Alison Lurie - Foreign Affairs

“Sure, I could do that,” Chuck agrees. “I could rent a car, maybe, and drive down there.”

“Or you might be able to take a train. Hiring an automobile is frightfully expensive here, you know.”

“That’s okay. Money’s no problem. When Amalgamated threw me out, I got to admit, they threw a lot of stock after me.”

Money is no problem to Chuck Mumpson, Vinnie thinks as she boards the bus to Camden Town, having declined his offer to find her a taxi; and obviously time is no problem either, except in terms of oversupply. The problems are loneliness, boredom, anomie, and loss of self-esteem, somewhat disguised by a hearty manner which was probably at one time more congruous with his actual condition.

For a moment Vinnie considers adding a fifth problem, sexual frustration, to her list. It is suggested to her by the warm, determined way Chuck grasped her arm-or rather, the arm of her raincoat-just above the elbow as he guided her through Piccadilly Circus toward her bus stop. After all, he is a large, healthy, muscular man; and without those silly, rather vulgar cowboy clothes he would probably not look too bad in a bedroom. Possibly this was what he was, in a blurry way, trying to convey.

But on reflection Vinnie decides this is unlikely. Chuck Mumpson is so obviously a typical middle-American businessman, the sort of person who, if he needs what Kinsey et al. have unromantically called an “outlet”-when she hears the word Vinnie always thinks of an electrical wall socket-will simply purchase one. And Chuck probably already has purchased this wall socket several times, in the hardware and software markets of Soho, no doubt getting stinking drunk beforehand on each occasion as an excuse. (“I was bombed out-didn’t know what I was doing.”) Men of this type never think of anyone like Vinnie in connection with sex; they think of some “cute babe” or “hot little number”-ideally, a number under thirty. What Chuck was pressing for was sympathy, companionship, an understanding listener. It’s probably not very satisfying to talk to whores, and apart from them she is the only woman he knows in Britain.

This conclusion, though unflattering and even, in a very familiar way, irritating and depressing, also reassures Vinnie. There will be no need to fend off the advances of Chuck Mumpson; she only imagined there might be because she is used to thinking of friendship and sex as linked.

As related earlier, Vinnie has throughout her life slept mainly with men whose interest in her was casual and comradely rather than romantic. They seldom used the word “love” to her except in moments of passionate confusion; instead they told her that they were “very fond” of her and that she was great in bed and a real pal. (Possibly as a result, Vinnie detests the word “fond,” which always suggests to her its archaic or folk meaning of “foolish” or “silly.”)

In her youth Vinnie made the painful error of allowing herself to care seriously for some of these people. Against her better judgment, she even married one of them who was on the tearful rebound from a particularly aggravating beauty and, like a waterlogged tennis ball, had rolled into the nearest hole. Over the three subsequent years Vinnie had the experience of seeing her husband gradually regain his confidence and elasticity, begin to bounce about at parties, flirting and dancing with prettier women; hop briefly into the arms of one of his students; and eventually soar entirely beyond the boundaries of marriage, where he was caught and carried off by someone she had once thought of as a good friend.

After her divorce, Vinnie protected herself against emotional attachment to her occasional bed partners by declaring an extramural involvement of her own. She too was in love with someone else, she would hint, someone in another city-though unlike them she never went into details. This strategy was brilliantly successful. The more generous and sensitive of her lovers were relieved of the fear that Vinnie might take them too seriously, and suffer as a consequence; the less generous and sensitive were relieved of the fear that she might “make trouble.”

Moreover, as was perhaps necessary for the ploy to work, it wasn’t quite a lie. As she had done in early adolescence, Vinnie allowed herself to fix her romantic desires on men she hardly knew and seldom saw. These were not, as previously, film stars, but writers and critics whose work she had read, whom she had heard speak or even briefly met at the receptions that generally follow university readings or lectures. She had thus over the years enjoyed imaginary relationships with, among others, Daniel Aaron, M. H. Abrams, John Cheever, Robert Lowell, Arthur Mizener, Walker Percy, Mark Schorer, Wallace Stegner, Peter Taylor, Lionel Trilling, Robert Penn Warren, and Richard Wilbur. As this list shows, she rather preferred older men; and she insisted on intellectuals. When several members of a women’s group she belonged to in the early seventies confessed that they had passionate fantasies about their carpenter, their gardener, or the mechanic at the service station, Vinnie was astonished and a little repelled. What would be the point of going to bed with someone like that?

Vinnie’s fantasy affairs tended to be of brief duration, though under the influence of a brilliant new book or lecture she sometimes returned to an earlier passion. When, by coincidence, one or two of these distinguished people came to teach for a term at her own university and established cordial relations with Vinnie, she at once broke off her private affair with him. It wasn’t difficult; after all, seen at close range, this man was nothing extraordinary, not a patch on Daniel Aaron, M. H. Abrams, or whoever was center stage at the moment.

After the disastrous experience of her marriage, Vinnie always ended her real affairs whenever she found her current lover getting into her bedtime home movies, or when one of them began to use the word “love” casually, or to announce that he could really imagine getting seriously involved with her. No thanks, chum; I was caught that way once before, she would think to herself. Not that there was always a current lover. For long periods Vinnie’s only companions were the shades of Richard Wilbur, Robert Penn Warren, etc., who faithfully every evening appeared to admire and embrace her, commending her wit, charm, intelligence, scholarly achievement, and sexual inventiveness.

In all the years she has been coming to England, Vinnie has never found a lover there. Nor is there any sign of one appearing now. And perhaps that’s for the best, she thinks. Because really, isn’t it time? In the popular imagination, and (more importantly) in English literature, to which in early childhood Vinnie had given her deepest trust-and which for half a century has suggested to her what she might do, think, feel, desire, and become-women of her age seldom have any sexual or romantic life. If they do, it is either embarrassingly pathetic or vulgarly comic or both.

In the last year or so Vinnie had begun to think more and more often that what she does with her pals is inappropriate-unbecoming to her station on the railway line of life. The fact that at fifty-four she still had erotic impulses and indulged them with such abandon seemed to her almost shameful. It has been something of a relief for her to be away from home, and chaste; to be as it were on sabbatical from sex-one which might well develop into a long leave of absence or even an early retirement. She is therefore embarrassed and irritated at herself for having, even briefly, imagined Chuck Mumpson standing naked by her bed in Regent’s Park Road. She tells herself to act and feel her age, for heaven’s sake. She certainly doesn’t want someone like Chuck, she tells herself; she doesn’t even want her brilliant, handsome, charming imaginary lovers very much.