Foreign Affairs

by Alison Lurie

  “Anyhow, I kept thinking, if I was out of the way Myrna could cut her losses. Wal, y’know, I couldn’t get the hang of the traffic over here, those tinny little cars they have that you can’t hardly see coming at you, and the crazy two-story buses. I tried to remember to look in the wrong direction and do everything backward, but I couldn’t concentrate on it. A couple of times it was a damn near thing. I didn’t care; I used to think, okay, why not—I’ve had a pretty fair life.”

  A strange impulse comes over Vinnie, an impulse to emulate Fido, to embrace and comfort this large stupid semiliterate man. She is irritated at herself, then at him.

  “Oh, come on. Don’t overdramatize,” she says to both of them.

  “Naw. That’s what I thought, honest. Only once I’d talked to you in that restaurant, and ‘specially after I located South Leigh, I started to feel better. I thought, okay, maybe I’ll show them yet. I’ll come home with fancy English relations, a castle, maybe a set of those plates they sell here, with gold rims and a coat of arms painted on them. Hey, look, I’ll say to Myrna, I’m not such a worthless bum as you thought. Let’s tell your mother and your pissfaced sister about my ancestors, honey. And the kids, they’d like it too. It’d be something I could give them, make it up to them, kinda. This afternoon down in South Leigh I mailed Myrna a card; it said ‘Hot on the trail of Lord Charles Mumpson the First, looks like Grampa was right.’ Wait till she finds out. I’ll never hear the last of it. Myrna loves a good joke, ‘specially if it’s on me.”

  “Does she,” says Vinnie, forming an even more negative opinion of Chuck’s wife.

  “Runs in the family. Her Uncle Mervin, he’ll work a gag to death. All he needs is a fall guy.”

  “Really.” It is a long time since Vinnie has heard this term. She imagines Chuck as a fall guy, a kind of debased stuntman made to perform over and over again for the amusement of his wife’s relatives. “Well, if it’s going to be like that, don’t tell them.”

  “Yeh-uh.” He sits forward. “Naw. What about the goddamn postcard?”

  “Say it was a mistake, a false lead. For heaven’s sake, Chuck, show a little initiative!”

  “Yeh. That’s what Myrna always tells me.” He sags back into the cushions, hugging Fido to him.

  “All right then, don’t show a little initiative,” Vinnie says, losing her temper. “Lie down in the street and let a bus run over you if you want to. Only stop being so damn sorry for yourself.”

  Chuck’s square, heavy jaw falls; he stares at her dumbly.

  “I mean, for God’s sake.” She is breathing hard, suddenly enraged. “A white Anglo-Saxon American male, with good health, and no obligations, and more money and free time than you know what to do with. Most people in the world would kill to be in your shoes. But you’re so stupid you don’t even know how to enjoy yourself in London.”

  “Yeh? Like forinstance?” Chuck sounds angry now as well as hurt, but Vinnie cannot stop herself.

  “Staying in that awful tourist hotel, like forinstance, and eating their terrible food, and going to ersatz American musicals; when the town is full of fine restaurants, and you could be at Covent Garden every night.”

  Chuck does not respond, only gapes.

  “But of course it’s none of my business,” she adds in a lower tone, astonished at herself. “I didn’t mean to shout at you, but it’s very late, and I have to get up early tomorrow and visit a school in Kennington.”

  “Yeh. All right.” Chuck looks at his watch, then stands up slowly; his manner is injured, stuffy, formal. “Okay, Professor, I’m going. Thanks for the drink.”

  “You’re welcome.” Vinnie cannot bring herself to apologize further to Chuck Mumpson. She shows him out, washes his glass and her teacup and sets them to dry, gets back into her flannel nightgown, and climbs into bed, noting with disapproval that it is ten minutes past twelve.

  But instead of slowing into sleep, her mind continues to revolve with a clogged, grating whir. She is furious at herself for losing her temper and telling Chuck what she thinks of him, as if that could do any good. It is years since she flamed out like that at anyone; her usual expression of anger is a tight-lipped, icy withdrawal.

  She is also furious at Chuck: for waking her up and depriving her of necessary sleep, for failing to discover interesting folkloric material in Wiltshire, and for being so large and so unhappy and such a hopeless nincompoop. He and his story remind her of everything she dislikes most about America, and also of things she dislikes in England: its tourist hotels, its tourist shops, its cheapened and exaggerated self-exploitation for the tourist trade, the corruption of many of its citizens by American commercial culture into an almost American illiterate coarseness (“I wish I wuz a seagull, I wish I wuz a duck . . .”).

  Why is she being persecuted by transatlantic vulgarity in this awful manner? It really isn’t fair, Vinnie thinks, turning over restlessly. Then, hearing the silent whine in this question, she glances mentally round for Fido. But her imagination, usually so vivid, fails to manifest him. Instead she sees a dirty-white long-haired dog trailing Chuck Mumpson down Regent’s Park Road in the fog from streetlamp to streetlamp, panting at his side in the fuzzy yellow glare as Chuck unsuccessfully tries to hail a taxi.

  Fido’s infidelity astonishes Vinnie. For the nearly twenty years of his life in her imagination he has never shown the slightest interest in or even awareness of anyone except her. What does it mean that she should now so vividly picture him following Chuck Mumpson across London, or making sloppy canine love to him? Does it mean, for instance, that she is really sorry for Chuck, perhaps even sorrier than she is for herself? Or are he and she somehow alike? Is there some awful parallel between Chuck’s fantasy of being an English lord and hers of being—in a more subtle and metaphysical sense, of course—an English lady? Might there be someone somewhere as impatiently scornful of her pretensions as she is of his?

  Almost as uncomfortable to contemplate is the idea that she is partly responsible for Chuck’s illusion—and, as a logical consequence, for his disillusion. As if she’d ever promised that he would turn out to be a scion of some noble family! She begins to lose her cool again.

  Well, after all, as he said, it might have turned out that way: there are plenty of nincompoops in the British aristocracy. Vinnie’s memory provides her at once with examples, including that of Posy Billings, who is not at all what Vinnie means by “a real English lady.” On the other hand, Rosemary Radley, annoying as she sometimes is, has to be granted the epithet. Rosemary would never have flown into a rage as Vinnie did this evening; she wouldn’t have made Chuck Mumpson feel even worse and more stupid than he felt when he arrived. If she had been there to witness the scene, she would have turned her face away as from any unkindness, any unpleasantness.

  And what about Chuck himself? Though he probably has only the most conventional idea of what a lady is, he will hardly think of Vinnie as one now. He will think instead that she is uncontrolled and unfeeling—in other words, both messy and cold.

  Of course in a way it doesn’t matter, Vinnie tells herself, turning over in bed, since she will obviously never see Chuck Mumpson again. She has thoroughly depressed and offended him, and presently he will go and do himself in—or, far more likely, lumber on back to Oklahoma—with disagreeable if fading memories both of England and of Professor Miner.

  It is 12:39 by the poison-green light of the digital alarm clock. Vinnie sighs and turns over in bed again, causing her nightgown to twist itself round her into a tight, wrinkled husk that resembles her thoughts. With an effort she revolves in the opposite direction, unwinding herself physically; then she begins to breathe slowly and rhythmically in an attempt to unwind herself mentally. One-out. Two-out. Three-out. Four—

  The telephone rings. Vinnie startles, lifts her head, crawls across the bed, and gropes in the dark toward the extension, which rests on the carpet because her landlord has never provided a bedside table. Where the hell is it?

  “Hell
o,” she croaks finally, upside down and half out of the covers.

  “Vinnie? This is Chuck. I guess I woke you up.”

  “Well yes, you did,” she lies; then, abashed at the sound of this, adds, “Are you all right?”

  “Yeh, sure.”

  “I hope you’re not still upset about what I said. I don’t know why I blew up like that; it was rude of me.”

  “No it wasn’t,” Chuck says. “I mean, that’s why I called. I figure maybe you were right: maybe I oughta give London another chance before I lie down in front of a bus . . . Wal, so, if you’re free sometime this week, I’ll take you anywhere you say. You can pick a restaurant. I’ll even try the opera, if I can get us some decent seats.”

  “Well . . .” With considerable difficulty Vinnie rights herself and crawls backward into bed, dragging the telephone and the comforter with her. “I don’t know.” If she refuses, she thinks, Chuck will go back to Oklahoma with his low opinion of London and of Vinnie Miner intact; and she will never see him again. Also she will miss a night at Covent Garden, where “decent seats” cost thirty pounds.

  “Yes, why not,” she hears herself say. “That’d be very nice.”

  For heaven’s sake, what’d I do that for? Vinnie thinks after she has hung up. I don’t even know what’s on this week at Covent Garden. I must be half asleep, or out of my mind. But in spite of herself she is smiling.

  6

  * * *

  Woman’s like the flatt’ring ocean,

  Who her pathless ways can find?

  Every blast directs her motion,

  Now she’s angry, now she’s kind.

  John Gay, Polly

  MAY in Kensington Gardens. The broad lawns are as velvet-smooth as the artificial turf of a football field, and ranked tulips sway on their stems like squads of colored birds. Above them brisk sudden breezes pass kites about a sky suffused with light. As Fred Turner crosses the park, one landscaped vista after another fans out before him, each complete with appropriate figures: strolling couples, children suspended from red and blue balloons, well-bred dogs on leash, and joggers in shorts and jerseys.

  Fred is on his way across town to a drinks party (he has learnt not to say “cocktails”) at Rosemary Radley’s. Near the Round Pond he checks his watch, then sits down on a bench to wait a few minutes so that he won’t arrive too soon. He has offered to come early and help, but Rosemary wouldn’t hear of it. “No, Freddy darling. I want you just to enjoy yourself. You mustn’t get here a minute before six. The caterers will do everything—and Mrs. Harris, of course.”

  For Fred has won their argument, and Rosemary has hired a cleaning lady. He hasn’t met her yet, but she sounds great. According to Rosemary she is a hard worker and very thorough: she gets right down on her hands and knees to wax the floors. What’s more, she doesn’t talk Rosemary’s ear off about her husband or her children or her pets: she has no children or pets, and she is long divorced from her drunken husband.

  Insisting that she hire Mrs. Harris is one good thing Fred has done for Rosemary. She has done much more for him: she has transformed him from a depressed, disoriented visiting scholar to his normal confident self. His earlier anomie, Fred realizes now, was occupational. Psychologically speaking, tourists are disoriented, ghostly beings; they walk London’s streets and enter its buildings in a thin ectoplasmal form, like a double-exposed photograph. London isn’t real to them, and to Londoners they are equally unreal—pale, featureless, two-dimensional figures who clog up the traffic and block the view.

  Before he met Rosemary, Fred didn’t really exist for anyone here except a few other academic ghosts. Nor did London really exist for him. He wasn’t so much living in Notting Hill Gate as camping out there so that he could walk every day to the British Museum and sit before a heap of damp-stained, crumbling leather-bound books and foxed pamphlets. Now the city is alive for him and he is alive in it. Everything pulses with meaning, with history and possibility, and Rosemary most of all. When he is with her he feels he holds all of England, the best of England, in his arms.

  He has wholly recovered from the panic that seized him last month in Oxfordshire, when he was frightened by a few topiary birds and a too-vivid memory of the novels of Henry James into condemning an entire society. His distrust of Edwin and Nico remains—homosexuals have always made Fred uneasy, maybe because so many of them have propositioned him. But he feels fine about Posy Billings and William Just; he looks back on his moral indignation that night as priggish and provincial.

  Among Rosemary’s long-married friends, he has found, arrangements like that of the Billings are common. More often than not, husbands and wives have agreed to allow each other a discreet sexual freedom, which their friends then take for granted. Everyone knows who Jack or Jill is “seeing” at the moment, but no one mentions it—except maybe to ask whether Jill would rather have her husband or her lover invited with her to some party. The couples remain amicable, sharing a house or houses, concerned for each other’s welfare and that of their children, giving dinners and celebrating holidays together. As Rosemary says, it’s a much more civilized way of coping with passionate impulse than the American system. One avoids open scandal, and also the tantrums of self-righteous possessive jealousy—which, as she points out, usually end in dreadful messy scenes, economically vindictive divorces, and the destruction of homes, children, reputations, and careers. Nor is there any of the frantic defensiveness and public display of the so-called open marriages that she’s seen among actors in the States (and Fred, now and then, among graduate students)—and which, as Rosemary remarks, never work anyhow. “It’s exactly like leaving all the doors and windows open in a house. You get nasty drafts, and very likely you’ll have burglars.”

  The strain on Fred’s budget has also been eased—at least temporarily—by a loan from the Corinth University Credit Union, arranged by mail with some difficulty. With luck it will just about last until he leaves. He can go to restaurants with Rosemary now without always ordering salad; he can buy her the flowers she loves so much. If he has to skimp and save for the next year or so, hell, it’s worth it.

  Only two things currently trouble Fred. One is the fact that his work on John Gay isn’t getting on too fast. When he was first in London, depression slowed him down; now euphoria does so. In comparison to the world outside its walls, the BM seems even more oppressive than before. He is irritated at having to show his pass on entry to the suspicious guard, who ought to know him by now; and he detests having his briefcase searched on departure. He is even more impatient when the volumes he wants turn out to be in the deposit library at Woolwich (two days’ wait) or in use by other readers (one to four days’ wait). And the less often he goes to the Bowel Movement the worse it gets, since books placed on temporary reserve by Fred or any other reader fail to rise again on the third day and are, with infinite slowness, returned to their dark tombs.

  Though he knows this rule, several days more and more often intervene between Fred’s visits to the library, and more and more of the books he has been using have now disappeared somewhere within the system; the slips come back marked NOT ON SHELF, DESTROYED BY BOMBING, or—most infuriatingly of all—OUT TO F. TURNER. Meanwhile there is so much to do in London, so many plays and films and exhibitions to see with Rosemary, so many parties. The hell with it, Fred tells himself almost every day. He’ll learn a lot more about British theatrical history and tradition by listening to Rosemary and her friends than by sitting in a library—something that, Christ knows, there’ll be time enough for back in Corinth.

  The other weight on Fred’s mind is heavier, though it consists not of a stack of books but of an airletter almost lighter than air. The letter is from his estranged wife Roo, and is her first in four months—though Fred has written her several times: asking her to forward his mail, returning her health insurance card, and inquiring for the address of a friend who’s supposed to be at the University of Sussex. Roo, as he might have expected, hasn’t forwarded the
mail, acknowledged the card, or provided the address.

  But now, like a tardy bluebird of peace returning late to a deserted ark after three times forty days and nights, this blue airletter has flapped its way across the ocean to him. In its beak it holds, no question about that, a fresh olive branch.

  . . . The thing is [Roo writes] I guess I should have told you I was going to put your cock and the rest of those pictures in my show. I’m not sure I would have taken them down even if you raised hell—but I didn’t need to make it such a big surprise. If it’d been me, I mean say my pussy, I probably would have freaked out too. Kate says I must have been pissed off at you for something, maybe for being so wound up with school. Or maybe I was scared I wouldn’t have the guts to show the photos if you said not to.

  Anyhow I wanted to tell you this, okay?

  Nothing much happening here, the weather is still foul. I won second prize in the Gannett contest for those 4-H pictures, Collect $250 but do not pass Go. The emergency room ones were better but not so heart-warming. Everybody misses you. I hope London is fabulous and you’re getting your shit together in the BM. Love, Roo.

  Here, four months late, is the letter Fred had imagined and desired so often during the dark emptiness of January and February—the letter he had so often fantasized finding on the scratched mahogany table in the front hall of his building, tearing open, laughing and shouting over, cabling or telephoning in response to. He had imagined changing the sheets on his bed, meeting Roo’s plane—