Foreign Affairs (36 page)

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.

As he clears the cupboard over the sink, he stops dead with a package of McVitie’s Cream Crackers in his hand, suddenly remembering Rosemary’s party, and Edwin Francis standing on the stairs eating one of these crackers overloaded with pâté, and confiding in his nervous nice-old-lady manner that he was worried about Mrs. Harris’s effect on Rosemary. He hears Edwin saying: “She can get a bit frantic . . . She can get into rather a state sometimes.”

Suppose Rosemary hadn’t been playing Mrs. Harris as a joke, out of rage and spite when she saw Fred, whom she thought she’d got rid of, walk into her kitchen. Because she couldn’t have expected him. Whether he’d been there or not she would have been sitting drinking in the basement in Mrs. Harris’s clothes.

Suppose she wasn’t just acting; suppose she was “in a state,” whatever that means. What if Fred isn’t the only one who doesn’t know who Rosemary is? What if she doesn’t know either? What if she is a disturbed person, and there’s something really wrong with her?

Maybe Rosemary has started to drink at other times before this; maybe she’s become “frantic”—had some kind of breakdown—in the past, maybe more than once. Is that what Edwin was hinting? Was he trying to warn Fred?

No. More likely Edwin was asking for his help, just as he’d claimed, twittering that he wouldn’t feel comfortable unless Fred promised to “look out for our Rosemary.” Fred hadn’t paid any attention; he hadn’t looked out for their Rosemary. He hadn’t been able to, because an hour or two later she’d thrown him out of her house. Anyhow, he hadn’t thought she needed to be looked after.

But maybe she needs it now, he tells himself as he stands in the kitchen holding the box of crackers. If she’s on a binge or having a nervous breakdown or both, somebody ought to be taking care of her. The trouble is, who?

By three
A.M.
he has finished the Scotch, two leftover beers, and most of a bottle of souring white wine. He is drunk in Notting Hill Gate, and Rosemary is drunk or mad in Chelsea It’s all too goddamn much for him. He wants to go home to America; he wants to see Roo again. Only by now she probably doesn’t want to see him, he thinks, falling back onto the bed without bothering to take off his clothes, and dizzily spiraling into unconsciousness.

When Fred comes to, with a headache like an ax blow, the sun is high in the sky and hot on his disordered bed. Too ill to think of eating anything, he stands in the shower for a long time soaking his headache, with little effect. The one clear thought in his mind is that he’s got to tell somebody to look out for Rosemary before he leaves. He bundles his dirty clothes together with the dirty sheets and towels and drags them through the streets to the laundromat. While they slosh about in the machine in a queasy way that makes his headache worse, he goes to the pay phone and tries to call Edwin Francis, who ought to be back from Japan by now. Then he tries to get Posy’s or Nadia’s number from William Just at the BBC. Finally, because he can’t think of anyone else, he calls Vinnie Miner. None of these people are in, and for the rest of the day and the evening they continue not to be in. But he keeps on trying.

11

A
T
the London University School of Education, Vinnie Miner is attending a symposium on “Literature and the Child” and becoming steadily more bored. The subject is promising, and the first panelist was a friend of hers and an amusing speaker; but the other two have begun to annoy her greatly. One is a fat educational psychologist named Dr. O. C. Smithers; the other a tense young pedant called Maria Jones who is devoting her life to a study of early etiquette books.

In Britain, Vinnie has observed, most lecturers feel an obligation to entertain their listeners and to avoid jargon; it is therefore usually safe to attend any public talk if the topic seems interesting. Maria Jones, however, is too nervous to think of her audience, and is made almost inaudible by shyness; and Dr. Smithers is too self-satisfied. He has, as he puts it, “studied extensively in the United States,” and delivers his platitudes with a bland transatlantic pompousness. Like some American educators, he insists upon speaking of The Child as a sort of abstract metaphorical figure—one of those Virtues or Graces represented in stone on public monuments. Smithers’ abstract Child is full of Needs that are in danger of being “unmet” and of Creative Potential that must be “developed” if “he-or-she” is to become a “full human being.” Vinnie has always especially detested the latter phrase; this evening it has an ironic ring—seeming inevitably to refer to Smithers’ own physique, which is of a rotundity rare in Britain. In Vinnie’s own country, according to statistics (borne out by her own observation) one out of three men over thirty is overweight. Here most remain trim; but those few who do become fat, as if by some law of averages, often becomes excessively so. In the same way, those British minds that allow themselves to be filled with jargon swell to sideshow proportions.

Warming to his subject, exceeding his allotted twelve minutes, Smithers declares that The Child’s “moral awareness” must be awakened by “responsible literature.” The frictions and stresses of Our Contemporary World press hard upon The Child; he-or-she (Smithers, no doubt aware that the majority of his audience is female, has used this awkward pronoun throughout his talk) must be able to look to literature for guidance.

Vinnie yawns angrily. There is no Child, she wants to shout at Smithers, there are only children, each one different, unique, as we here in this room are unique—perhaps more so, for we are all in the same profession and have been sanded down over time by the frictions of your nasty Contemporary World.

How much nicer and less boring it would be if we were all still children, Vinnie thinks. Then, as she often does on boring public occasions, she relieves her restlessness by imagining the weight of years lifted suddenly from everyone in the room. The older members of the audience, like herself, become children of ten or twelve; the undergraduates mere babies. Whatever their new age, all those present, upon finding themselves transformed, share a single thought: Why am I sitting here on this chair listening to this nonsense? At their table, the speakers and the moderator look at each other with surprise. Smithers, who is now a fat, earnest boy of six, drops his notes to the floor. Vinnie’s friend Margaret—already at nine a sensible, kind, observant little girl—leans over to comfort Maria Jones, who is now only about three years old, but already painfully anxious in public. Margaret wipes Maria’s brimming tears and helps her to climb down from the platform. In the audience the baby students toddle about, playing house under overturned chairs, scribbling on the walls with pencil and chalk, building and demolishing textbook towers with shrieks of mirth.

It would be only just if some minor, humorous god, perhaps The Child Him-Herself, were to work such a metamorphosis, Vinnie thinks. The very idea of making children’s literature into a scholarly discipline, of forcing all that’s most imaginative and free in what Smithers calls Our Cultural Heritage into a grid of solemn pedantry, pompous platitude, and dubious textual analysis—psychological, sociological, moral, linguistic, structural—such a process invites divine retribution.

Though it has given her a livelihood and a reputation, not to mention these happy months in London, Vinnie has a bad conscience about her profession. The success of children’s literature as a field of study—her own success—has an unpleasant side to it. At times she feels as if she were employed in enclosing what was once open heath or common. First she helped to build a barbed-wire fence about the field; then she helped to pull apart the wild flowers that grow there in order to examine them scientifically. Ordinarily she comforts herself with the thought that her own touch is so light and respectful as to do little harm, but when she has to sit by and watch people like Maria Jones and Dr. Smithers dissecting the Queen Anne’s lace and wrenching the pink campion up by its roots, she feels contaminated by association.

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.