Alison Lurie: Foreign Affairs

Half an hour later, as she refolds the Times and gets out a novel, she glances again at her companion. He is wedged heavily in his seat, neither dozing nor reading, although the airline magazine lies limp on his broad knees. For a moment she speculates as to what sort of man would embark on a transatlantic flight without reading materials, categorizing him as philistine and as improvident. It was foolish of him to count on passing the time in conversation: even if he didn’t happen to be seated beside someone like Vinnie, he might well have been placed next to foreigners or children. What will he do now, just sit there?

As the plane drones on, Vinnie’s question is answered. At intervals her seatmate gets up and walks toward the rear, returning each time smelling unpleasantly of burnt tobacco. Vinnie, who detests cigarettes, wonders irritably why he didn’t request a seat in the smoking section. He rents headphones from the stewardess, fits the plastic pieces into his large red ears, and listens to the low-grade recorded noise-evidently without satisfaction, since he keeps switching channels. Finally he rises again and, standing in the aisle, converses with a member of his tour group in the seat ahead, and then for even longer with two others in the seats behind. Vinnie realizes that she is surrounded by Sun Tourists, the representatives of all she deplores and despises in her native land and is going to London to get away from.

Though she has no wish to eavesdrop, she cannot avoid hearing them complain in loud drawling guffawing Western voices about their delayed departure, the lack of movies on this flight, and the real bum steer given to them in this matter by their travel agent. As this phrase is repeated, Vinnie visualizes the Real Bum Steer as a passenger on the plane. Scrawny, swaybacked, probably lamed, it stands on three legs in the aisle with a SUN TOURS label glued on its scruffy brown haunch.

Unable to concentrate on her novel while the conversation continues, Vinnie gets up and walks toward the rear. She finds a washroom that looks reasonably clean and wipes the seat, first with a wet, then with a dry paper towel. Before leaving, she removes the plastic containers of Blue Grass cologne, skin freshener, and moisturizer from their rack and places them in her handbag, as is her custom. As is her custom, she tells herself that British Airways and Elizabeth Arden expect, perhaps even hope, that some passenger will appropriate these products; that they are offered to the public as a form of advertising.

This kind of confiscation-borrowing, some might call it, though nothing of course is ever returned-is habitual with Professor Miner. Stores are out of bounds-she is no common shoplifter, after all-and the possessions of her acquaintances are usually safe, though you must be careful when lending her your pen, particularly if it has an extra-fine point; she is apt to return it absent-mindedly to her own purse. But planes, restaurants, hotels, and offices are fair game. As a result, Vinnie has a rather nice collection of guest towels, and a very large revolving supply of coasters, matches, paper napkins, coat hangers, pencils, pens, chalk, and expensive magazines of the sort found in expensive doctors’ and dentists’ waiting rooms. She owns quantities of Corinth and University College (London) stationery and a quaint little pewter cream pitcher from a lobster house in Maine, about which her only regret is that she hadn’t taken the matching sugar bowl too. Well, perhaps one day…

It should not be imagined that these confiscations are of common occurrence. Weeks or months may pass without Vinnie feeling any need to add to her hoard of unpurchased objects. But when things are not going well she begins to look round, and annexations take place. Each one causes a tiny ascent in her spints, as if she sat on one of a pair of scales so delicately hung that even the weight of a free box of paper clips on the opposite pan would make hers rise in the air.

Now and then, instead of appropriating something she likes that doesn’t belong to her, Vinnie improves her world by getting rid of something she dislikes. During her short marriage, she caused several of her husband’s ties and a camp souvenir ashtray in the shape of a bathtub to vanish completely. Twice she has removed from the women’s faculty washroom in her building at Corinth an offensive sign reading WASH HANDS BEFORE LEAVING: YOUR HEALTH DEPENDS ON IT.

None of Vinnie’s acquaintances are aware of these habits of hers, which might best be explained as the consequence of a vague but recurrent belief that life owes her a little something. It is not miserliness: she pays her bills promptly, is generous with her possessions (both bought and borrowed), and scrupulous about splitting the check at lunch. As she sometimes says on these occasions, her salary is perfectly adequate for one person with no dependents.

Her superego does sometimes complain to Vinnie about this do-it-yourself justice, most often when her morale is so low that nothing can raise it. Now, for instance, as she stands in the narrow toilet cubicle surrounded by multilingual scolding and warning signs, a shrill and penetrating interior voice sounds above the roar of the plane. “Petty thief,” it whines. “Neurotic kleptomaniac. Author of a research proposal nobody needs.”

With effort Vinnie pulls her clothes together and returns to her seat. The red-faced man rises to let her in, looking uncomfortable and rumpled. An inexperienced traveler, he has worn a too-tight suit of some synthetically woolly material that crumples under pressure.

“Pain in the neck,” he mutters. “They oughta build these seats farther apart.”

“Yes, that would be nice,” she agrees politely.

“What it is, they’re trying to save dough.” He sits down again heavily. “Packing the customers in like cattle in a damn boxcar.”

“Mm,” Vinnie utters vaguely, picking up her novel.

“I guess they’re all pretty much the same, though, the airlines. I don’t travel all that much myself.”

Vinnie sighs. It is clear to her that unless she takes definite action this Western businessman or rancher or whatever he is will prevent her reading The Singapore Grip and make the rest of the flight very boring.

“No, it’s never awfully comfortable,” she says. “Really I think the best thing to do is bring along something interesting to read, so one doesn’t notice.”

“Yeh. I shoulda thought of that, I guess.” He gives Vinnie a sad, baffled look, arousing the irritation she feels at her more helpless students-students on athletic scholarship, often, who should never have come to Corinth in the first place.

“I have some other books with me, if you’d like to look at them.” Vinnie reaches down and pulls from her tote bag The Oxford Book of Light Verse; a pocket guide to British flowers; and Little Lord Fauntleroy , which she has to reread for a scholarly article. She places the volumes on the middle seat, aware as she does so of their individual and collective inappropriateness.

“Hey. Thanks,” her seatmate exclaims as each one appears. “Wal, if you’re sure you don’t need them now.”

Vinnie assures him that she does not. She is already reading a book, she points out, suppressing a sigh of impatience. Then, with a sigh of relief, she returns to The Singapore Grip. For a few moments she is aware of the flipping of pages on her right, but soon she is absorbed.

While the shadows of war darken over Singapore in Jim Farrell’s last completed novel, the atmosphere outside the cabin windows brightens. The damp grayness becomes suffused with gold; the plane, breaking through the cloudbank, levels off in sunlight over an expanse of whipped cream. Vinnie looks at her watch; they are halfway to London. Not only has the light altered, she senses a change in the sound of the engines: a shift to a lower, steadier hum as the plane passes midpoint on its homeward journey. Within too she feels a more harmonic vibration, a brightening of anticipation.