Alison Lurie - Foreign Affairs

Annoyed, she tries to calm her, speaking slowly and firmly as she would to an anxious class. “Of course you’re not alone. You have so many friends, so many beaux, I’m quite sure-”

“That’s what you think, my dear. You think a lot of men want to sleep with me. I used to think that myself.” Her voice alters. “Bloody little fool that I was. Men don’t want to sleep with me, they want to have slept with me. They want to be able to tell their mates, ‘Oh, Lady Rosemary Radley, the television star? Yes, I do know her. In fact, I knew her very well , at one time.’ “Rosemary has slipped into a third voice: tenor, smarmily insinuating.

“That’s how they all are, the bastards,” she continues, her accent shifting again. “Except for Freddy. Freddy knew I was an actress, but it didn’t mean fuck-all to him. He’d never even heard of Tallyho Castle before he met me. I thought all you Americans were mad about British TV, but he didn’t even own a set, for Christ’s sake. He never even saw the show, he loved me anyhow.” Rosemary is sobbing now, her face distorted in a way it never becomes when she weeps on camera. “But he’s a bastard like the rest of them.”

The taxi is in Oxford Street now, snarled in a skein of other vehicles. From either side their drivers and passengers, with the covert but avid interest of the British in personal disaster, regard the drunken and weeping woman from whom they are separated by only a sheet of glass.

“He keeps on phoning my service, but I don’t dare see him or talk to him. I bloody couldn’t take it, Vinnie, unless I knew he was coming back for good, I-” Rosemary breaks off, perceiving that she has an audience.

“Yah!” she screams suddenly, turning with an ugly face and a coarse gesture to the nearest spectator, a portly well-dressed man in an adjoining taxi. He flinches visibly, then turns away with an unconvincing attempt at casualness.

Rosemary laughs wickedly, almost hysterically. Then she flings herself across the cab and repeats the performance at Vinnie’s open window, horrifying a young woman at the wheel of a Mini. “Yah, you nosy bitch! Why don’t you mind your own business!” She flops back into her seat, grinning. The pale silk cocoon of her cape has been sloughed off by all this activity, and lies crumpled on the seat beneath her; and what has emerged from it, Vinnie thinks, is not a butterfly.

The light changes, the taxi jolts ahead. Rosemary turns to her and says in a light sweet voice, “Next time you happen to see Mr. Frederick Turner-”

“Er-yes?”

“You might be kind enough to give him a message from me. Would you do that?” Her manner has become exaggeratedly gracious, almost caressing.

“Yes, of course,” Vinnie agrees, bewildered and even a little frightened by these rapid histrionic changes.

“I’d like for you to tell him, mm-Please tell him, would he be kind enough to stop telephoning me, and writing to me”-her voice alters again-”and just bloody well go screw himself.”

“Now really, Rosemary. You don’t mean-”

“Now really, Vinnie. That’s exactly what I do mean,” Rosemary interrupts, caricaturing Vinnie’s intonation and accent. “I’ve had it with all you fuckin’ Americans,” she goes on in the other voice, the coarse cockney Vinnie has heard somewhere. “Why don’t you stay home where you belong? Nobody wants you comin’ over here, messin’ up our country.” She waves at the souvenir shops and hamburger bars with which this portion of Oxford Street is disfigured. The loose, excessive gesture and grimace are those of a low-comedy stage character-of a music-hall charlady, say-of Mrs. Harris. Yes. That’s where Vinnie has heard this voice before: once or twice on the phone when she called Rosemary, and often at parties when Rosemary, telling some story, had imitated Mrs. Harris.

“It wasn’t me,” she starts to protest, with a strained laugh, trying to treat Rosemary’s performance as a joke-which after all it must be. “I certainly never wanted-”

“Of course not,” Rosemary interrupts smoothly. “Tell me something, Vinnie. How old are you?”

“Uh, I’m fifty-four,” replies Vinnie, who makes a point of answering this question accurately.

“Imagine that.” Rosemary smiles sweetly. “I would never have guessed it.”

“Thank you.” She is pleased in spite of herself, and somewhat mollified, “It’s just because I’m small, really.”

“You know what’s so wonderful about you, Vinnie?”

“Er-no.” Vinnie smiles expectantly.

“I’ll tell you what’s so wonderful about you.” It is Mrs. Harris’ voice again, speaking through the pink sweet-pea lips of Rosemary Radley. “You’re fifty-four years old, and you look sixty, and you don’t know fuck-all about life.”

The taxi has, with many stops and starts, negotiated the turn into Portman Square, and is halted next to a bed of yellow parrot tulips. Seizing the opportunity, Vinnie mumbles something about having to be home by seven-thirty, shoves the door open, and flees.

Not looking back, she makes her way hazardously through the traffic toward the 74 bus stop, walking too fast and breathing painfully hard, but congratulating herself on having had the nerve to get out of Rosemary’s taxi and escape from her drunken insults. Messing up our country. Fifty-four, and you look sixty. Standing on the curb, she shivers with rage and pain. She shouldn’t have sat there and taken it, she should have said-But Vinnie can’t think what she should have said. And after all, what’s the point of arguing with a drunk?

Of course Vinnie has never liked Rosemary, and probably Rosemary doesn’t like her. It’s not as if they’d ever been friends. Vinnie’s real friends don’t like Rosemary very much either, except for Edwin, and even he admits that she is self-indulgent and erratic, though he excuses it because she’s an artist, an actress-as if that were any excuse, Vinnie thinks, with another spasm of fury.

She’s always thought there was something unpleasant about the art of acting, Vinnie remembers as she reaches the bus stop; something unnatural, really, in the ability of certain persons to assume at will a completely alien voice and manner. She has felt this often at the theater, where she is never really comfortable, however entertained or moved she may be. The mimicry of other living beings is a nasty business; the more successful the imitation, the more there is essentially something horrible and uncanny in it.

Uncanny; literally so, because it overturns our belief in the uniqueness of the individual, Vinnie decides as she stands waiting for the bus in a queue of half-a-dozen women of varied ages and walks of life, any one of whom Rosemary might presumably if she chose become, as she had a few minutes ago become Vinnie Miner. Again she hears what was supposed to be her own voice coming out of Rosemary’s mouth: “Now really, Vinnie-” Does she always sound like that, so pert, nasal, and schoolmistressy? Of course no one likes his own voice; she remembers embarrassing moments with her tape recorder. Then she wonders whether Mrs. Harris has ever heard Rosemary’s impersonation of Mrs. Harris. Somehow she doubts it-a woman of her sort wouldn’t stand for that; she would fly into a rage, she would curse out Rosemary or maybe even smack her, the way Vinnie would have liked to.

Histrionic talent such as Rosemary’s has other dangers besides the hostility of those who are mimicked, Vinnie thinks, breathing more normally now. It’s possible to play a part once too often; actors can be typecast, so that they have to go on being silly ingenues or strong-silent detectives for years. Sometimes they become so identified with a role that it gradually usurps their own shallower and less defined personalities-in private as well as in the public eye.