Alison Lurie - Foreign Affairs

“So what; that doesn’t make it true,” Fred says, recalling how often his love had complained of the disgusting lies printed about her and other actors. “Screw them.”

“All right, don’t believe it.” Debby’s tone combines annoyance and condescension. “No, no Jakie! You don’t really want that.” She stoops and pries from her baby’s fingers a half-squashed rubber ball with a cracked and faded Union Jack pattern. “Nasty, dirty thing. Joe, would you hold onto him a moment?” Debby transfers the struggling baby’s hand to his father, then hurls the ball away up the weedy slope. Jakie stares after it, then lets out a surprised howl.

“Look, Jakie, look!” his father cries, trying to distract him. “See the, uh, boat.” He points to a painted dinghy moored on the farther shore. “Oh, hell.”

The squashed rubber ball has reemerged from the weeds; it bounces across the path ahead of them and into the sliding frog-green water of the canal, where it joins a flotilla of debris that includes a plastic bleach bottle, half an orange, and bits of waterlogged wood and straw. “No, Jakie!” He holds the straining, screaming child back. “Bad germs. All gone now.”

“You don’t want that dirty old ball,” Debby insists-an obvious lie, Fred thinks. “Stop that right now!” The baby, in a paroxysm of frustrated desire, is kicking and screaming at the top of his lungs; his face is distorted into a red gargoyle mask.

“Oh, shit,” Joe sighs. “Come on now, Jakie. Up you go.” He hoists the struggling, howling gnome to his shoulder. “A-one, a-two.” Joe begins to bounce his son in what Fred supposes is meant to be a soothing manner, at the same time striding rapidly down the towpath, followed by Debby and the stroller. “A-one, a-two. That’s-a-baby.”

“Listen, I’m sorry if what I said annoyed you,” Debby remarks, as they outdistance the floating ball and Jakie’s screams diminish to a fretful gurgle.

“That’s all right,” says Fred, feeling magnanimously sorry for the Vogelers, parents of a retarded infant troll.

“It’s just like, I don’t like to see you so down over something like this.”

“Like okay,” Fred says. “It’ll pass,” he adds, thinking that with luck he and his love will be together again by this time tomorrow.

“Sure it will,” Joe tells him. “Rosemary Radley’s not what you really want anyhow.”

“Once you’re back in America, I bet you’ll read the whole experience a lot differently,” says his wife.

“Mh,” Fred mutters; it has just occurred to him that to the Vogelers his passion for Rosemary is more or less exactly equivalent to Jakie’s passion for an old rubber ball.

“That’s right,” Debby agrees. “You need a woman with some real intellectual substance. That’s what I’ve always thought,” she continues, mistaking Fred’s silence for receptivity. “Someone you can really communicate with on your own level. Share your ideas with.”

“Right,” Joe puts in. “For instance, somebody like Carissa.”

“Carissa wouldn’t ever have behaved in such a flighty, irrational way. You always know exactly where you are with Carissa. She’s really up front; I remember once when she-”

“Look, Debby,” Fred interrupts, halting and turning to face her. “Do me a favor: quit mentioning Carissa to me. Carissa is not the point.”

“But she is the point,” says Joe. “Oh, all right,” he concedes, registering Fred’s expression. “If that’s the way you feel.”

“That’s the way I feel, God damn it,” Fred says. It occurs to him that he and the Vogelers are on the verge of a real quarrel-maybe of a break in their seven-year friendship. But in his present mood he doesn’t give a shit.

All of them are stopped on the towpath now, facing one another. But the slippery greenish water still pours by, bearing its flotsam and jetsam. Jakie, gazing over his father’s shoulder, sees his lost prize approaching and begins to babble excitedly. “Oooh! Oo-ah-um! Ba-boo-ball!”

“Ball!” Joe cries. “He said ‘ball,’ Debby!”

“I heard him!” Debby’s cross, set face breaks into a delighted grin. “Jakie, darling. Say it again. Say ‘ball.’”

“Boo-uh-aw! Bah-aw. Ball!” The baby strains toward his object of desire as it floats by, surrounded by waterlogged crap.

“He said ‘ball,’” his mother declares with triumph.

“His first word.” His father’s voice trembles.

“Ball,” Debby breathes. “Did you hear that, Fred? He said ‘ball.’” But she and Joe hardly wait for an answer; forgetting Fred, they gaze at their son with relief and awe, then clasp him in a double embrace and cover him with happy kisses.

Fred’s confrontation with Rosemary the next day has been planned without her knowledge or consent. A listing in the Sunday papers had informed him that she was appearing on a radio program featuring the newly published memoirs of her friend Daphne Vane, and he had determined to be there. After a morning of trying (without success) to work on his book, he checks the time and the address again and sets out.

The studio, when he finds it, is discouraging-not the sort of place anyone would choose for a lovers’ meeting. Fred would have preferred the BBC building in Portland Place, where he once went with Rosemary: a comic temple of art deco design with a golden sunburst over the door and a bank of gilded elevators. Behind them was a warren of corridors down which eccentric-looking persons hurried with White Rabbit expressions. The sound rooms were cosy burrows furnished with battered soft leather chairs and historical-looking microphones and switchboards; the Battle of Britain still seemed to reverberate in the smoky air.

This commercial station is cold and anonymous and ultra-contemporary; its glass-fronted lobby is decorated in Madison Avenue minimalism. A dozen or so teenagers slump on plastic divans, chewing gum and jiggling their knees to the pounding beat of rock music.

“I’m here to meet Rosemary Radley,” Fred shouts through the din at a sexy young receptionist with magenta lips and greasy-green iridescent eyelids. “She’s going to be on the Lively Arts program at four.”

“What name, please?”

Fred pronounces it, thinking a second later that maybe he should have claimed to be somebody else.

“Just a sec, baby; see what I can do.” She gives him an openly admiring look and a glossy ripe-plum smile, and lifts a red telephone. “They’re trying to locate her.” She smiles at Fred again. “You from America?”

“That’s right.”

“I thought so. That’s my dream, to go to the States.” She listens to the phone again, her smile tightening from plum to prune; finally she shakes her head.

“Tell her it’s important. Very important.”

The receptionist gives him a different sort of look, equally admiring but less respectful; Fred realizes that she has reclassified him from VIP to groupie. She speaks again into the shiny red phone.

“Sorry. Nothing doing,” she says finally. “I’d let you in, but they’d give me hell.”

“I’ll wait till the program’s over.” Fred makes for a cube covered in shiny black imitation leather. As he sits on its edge, waiting, other visitors approach the desk; after checking by phone the receptionist presses a buzzer, allowing them to pass through the quilted, metal-studded imitation-leather doors behind her. The rock music continues, then blares to a crescendo, inspiring some of the lounging teenagers to rise and dance with hysterical, jerky motions.

The music crashes to a halt and is followed by a string of deafening commercials. The teenagers swarm toward the rear of the lobby, some of them holding out what look like autograph books.

“Don’t miss this amazing opportunity! Call NOW!… Stay tuned now for The Lively Arts.” There is a surge of mood-music.