Alison Lurie - Foreign Affairs

Of course if she doesn’t use Mary Maloney’s contribution she won’t be exploiting her. No; she’ll only be exploiting the scores, hundreds even, of schoolchildren who for thirty years have told her their rhymes, stories, riddles, and jokes for nothing. But to think this way is ridiculous. It is to condemn every folklorist who ever lived, from the Grimm brothers on.

Yes, Vinnie thinks, she will forget those rhymes, as she prefers to forget much of adult folklore. A scholar, of course, cannot afford to be prudish, and over the years she has recorded a good deal of off-color material with hardly a quiver. Children are given to bathroom humor:

Milk, milk, lemonade.

Around the corner fudge is made.

She has even (without the accompanying gestures to parts of the body, of course) used this verse in her lectures as an example of folk metaphor, demonstrating the young child’s undifferentiated pre-moral pleasure in both food and bodily products.

But some of the jokes told by grownups and collected by other folklorists really gross Vinnie out, as her students would say. They are not only filthy, they emphasize an aspect of the relations between men and women that she prefers not to look at too closely. However carried away by sex-and at times she has been carried far-Vinnie always returns with a slight sense of embarrassment. Intellectually she considers the physical side of love ridiculous at best, certainly unaesthetic-not one of nature’s best inventions. The female organs seem to her damp and cluttered; that of the male positively silly, a pink unnatural toadstool sort of thing. As the only child of modest, even rather squeamish parents, Vinnie was six years old before she saw a naked human male-a friend’s baby brother. Because she was a polite child she made no comment on what appeared to her a kind of unfortunate growth on the baby’s tummy, a sort of large fleshy wart. Subsequently, through contemplation of public sculptures and her parents’ art books, it occurred to her that other males besides little Bobby had this handicap, though in art it was usually concealed, or partly concealed, by a sculptured or painted leaf. Other men, she concluded from a visit to Rockefeller Center and a photograph in Life of the Oscar Award, were not so deformed. When she discovered the truth, Vinnie’s main feeling was one of pity. A decade later she saw her first erect penis; in spite of all she now knew, her first thought was that it looked infected: sore, red, puffy. Though she has tried to suppress them, these ideas are never far from Vinnie’s consciousness. She has never got used to the way sex looks.

But though it looks foolish or even disgusting, Vinnie presently found, sex feels wonderful. She didn’t find that odd, since it is the same way with food: an oyster or a plate of spaghetti is far from attractive in itself. The solution to the problem was simple: you either make love in the dark or shut your eyes. Of course, this hasn’t always been possible. In graduate school she once broke up with a most attractive man because the wall opposite his bed was one large gold-framed mirror salvaged from a demolished building nearby. Vinnie managed to keep her eyes closed most of the time, but she couldn’t help opening them once in a while; and then the sight of her own thin white legs wrapped around her friend Paul Cattleman’s brown hairy back filled her with a deep embarrassment that almost wholly quenched her pleasure.

While she was growing up Vinnie often heard the minister of her parents’ church say that love (the married sort, of course) was a God-given blessing. Vinnie herself is not religious, though she is somewhat superstitious, and she does not blame the human reproductive process on anyone. But if she were to imagine the sort of God who might have arranged it, he would hardly inspire veneration. She sees one of those fat, undignified, naked bronze deities that are occasionally offered for sale in Oriental shops, whose human avatars are worshiped by the least stable of her students. Some little plump godling, with a limited imagination and the giggly, vulgar sense of humor one sometimes sees in young children.

Before she left America, Vinnie had rather dreaded the prospect of being without physical love for six months, and anticipated with anxiety the frustration and/or unsuitable incidents it might bring into her life-the necessity of calling too desperately on fantasy affairs. But as it turns out, she has been less often painfully troubled by desire than in the past, perhaps because of her age.

Even in her fantasy life, she has noticed, professional recognition has of late tended to replace romance. As she drowses over a book, or lies among her pillows drifting into sleep, public bodies rather than private ones approach her. She accepts their advances as warmly and graciously as before, but now in a vertical rather than a horizontal position, and clad not in her best black nightgown but in the black gown and colored silk hood appropriate to the recipient of various prizes and honorary degrees. It annoys Vinnie that she is enough a woman of her generation to be rather ashamed of these imaginings when fully awake. Among her feminist students they would be thought far less embarrassing than the other sort of fantasy; even admirable. But Vinnie has been brought up to believe that though a man may work for wealth or fame, a woman must labor for love-if not that of a husband or children, at least that of a profession.

No, Vinnie doesn’t miss sex as much as she had feared. What she misses is the affectionate and romantic side of love, insofar as she has known it: the leisurely walks in the woods, the exchange of notes, the rapid concealed half-caress at the crowded party, the glance across the lounge at the faculty club, the sense of sharing a complex, secret life. But she is used to missing all this-she has been short of it almost all her life.

And here in London she thinks of it rather less often, for there is so much else to entertain her. Tonight, for instance, she’s going to the English National Opera with a friend whom she considers one of the nicest people and best authors of children’s fiction in Britain.

At the Coliseum that evening, during the intermission of Così fan tutte , Vinnie descends the stairs from the balcony in search of coffee for herself and for her friend Jane, who has a sprained ankle. Her hope is that the lower bar will be less crowded, but it is worse if anything: surrounded by very large, pushing men, none of whom shows the slightest inclination to make way for her. She has noticed before that the British, who unlike Americans queue so politely on all other occasions, become selfish and shoving around any supply of liquor, public or private. It is, she thinks, a sort of national hysteria, probably the result of the licensing laws.

As Vinnie gives up all hope of coffee and heads back toward the stairs, she sees Rosemary Radley and Fred Turner sitting on a bench. That they should be here together doesn’t surprise her. Everyone knows about them now; Rosemary has even been mentioned in Private Eye as “discussing Ugandan affairs with a gorgeous young American don.” She has also, presumably because of Fred, canceled out of a film now being shot in Italy. It wasn’t a very large role, admittedly; but a fair amount of money was involved-and, as everyone says, Rosemary has to think of her reputation; she isn’t getting any younger.

None of this gossip seems to affect the lovers. They go everywhere together, and Vinnie has to admit that they make a handsome couple. Rosemary of course is famous for her looks, and more than one of her friends has compared Fred’s profile to that of Rupert Brooke-which is fine if you like that rather flamboyant sort of appearance, Vinnie thinks. Nor do they seem mismatched as to age: Fred’s seriousness of manner, and Rosemary’s delicate playfulness, help to cancel the difference. And they are evidently good for each other. Fred has cheered up amazingly, and Rosemary’s scatty manner has moderated. She still darts from one topic to the next, but far more smoothly.