by Alison Lurie
Smithers now figuratively spreads out his collection of dead flowers, pours a final slow molasses-jug full of clichés over them, and sits down looking self-satisfied. The discussion period begins; earnest persons rise and in assorted accents direct self-promoting speeches disguised as questions to the panel members. Vinnie yawns behind her hand; then she unobtrusively opens the latest New York Review of Books, bought at Dillon’s on her way to the symposium. She smiles at one of the caricatures; then she receives an unpleasant shock. On the facing page, in a prominent position, is the announcement of a collection of essays entitled Unpopular Opinions, by L. D. Zimmern, whom she hasn’t thought of for weeks.
She is startled too by the accompanying photograph, which doesn’t at all resemble the figure in her imagination, the victim of polar bears and the Great Plague. Zimmern is older than she has pictured him, thin and angular rather than heavy, and not bald—indeed, he has more hair than necessary, including a short dark pointed beard. His semi-smile is ironic, verging on scornful or pained.
But it doesn’t matter what Zimmern actually looks like. What matters is that he is about to publish, probably already has published, a book that is almost certain to contain his awful Atlantic article. This disgusting book, available both in hard cover and in paperback, is at this very moment in bookshops all over the United States, lying in wait for anyone who might come in. It will be—or has already been—widely reviewed; it will be—or has been—purchased by every large public and university library in the country. Presently it will be catalogued, and shelved, and borrowed, and read. It will shove its sneering way even into Elledge Library at Corinth. Later, probably, there will be an English edition, and possibly—especially if he is one of those awful post-structuralists—a French edition, a German edition . . . The hideous possibilities are endless.
Vinnie feels a sour, burning pain beneath her ribs, the gift of L. D. Zimmern. To relieve it she tries to picture him as a child among the instant children here: an unpopular child, scorned and persecuted by the others. But the scene won’t come clear. She can transport Zimmern to London University mentally, but she is unable to make him young. Persistently fixed in sour middle age, he stands by the deserted speakers’ table glancing round condescendingly at the roomful of riotous children, including or especially Vinnie.
And even if she could imagine another suitably sticky end for Zimmern, she thinks, what’s the point? This violent fantasizing is unhealthy; also useless. There is no way Vinnie can actually revenge herself; no forum for her except magazines like Children’s Literature that Zimmern and his colleagues will never see. She can’t even complain to her friends any longer, not after so many months—it would make her seem neurotic, obsessed.
Besides, Vinnie is reluctant to relate her troubles at any time. She believes that talking about what’s gone wrong in one’s life is dangerous; that it sets up a magnetic force field which repels good luck and attracts bad. If she persists in her complaints, all the slings and arrows and screws and nails and needles of outrageous fortune that are lurking about will home in on her. Most of her friends will be driven away, repelled by her negative charge. But Vinnie won’t be alone. Like most people, she has some acquaintances who are naturally magnetized by the unhappiness of others. These will be attracted by her misfortunes, and will cluster round, covering her with a prickly black fuzz of condescending pity like iron filings.
The one person Vinnie could safely complain to is Chuck Mumpson. He is outside the operations of the magnetic system, and nothing printed in any book can alter his view of her, for it does not depend on her professional reputation or the opinions of others. To Chuck, L. D. Zimmern is a no-account sorehead that nobody in their right mind would pay any attention to. “Who gives a hoot in hell what some creep says in a magazine?” as he once put it. Vinnie finds this ignorance of the ways of the academic world both wonderfully restful and very frustrating, just as she does many things about Chuck. It is this ambivalence, no doubt, that keeps her from fixing a date for her visit to Wiltshire.
Chuck has, for instance, an intellectual resilience she hadn’t suspected earlier. By now, for instance, he has not only managed to reconcile himself to the fact that the Hermit of South Leigh was an illiterate farm laborer, but to take as much pride in him as if he had been a learned earl. When she remarked on this, he generously attributed his change of heart to her. “The way you love me—it makes everything that happens okay,” he said. Vinnie opened her mouth to protest, and then shut it again. “I don’t think I love you,” she had been about to say. But she’s never said she did, and probably Chuck only meant “the way you make love to me.”
That she can accept; can affirm. Physical pleasure of the sort she’s known with Chuck does improve the entire world; it becomes a humming, spinning top in which all the discordant colors are blurred and whirled into a harmony that spirals out from that center. When she is away from him the spin slackens; the top totters, lurches, falls, showing its ugly pattern. Lying alone in bed under only a flowered sheet, these warm short nights of late June when darkness seems merely to blow over the city and the sky begins to flush with light at three-thirty A.M., she longs physically for Chuck. But then morning comes; the telephone gives its characteristic excited double ring, higher-pitched and more rapid than in America. June is a highly social season in London, and Vinnie’s appointment book keeps filling itself up with interesting parties, leaving no room for a trip to Wiltshire.
Besides, if/when she does go, what will it be like staying with Chuck, in his house? It’s ages since Vinnie shared a place with a man—or with anyone. And after all, it is partly by choice that she hasn’t done so. In the score of years since her marriage ended she probably could have found a housemate if she’d wanted one—if not a lover, then some good friend.
“Don’t you ever feel frightened living alone? Don’t you ever get lonely?” say Vinnie’s friends—or rather, her acquaintances, for any friend who asks these questions is instantly, though sometimes only temporarily, demoted to an acquaintance. “Oh no,” Vinnie always replies, concealing her irritation. Of course she feels frightened, of course she gets lonely—how stupid can they be? Obviously she only puts up with it because for her the alternative is worse.
Sometimes, in spite of her disclaimers, her acquaintances go on to suggest that it really isn’t safe for a small aging single woman to live alone, that she ought to get herself a large unfriendly dog. But Vinnie, who dislikes dogs and is unwilling to conform to the stereotype of the lonely old maid, has always refused to do so. Fido has remained her only companion. It has occurred to her that she treats him much as the traditional spinster does her pets: until two months ago he went almost everywhere with her, and was alternately indulged and scolded.
The truth is that Vinnie isn’t temperamentally suited to a shared life. The last time Chuck was in London, nice as that was (she recalls a particular moment when they were lying moving together on her sitting-room carpet, looking up through the bay window at a sky full of green moving leaves), even then she sometimes felt—how to put it?—crowded, invaded. Chuck is too large, too noisy; he takes up too much room in her flat, in her bed, in her life.
And it isn’t only Chuck who makes her feel this way. Whenever she stays with friends, however fond she is of them, she is uncomfortable. So many things about sharing a house bother her: for instance, the unending necessity for politeness, both positive and negative. The Please and Thank You and Excuse Me and Would You Mind If; the daylong restraint of the natural impulse to yawn, to sigh, to scratch her head or pass wind or take off her shoes. Then, there is the sense of being constantly, even if benevolently, observed, making it impossible to do anything odd or impulsive—go for a walk in the rain before breakfast, for instance, or get up at two A.M. to make herself a cup of cocoa and read Trollope—without provoking anxious inquiry. “Vinnie? What are you doing down there? Are you all right?”
And then there is the noise and clutter that’s involved in having som
eone else always around, walking from room to room, opening and shutting doors, turning on the radio, the television, the record player, the stove, and the shower. Having to negotiate with this someone before you did the simplest thing: having to agree with them about when and where and what to eat, when to sleep, when to bathe, what film to see, where to go on holiday, whom to invite to dinner. Having to ask permission, as it were, to see her friends or hang a picture or buy a plant; having to inform someone every single damn time she felt like taking any action whatsoever.
It had been that way with her husband almost from the start. And even with Chuck, who is wonderfully easygoing, sharing a flat was like playing a permanent game of Grandmother’s Steps. “I think I’m going to have a bath now and go to bed.” “Okay, honey.” “I’m going up to the shops now.” “Okay, honey.” And if you didn’t remember to ask permission before you did anything: “Hey, honey, where were you? You just disappeared—I was kinda worried.” (Go back: you forgot to say “May I?”) And of course the whole thing was reciprocal, so that when whoever you were living with wanted to go to the store, take a bath, move a piece of furniture, or any of a hundred other things, you had to listen to them asking you for your permission.
And then finally, after you had begun to tolerate living like this, because you’d begun loving the other person—after you’d learned even to like it, maybe, and depend on it—they walked out on you. No thanks, Vinnie thinks.
The trouble is, it’s too late to say No thanks. She will go to Wiltshire soon because she wants to go there; she won’t be able to stop herself, because somehow by accident Chuck Mumpson, an unemployed sanitary engineer from Tulsa, Oklahoma, has got into her life in such a way that she cares about him and depends on him to a degree she would be embarrassed to admit to her London friends, and even more to her American ones.
And when she goes down to Wiltshire it will be worse. There is a terrible danger that she will become wholly entangled, caught. Vinnie imagines the English countryside in June—in itself a seduction. Then she imagines walking with Chuck between flowering hedgerows, lying beside him in some grassy flower-strewn glade in the woods . . . All her caution and reservations will give way; she will be lost. She will feel more and more for him, and the more she feels the worse it will be when he comes to his senses later.
Vinnie knows, she has taught herself to know in over thirty years of loss and disappointment, that no man will ever really care for her. It is her belief, almost in an odd way her pride, that she has never been loved in the serious sense of the word. Her husband had once said he loved her, of course, but events soon proved this a delusion. The few other men who claimed to do so had made the assertion when carried away by desire, telling her then, and only then, what soon enough turned out to be a lie. Chuck, she admits, has said it on other occasions—out of politeness, she had told herself, or out of some antiquated code of Wild Western honor that made it necessary for him to believe he loved in order to justify what was, after all, adultery. He has even praised her looks (“Everything about you, it’s so kinda little and neat; you make most of the women back in Tulsa look like plow horses.”)
Perhaps at the moment Chuck does think he loves her, because she was nice to him when he was in a state of despair; because she took him in and scolded him and cheered him up—just as she had done with her former husband years ago. But once his confidence has been fully restored, he—like her husband—will look at Vinnie again and see her for what she is, a small, selfish, unattractive, aging woman. He will turn away to someone younger and prettier and nicer, and nothing will remain of his love for Vinnie except a kind of tired guilty gratitude.
Vinnie knows all this—and yet she also knows that she cannot prevent herself from going to Wiltshire. All she can do, and that not for very long, is put it off. She can accept invitations in London. She can remind herself of Chuck’s faults; she can cast a cold eye on her own passion, telling herself that he isn’t even her type physically: he’s too large-boned, beefy, and freckled; his hair is too thin, his features too blunt. True, all true—but no use: she wants him still.
After the symposium, and the reception that follows it, which is well supplied with wine and with literary conversation, Vinnie returns to her flat in a superficially improved but essentially down mood, brooding about Unpopular Opinions and her helplessness in the face of L. D. Zimmern’s persecution. She has a strong impulse to telephone Chuck in the country; but it’s almost eleven, and he will surely be asleep, for the archaeologists keep early hours. As she looks indecisively at the telephone, it rings. It isn’t Chuck on the line, however, but a young strong female American voice, with a tremor of urgency.
“This is Ruth March,” it announces, as if Vinnie ought to recognize the name, which she doesn’t. “I’m calling from New York. I’m trying to get in touch with Fred Turner; I have his number in London, but it’s been disconnected. I’m sorry to bother you so late, but I have to reach him, it’s really important.”
“Really,” Vinnie repeats flatly, annoyed at the voice for not being Chuck’s. “Are you one of his students?”
“No, uh,” Ruth March stutters, then declares, “I’m his wife. I met you at an English Department party in Corinth.”
“Oh yes.” A vague image appears in Vinnie’s mind, the image of a tall, dark, annoyingly handsome young woman in a black jersey. Not for the first time, she thinks that the feminist practice of keeping one’s unmarried name, though politically admirable, has social disadvantages. “Well, I wish I could help you, but I think he’s about to leave for New York anyhow—tomorrow, I believe.”
“I know he’s coming back tomorrow. But the thing is, I won’t be in Corinth then, I have to fly to New Mexico about a job there. I was away before, on a photo assignment, so I didn’t get the telegram he sent me, so I couldn’t call him, otherwise I would have.” Fred’s estranged wife is beginning to sound almost out of breath. “I want to get hold of him now, so we can meet in New York, because I’ll be there tomorrow night.”
“Yes,” Vinnie says neutrally.
“I thought maybe you might know where he is.”
“Well.” As a matter of fact Vinnie does know where Fred is now. When she saw him the day before yesterday at the British Museum he told her that he was going to have dinner with Joe and Debby Vogeler on his last night in London, and then go with them to watch the Druids perform their midsummer solstice rites on Parliament Hill. “Yes; I think he’s with some friends, people named Vogeler.”
“Oh yeh. I know who you mean. Do you have their number?”
“I think I have it somewhere. Hang on just a moment.” Vinnie runs into the sitting room, thinking again how stupid it was of her landlord to have the telephone installed in the bedroom. “Here . . . no, sorry. Wait a sec.” Embarrassing moments pass as she shuffles through scraps of memo paper and cards from mini-cab companies, increasing Ruth March’s transatlantic telephone bill. “Well, I’m sure I can find it if I have time to look,” she says eventually, “I tell you what; when I locate the number I’ll phone and give Fred your message.”
“Oh, would you? That’s wonderful.” Ruth releases a grateful sigh. “If you could just please ask him to call me in New York, as soon as he gets into Kennedy.”
“Yes, all right.”
“I’ll be at my father’s place. I think he has the number, but anyhow it’s in the book: L. D. Zimmern, on West Twelfth Street.”
“L. D. Zimmern?” Vinnie repeats slowly.
“Uh huh. Maybe you know him? He’s a professor.”
“I think I’ve heard of him, yes,” Vinnie says.
“And hey. When you speak to Fred, you could tell him, if you wouldn’t mind—”
Stunned by what she has just learnt, Vinnie is silent. Ruth March takes this for assent.
“Tell him I love him. Okay?”
“Okay,” Vinnie replies mechanically.
“Thanks. Thanks a lot. You’re a real sport.”
As soon as she hangs up
, Vinnie begins searching for the Vogelers’ phone number. At the same time, rather distractedly, she wonders why Fred’s wife is not named Ruth Zimmern or Ruth Turner. Maybe she’s been married before. The idea in the forefront of her mind, however, is that her wish has been granted. Her generic and specific enemy has been, in a manner of speaking, delivered into her hands; the sins of the father can be visited upon the daughter, a young, beautiful, and loved woman. Without the slightest effort Vinnie can prevent Ruth and Fred from having a reconciliation—for surely that is what it would be—in New York. And her subconscious seems eager to cooperate, for the Vogelers’ phone number refuses to surface. Vinnie is positive that she has it somewhere, written on the back of a British Museum call slip; but this slip, in league with her worser nature, has concealed itself completely. Yet her better nature, which doesn’t believe in the law of genealogical justice—what harm has Ruth March ever done her?—continues to search.
Of course it doesn’t really make any difference, she thinks, giving up at last. If Fred doesn’t meet his wife in New York tomorrow they’ll get back together eventually. She will phone him from New York tomorrow, or from New Mexico, or wherever she is going.
Or maybe she won’t phone him, because she’ll believe that he got her message and deliberately ignored it. She’ll be hurt, angry. She’ll take that job she mentioned and move to the opposite corner of the United States and that will be the end of their marriage.
Well, too bad—or maybe not so bad after all. Since she is L. D. Zimmern’s daughter, Ruth may very well take after him. She may be spiteful, inconsiderate, destructive; the sort of wife Fred or any man is well rid of—just as her first husband, if he exists, was well rid of her. Probably it’s her fault that her marriage broke up in the first place; nobody could say that Fred was hard to get on with. Anyhow, Vinnie can’t do anything for her. She hasn’t got the Vogelers’ phone number, and she doesn’t know anyone who might.