Alison Lurie - Foreign Affairs

“Roo, it’s so damn good,” he said. “Really fine.” Then he released her and entered the other room of the gallery.

What he saw first were photographs of himself, or rather of bits of himself: his left eye, its long lashes magnified, placed next to a magnified spider; his mouth with its slight pout, its infolded curve, likened to a spray of bougainvillea; his reddened knees compared to a basket of reddening apples. He admired the wit, but was somewhat embarrassed. As Roo had promised, his face didn’t really show; nobody could be sure that it was him, though many might guess. He glanced at Roo, whose own face expressed-there was no doubt about it-anxiety and suspense; then at the next two photographs. There, paired with a beautiful color shot of woodland mushrooms, dew-dappled, springing strongly from moss and mold, was an unmistakable portrait of his own erect cock, also holding aloft a drop of dew. Fred recognized the picture-or rather, the photograph from which this detail had been grossly enlarged-but had never thought to see it on public view.

“Roo. For God’s sake.”

“I told you.” Her large soft mouth quivered. “I had to put it in, it’s just so beautiful. And anyhow”-her voice modulated, as it did sometimes, into a strained toughness-“who’s going to know it’s yours?”

“Well, for Christ’s sake, who else’s would it be?”

Roo didn’t answer. But the question, he soon saw, was not a rhetorical one. On the walls beyond his own partial portraits were others not his own. Including other penises-two others, to be exact. Neither was as fully enlarged (in either sense) as his, but both displayed some interest. One tended to length at the expense of breadth and rose from sparse blond tendrils; it was compared by juxtaposition to a stalk of asparagus. The other, stubbier and mottled a darker red, was displayed next to a high-focus photograph of the heavy, rusted bolt of an ancient barn door.

The battles that followed this private view were fierce, painful, and prolonged. Roo refused to take down a single one of her photographs before the show opened or at any time thereafter-a decision in which she was upheld by the owners of the gallery, two small, deceptively quiet and pretty radical feminists whom Fred had once liked very much. She also refused to identify her other models, whose feelings she was evidently more considerate of than her own husband’s. (“Honestly, I can’t, I like swore I wouldn’t say.”)

When he protested, using phrases like “good taste,” Roo started screaming at him. “Yeh, well you know what that is, baby, that’s a pile of chauvinist shit. What about all the male painters and sculptors that’ve been exploiting women’s bodies for thousands of years-and photographers too, posing women to look like fruit or sand-dunes or teacups? A room full of breasts and asses, oh yes, that’s really nice, that’s Art. But don’t let the cunts think they can try the same thing on us. Well, too bad. Goose sauce, sauce for the gander!”

Okay, all right, Fred conceded for the sake of argument. If she wanted to take photographs of good-looking men, their physiques, he guessed he could see the point of that, their chests and shoulders and arms and legs. Or even their asses-“great buns,” he had heard that was the term- But Roo, still fuming, interrupted him. “That’s not where it’s at, pal. Women aren’t interested in men’s behinds, that’s a fag thing.” What they are interested in, she didn’t say, didn’t have to say, was cocks.

At the same time, Roo insisted and kept on insisting that neither of her unknown models had been physically intimate with her. “I don’t know how they got aroused like that. Being photographed turns a lot of people on. You really think if I’d fucked some other guy I’d put a picture of his cock in my show, you think I’m that kind of bitch?”

“I don’t know,” Fred said, angry and weary. “Hell, I don’t know what you might do any more. I mean, what’s the difference?”

Roo looked at him with rage. “Kate and Harriet were right,” she said. “You really are a pig.”

Far below Tottenham Court Road a train pulls up beside the cold dirty platform on which Fred is standing. He gets in, feeling gloomy and tense-as always when, against his better judgment, he allows himself to think of Roo. She is something he has to put behind himself, to forget, to recover from. The marriage is an emotional disaster, a failed adventure which has, inevitably, shrunk his view of himself and of the world; he is wiser, maybe, but at the expense of being that much sourer and sadder.

Fred’s choice of Roo had felt to him like a bold and expansive act, a defiance of conventions-and also of his own conventional self. For years he had been aware that in spite of all his abilities and advantages his life was a little unexciting. From babyhood on he had been what he once heard his father describe as “a very satisfactory child”-bright, good-looking, successful in everything, above all well behaved. His adolescent rebellion was of the most ordinary variety, and gave his parents no serious anxiety. Fred would have liked to worry them a little more-but not at the cost of failing school, scrambling his brains permanently with acid, or wrecking the battered tail-finned Buick he had delivered papers in zero weather and mowed lawns for five years to earn.

Roo was his red flag, his declaration of independence-and in the beginning, the less comfortable his family and more conventional friends were with her, the better pleased he was. Now he feels shamed and enraged to realize that they had judged her more accurately than he. His father, for instance, held the unspoken but clearly evident opinion that Roo was not a lady. Once Fred would have indignantly denied this, or rather condemned the concept as outmoded and meaningless. Now he has to recognize its validity. Even if you suppose, just for the sake of argument, that Roo never slept with either of the two guys whose semi-erect cocks were featured in her show, those photos were pretty vulgar. And worse, she didn’t even know it. As Joe had put it, she wasn’t on the same wavelength; they weren’t, as Debby had said, “coming from the same place”-though in fact they had both grown up in university towns with fathers who were professors.

Possibly it was this similarity of background that had helped mislead him into assuming that Roo and he were, whatever her language and manners, essentially in cahoots. It wasn’t his fault; Debby had said so: “Anyone can make a mistake-even you.”

As Fred hears her remark again in his head, however, it begins to deconstruct, becoming condescending, chilly, and spiteful. It occurs to him for the first time that Debby does not like him, possibly has never liked him, that she is glad to see him depressed and discomfited. Why this should be so, however, he has no idea. He has known Debby even longer than he has known Joe, since their first year in graduate school, and has always thought of her as a friend, though not an intimate one.

As a matter of fact, though he doesn’t know it, Debby had originally liked Fred very much-too much for her peace of mind. When they met-almost daily, in class or at some lecture or party-or when they had lunch together, usually in a group but now and then alone, Fred remained unaware of her feelings. With the good-natured vanity of the extremely good-looking, it didn’t occur to him that dumpy, dish-faced Debby might hope he was developing a romantic interest in her, or that as time passed she regarded herself as a woman scorned. At present Debby would tell anyone who asked that she “likes” Fred, but privately she thinks of him as rather immature and thoroughly spoilt. She resents him professionally too, both on her own account and on her husband’s. Why should Fred, who did no better in graduate school than they, and has published no more, have a job in an Ivy League university, while they are at California colleges nobody ever heard of? It is only because he dresses well and has a smooth manner at interviews, and because of his connections: because his father is a dean at another Ivy League school. Fred, according to an article Debby once read, is an example of Entitlement Psychology: he has been brought up to get, and think he deserves, all the good things of this world. So why should she mind seeing him stumble, even fall? It will do him good to get a few bruises and a little mud in his eye. The fact that Joe doesn’t resent Fred the way she does, though he is in her opinion basically much more brilliant and has a more original mind, is for Debby just another proof of her husband’s inner superiority.