Alison Lurie - Foreign Affairs

“I see what you mean.” Vinnie looked around the great opera house, with its multiplication of shaded lamps and crimson velvet, its festooned golden tiers of balcony-and then, with a sense of the collision of worlds, back at Chuck in his plastic raincoat and leather string tie. “So you went straight,” she remarked.

“I guess you could say that.” Chuck laughed awkwardly. “Anyways, after I was discharged I didn’t hang around home for too long. I had the G.I. Bill, and the tests said I was smart enough for engineering college, so I thought, hell, why not.”

“Why not,” Vinnie echoed, marveling at the long fuse of chance that had blasted this unhappy jobless ex-delinquent from rural Oklahoma into the seat next to hers at Covent Garden. She felt a rush of condescending pity, and congratulated herself on her good luck in being born to educated, affectionate, sober, and solvent parents.

In the days that followed that evening at the opera, however, Chuck gradually became less pitiable. Because he was bored and miserable, he was willing to go anywhere, eat anything, and look at anything Vinnie suggested. Sometimes he seemed to enjoy it, or at least find it interesting. After Fidelio , for instance, he remarked that it sure wasn’t much like real life, but maybe we’d all be better off if when things went wrong we stood around and screamed for a while. His grandad used to do that, he said. “When he got really riled up he’d stop whatever he was doing and just cuss everybody and everything for maybe ten, fifteen minutes, till he was out of breath.”

Somewhat to Vinnie’s embarrassment, Chuck insisted on paying for everything they did together, and thanking her for it as well. From the start he has had a wrong idea of her as helpful and kindly-a misconception born on the flight to London, when all she was really trying to do was protect herself from having to talk to him, and confirmed when she made a few simple suggestions about genealogical research. “You think I’m a nice person, but I’m not,” she occasionally wants to say, but refrains.

Apart from his misunderstanding of her character and motives, Vinnie decided presently, Chuck wasn’t really stupid so much as badly educated-hardly educated at all in her sense of the word. But at least he was willing to learn. Since he’d read practically nothing, she decided to start him at the beginning, with the classics of children’s literature: Stevenson, Grahame, Barrie, Tolkien, White. She bought him the books to ensure that he had decent editions, and to make some sort of return for the dinner and theater tickets he kept buying her.

Going with Chuck to the best current plays, films, concerts, and exhibitions, Vinnie of course risked meeting some of her London acquaintances. And indeed, on only their third excursion-to the National Theatre-they ran into Rosemary Radley. Vinnie quailed inwardly as she introduced Chuck, and took him off as soon as was reasonably polite. His subsequent comment was predictable: “A Lady, is she? Wal, anyhow, I got to meet one real aristocrat over here. Handsome gal, too.”

But Vinnie was astonished when at a lunch party a few days later Rosemary, without any appearance of irony, regretted that she had rushed her “amusing cowboy friend” away so fast, and declared that she positively must bring him to her house the following week. Vinnie said she would try, at first resolving not to. She might not think all that much of Chuck, but she wasn’t going to take him to a Chelsea party to be laughed at. But then, Chuck probably wouldn’t notice if someone like Rosemary was laughing at him; and if she was showing him London, shouldn’t he see more than just its tourist attractions?

So again Vinnie broke her rule about not mixing English and American acquaintances: she took Chuck to Rosemary’s party, hoping that it would be large and various enough to muffle his impact somewhat. To her surprise, his Western costume and Western drawl were an instantaneous hit. Though he explained that he hadn’t worked on a ranch since he was a kid, the British clustered round him, inquiring in sentences bristling with invisible quotation marks how exactly one went about roping and branding cattle, and whether there were still many Red Indians on the range. “I adore your Mr. Mumpson,” Daphne Vane, the actress, said to Vinnie. “He’s definitely the real thing, isn’t he?” And Posy Billings, pronouncing Chuck “awfully amusing,” declared that he and Vinnie must come to stay with her soon in Oxfordshire. Vinnie realized that over here Chuck wasn’t a banal regional type, but original, even exotic-just as, for instance, a Scots sanitation engineer in a kilt would be in New York.

Chuck’s London season was brief, however. Ten days after Rosemary’s party he decided to return to Wiltshire, largely because of something Edwin Francis had said. Instead of sympathizing with Chuck’s disappointment over Old Mumpson, Edwin had congratulated him. “Fascinating! A real Hardy character, he sounds. You’re so lucky; most of my forebears are dreary beyond words, all lawyers and parsons. You must find out more.”

“I’ve been thinking,” Chuck told Vinnie later. “I figure Mr. Francis has a point. I oughta learn all I can about the old guy. After all, he was family, whatever else he was.”

So, leaving most of his possessions with Vinnie, Chuck departed. She gave him a book for the train journey and packed him a lunch-well, why not? He’d certainly bought her enough meals in the last few weeks, and British Rail food is famously dreadful. Besides, by now-at least in Chuck’s view-they are friends. Many of Vinnie’s acquaintances, she is irritatingly aware, suspect that they are also lovers, in spite or even because of her perfectly truthful statements to the contrary.

In all the years she has been coming to England, Vinnie has never made love with an Englishman. Of course her previous visits have been brief, a few weeks at the most. This time, however, she had rather hoped for an adventure; and she had, as always on these trips, recast her fantasies to feature British intellectuals rather than American ones. Not of course that she really expected a romantic interlude with any of these well-known dons, critics, folklorists, or writers. But she certainly hadn’t come all the way to London to make it with a sunbelt polyester American left behind by a two-week guided tour, an unemployed sanitary engineer who wears a transparent plastic raincoat and cowboy boots and had never heard of Harold Pinter, Henry Purcell, or William Blake until he was fifty-seven years old and she told him about them. To be suspected unjustly of such a connection causes Vinnie much social discomfort-and also, it must be admitted, a certain amount of irrational pique. Of course she’d turn Chuck down if he made a move, but why hasn’t he done so? Either because he foresees her response-unlikely, since he isn’t the intuitive type-or because, though he likes her, he finds her unattractive.

The whole situation was beginning to make Vinnie cross and uncomfortable, and she was therefore positively glad to see Chuck leave London. She quite enjoyed imagining him traveling down on the train to Bristol, where he would pick up his rental car: a large red-faced American in a cowboy hat and a fringed leather jacket, eating her excellent ham sandwiches and, to the surprise of the other first-class passengers, reading Jacobs’ English Fairy Tales . But now that he’s gone, though Vinnie doesn’t much like to admit it, she misses him. She almost looks forward to the frequent phone calls in which he reports on his research and thanks her for sending on his mail. Most of this seems to be concerned with business: as far as she can tell there has been almost nothing from his wife or his children. Nevertheless, on the phone Chuck sounds in reasonable spirits, sometimes almost cheerful.