Alison Lurie - Foreign Affairs

“Yeh, they sure did.” The commotion caused by Rosemary’s solicitude takes on another meaning. “You took care of that.” Fred runs his hands down his love’s back, feeling the deep lace border of her chemise below the gauzy dress, the rounded convexities below that, marveling again that anyone so slight, soft, and silky could have so much purpose and will. In a few moments, he decides, he will get up and lower the lights.

“Well, naturally,” Rosemary agrees. She smiles slyly, charmingly. “But I had help. What a wonderful baby! But you mustn’t invite it again, darling, once is enough.”

“I didn’t invite the baby. I told Joe and Debby not to bring him. Honestly.”

“I believe you. Honestly.” Rosemary mimics Fred’s intonation, then gives him a butterfly kiss. “One can’t trust these hippies, they’ll do anything.”

Not wanting to break the mood, Fred refrains from explaining that the Vogelers are not hippies. He kisses Rosemary; she laughs softly and presses him closer. “Or say anything,” she adds; a little puckered frown appears between the feathery golden arches of her brows. “Your friend Joe, for instance”-her intonation subtly but definitely conveys that Joe is not and never will be her friend-”your friend Joe says that you’re going back to the States next month. I told him he was quite mistaken, that you’ll be here till the autumn at least.”

“I’m afraid he’s right,” Fred says reluctantly. “I’ve got to start teaching summer school at Corinth June twenty-fourth. I told you about that,” he adds, uncomfortably aware that he hasn’t mentioned it lately, or even wanted to think about it.

“Oh, nonsense,” Rosemary purrs. “You never said a word. Anyhow, you can’t leave then, we’ve got far too many lovely things to do. There’s Michael’s play opening, and I’m getting tickets for Glyndebourne. And then in July we start shooting the outdoor scenes for next season’s Tallyho Castle in Ireland-you’ll adore that. We always have such a good time: we stay at this perfectly delicious inn run by two of the most amusing old characters. They do marvelous meals: fresh salmon sometimes, and real Irish soda bread and scones. And of course it usually rains half the time, and then we’re free all day long.”

“It sounds great,” Fred says. “I wish I could come. But if I canceled out of summer school they’d be really pissed.”

“Who cares?” Rosemary ruffles his hair. “Let them rage.”

“I can’t. Everyone in the department would think I was irresponsible. It’d count against me in the tenure vote, I know it would.”

“Oh, darling.” Rosemary’s voice softens. “You’re worrying about nothing. That’s not the way it goes in the world. If you’re good, they’ll always want you. Look at Daphne: she’s absolutely impossible in so many ways, but directors are still falling all over themselves to cast her.”

“It’s not like that in academia,” Fred says. “Not in America, anyway. And anyhow, I’m not a star.”

Rosemary does not contradict him. Instead she sits up away from Fred, with her fair, fine hair tumbling over her face. “You’re not really going back to the States next month,” she says, with a half lazy, half threatening whispery intonation like the sound of his grandfather stropping a razor.

“I have to. But it’s not because I want-”

“You’re tired of me.”

“No, never-”

“You’ve been planning to leave me all along.” The blade is almost sharp now.

“No! Well, yeh, but I told you-”

“It was only an act with you, the entire time.” Her voice slashes at him.

“No-”

“Everything you’ve said to me, all those pretty speeches-” A half sob.

“No! I love you, oh, Jesus, Rosemary-” Fred pulls her back to him with force. “Don’t talk like that.” He rocks her against him, feeling again how soft she is, how feathery and fragile.

“Then you mustn’t frighten me.”

“No, no,” he says, kissing her face and neck through the light, fallen curls.

“And you’re not really going away next month, are you?” she whispers presently. “Are you?”

“I don’t know,” Fred whispers back, wondering what the hell he can possibly tell his department if he doesn’t. Rosemary’s crinkled pale-green silk dress has been pushed down over her creamy shoulders; his hands are on her naked breasts. “Oh, darling-”

But she twists sideways, wrenches away. “You think I’m a little fool, don’t you,” she says, her voice shaking in a way Fred has never heard before. “You think I’m a-what is it you said of your cousin, an easy pushover.”

“No-”

“And when you walk out on me next month and go back to America, you think that will be easy too.”

“Jesus God. I don’t want to go back to America. But anyhow, it’s not forever. Next summer-” Fred reaches for Rosemary again, but as he does she stands up abruptly, causing him to lose his balance and flop across the white silky cushions of the sofa.

“Very well,” she says, in a tremulous version of what Edwin Francis calls “her Lady Emma voice.” Fred has heard this voice before, but not often, and only directed to recalcitrant taxi drivers or waiters. “In that case I’m afraid I must ask you to leave my house now.” She walks gracefully to the front door, and opens it.

“Rosemary, wait.” Fred hastens after her.

“Out.” Though she speaks through a tangled curtain of pale hair, and with one lovely breast still half exposed, her tone is chilly and formal. “Out, please.” She points the way at a downward angle, as if speaking to a dog or cat.

Years of training in good manners now work to Fred’s disadvantage. Without consciously willing it, he steps across the threshold.

“Listen to me a moment, damn it-” he begins, but she slams the door on him.

“Wait! This is crazy, Rosemary,” he shouts at the glossy lavender paint, the brass dolphin knocker. “I love you, you know that. I’ve never been so happy in my life… Hey, Rosemary. Rosemary!” There is no answer.

FOR the first time this spring Vinnie is ill, with a heavy wet cold that threatens to develop into bronchitis. She lies huddled in bed this mild showery morning under the down-filled comforter, with a flannel-covered hot-water bottle at her feet, and a roll of loo paper by her head because she has used up all the tissues in the flat. The hot-water bottle is lukewarm, and the carpet by the bed is littered with damp wads of paper, offensive to her natural tidiness; but she is too weary and depressed to do anything about either discomfort.

Vinnie’s cold is an embarrassment to her as well as an irritation. She has always declared and believed that she never gets ill in England-that the viruses and headaches that afflict her in Corinth cannot follow her across the Atlantic to what she feels is her ecologically correct habitat. What is she to say now?

Even worse, she suspects a psychological source for her affliction, though she doesn’t believe in such things. She was perfectly well until last week, when she heard that her grant wasn’t going to be extended for another six months. It wasn’t this news that made her ill-she hadn’t really counted on more support-but a letter in the same mail from an acquaintance in New York: a well-known scholar, one of the judges who had awarded Vinnie her original grant. This woman now wanted to dissociate herself from the recent decision. “I really tried,” she wrote, punctuating her words with a heavy black underline. “But I simply couldn’t convince them. I’m afraid it wasn’t any help that Lennie Zimmern is on the committee this year-and by the way, I should tell you that lots of people consider his remarks about you in the Atlantic most unfair.”