Alison Lurie - Foreign Affairs

Insisting that she hire Mrs. Harris is one good thing Fred has done for Rosemary. She has done much more for him: she has transformed him from a depressed, disoriented visiting scholar to his normal confident self. His earlier anomie, Fred realizes now, was occupational. Psychologically speaking, tourists are disoriented, ghostly beings; they walk London’s streets and enter its buildings in a thin ectoplasmal form, like a double-exposed photograph. London isn’t real to them, and to Londoners they are equally unreal-pale, featureless, two-dimensional figures who clog up the traffic and block the view.

Before he met Rosemary, Fred didn’t really exist for anyone here except a few other academic ghosts. Nor did London really exist for him. He wasn’t so much living in Notting Hill Gate as camping out there so that he could walk every day to the British Museum and sit before a heap of damp-stained, crumbling leather-bound books and foxed pamphlets. Now the city is alive for him and he is alive in it. Everything pulses with meaning, with history and possibility, and Rosemary most of all. When he is with her he feels he holds all of England, the best of England, in his arms.

He has wholly recovered from the panic that seized him last month in Oxfordshire, when he was frightened by a few topiary birds and a too-vivid memory of the novels of Henry James into condemning an entire society. His distrust of Edwin and Nico remains-homosexuals have always made Fred uneasy, maybe because so many of them have propositioned him. But he feels fine about Posy Billings and William Just; he looks back on his moral indignation that night as priggish and provincial.

Among Rosemary’s long-married friends, he has found, arrangements like that of the Billings are common. More often than not, husbands and wives have agreed to allow each other a discreet sexual freedom, which their friends then take for granted. Everyone knows who Jack or Jill is “seeing” at the moment, but no one mentions it-except maybe to ask whether Jill would rather have her husband or her lover invited with her to some party. The couples remain amicable, sharing a house or houses, concerned for each other’s welfare and that of their children, giving dinners and celebrating holidays together. As Rosemary says, it’s a much more civilized way of coping with passionate impulse than the American system. One avoids open scandal, and also the tantrums of self-righteous possessive jealousy-which, as she points out, usually end in dreadful messy scenes, economically vindictive divorces, and the destruction of homes, children, reputations, and careers. Nor is there any of the frantic defensiveness and public display of the so-called open marriages that she’s seen among actors in the States (and Fred, now and then, among graduate students)-and which, as Rosemary remarks, never work anyhow. “It’s exactly like leaving all the doors and windows open in a house. You get nasty drafts, and very likely you’ll have burglars.”

The strain on Fred’s budget has also been eased-at least temporarily-by a loan from the Corinth University Credit Union, arranged by mail with some difficulty. With luck it will just about last until he leaves. He can go to restaurants with Rosemary now without always ordering salad; he can buy her the flowers she loves so much. If he has to skimp and save for the next year or so, hell, it’s worth it.

Only two things currently trouble Fred. One is the fact that his work on John Gay isn’t getting on too fast. When he was first in London, depression slowed him down; now euphoria does so. In comparison to the world outside its walls, the BM seems even more oppressive than before. He is irritated at having to show his pass on entry to the suspicious guard, who ought to know him by now; and he detests having his briefcase searched on departure. He is even more impatient when the volumes he wants turn out to be in the deposit library at Woolwich (two days’ wait) or in use by other readers (one to four days’ wait). And the less often he goes to the Bowel Movement the worse it gets, since books placed on temporary reserve by Fred or any other reader fail to rise again on the third day and are, with infinite slowness, returned to their dark tombs.

Though he knows this rule, several days more and more often intervene between Fred’s visits to the library, and more and more of the books he has been using have now disappeared somewhere within the system; the slips come back marked NOT ON SHELF, DESTROYED BY BOMBING, or-most infuriatingly of all- OUT TO F. TURNER. Meanwhile there is so much to do in London, so many plays and films and exhibitions to see with Rosemary, so many parties. The hell with it, Fred tells himself almost every day. He’ll learn a lot more about British theatrical history and tradition by listening to Rosemary and her friends than by sitting in a library-something that, Christ knows, there’ll be time enough for back in Corinth.

The other weight on Fred’s mind is heavier, though it consists not of a stack of books but of an airletter almost lighter than air. The letter is from his estranged wife Roo, and is her first in four months-though Fred has written her several times: asking her to forward his mail, returning her health insurance card, and inquiring for the address of a friend who’s supposed to be at the University of Sussex. Roo, as he might have expected, hasn’t forwarded the mail, acknowledged the card, or provided the address.

But now, like a tardy bluebird of peace returning late to a deserted ark after three times forty days and nights, this blue airletter has flapped its way across the ocean to him. In its beak it holds, no question about that, a fresh olive branch.

… The thing is [Roo writes] I guess I should have told you I was going to put your cock and the rest of those pictures in my show. I’m not sure I would have taken them down even if you raised hell-but I didn’t need to make it such a big surprise. If it’d been me, I mean say my pussy, I probably would have freaked out too. Kate says I must have been pissed off at you for something, maybe for being so wound up with school. Or maybe I was scared I wouldn’t have the guts to show the photos if you said not to.

Anyhow I wanted to tell you this, okay?

Nothing much happening here, the weather is still foul. I won second prize in the Gannett contest for those 4-H pictures, Collect $250 but do not pass Go. The emergency room ones were better but not so heart-warming. Everybody misses you. I hope London is fabulous and you’re getting your shit together in the BM. Love, Roo.

Here, four months late, is the letter Fred had imagined and desired so often during the dark emptiness of January and February-the letter he had so often fantasized finding on the scratched mahogany table in the front hall of his building, tearing open, laughing and shouting over, cabling or telephoning in response to. He had imagined changing the sheets on his bed, meeting Roo’s plane-

Faced with this evidence of Roo’s contrition and candor-he has never known her to tell a lie, even when it would have been socially convenient-Fred has to admit that he had accused her falsely. If Roo had had an affair he would have been the first to hear about it, from her. She was telling the truth when she said she never had anything to do with those two other cocks in the exhibit except to photograph them. More than likely they belonged to an old friend of hers from art school who is now working in New York, and his homosexual lover. In fact, she was guilty of nothing worse than bad taste.

But in Rosemary’s world bad taste is not nothing: it is the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual flaw. Fred remembers her saying only the other day, when discussing a mutual acquaintance with Posy: “I can understand how anyone might get carried away temporarily by Howie’s looks, and his talent, but what I really don’t see is how Mimi could possibly bring herself to move into that dreadful Kentish Town flat of his, with the plastic ferns and the bullfight posters.” “And those frightful gold-flocked shiny curtains, like cheap Christmas ribbon,” Posy agreed. “She must be out of her mind.” Their unspoken assumption was that anyone who would choose such a spuriously natural (the ferns), spuriously virile (the posters), and spuriously elegant environment must be false in other ways as well. And probably, Fred thinks now, recalling his own impressions of Howie, an ITV television executive, Rosemary and Posy are right.