Alison Lurie - Foreign Affairs

A March afternoon in St. James’s Square. In what she has determined by experiment to be the most comfortable and best lit of the chairs in the London Library Reading Room, Vinnie Miner sits working. Unless she needs some volume available only in the British Museum, she prefers to study in these quiet, elegantly shabby surroundings, which for her are agreeably haunted by the shades of writers past and the shapes of writers present. It is easy for her to imagine the portly, well-dressed spirit of Henry James climbing the stairs in a dignified manner, or that of Virginia Woolf trailing limp crushed twenties silks between two shadowy bookstacks. And almost any day she might see Kingsley Amis, John Gross, or Margaret Drabble in their still incarnate state. Many of her friends, too, use the library; there is almost always someone around to lunch with.

Vinnie’s scholarly research is nearly complete. As soon as it stops raining and warms up a bit she can begin the more exciting part of her project: collecting playground rhymes in city and suburban schools. Already she has spoken to a number of principals and teachers, some of whom have not only given her permission to visit, but volunteered their help in recording rhymes, or even made this part of a classroom project. Here in Britain, she doesn’t have to educate the educators; her interest in folklore is seen as natural and respectable. All that remains is to wait for the weather to improve.

By now Vinnie has more or less forgotten her unpleasant flight to Britain and-most of the time-that hateful article in the Atlantic. So far, no one she knows here has mentioned it; probably no one has even seen it. To help ensure this, since many of her friends regularly use the London Library, on her first visit she took the precaution of removing the March issue of the Atlantic from the top of its pile in the reading room and sliding it under a stack of Archaeology nearby. From time to time the magazine reappears; then she hides it again. One sign of the moderation of her distress is that this morning she merely moved the March issue to the bottom of the heap of Atlantics . As she did so, she imagined L. D. Zimmem as shrunken to about six inches high and crushed flat between the pages of his own article, a kind of unattractive paper doll, staining the paper with a thin sepia smear. It also occurred to her, as it has before, that she might slip the magazine into her canvas shopping bag, sneak it out of the library, and destroy it at her leisure. But all her training is against this final solution. Magazine-burning, in Vinnie’s mind, is nearly as bad as book-burning; besides, in the same issue there is a really excellent article on vanishing wildlife, which many people might enjoy.

The only thing that disturbs her at the moment is her conversation with Edwin Francis at lunch yesterday. Mentally reviewing it, she is not quite comfortable in the most comfortable chair in the reading room. She is annoyed at Fred Turner, and feels-quite illogically, she realizes-that he is somehow responsible for a slight but definite coolness between her and her oldest London friend and for the fact that Edwin and she had parted yesterday without making plans to meet again. Fred has also somehow deprived her of an apricot tart with whipped cream-a treat that seems even more desirable today after a pub lunch of wafer-thin salmon-paste sandwiches and a rubbery Scotch egg. Why should she be involved in the affairs of some junior colleague whom she hardly knows? If Fred needs to be recommended for a grant, very well; if he wants to have a frolic with a mutual acquaintance, it is no concern of hers. At the same time, Vinnie is uncomfortably aware that if Fred did ask for a recommendation now, it would take some effort to respond with disinterested good will.

Her mistake had been asking him to her party in the first place. In the past, instinct has always warned Vinnie to keep her American colleagues and her English friends apart. She has suspected that if they did meet, they would probably fail to appreciate or would even dislike one another, and that this dislike might rub off on her, staining both existing relationships (“I just don’t understand Vinnie. How could she possibly care for someone like that?”). In one or two cases she had almost disregarded her intuition, but after consideration decided not to risk it. As Edwin once said, social life is like alchemy: mixing foreign elements is dangerous. Last month she had broken her rule for a mere junior colleague; and instead of disliking each other Fred and Rosemary Radley apparently liked each other too well. Trouble either way.

Originally Vinnie had never meant to invite Fred to anything. She knew he was in London, of course-she had seen him several times in the British Museum. She knew he was alone here, having somehow misplaced his wife, though she had no idea how he had done this; one seldom does know personal details about the junior members of one’s department, though there is, in Vinnie’s opinion, more than enough gossip about one’s contemporaries. It had never occurred to her to feel sorry for Fred because he had no spouse with him: after years of detached observation, she doesn’t think that much of marriage.

The whole thing was an accident, really. One gusty wet afternoon, on her way home from a luncheon party, Vinnie had stopped in a grocery store in Notting Hill Gate and run into Fred, who lives nearby. He was looking windblown and damp, and buying two sickly greenish oranges and a can of the wrong kind of vegetable soup for his supper. Vinnie felt an irritated, uncharacteristic concern. At home, except for her students and very close friends, she seldom does anything for anyone else if she can help it; she simply hasn’t the energy. But here was a junior member of her own department, hungry and lost in a foreign city. In Corinth she would have passed him by with hardly a nod; but in London, where she is a different, nicer person, the unfamiliar conviction came to her that she ought to do something about him. Well, I suppose I could ask him to my party next week, she thought. He’s presentable enough.

Too presentable, almost. There is something overfinished about Fred’s looks that reminds Vinnie of the Arrow Collar Man in the advertisements of her childhood-though that isn’t his fault, heaven knows. He doesn’t dress up or act up to his appearance: he wears ordinary, even colorless preppie-professor clothes and has unremarkable good manners. All the same, his appearance sometimes annoys people, especially men: Vinnie remembers the hostile, jocular remarks that were made after his MLA interview. It was lucky for Fred that he had already published two solid articles and was in the eighteenth century, where good candidates are scarce.

Fred’s handsomeness hadn’t saved his marriage either, Vinnie thinks. That wasn’t so hard to understand, perhaps. Such looks arouse false expectations: the noble exterior is assumed to clothe a mind and soul equally great-the Platonic fallacy. Whereas inside Fred, as far as Vinnie can tell, is simply an ordinary, reasonably intelligent young man who knows something about the eighteenth century. Besides, one might get tired of striking, continual beauty after a while, just as one might get tired of being struck continually.

Even as she issued the invitation, Vinnie had regrets. But at the party Fred caused her no anxiety. She noticed that he didn’t spend much time talking to Mariana’s punk daughter and her angry-looking boyfriend-well, who could blame him for that? He ate a good deal, which was understandable considering the financial difficulties suggested by the vegetable soup and his rather desperate inquiries about how one could get Corinth paychecks cashed without a four-week delay. (No way, is the answer.)

Later on at her party Vinnie had noticed that Fred was part of the circle around Rosemary Radley; but then there is always a circle around Rosemary. She has the knack of becoming the center of a group without seeming to dominate it that, Vinnie supposes, any successful actor must possess. Her sphere of influence is rather small-only a few feet in diameter-as you might expect of someone who works mainly in television and films. She cannot, like some stage performers Vinnie has met, effortlessly focus all attention in a large room; but within her range she is invincible. And this somehow without holding forth on any topic, retailing gossip, wholesaling personal confessions, or saying anything especially clever or shocking-anything, really, that would have been out of character for the roles she plays on camera.