Alison Lurie: Foreign Affairs

“Okay, okay. Forget I said it. She’s your mother, so you want her to be like one of those Virgin Mary statues in your church. Maybe she is, how should I know?”

“And you’ve got the wrong set of stereotypes,” he said, hugging her. “There are no Virgin Mary statues in our church; it’s all very abstract, very Reformation. Come on, get your coat, I’ll show you.”

Though he had known Roo for nearly three months at this point, Fred was still intoxicated with her-and not only sexually. As if she had been some mind-expanding drug, he was in a constant state of heightened awareness: what he saw seemed both strange and amazingly familiar. The transformation had begun with her photographs, but did not depend on them. In Roo’s presence at first, and then even when he was alone, Fred saw that farm workers had the expressions and gestures of Gothic carvings-elongated, creased, hollowed; and disco dancers, those of a Francis Bacon painting-all pale, screaming, metamorphosing mouths and limbs. He saw that the gate of the college was a frozen iron flower, and that the university officials resembled a convocation of barnyard fowl. Moreover, he knew that these visions were real-that he now saw the world as it was and always had been: like Roo herself, naked, beautiful, full of meaning.

Soon he no longer cared if Roo’s pictures and Roo’s conversation shocked his kith or kin. Indeed he privately enjoyed it, as she pointed out later: “You know something: you use me to say things you’re too polite to say yourself. It’s like that ventriloquist I used to watch on TV when I was a little kid. He wore this big crazy puppet on his arm, sort of a woolly yellow bear with goggle eyes and a big pumpkin mouth, that was always making smartass cracks and insulting everybody else on the show. And the guy always pretended to be suprised, like he had nothing to do with it: ‘Ow, that’s awful! I can’t control him, he’s so naughty!’… Hell no, I don’t mind. It’s a good act.”

“Besides, it’s reciprocal,” Fred told her. “You use me to say all the conventional things you don’t want to say. For instance, last week you got me to tell your mother we were getting married and take the blame for being a square.” The reaction of Roo’s mother was: “Really? How come? I thought nobody your age got married anymore unless-Oh, hey! Are you two having a baby?… Well then, I don’t get it, but it’s fine by me if you want to.” (Needless to say, on the one occasion when Roo and Fred had stayed overnight with her mother and stepfather, due to blizzard conditions following a party, they were put in the same room.)

It had in fact been Fred’s suggestion that they might get married, ostensibly to simplify his relations with his students and hers with his colleagues (“This is Fred’s er-friend.”). But it was also a way of proving to everyone that he took Roo seriously-that she wasn’t just, as one of his cousins had suggested, the kind of girl you can have a lot of fun with for a while. And Roo, he thought, had wanted to marry him because in spite of appearances (her radical views and getups, her tough manner) she was deeply romantic.

As their plans progressed it became clear that he had been cast in another of her youthful fantasies: the Perfect Wedding. Sunlight on the lawn, massed bouquets of flowers, Mozart and Bartók, strawberries, homemade wedding cake and elderflower champagne. Romantic, but still a radical feminist. Roo had, for instance, refused to take his name; nor would she remain Ruth Zimmern. Her relations with her father, L. D. Zimmern, an English professor and critic of some reputation in New York, were friendly; but still, why should any feminist go through life with a patronymic, particularly that of a pater who had walked out on his familias when Roo was a small child? Instead, she used the occasion of her marriage to become legally Ruth March. The new surname was chosen because it was the month of her birth; and also in tribute to the favorite book of her childhood, Little Women , with whose heroine Jo March she had deeply identified. (She was determined that if they had children, the boys would take his ancestral surname and the girls her new one, establishing a matrilineal line of descent.)

Just as Fred is beginning to wonder if the Northern-or as the London papers call it, the Misery-Line has stopped running, a train arrives. He gets into it, is carried by slow stages to Tottenham Court Road station, and makes his way through a series of cold tiled sewerlike tunnels plastered with posters advertising cultural attractions available in London in February. He pays them no heed. Because of the desperate condition of his finances he cannot afford to go to any of these concerts, plays, films, exhibitions, or sporting events; nor can he afford to travel anywhere outside of London. Last fall when he and Roo were planning their trip together, counting on his study leave, both their savings, and the sublet of their apartment, it seemed as if time were the only barrier to their plans for exploring London, and beyond: Oxford, Cambridge; Cornwall, Wales, Scotland; Ireland; the Continent. He wanted to see everything then, to travel forever; he felt that forever was hardly long enough for him and Roo. Now, even if he had the funds, he lacks the spirit to explore Notting Hill Gate.

Roo, for instance, wanted to go to Lapland in June to photograph the midnight sun, the glaciers, the Northern Lights, the reindeer-the whole landscape, she explained, of Andersen’s “Snow Queen.” But there is no point in thinking about Roo, Fred tells himself as he waits on the platform for a westbound train. She cares nothing for him and never did; she has insulted him and probably betrayed him and said she never wants to see him again. And he doesn’t want to see her again; how could he, after what has happened?

But in spite of this he can see her now: her dark eyes wide, her hair electrically springy, talking about the green ice of the glaciers, the mountain flowers-and then, even then, Roo was destroying him, photographing and possibly, probably, fucking-you couldn’t use a more polite word-both of those- And what made it worse, at the exact same time she was photographing and fucking him. She was even more full of energy those last, unseasonably warm November weeks, even more beautiful, alight with joy because she was about to have her first one-woman exhibition in Corinth and because (she thought) she was going with him to London.

Her show, Roo had decided, would be called “Natural Forms” and would include mostly pictures taken in Hopkins County, some of them for her newspaper. She claimed afterward that she had offered to let him see the prints before they were framed, and that he hadn’t taken her up on it. As Fred recalled it, Roo had suggested it would be better if he saw the show as a whole.

Roo also claimed she had warned him to expect surprises, and had said she was worried about whether he would like them; but Fred has no recollection of this. He did remember her saying at one point: “I’m going to use some of the shots I took of you last summer, okay? Your face won’t show much.” To which he must, unfortunately-probably he was working at the time-have replied “Okay.” Certainly she had said more than once that her exhibition was going to bother some people; but there are ways of telling the truth that are worse than an outright lie. Fred knew that Roo’s photographs had always bothered some people, people who didn’t like sharp-focus views of poverty or of the hysterical underside of the American dream.

On a cold bright afternoon in November, then, an hour before Roo’s show was to open, Fred walked into the gallery. As he stood with her in the first and larger of the two rooms beside a bowl of blood-red punch and symmetrical plates of cheese cubes, each pierced by a toothpick, they exchanged their last warm, untroubled embrace. Around them, Roo’s photographs were hung in groups of two. What she had done was to pair views of natural and manmade objects in such a way as to emphasize their similarity. A few of the combinations he had already seen. Others were new to him: insects waving antennae and TV roof aerials; Shara’s rump and a peach. Some of the juxtapositions were personal and humorous, some strongly political: two overweight politicians and a pair of beef cattle. But the overall tone, in contrast to that of earlier exhibitions, was sympathetic and even lyrical. Three years of happiness, he had thought stupidly as he stood with his arms round his gifted wife, have made her see the comedy and beauty of the world as well as its ugliness and tragedy.