Foreign Affairs

by Alison Lurie

  Back in the sanctuary of her pleasant warm flat, with a pot of Twining’s Queen Mary tea on the table before her next to the bowl of white hyacinths, Vinnie begins to feel better. She is able to pity Mary Maloney for what must surely be a tainted and deprived background, a premature exposure to all that is synthetic and filthy in popular culture.

  It might be possible, she decides, buttering the second half of her cinnamon bun, to exclude those last two texts from her study. After all they are not, to paraphrase her projected title, British Rhymes of Childhood, but rather rhymes of a precocious and corrupt adolescence. Besides, she never got Mary Maloney’s age; very likely she is older than she looked, undersized like many slum-dwellers, maybe fourteen or even fifteen, not a child at all.

  All the same she feels a nagging unease. Mary Maloney remains in her mind: the skinny white gooseflesh legs, the flat dirty face, the chipped teeth, the matted acrylic hair; the pressure of her greed and her need.

  It also occurs to Vinnie that in a sense the girl was right: she will get more than tenpence for each rhyme in her notebook when her study is published. And more still if, as she hopes, Janet Elliot in London and Marilyn Krinney in New York agree to print a selection of her rhymes as a children’s book; negotiations for this project are already underway. And what would her Marxist friend say to that? Depending on his mood, which is highly unstable, he might say either “Well, we all have to live” or “Capitalist bitch.”

  Of course if she doesn’t use Mary Maloney’s contribution she won’t be exploiting her. No; she’ll only be exploiting the scores, hundreds even, of schoolchildren who for thirty years have told her their rhymes, stories, riddles, and jokes for nothing. But to think this way is ridiculous. It is to condemn every folklorist who ever lived, from the Grimm brothers on.

  Yes, Vinnie thinks, she will forget those rhymes, as she prefers to forget much of adult folklore. A scholar, of course, cannot afford to be prudish, and over the years she has recorded a good deal of off-color material with hardly a quiver. Children are given to bathroom humor:

  Milk, milk, lemonade.

  Around the corner fudge is made.

  She has even (without the accompanying gestures to parts of the body, of course) used this verse in her lectures as an example of folk metaphor, demonstrating the young child’s undifferentiated pre-moral pleasure in both food and bodily products.

  But some of the jokes told by grownups and collected by other folklorists really gross Vinnie out, as her students would say. They are not only filthy, they emphasize an aspect of the relations between men and women that she prefers not to look at too closely. However carried away by sex—and at times she has been carried far—Vinnie always returns with a slight sense of embarrassment. Intellectually she considers the physical side of love ridiculous at best, certainly unaesthetic—not one of nature’s best inventions. The female organs seem to her damp and cluttered; that of the male positively silly, a pink unnatural toadstool sort of thing. As the only child of modest, even rather squeamish parents, Vinnie was six years old before she saw a naked human male—a friend’s baby brother. Because she was a polite child she made no comment on what appeared to her a kind of unfortunate growth on the baby’s tummy, a sort of large fleshy wart. Subsequently, through contemplation of public sculptures and her parents’ art books, it occurred to her that other males besides little Bobby had this handicap, though in art it was usually concealed, or partly concealed, by a sculptured or painted leaf. Other men, she concluded from a visit to Rockefeller Center and a photograph in Life of the Oscar Award, were not so deformed. When she discovered the truth, Vinnie’s main feeling was one of pity. A decade later she saw her first erect penis; in spite of all she now knew, her first thought was that it looked infected: sore, red, puffy. Though she has tried to suppress them, these ideas are never far from Vinnie’s consciousness. She has never got used to the way sex looks.

  But though it looks foolish or even disgusting, Vinnie presently found, sex feels wonderful. She didn’t find that odd, since it is the same way with food: an oyster or a plate of spaghetti is far from attractive in itself. The solution to the problem was simple: you either make love in the dark or shut your eyes. Of course, this hasn’t always been possible. In graduate school she once broke up with a most attractive man because the wall opposite his bed was one large gold-framed mirror salvaged from a demolished building nearby. Vinnie managed to keep her eyes closed most of the time, but she couldn’t help opening them once in a while; and then the sight of her own thin white legs wrapped around her friend Paul Cattleman’s brown hairy back filled her with a deep embarrassment that almost wholly quenched her pleasure.

  While she was growing up Vinnie often heard the minister of her parents’ church say that love (the married sort, of course) was a God-given blessing. Vinnie herself is not religious, though she is somewhat superstitious, and she does not blame the human reproductive process on anyone. But if she were to imagine the sort of God who might have arranged it, he would hardly inspire veneration. She sees one of those fat, undignified, naked bronze deities that are occasionally offered for sale in Oriental shops, whose human avatars are worshiped by the least stable of her students. Some little plump godling, with a limited imagination and the giggly, vulgar sense of humor one sometimes sees in young children.

  Before she left America, Vinnie had rather dreaded the prospect of being without physical love for six months, and anticipated with anxiety the frustration and/or unsuitable incidents it might bring into her life—the necessity of calling too desperately on fantasy affairs. But as it turns out, she has been less often painfully troubled by desire than in the past, perhaps because of her age.

  Even in her fantasy life, she has noticed, professional recognition has of late tended to replace romance. As she drowses over a book, or lies among her pillows drifting into sleep, public bodies rather than private ones approach her. She accepts their advances as warmly and graciously as before, but now in a vertical rather than a horizontal position, and clad not in her best black nightgown but in the black gown and colored silk hood appropriate to the recipient of various prizes and honorary degrees. It annoys Vinnie that she is enough a woman of her generation to be rather ashamed of these imaginings when fully awake. Among her feminist students they would be thought far less embarrassing than the other sort of fantasy; even admirable. But Vinnie has been brought up to believe that though a man may work for wealth or fame, a woman must labor for love—if not that of a husband or children, at least that of a profession.

  No, Vinnie doesn’t miss sex as much as she had feared. What she misses is the affectionate and romantic side of love, insofar as she has known it: the leisurely walks in the woods, the exchange of notes, the rapid concealed half-caress at the crowded party, the glance across the lounge at the faculty club, the sense of sharing a complex, secret life. But she is used to missing all this—she has been short of it almost all her life.

  And here in London she thinks of it rather less often, for there is so much else to entertain her. Tonight, for instance, she’s going to the English National Opera with a friend whom she considers one of the nicest people and best authors of children’s fiction in Britain.

  At the Coliseum that evening, during the intermission of Così fan tutte, Vinnie descends the stairs from the balcony in search of coffee for herself and for her friend Jane, who has a sprained ankle. Her hope is that the lower bar will be less crowded, but it is worse if anything: surrounded by very large, pushing men, none of whom shows the slightest inclination to make way for her. She has noticed before that the British, who unlike Americans queue so politely on all other occasions, become selfish and shoving around any supply of liquor, public or private. It is, she thinks, a sort of national hysteria, probably the result of the licensing laws.

  As Vinnie gives up all hope of coffee and heads back toward the stairs, she sees Rosemary Radley and Fred Turner sitting on a bench. That they should be here together doesn’t surprise her. E
veryone knows about them now; Rosemary has even been mentioned in Private Eye as “discussing Ugandan affairs with a gorgeous young American don.” She has also, presumably because of Fred, canceled out of a film now being shot in Italy. It wasn’t a very large role, admittedly; but a fair amount of money was involved—and, as everyone says, Rosemary has to think of her reputation; she isn’t getting any younger.

  None of this gossip seems to affect the lovers. They go everywhere together, and Vinnie has to admit that they make a handsome couple. Rosemary of course is famous for her looks, and more than one of her friends has compared Fred’s profile to that of Rupert Brooke—which is fine if you like that rather flamboyant sort of appearance, Vinnie thinks. Nor do they seem mismatched as to age: Fred’s seriousness of manner, and Rosemary’s delicate playfulness, help to cancel the difference. And they are evidently good for each other. Fred has cheered up amazingly, and Rosemary’s scatty manner has moderated. She still darts from one topic to the next, but far more smoothly.

  What strikes Vinnie about them now isn’t so much the way Fred is looking at Rosemary—she’s seen plenty of people stare at Rosemary like that, including some who don’t much like her—but rather Rosemary’s unwavering concentration on Fred.

  Like many actors, Rosemary usually broadcasts rather than receives impressions. She also seems unable as a rule to fix her attention on anyone or anything for more than a few moments; perhaps this helps to explain why she hasn’t ever had any real success on stage. Television, on the other hand, is shot in tiny segments: it doesn’t require an extended and developed performance, only a concentrated brief intensity of expression, something Rosemary is certainly capable of—even famous for—in private life.

  Her normal modus operandi is to leap charmingly and distractingly from subject to subject, mood to mood, and person to person, often so quickly that the outlines of her conversation and even of her appearance seem to blur; one is left with an impression of sparkle and flutter. Her clothes produce the same effect. Rosemary never follows current fashion, but has developed a style of her own. Everything she wears shimmers and billows and dangles; she seems not so much dressed as loosely draped in flimsy, flowery, lacy stuffs: veils and scarves and floating gauzy blouses and trailing skirts and fringed silk shawls. Her hair too is continually in flux: tinted and streaked in varying shades from pale gold to bisque, it alternately gathers itself up in soft coils, falls in flossy clouds about her shoulders, or extends wayward tendrils and curls in all directions.

  Tonight, though, Rosemary seems unusually tranquil. Light but serene blonde waves lie on her brow; her ropes of blue and silver beads and her long chiffon dress printed with shadowy azure flowers fall undisturbed toward the floor; her gaze is steady on Fred. Vinnie has to speak twice before either of them notices her.

  “Oh, uh-Vinnie, hello.” Fred rises smoothly, but stumbles over her first name, which she has recently invited him to use. “I’m glad you’re here. I need support; Rosemary’s being very stubborn. You’ll tell her I’m right.”

  “Don’t be silly, darling. Vinnie will agree with me. Now, sit down.” With a flutter of sleeve and a tinkle of silver-gilt bangles Rosemary smooths the banquette beside her.

  Their dispute turns out to concern—or have as its pretext—the question of whether Rosemary should hire a cleaning lady. Even before Vinnie hears their arguments she’s on Fred’s side. Rosemary’s Chelsea house is famous for its disorder, its elegant slovenliness; every time Vinnie’s been there it has been cluttered with things that need mending, scrubbing, dusting, polishing, emptying, and throwing away. But Rosemary claims to be perfectly satisfied with her present method of housekeeping, which is to let everything go until she can’t stand it and then ask an agency called Help Yourself to send someone over for a day.

  “I can’t bear housecleaning,” she tells Vinnie. “It always reminds me of my mother’s two spinster aunts in Bath, where I was sent to stay as a child during the war—mean, obsessive old things. All their staff had left except this elderly battle-axe Mrs. McGowan, but they insisted on keeping that great ugly barn of a house up. Always cleaning, they were, working their fingers to the bone.” Rosemary extends and flexes her soft ringed hands. “They were fearfully cross with me because I was so careless and untidy. ‘You’re a most inconsiderate child,’ Aunt Isabel used to tell me”—Rosemary assumes an unfamiliar voice, thin and nasal—‘“You can’t expect Mrs. McGowan to pick up after you, she has other things to do. If you don’t change your ways before you’re grown, no self-respecting servant will ever want to work for you.’

  “Well, I made up my mind right then. I said to them, ‘I don’t want my room picked up. I like it the way it is.’ Oh, they were shocked. My Aunt Etty said”—another voice, lower and wearier—” ‘No man’ll stay in a house that looks the way your room does now.’ Little she knew.” Rosemary giggles provocatively

  Besides, she goes on, charladies always get so dreadfully familiar, trying to involve you in their awful pathetic lives. “You Americans—” She made a face at Vinnie and Fred. “You haven’t any idea what household help is like nowadays in this country. You think if I phone an agency they’ll send me a dear old family retainer out of Upstairs, Downstairs.”

  “No—” begins Vinnie, who has never tried to find a cleaning lady in London, because she can’t afford one.

  “What I’ll get instead”—Rosemary rushes on—“is some miserable immigrant who speaks only Pakistani or Portuguese and is terrified of electricity. Or else some awful slut who can’t find a proper job in a shop or a factory because she’s too stupid and ill-tempered. And then twice a week I’ll have to hear all about her backache and her constipation and her drunken husband and her delinquent children and her squabbles with the Council over her flat.” Rosemary slides into stage Cockney—“and ’er dawg’s worms and ’er cat’s fleas and ’er budgie’s molt, ooh, the pore dear, ’e’s losin’ ‘is feathers somethin’ awful and won’t touch ‘is bloody birdseed.”

  Fred awards the performance a grin of appreciation, then goes on to criticize the script. “It doesn’t have to be like that,” he tells Vinnie. “You can still find a good cleaning lady if you go to the right agency; Posy Billings gave me the name of one when we were there last weekend. If the woman talks too much, well, Rosemary can just leave the house. She can’t do that with Help Yourself, because they send somebody different every time, right?”

  “Mm,” Vinnie assents; but what she is thinking is that Fred Turner has received after only a few weeks’ acquaintance what she will probably never receive: an invitation to Posy Billings’ house in Oxfordshire.

  “Those people from Help Yourself, see, they’re out-of-work actors and singers and dancers, most of them,” he explains. “They don’t know anything about how to clean a house. When I come over they’re usually just standing holding a dust rag like it was some prop in a play they didn’t understand, or they’re pushing the vacuum back and forth over the same place in the carpet, talking about the theater and trying to persuade Rosemary to get them a part in Tallyho Castle.”

  “Not always.” Rosemary protests, with a soft giggle.

  “And if she goes out,” he continues, “if she doesn’t watch them every minute, the people from Help Yourself help themselves to her whisky and her pâté and her opera records and sometimes even her clothes. They smear her windows with detergent and ruin her parquet with soap and hot water and tear up her silk scarves for dust rags.”

  As Fred relates these disasters, Vinnie is struck not only by his grasp of the details of housekeeping but by his familiarity with Rosemary’s domestic circumstances. Evidently he’s not actually living with her now, but Vinnie wonders if he might be planning to move in, especially if conditions improve. She thinks of the remark of Rosemary’s aunt, that no man would stay in her niece’s house because of its disorder. As Rosemary implied, her aunt had been wrong: many men have stayed in her house. On the other hand, none has done so for very long.

 
Before Vinnie can pronounce any judgment in the dispute, the bell rings for the second act. Just as well, she thinks as she climbs the stairs to the balcony, jostled aside by larger and heavier persons. It’s always a mistake for an outsider to venture an opinion in arguments of this sort, which are often largely a sort of amorous play. At least for Rosemary the quarrel seemed no more than a pretext for dramatic monologue and affectionate banter. At times she’d even taken the other side, adding weight to Fred’s case by telling how she once came home to find a youth from Help Yourself soaking in pink bubbles in her tub. “And he wasn’t even attractive! He was rather pudgy, and soapy and apologetic, and later I found he’d used up all my Vitabath.”

  But Fred, underneath his light manner, is singing the basso part. He has a temperamental commitment to the idea of order, already demonstrated to Vinnie in meetings of the Corinth Library Committee. The dusty chaos of Rosemary’s house would surely seem to him a most unsuitable backdrop for their love duet. Also, no doubt, he doesn’t much care to have ambitious young actors chatting intimately with Rosemary, or sloshing about (however pudgily) in her bathtub.

  Vinnie’s guess is that Rosemary will win the argument. She’s used to having her own way, and besides it’s her house, not to mention her country. But there is something in Fred’s manner that suggests he won’t give up easily. On the Library Committee this past autumn he was—though always polite—quite stubborn: willing to prolong a meeting well past five o’clock to gain his point. Vinnie had thought that this might be because he didn’t want to go home to an empty apartment. On the other hand, perhaps stubbornness was part of Fred’s character—and as such possibly a cause rather than a result of his newly single state.

  As she lies in bed later that evening, sinking into an agreeable unconsciousness, with Mozart’s tunes drifting vaguely through her head, Vinnie hears what is unmistakably the sound of her doorbell. Startled, she lifts her head from the pillow. Her first thought is of the habitués of the local municipal lodging-house—slovenly meat-faced men in soiled clothes who lounge on the benches by the railway underpass in good weather, passing a bottle in a crumpled paper bag, or lurch along the streets near Camden Town tube station mumbling to themselves or to strangers. Her next, crazier notion is that the girl from the playground has somehow found out where she lives and is waiting on the stoop to recite the rest of her filthy nursery rhymes the moment Vinnie opens the front door.