Alison Lurie - Foreign Affairs

“Rosemary, darling-”

“Excuse me, please. I have to get my makeup repaired.” With a swish of her satin fishtail skirt, Rosemary is out the door and tripping down the street.

Fred stands a moment, stunned; then he races after her. “Rosemary, please-”

Rosemary halts. She looks round coldly at him, then calls to one of the attendant policemen. “Oh, officer!”

“Yes, Miss?” He approaches, smiling.

“Could you move this man away, please?” She indicates Fred with a toss of her head. “He’s bothering me.”

“Right you are, Miss.”

“Thank you.” She gives him a smile made more dazzling by the sooty dampness of her great blue-gray eyes, and trips off.

“All right, you don’t have to shove me, I’m going,” Fred says, shaking the policeman’s hand from his arm. He picks his way through the electrical snakes, round the barricade, and past a large crowd of spectators. Then he turns and looks back over their heads to the house bathed in brazen unnatural light. In its front courtyard a man with a bucket and brush is methodically painting the plastic roses a brilliant, glamorous crimson.

Even after this scene Fred isn’t wholly discouraged. He has never in his life been rejected by any girl or woman he seriously cared for, and he is almost as certain of Rosemary’s feelings as he is of his own. Hadn’t she been crying at the idea of parting from him?

Not that he takes her tears all that seriously. He has seen his love weep before: at a sad film, or for the death of some actor she barely knew; and then, half an hour later, he has seen her dissolved in laughter at some scandal about the same actor relayed by a friend. The theatrical temperament, he suspects, enjoys emotional scenes and tangles of misunderstanding, just as it later enjoys their untangling. The climate of their affair had always been, not stormy, but dramatically various, as changeable as the English spring weather-sunshine succeeding showers with a breezy, careless rapidity.

But as the days pass and he still can’t reach Rosemary, Fred becomes more and more tense and desperate. From one hour to the next his mood changes. He is enraged at Rosemary and never wants to see her again; he wants to see her, but only to tell her off, to let her know how angry he is; he wants to break into her house, to force his love upon her; he wants to plead with her: Hasn’t she shut him out long enough? There are so few weeks left; it is perverse and wasteful of her to squander them this way.

Also, for the first time, he seriously asks himself if he should do as Rosemary demands. Should he cable or telephone to the Summer School office in Corinth and say that he won’t be able to teach this year-maybe say he is ill? Isn’t two months in England with Rosemary worth it-worth angering his senior colleagues and risking his promotion? But if he doesn’t teach this summer, what the hell is he going to live on? He’s practically broke now, and if he stays on he’ll be-there’s no getting round it-living on Rosemary, in her house; letting her buy his meals and, when they go to Wales or to Ireland, his train and plane tickets. He will be what is called a kept man-a man who is maintained, enclosed, as one might house and feed and cage an expensive pet. And hadn’t Rosemary, when they last met, called him “pet”? No, no, never.

If he could only find the key to Rosemary’s house that she once gave him, he would go there and wait for her to come home. But the damn thing is lost; he must have left it behind the day of the party. Without it, he does what he can: he phones again and again; he even goes to the house in Chelsea, but nobody is ever home, except, once, Mrs. Harris, who won’t let him in or take a message, only shouts through the locked door something that sounds like “bugger off!” Is Rosemary staying somewhere else? Has she left town? He tries her agent, but now the man is coolly and smoothly uncommunicative. He is awfully sorry, he says, but he has no idea where Rosemary might be-two evident lies.

Rosemary’s friends are more agreeable, but just as unhelpful. And their agreeableness, Fred realizes now, is and always was generic rather than specific. In the past, because he was Rosemary’s current boyfriend, they had inquired about his work and solicited his opinions on matters cultural, political, and domestic. Now they have dropped him-though in all cases with the gentlest and most casual motion, as if brushing a crumb to the floor. They all have charming manners; when he telephones they are uniformly pleasant, but rather vague and always “awfully busy.” Some seem to have difficulty remembering who he is (“Oh yes, Fred Turner. How nice to hear from you”). Though he isn’t leaving for several weeks, they wish him a pleasant journey back to “the States” as if he were just about to step onto a plane. His questions about Rosemary are passed over as if unheard, or met with what he is beginning to recognize as the classic waffling manner of the British upper classes when confronted with the insignificant unpleasant. (“Goodness, I haven’t the faintest-wasn’t she going to the Auvergne or somewhere like that?”) Rosemary’s closest friends, who might have been more helpful, and with whom he could have been more direct, are unavailable. Posy lives out of town, and he doesn’t have her (unlisted) number; Erin, Nadia, and Edwin are abroad.

His colleague and fellow-citizen Vinnie Miner is also of no use. When he saw her last week at the British Museum she promised to speak to Rosemary for him, promised to explain that Fred didn’t want to leave London, that he loves her-Nothing has come of that commission, if she carried it out, which he doubts. And even if she did, Fred thinks, she probably didn’t make much of a job of it. If Vinnie ever in her life experienced real romantic love, let alone sexual passion, she has probably forgotten it.

Whereas he, Fred, is-shit, he might as well admit it-emotionally and physically obsessed. All he can think of, day and night both, is Rosemary. He tries to work at home, he goes to the BM, but he can’t concentrate, can’t read, can’t take notes, can’t write. And this although he has, for the first time in months, all the time in the world: long empty days and nights.

Again, just as he did last winter, he has taken to wandering about London. But now he knows that the city exists; that a rich, complex, intense life goes on within its walls, behind its shuttered and curtained windows. Everywhere he passes houses, restaurants, office buildings, shops, and blocks of flats where he has been with Rosemary; the streets themselves shimmer with the almost visible ghosts of his love affair. In this keyed-up state he often thinks he sees Rosemary herself at a distance: going into Selfridge’s, or in the intermission crowd at a theater; he spots her pale-gold halo of hair and light tripping walk three blocks away down Holland Park Road or getting out of a taxi in Mayfair. His heart pounds; he races, dodging traffic and shoving aside pedestrians, toward what always turns out to be some stranger.

Today Fred is in a part of London where he has little hope of coming upon Rosemary. He is walking along the Regent’s Canal above Camden Lock on a glowing June day with Joe and Debby Vogeler. Their progress is slow, since Joe is pushing the baby, and the old towpath is thronged with Sunday strollers. By the time Fred gets back to his flat and his typewriter most of the working day will be gone. On the other hand, if he’d stayed home he probably wouldn’t have accomplished damn-all either. His mind cannot focus on the eighteenth century; it is focused too hard on the late twentieth, and specifically on the moment less than twenty-four hours from now when he will be face to face with Rosemary for the first time in a fortnight, and she will have to listen to him.