get together again sometime, have lunch.”

  Vinnie declines tactfully; she’s awfully busy this week, she lies. But why doesn’t Chuck let her know how he gets on with his research? She gives him her telephone number—correctly this time—and also her address. If he really wants to find out anything, she adds, he’ll probably have to go to the town or village his ancestors lived in, once he discovers where it is.

  “Sure, I could do that,” Chuck agrees. “I could rent a car, maybe, and drive down there.”

  “Or you might be able to take a train. Hiring an automobile is frightfully expensive here, you know.”

  “That’s okay. Money’s no problem. When Amalgamated threw me out, I got to admit, they threw a lot of stock after me.”

  Money is no problem to Chuck Mumpson, Vinnie thinks as she boards the bus to Camden Town, having declined his offer to find her a taxi; and obviously time is no problem either, except in terms of oversupply. The problems are loneliness, boredom, anomie, and loss of self-esteem, somewhat disguised by a hearty manner which was probably at one time more congruous with his actual condition.

  For a moment Vinnie considers adding a fifth problem, sexual frustration, to her list. It is suggested to her by the warm, determined way Chuck grasped her arm—or rather, the arm of her raincoat—just above the elbow as he guided her through Piccadilly Circus toward her bus stop. After all, he is a large, healthy, muscular man; and without those silly, rather vulgar cowboy clothes he would probably not look too bad in a bedroom. Possibly this was what he was, in a blurry way, trying to convey.

  But on reflection Vinnie decides this is unlikely. Chuck Mumpson is so obviously a typical middle-American businessman, the sort of person who, if he needs what Kinsey et al. have unromantically called an “outlet”—when she hears the word Vinnie always thinks of an electrical wall socket—will simply purchase one. And Chuck probably already has purchased this wall socket several times, in the hardware and software markets of Soho, no doubt getting stinking drunk beforehand on each occasion as an excuse. (“I was bombed out—didn’t know what I was doing.”) Men of this type never think of anyone like Vinnie in connection with sex; they think of some “cute babe” or “hot little number”—ideally, a number under thirty. What Chuck was pressing for was sympathy, companionship, an understanding listener. It’s probably not very satisfying to talk to whores, and apart from them she is the only woman he knows in Britain.

  This conclusion, though unflattering and even, in a very familiar way, irritating and depressing, also reassures Vinnie. There will be no need to fend off the advances of Chuck Mumpson; she only imagined there might be because she is used to thinking of friendship and sex a
s linked.

  As related earlier, Vinnie has throughout her life slept mainly with men whose interest in her was casual and comradely rather than romantic. They seldom used the word “love” to her except in moments of passionate confusion; instead they told her that they were “very fond” of her and that she was great in bed and a real pal. (Possibly as a result, Vinnie detests the word “fond,” which always suggests to her its archaic or folk meaning of “foolish” or “silly.”)

  In her youth Vinnie made the painful error of allowing herself to care seriously for some of these people. Against her better judgment, she even married one of them who was on the tearful rebound from a particularly aggravating beauty and, like a waterlogged tennis ball, had rolled into the nearest hole. Over the three subsequent years Vinnie had the experience of seeing her husband gradually regain his confidence and elasticity, begin to bounce about at parties, flirting and dancing with prettier women; hop briefly into the arms of one of his students; and eventually soar entirely beyond the boundaries of marriage, where he was caught and carried off by someone she had once thought of as a good friend.

  After her divorce, Vinnie protected herself against emotional attachment to her occasional bed partners by declaring an extramural involvement of her own. She too was in love with someone else, she would hint, someone in another city—though unlike them she never went into details. This strategy was brilliantly successful. The more generous and sensitive of her lovers were relieved of the fear that Vinnie might take them too seriously, and suffer as a consequence; the less generous and sensitive were relieved of the fear that she might “make trouble.”

  Moreover, as was perhaps necessary for the ploy to work, it wasn’t quite a lie. As she had done in early adolescence, Vinnie allowed herself to fix her romantic desires on men she hardly knew and seldom saw. These were not, as previously, film stars, but writers and critics whose work she had read, whom she had heard speak or even briefly met at the receptions that generally follow university readings or lectures. She had thus over the years enjoyed imaginary relationships with, among others, Daniel Aaron, M. H. Abrams, John Cheever, Robert Lowell, Arthur Mizener, Walker Percy, Mark Schorer, Wallace Stegner, Peter Taylor, Lionel Trilling, Robert Penn Warren, and Richard Wilbur. As this list shows, she rather preferred older men; and she insisted on intellectuals. When several members of a women’s group she belonged to in the early seventies confessed that they had passionate fantasies about their carpenter, their gardener, or the mechanic at the service station, Vinnie was astonished and a little repelled. What would be the point of going to bed with someone like that?