Alison Lurie - Foreign Affairs

Smithers now figuratively spreads out his collection of dead flowers, pours a final slow molasses-jug full of clichés over them, and sits down looking self-satisfied. The discussion period begins; earnest persons rise and in assorted accents direct self-promoting speeches disguised as questions to the panel members. Vinnie yawns behind her hand; then she unobtrusively opens the latest New York Review of Books , bought at Dillon’s on her way to the symposium. She smiles at one of the caricatures; then she receives an unpleasant shock. On the facing page, in a prominent position, is the announcement of a collection of essays entitled Unpopular Opinions , by L. D. Zimmern, whom she hasn’t thought of for weeks.

She is startled too by the accompanying photograph, which doesn’t at all resemble the figure in her imagination, the victim of polar bears and the Great Plague. Zimmern is older than she has pictured him, thin and angular rather than heavy, and not bald-indeed, he has more hair than necessary, including a short dark pointed beard. His semi-smile is ironic, verging on scornful or pained.

But it doesn’t matter what Zimmern actually looks like. What matters is that he is about to publish, probably already has published, a book that is almost certain to contain his awful Atlantic article. This disgusting book, available both in hard cover and in paperback, is at this very moment in bookshops all over the United States, lying in wait for anyone who might come in. It will be-or has already been-widely reviewed; it will be-or has been-purchased by every large public and university library in the country. Presently it will be catalogued, and shelved, and borrowed, and read. It will shove its sneering way even into Elledge Library at Corinth. Later, probably, there will be an English edition, and possibly-especially if he is one of those awful post-structuralists-a French edition, a German edition… The hideous possibilities are endless.

Vinnie feels a sour, burning pain beneath her ribs, the gift of L. D. Zimmern. To relieve it she tries to picture him as a child among the instant children here: an unpopular child, scorned and persecuted by the others. But the scene won’t come clear. She can transport Zimmern to London University mentally, but she is unable to make him young. Persistently fixed in sour middle age, he stands by the deserted speakers’ table glancing round condescendingly at the roomful of riotous children, including or especially Vinnie.

And even if she could imagine another suitably sticky end for Zimmern, she thinks, what’s the point? This violent fantasizing is unhealthy; also useless. There is no way Vinnie can actually revenge herself; no forum for her except magazines like Children’s Literature that Zimmern and his colleagues will never see. She can’t even complain to her friends any longer, not after so many months-it would make her seem neurotic, obsessed.

Besides, Vinnie is reluctant to relate her troubles at any time. She believes that talking about what’s gone wrong in one’s life is dangerous; that it sets up a magnetic force field which repels good luck and attracts bad. If she persists in her complaints, all the slings and arrows and screws and nails and needles of outrageous fortune that are lurking about will home in on her. Most of her friends will be driven away, repelled by her negative charge. But Vinnie won’t be alone. Like most people, she has some acquaintances who are naturally magnetized by the unhappiness of others. These will be attracted by her misfortunes, and will cluster round, covering her with a prickly black fuzz of condescending pity like iron filings.

The one person Vinnie could safely complain to is Chuck Mumpson. He is outside the operations of the magnetic system, and nothing printed in any book can alter his view of her, for it does not depend on her professional reputation or the opinions of others. To Chuck, L. D. Zimmern is a no-account sorehead that nobody in their right mind would pay any attention to. “Who gives a hoot in hell what some creep says in a magazine?” as he once put it. Vinnie finds this ignorance of the ways of the academic world both wonderfully restful and very frustrating, just as she does many things about Chuck. It is this ambivalence, no doubt, that keeps her from fixing a date for her visit to Wiltshire.

Chuck has, for instance, an intellectual resilience she hadn’t suspected earlier. By now, for instance, he has not only managed to reconcile himself to the fact that the Hermit of South Leigh was an illiterate farm laborer, but to take as much pride in him as if he had been a learned earl. When she remarked on this, he generously attributed his change of heart to her. “The way you love me-it makes everything that happens okay,” he said. Vinnie opened her mouth to protest, and then shut it again. “I don’t think I love you,” she had been about to say. But she’s never said she did, and probably Chuck only meant “the way you make love to me.”

That she can accept; can affirm. Physical pleasure of the sort she’s known with Chuck does improve the entire world; it becomes a humming, spinning top in which all the discordant colors are blurred and whirled into a harmony that spirals out from that center. When she is away from him the spin slackens; the top totters, lurches, falls, showing its ugly pattern. Lying alone in bed under only a flowered sheet, these warm short nights of late June when darkness seems merely to blow over the city and the sky begins to flush with light at three-thirty A.M., she longs physically for Chuck. But then morning comes; the telephone gives its characteristic excited double ring, higher-pitched and more rapid than in America. June is a highly social season in London, and Vinnie’s appointment book keeps filling itself up with interesting parties, leaving no room for a trip to Wiltshire.

Besides, if/when she does go, what will it be like staying with Chuck, in his house? It’s ages since Vinnie shared a place with a man-or with anyone. And after all, it is partly by choice that she hasn’t done so. In the score of years since her marriage ended she probably could have found a housemate if she’d wanted one-if not a lover, then some good friend.

“Don’t you ever feel frightened living alone? Don’t you ever get lonely?” say Vinnie’s friends-or rather, her acquaintances, for any friend who asks these questions is instantly, though sometimes only temporarily, demoted to an acquaintance. “Oh no,” Vinnie always replies, concealing her irritation. Of course she feels frightened, of course she gets lonely-how stupid can they be? Obviously she only puts up with it because for her the alternative is worse.

Sometimes, in spite of her disclaimers, her acquaintances go on to suggest that it really isn’t safe for a small aging single woman to live alone, that she ought to get herself a large unfriendly dog. But Vinnie, who dislikes dogs and is unwilling to conform to the stereotype of the lonely old maid, has always refused to do so. Fido has remained her only companion. It has occurred to her that she treats him much as the traditional spinster does her pets: until two months ago he went almost everywhere with her, and was alternately indulged and scolded.

The truth is that Vinnie isn’t temperamentally suited to a shared life. The last time Chuck was in London, nice as that was (she recalls a particular moment when they were lying moving together on her sitting-room carpet, looking up through the bay window at a sky full of green moving leaves), even then she sometimes felt-how to put it?-crowded, invaded. Chuck is too large, too noisy; he takes up too much room in her flat, in her bed, in her life.

And it isn’t only Chuck who makes her feel this way. Whenever she stays with friends, however fond she is of them, she is uncomfortable. So many things about sharing a house bother her: for instance, the unending necessity for politeness, both positive and negative. The Please and Thank You and Excuse Me and Would You Mind If; the daylong restraint of the natural impulse to yawn, to sigh, to scratch her head or pass wind or take off her shoes. Then, there is the sense of being constantly, even if benevolently, observed, making it impossible to do anything odd or impulsive-go for a walk in the rain before breakfast, for instance, or get up at two A.M. to make herself a cup of cocoa and read Trollope-without provoking anxious inquiry. “Vinnie? What are you doing down there? Are you all right?”