Alison Lurie - Foreign Affairs

And then there is the noise and clutter that’s involved in having someone else always around, walking from room to room, opening and shutting doors, turning on the radio, the television, the record player, the stove, and the shower. Having to negotiate with this someone before you did the simplest thing: having to agree with them about when and where and what to eat, when to sleep, when to bathe, what film to see, where to go on holiday, whom to invite to dinner. Having to ask permission, as it were, to see her friends or hang a picture or buy a plant; having to inform someone every single damn time she felt like taking any action whatsoever.

It had been that way with her husband almost from the start. And even with Chuck, who is wonderfully easygoing, sharing a flat was like playing a permanent game of Grandmother’s Steps. “I think I’m going to have a bath now and go to bed.” “Okay, honey.” “I’m going up to the shops now.” “Okay, honey.” And if you didn’t remember to ask permission before you did anything: “Hey, honey, where were you? You just disappeared-I was kinda worried.” (Go back: you forgot to say “May I?”) And of course the whole thing was reciprocal, so that when whoever you were living with wanted to go to the store, take a bath, move a piece of furniture, or any of a hundred other things, you had to listen to them asking you for your permission.

And then finally, after you had begun to tolerate living like this, because you’d begun loving the other person-after you’d learned even to like it, maybe, and depend on it-they walked out on you. No thanks, Vinnie thinks.

The trouble is, it’s too late to say No thanks. She will go to Wiltshire soon because she wants to go there; she won’t be able to stop herself, because somehow by accident Chuck Mumpson, an unemployed sanitary engineer from Tulsa, Oklahoma, has got into her life in such a way that she cares about him and depends on him to a degree she would be embarrassed to admit to her London friends, and even more to her American ones.

And when she goes down to Wiltshire it will be worse. There is a terrible danger that she will become wholly entangled, caught. Vinnie imagines the English countryside in June-in itself a seduction. Then she imagines walking with Chuck between flowering hedgerows, lying beside him in some grassy flower-strewn glade in the woods… All her caution and reservations will give way; she will be lost. She will feel more and more for him, and the more she feels the worse it will be when he comes to his senses later.

Vinnie knows, she has taught herself to know in over thirty years of loss and disappointment, that no man will ever really care for her. It is her belief, almost in an odd way her pride, that she has never been loved in the serious sense of the word. Her husband had once said he loved her, of course, but events soon proved this a delusion. The few other men who claimed to do so had made the assertion when carried away by desire, telling her then, and only then, what soon enough turned out to be a lie. Chuck, she admits, has said it on other occasions-out of politeness, she had told herself, or out of some antiquated code of Wild Western honor that made it necessary for him to believe he loved in order to justify what was, after all, adultery. He has even praised her looks (“Everything about you, it’s so kinda little and neat; you make most of the women back in Tulsa look like plow horses.”)

Perhaps at the moment Chuck does think he loves her, because she was nice to him when he was in a state of despair; because she took him in and scolded him and cheered him up-just as she had done with her former husband years ago. But once his confidence has been fully restored, he-like her husband-will look at Vinnie again and see her for what she is, a small, selfish, unattractive, aging woman. He will turn away to someone younger and prettier and nicer, and nothing will remain of his love for Vinnie except a kind of tired guilty gratitude.

Vinnie knows all this-and yet she also knows that she cannot prevent herself from going to Wiltshire. All she can do, and that not for very long, is put it off. She can accept invitations in London. She can remind herself of Chuck’s faults; she can cast a cold eye on her own passion, telling herself that he isn’t even her type physically: he’s too large-boned, beefy, and freckled; his hair is too thin, his features too blunt. True, all true-but no use: she wants him still.

After the symposium, and the reception that follows it, which is well supplied with wine and with literary conversation, Vinnie returns to her flat in a superficially improved but essentially down mood, brooding about Unpopular Opinions and her helplessness in the face of L. D. Zimmern’s persecution. She has a strong impulse to telephone Chuck in the country; but it’s almost eleven, and he will surely be asleep, for the archaeologists keep early hours. As she looks indecisively at the telephone, it rings. It isn’t Chuck on the line, however, but a young strong female American voice, with a tremor of urgency.

“This is Ruth March,” it announces, as if Vinnie ought to recognize the name, which she doesn’t. “I’m calling from New York. I’m trying to get in touch with Fred Turner; I have his number in London, but it’s been disconnected. I’m sorry to bother you so late, but I have to reach him, it’s really important.”

“Really,” Vinnie repeats flatly, annoyed at the voice for not being Chuck’s. “Are you one of his students?”

“No, uh,” Ruth March stutters, then declares, “I’m his wife. I met you at an English Department party in Corinth.”

“Oh yes.” A vague image appears in Vinnie’s mind, the image of a tall, dark, annoyingly handsome young woman in a black jersey. Not for the first time, she thinks that the feminist practice of keeping one’s unmarried name, though politically admirable, has social disadvantages. “Well, I wish I could help you, but I think he’s about to leave for New York anyhow-tomorrow, I believe.”

“I know he’s coming back tomorrow. But the thing is, I won’t be in Corinth then, I have to fly to New Mexico about a job there. I was away before, on a photo assignment, so I didn’t get the telegram he sent me, so I couldn’t call him, otherwise I would have.” Fred’s estranged wife is beginning to sound almost out of breath. “I want to get hold of him now, so we can meet in New York, because I’ll be there tomorrow night.”

“Yes,” Vinnie says neutrally.

“I thought maybe you might know where he is.”

“Well.” As a matter of fact Vinnie does know where Fred is now. When she saw him the day before yesterday at the British Museum he told her that he was going to have dinner with Joe and Debby Vogeler on his last night in London, and then go with them to watch the Druids perform their midsummer solstice rites on Parliament Hill. “Yes; I think he’s with some friends, people named Vogeler.”

“Oh yeh. I know who you mean. Do you have their number?”

“I think I have it somewhere. Hang on just a moment.” Vinnie runs into the sitting room, thinking again how stupid it was of her landlord to have the telephone installed in the bedroom. “Here… no, sorry. Wait a sec.” Embarrassing moments pass as she shuffles through scraps of memo paper and cards from mini-cab companies, increasing Ruth March’s transatlantic telephone bill. “Well, I’m sure I can find it if I have time to look,” she says eventually, “I tell you what; when I locate the number I’ll phone and give Fred your message.”

“Oh, would you? That’s wonderful.” Ruth releases a grateful sigh. “If you could just please ask him to call me in New York, as soon as he gets into Kennedy.”

“Yes, all right.”

“I’ll be at my father’s place. I think he has the number, but anyhow it’s in the book: L. D. Zimmern, on West Twelfth Street.”