Alison Lurie - Foreign Affairs

He will never be able to dream sentimentally about Rosemary’s bedroom again, Fred thinks; but hell, maybe that’s for the best. Who wants to be haunted by some goddamn room? He admits to himself that he hadn’t gone back only for his things, but in the stupid vain hope of seeing Rosemary again. In spite of everything he isn’t over her. Maybe he only got what he deserved. His job now is to forget Rosemary, who has obviously forgotten him and is enjoying herself in some luxurious country place.

In a calmer state of mind, Fred leaves the river and heads home. He has more packing to do, and in a couple of hours he is having supper and going to a late film with two old friends who have just arrived in England for the summer.

By the time Fred meets Tom and Paula his equilibrium is nearly restored, though he remains depressed. Their pleasure at the reunion and their eagerness for information about London raise his spirits somewhat. He is reminded that all American academics are not like the Vogelers (whom he has seen too much of lately) or like Vinnie Miner. A keen homesickness comes over him, a longing for American scenes and American voices, for people like Paula and Tom who say what they think without irony, who won’t ever pretend to like him and then drop him casually and graciously.

Over crepes and Beaujolais at Obelix, around the corner from his flat, Fred recommends to his friends a number of London sights, restaurants, and cultural events, without revealing his disillusion with the place. (Why discourage them, after all? They’re only here for a few weeks.) He also relates a censored version of the scene that afternoon with Mrs. Harris. He doesn’t say, for instance, that he had a key to the house; and Rosemary is transformed into “some people I know who are out of town.” Stripped of these aspects, his experience that afternoon begins to seem almost comic, in a rough way-a scene from Smollett, or maybe a cartoon by Rowlandson. It becomes a jocular tale, a kind of jest or fabliau, and is a riotous success with Tom and Paula.

“Great story,” Tom pronounces. “It would only happen to you.”

As he lies in bed much later that evening Fred recalls this comment, which at the time made him uncomfortable. But of course Tom, who has never heard of Rosemary, meant it as a kind of compliment. Because of Fred’s appearance, he was saying, it is comically appropriate that a drunken cockney charwoman should make obscene proposals to him.

It is true that over the years Fred has received other unwelcome-though less comically revolting-offers of this sort. Girls and women he has hardly looked at and never would look at have sometimes, there’s no denying it, thrown themselves at him, or at least in his general direction, causing him acute embarrassment. His male friends have often been less than sympathetic. Hell, they sometimes say, they wouldn’t complain if girls were falling all over them-not realizing what it’s really like to be heavily fallen upon by some woman you don’t want, even if some other guy does.

Physical attraction is a mystery, Fred muses as he watches the lamplight playing on his wall through the leaves outside. It makes a pattern like that of the dress Rosemary wore to Così fan tutte , which folded itself closely round and floated loose below her apple-blossom breasts, that he will never see or touch or kiss again.

Why is it that something which makes a beautiful woman like Rosemary more beautiful-for instance, large soft white breasts-makes a slattern like Mrs. Harris even more disgusting? Mrs. Harris’s breasts aren’t really any heavier than Rosemary’s, he thinks, allowing himself to visualize the scene in the closet for the first time; they are about the same size. They have the same kind of big strawberry-pink nipples, and there was even the same sort of pale-brown mark on the left one, like an ostrich feather-

No. Lying between the sheets, Fred shudders from head to toe. No, he must have imagined it.

But the memory is photographically clear. Mrs. Harris has Rosemary’s breasts. She is about the same size as Rosemary; she has almost the same color hair. She seems to be living in Rosemary’s house, drinking Rosemary’s gin, sleeping in Rosemary’s bed.

Of course her voice and accent were completely different. But Rosemary’s an actress; she’s often imitated Mrs. Harris. Oh, Jesus Christ. Fred sits up in the darkened room with his mouth hanging open as if he were seeing some foul ghost.

But hold on a minute. He’s met Mrs. Harris before, he would’ve noticed-Yeh, but he only met her for a moment, one evening when he’d got to the house too early. Mrs. Harris had opened the door a crack and, hardly looking at him, grumbled that Lady Rosemary wasn’t home yet. She wouldn’t even let him in to wait; he had to go to the pub round the corner.

She wouldn’t let him in-she wouldn’t ever let anyone in when she was working there-not because she couldn’t stand people underfoot, like Rosemary said, but because they might recognize her-because she was-Because the drunken harridan whom he called a filthy old cow and knocked onto the bedroom floor this afternoon was his false true love, the star of stage and screen, Lady Rosemary Radley.

Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus Christ. Though he is unconscious of having got out of bed, Fred now finds himself standing naked in a patch of blurred moonlight, pounding his fist against the wall. He stops only because he hears steps overhead; the repeated reverberating thud has woken another tenant-or worse, his landlord.

Maybe there was a Mrs. Harris once. And then she left, only Rosemary didn’t tell anybody, and she kept on answering the phone in Mrs. Harris’ voice. Or maybe there never was any Mrs. Harris; maybe Rosemary was cleaning the house herself the whole goddamn time.

How could he have been so dumb and deaf and blind this afternoon? Why hadn’t he known?

Because Rosemary had fixed in his head the idea of herself as beautiful and graceful and refined and aristocratically English, and anyone who wasn’t that, even if they were living in her house and sleeping in her bed and speaking with her voice, wasn’t Rosemary. So when she decided she didn’t want to see him or talk to him all she had to do was put on Mrs. Harris’s clothes and Mrs. Harris’s accent. That was what she’d done today. And she’d deliberately mocked him by using their private lovers’ language; she’d destroyed everything they’d ever had together.

And maybe that’s how it had been the whole goddamn time, Fred thinks, staring out the open window into the windy half darkness. Because if Rosemary had ever really loved him, she wouldn’t have pulled a trick like that. All these months he’s loved somebody who was as much a theatrical construct as Lady Emma Tally. She’d been putting him on the whole goddamn time, pretending to be Lady Rosemary when she wanted him and pretending to be Mrs. Harris when she didn’t-and God knows who she really was.

Well, now he’s got the message. She doesn’t want to see him again. And he doesn’t want to see her either. Even if she were to welcome him back passionately, to be again the Rosemary he’d loved, he wouldn’t believe it. He’d always be looking and listening for clues that she was only acting a part.

Fred flings himself onto his bed, where he lies for a long time staring at the play of nervous shadows on the paint-clogged Victorian plaster garlands of the ceiling. At last, despairing of sleep, he gets up. He pulls on some clothes, turns on the lights, and starts cleaning the fridge and the kitchen cupboards, throwing out most of the food and saving the rest for the Vogelers, with whom he will be having a final supper this coming evening. A bottle with an inch or two of Scotch remaining in it doesn’t seem worth lugging to Hampstead, so Fred pours it into a glass, adds lukewarm tap water, and drinks as he works.