Alison Lurie: Foreign Affairs

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 exactly like you, only of course at first he was seven years old.”