Alison Lurie - Foreign Affairs

Were Fred in fact an actor his appearance might be an asset. But he has no histrionic ability or ambition; and in his profession beauty is a considerable handicap, as he has been made to realize over the last five years. While he was in school there was no problem. Boys are allowed to be handsome, as long as that is not their only asset, and Fred was an all-round achiever: energetic, outgoing, good at both lessons and games; the sort of child teachers naturally favor. Later he became the kind of prep-school boy who is elected class president and the kind of undergraduate and graduate student who is described in letters of recommendation as “incidentally, also a most attractive young man.”

The real disadvantages of Fred’s appearance did not surface until he began to teach. As anyone who has been to college knows, most professors are not especially strong or beautiful; and though they may appreciate or at least forgive these qualities in their students they do not much care for them in their peers. If Fred had been in Theater Arts or Painting and Design, he might not have stood out so from his colleagues or had so much trouble with them. In English, his appearance was held against him: he was suspected, quite unfairly, of being vain, self-centered, unintellectual, and unserious.

Fred’s looks also interfered with his teaching. In his first term as a TA at least a third of his female students, and one or two of the males as well, developed crushes on him. When he called on these students they went all woozy and breathless and became quite incapable of concentrating on the topic of discussion. They hung round him after class, followed him to his office, leant over his desk in tight sweaters or shirts open nearly to the waist, clutched his arm in mute appeal, and in some cases openly declared their passion either in notes or in person (“I just think about you all the time, it’s really screwing up my head”). But Fred had no wish to sleep with ten screwed-up freshmen, or even with one carefully selected well-balanced freshman. He wasn’t attracted to puppy fat and unformed minds; and though in a couple of cases he was tempted, he had a strong sense of professional ethics. He also suspected correctly that if he fell and was found out he might be in serious professional trouble.

During that first year of teaching, Fred learnt to put more social distance between himself and his students; for one thing, though with irritation and regret, he stopped asking them to call him Fred. As time passed, the emotional and sexual pressure moderated-especially after he had met a woman whose appearance and temperament kept him fully occupied. But he still feels uncomfortable in the classroom. It bothers him to be “Professor Turner,” to have to maintain at all times a cool distance from his students, a dry manner, to give up hope of achieving the warm, relaxed, but in no way steamy and loose pedagogic climate enjoyed by his less-attractive colleagues. Time will solve his problem, but not for perhaps a quarter of a century, which from the perspective of twenty-eight might as well be forever. Meanwhile he has to put up with the belief of students that he is cold and formal-a belief promulgated every fall in the student-published Confidential Guide to Courses .

At the moment these academic difficulties are far from Fred’s mind, which is fixed, as it has been intermittently for the past two months, on the collapse of his marriage. Before that, he had assumed that his wife Ruth, known to him as Roo, would be coming abroad with him. They had prepared for the trip together, read books, studied maps, consulted all their friends-Roo even more excited by their plans than he was.

But a domestic storm had blown up: thunder, lightning, and a torrential downpour of tears. Just before Christmas Fred and Roo parted in a cloudy, electrically charged atmosphere for what was announced to their friends and relatives as a “trial separation.” Privately Fred suspects that the trial is already over, the verdict Guilty, and the sentence on their marriage Death.

No good thinking about it, going over the bad memories of a bad time. Roo is not here and she won’t ever be here. She hasn’t answered either of his brief but carefully composed, neutrally friendly letters, and she probably isn’t going to. Fred is alone for five months in a London empty of joy and meaning, where a cold drizzly rain seems to fall perpetually both within and without. He is more steadily miserable than he has ever been in his life.

He had come here prepared, even without Roo, to have an intense, vivid experience of the city of John Gay-and of Johnson, Fielding, Hogarth, and many more. Dutifully and mechanically, he has gone alone on foot to the places he and she had planned to visit together: St. Paul’s, London Bridge, Dr. Johnson’s house, and the rest. But everything he saw looked false and empty: façades of cardboard brick and stone, hollow, without meaning. Physically he is in London, but emotionally he remains in Corinth, in a part of his life that’s ceased to exist. He is living in the historic past, as he had planned and hoped to do-but not in eighteenth-century London. Instead he inhabits a more recent, private, and dismal era of his own history.

But Fred doesn’t believe that there is no real and desirable London. That city exists: he dwelt there for six months as a child of ten, and last week he revisited it. Though some of its landmarks have vanished, those that remain shimmer with meaning and presence as if benignly radioactive. The house his family once lived in is gone; the jungly, catacombed, sunken bomb-site where he and his grammar-school friends played Nazis and Allies or Cops and Villains has been built over with council flats. But there is the sweetshop on the corner, thick with the odor of anise, cinnamon drops, and slabs of milk chocolate; there are the wide, shallow, unevenly worn stone steps in the passageway beside the church where Freddy (as he was then known) often stopped on his way home to eat shiny twisted black ropes of licorice from a paper bag and read Beano comics, unable to postpone either pleasure.

Across the road is the surgery to which Freddy was carried by his father when he fell off his bike, where an old-lady doctor with chopped-off white hair put three prickly black stitches in his chin and called him a “brave handsome Yankee lad”-giving him, he realizes now, not only an encomium but an identity. The name on the brass plate is unfamiliar, but the heavy door with its stained-glass panel of haloed tomatoes is intact, and still seems to be a sign that this house is a kind of church-though now he knows the glass to be Art Nouveau and the holy tomatoes pomegranates. For a few hundred feet along one road in Kensington, Fred’s senses and his sensibility function supernormally; everywhere else London remains cold, dim, flat, and flavorless.

He doesn’t blame his inability to have an authentic experience of the city entirely on the loss of Roo. Partly he attributes it to tourist disorientation; he has noticed the same reaction in other Americans who have recently arrived, and back home he has seen it in friends and relatives returned from abroad. The main problem is, he thinks, that visitors to a foreign country are allowed the full use of only two of their five senses. Sight is permitted-hence the term “sightseeing.” The sense of taste is also encouraged, and even takes on a weird, almost sexual importance: consumption of the native food and drink becomes a highly charged event, a proof that you were “really there.”

But hearing in the full sense is blocked. Intelligible foreign sounds are limited to the voices of waiters, shopkeepers, professional guides, and hotel clerks-plus snatches of dubiously “native” music. Even in Britain, accent, intonation, and vocabulary are often unfamiliar; tourists do not recognize many of the noises they hear, and they speak mostly to functionaries. The sense of smell still operates; but it is likely to be baffled or disgusted by many foreign odors. Above all, the sense of touch is frustrated; visible or invisible Keep Off signs appear on almost everything and everyone.