Alison Lurie - Foreign Affairs

“Well, of course it’s a disappointment.” Vinnie speaks briskly so as not to encourage Fido. “But I can’t really see why you’re so upset. After all, most people don’t have ancestors. Some of them don’t even have descendants.” Fido turns his head and gives Vinnie a hopeful look. “I mean, you’re no worse off now than you were before.”

“That’s what you think.” Chuck gives a suppressed groan that reengages Fido’s total attention. “You don’t know what it’ll mean for me back in Tulsa. Myrna’s relations, they’re high-class people: got charts of their family going back to before the Revolution. They’ve always snooted me. They didn’t like what I came from or my language or the kinda jobs I had. Sanitary engineer, Myrna’s mother thought that was a dirty word. She told Myrna once it always reminded her of sanitary napkin.”

“Really,” says Vinnie, forming a negative opinion of Myrna’s relatives’ claims to gentility.

“And her sister, she’s a psychologist, got a degree from Stanford University. She said to Myrna the reason I missed my job so bad was my mind was stuck at the age of three, and secretly all I wanted was an excuse to play with my poo-poo.”

“Really.” Vinnie says again, but this time with some indignation.

“After Amalgamated flushed me out it was worse. It was ‘Wal, Myrna, I always told you so.’”

“I suppose everyone has relatives like that,” Vinnie says, though in fact she does not. It was her so-called friends, rather, who had warned her that her husband was still carrying the torch for his former girlfriend and that her marriage wouldn’t last-and had later reminded her of how prescient they had been. “You’ve simply got to ignore them.”

“Yeh. I try. But Myrna doesn’t. When I couldn’t find another job she figured her sister was right all along. Thought I wasn’t making an effort. Hell, I must’ve sent out near a hundred inquiries and résumés. But the thing of it is, nobody wants to hire a guy who’s fifty-six, fifty-seven. The benefit package is too expensive, and you naturally figure he’s past his best effort. Hell, I used to think that way myself.”

“Mm,” Vinnie says, remembering certain meetings of the tenure staff of her department. “I suppose many people do.”

“After a while I about gave up. I started drinking too much, mostly at night at first, when I couldn’t sleep. It was better then. The place was quiet, and I didn’t have to talk to Myrna, or watch the maid hustling around, following me all over the house with the damn vacuum cleaner. If I felt real bad, I’d keep at the booze till I passed out. Some days I didn’t get out of bed till the middle of the next afternoon. Or I’d get in the car and drive, most of the night sometimes, going nowhere like a goddamn rat out of hell. I mean bat.” Chuck laughs awkwardly. “So then I was in this smashup.”

“Yes,” Vinnie prompts after a minute, but he does not continue. “An accident? Were you hurt?”

“Naw; nothing much. I-. Never mind. It was bad. I totaled the car, and the cops took me in for DWI. That about finished it for Myrna. She used to like me pretty well once, but after that she didn’t even want to look at me. She couldn’t wait to get me on that plane. She’s ashamed of me now, they all are. Greg and Barbie too.” Fido, triumphant, puts his paws on Chuck’s shoulders and enthusiastically licks his broad weatherbeaten face.

“Oh, I don’t think-” Vinnie says, and stops. Maybe Chuck’s wife and grown children are ashamed of him; how should she know?

“That’s why I didn’t go home with the damn package tour. I was sick as hell of London, but I couldn’t face Tulsa again. I kept thinking, the best thing for everybody would be if I never came back. Myrna would carry on, but she’d be relieved really. She’d be free, and she’d be respectable. There’s this developer, this fat guy she sold a big land parcel to for a shopping plaza, that has a crush on her and a lot of dough and big political ambitions. Myrna would take to that: she always wanted me to run for some office. Her family would’ve put up the cash, only I couldn’t see it; I never liked politicians. But this guy’s also got born-again Christian principles, and real conservative fundamentalist backing. He could marry a widow, but not a divorcee.

“Anyhow, I kept thinking, if I was out of the way Myrna could cut her losses. Wal, y’know, I couldn’t get the hang of the traffic over here, those tinny little cars they have that you can’t hardly see coming at you, and the crazy two-story buses. I tried to remember to look in the wrong direction and do everything backward, but I couldn’t concentrate on it. A couple of times it was a damn near thing. I didn’t care; I used to think, okay, why not-I’ve had a pretty fair life.”

A strange impulse comes over Vinnie, an impulse to emulate Fido, to embrace and comfort this large stupid semiliterate man. She is irritated at herself, then at him.

“Oh, come on. Don’t overdramatize,” she says to both of them.

“Naw. That’s what I thought, honest. Only once I’d talked to you in that restaurant, and ‘specially after I located South Leigh, I started to feel better. I thought, okay, maybe I’ll show them yet. I’ll come home with fancy English relations, a castle, maybe a set of those plates they sell here, with gold rims and a coat of arms painted on them. Hey, look, I’ll say to Myrna, I’m not such a worthless bum as you thought. Let’s tell your mother and your pissfaced sister about my ancestors, honey. And the kids, they’d like it too. It’d be something I could give them, make it up to them, kinda. This afternoon down in South Leigh I mailed Myrna a card; it said ‘Hot on the trail of Lord Charles Mumpson the First, looks like Grampa was right.’ Wait till she finds out. I’ll never hear the last of it. Myrna loves a good joke, ‘specially if it’s on me.”

“Does she,” says Vinnie, forming an even more negative opinion of Chuck’s wife.

“Runs in the family. Her Uncle Mervin, he’ll work a gag to death. All he needs is a fall guy.”

“Really.” It is a long time since Vinnie has heard this term. She imagines Chuck as a fall guy, a kind of debased stuntman made to perform over and over again for the amusement of his wife’s relatives. “Well, if it’s going to be like that, don’t tell them.”

“Yeh-uh.” He sits forward. “Naw. What about the goddamn postcard?”

“Say it was a mistake, a false lead. For heaven’s sake, Chuck, show a little initiative!”

“Yeh. That’s what Myrna always tells me.” He sags back into the cushions, hugging Fido to him.

“All right then, don’t show a little initiative,” Vinnie says, losing her temper. “Lie down in the street and let a bus run over you if you want to. Only stop being so damn sorry for yourself.”

Chuck’s square, heavy jaw falls; he stares at her dumbly.

“I mean, for God’s sake.” She is breathing hard, suddenly enraged. “A white Anglo-Saxon American male, with good health, and no obligations, and more money and free time than you know what to do with. Most people in the world would kill to be in your shoes. But you’re so stupid you don’t even know how to enjoy yourself in London.”

“Yeh? Like forinstance?” Chuck sounds angry now as well as hurt, but Vinnie cannot stop herself.

“Staying in that awful tourist hotel, like forinstance, and eating their terrible food, and going to ersatz American musicals; when the town is full of fine restaurants, and you could be at Covent Garden every night.”

Chuck does not respond, only gapes.

“But of course it’s none of my business,” she adds in a lower tone, astonished at herself. “I didn’t mean to shout at you, but it’s very late, and I have to get up early tomorrow and visit a school in Kennington.”