Alison Lurie - Foreign Affairs

“Sure you do.”

She protested, but Chuck was determined. “You want to make me feel like a creep, a moocher, a traveling salesman, is that it?”

“No, of course not,” Vinnie said; and the result was the coat she’s wearing now, with its romantic gathered hood and designer label-the most beautiful garment she’s owned in years.

Vinnie’s raincoat isn’t the only surprising thing Chuck has given her. He has turned out to be wonderful in bed; so wonderful that Vinnie had broken her promise to herself and allowed-no, rather welcomed-him back once, twice, three times-almost every day until he left for Wiltshire again. And to think that if it hadn’t been for Posy Billings’ watercress-and-avocado soup, she might never have known…

Sometimes Vinnie wonders why any woman ever gets into bed with any man. To take off all your clothes and lie down beside some unclothed larger person is a terribly risky business. The odds are stacked almost as heavily against you as in the New York state lottery. He could hurt you; he could laugh at you; he could take one look at your naked aging body and turn away in ill-concealed, embarrassed distaste. He could turn out to be awkward, selfish, inept-even totally incompetent. He could have some peculiar sexual hangup: a fixation on your underclothes to the exclusion of you, for instance, or on one sexual variation to the exclusion of all else. The risks are so high that really no woman in her right mind would take such a chance-except that when you do take such a chance you’re usually not in your right mind. And if you win, just as with the state lottery (which Vinnie also plays occasionally) the prize is so tremendous.

In over forty years Vinnie has held a lot of losing tickets. But when she’s with Chuck she feels like one of those lottery winners who are occasionally pictured in the newspapers grinning dizzily, astounded at their own luck. She has had this experience before, but she never expected to have it again. Even though it has happened four times, she hardly believes it.

Her disbelief, Vinnie realizes, is the consequence not only of English literature but of contemporary culture. The media convention is that people like Chuck and Vinnie-especially Vinnie-don’t enjoy sex very much or experience it very often. This convention may date from an earlier era, when most women were physically worn out, if not dead, at fifty. Or it may reflect the distaste many people seem to feel for the idea of their parents as lovers. Superego figures are supposed to be dignified and disembodied; above all that.

Of course, elderly couples can now and then be seen hugging or kissing in a friendly manner. The public regards this indulgently, as visitors to the Zoo do the two damp-stained polar bears across the way from Vinnie, who are now nuzzling each other with a playful, clumsy affection. Anything more serious on their part, however, and most spectators would sidle off embarrassed, dragging their children with them, though perhaps with a prurient backward glance. To imagine these bears-or Chuck and Vinnie-really going at it would cause mental discomfort. In books, plays, films, advertisements, only the young and beautiful are portrayed as making love. That the relatively old and plain do so too, often with passion, is a well-kept secret.

Now that Chuck has been gone nearly a week, Vinnie misses him acutely. She misses the way he strokes her back and behind, remembering all the right places; the slow, delicious way he licks her breasts, first one and then the other; the size, shape, and color of his most private part, and its amazing motility-it can, uniquely in Vinnie’s experience, nod or shake its head in reply to a question. Remembering all this, and more, as she sits on the bench, she wants him back so much that it is acutely painful. On the other hand, his presence creates a difficult social dilemma.

For the sake of her London reputation, Vinnie believes, she would do best to remain, or at least seem, romantically uninvolved. In Edwin’s set-among people like Rosemary Radley and Posy Billings-occasional love affairs are forgiven. But her social world overlaps Edwin’s only slightly. Most of her English friends are rather old-fashioned in their views: even if they approved of Chuck, they would look askance at adultery. In their opinion, casual affairs are perhaps all very well for actors, students, secretaries, and people like that; but a woman of Vinnie’s age and professional reputation, if not celibate, ought to be married-or at least permanently living with another respectable educated person.

Vinnie has no regrets about having taken Chuck into her bed-much the reverse-but she doesn’t want anyone to find out that he’s been there. Unfortunately, since they became lovers Chuck’s public manner toward her has altered. He has developed a way of looking at her, a way of taking her arm, that-agreeable though they may be-are a dead giveaway, or would certainly have become so if he had stayed in London much longer. When he returns next weekend the public danger as well as the private pleasure will be renewed. Vinnie can hardly ask him to behave more formally toward her when other people are around: that would involve uncomfortable explanations of her motives, or even more uncomfortable lies. And to prevent him from meeting anyone she knows will be inconvenient-maybe impossible. At the same time, she can’t go around explaining to all her acquaintances that in spite of appearances, she isn’t sleeping with Chuck Mumpson, especially when it is no longer true.

Vinnie rises from her bench and walks on, as if her contemplation of the bear who looks so much like Chuck might in itself incriminate her, should some acquaintance appear. To be suspected of having a lover would be difficult enough, she thinks; to be suspected of sleeping with what, from the British point of view, is practically a polar bear, would be worse. It isn’t that her British friends dislike Chuck. They like him: they find him amusingly original; they are vastly entertained by his American simplicity and vulgarity.

The problem is that if her friends find out that Vinnie is mixed up with Chuck, they will begin to mix her up with him, to redefine her. This mental process isn’t typically British, of course, but universal. In certain cases the confusion of identities affects the lovers themselves: transported by passion, they believe that their souls have merged, or were always identical. As an American friend of hers once put it at a high point of their brief relationship, crossing the town park in Saratoga Springs: “Sometimes I think we’re the same person.” “Oh, I know,” Vinnie had replied, equally deluded. (She hasn’t been affected by any such hallucination in this case-rather the reverse: when she is with Chuck she feels more than usually small, intellectual, and timid.)

Even more often, outsiders conflate the couple, and credit them with each other’s characteristics. If a radical takes up with a conservative, both will be perceived as more moderate politically, regardless of whether their views have in fact altered. The man or woman who becomes involved with a much younger person seems younger, the latter more mature.

Vinnie doesn’t want her London friends to confuse her with Chuck, to think of her as after all rather simple, vulgar, and amusing-a typical American. She wants them to accept her, to take her for granted. She wants to be, believes she has been considered up to now, one of them. Subject, not object; observer, not observed, she thinks, stopping by the wildfowl enclosure, which resembles a gigantic wire-mesh mosquito net held up here and there by long aluminum poles. She is content, and more than content, to be one of the smaller, less noticeable brownish birds she can see swimming or wading among the rustling marsh grasses beyond the netting, looking busy, pleased with themselves, and totally at home. She has no ambition-rather a horror-of resembling one of the outsize, peculiarly colored and feathered exotic waterfowl at whom a knot of cockneys are now pointing and giggling.