Foreign Affairs (6 page)

Even now, when his spirits are so low, there is no doubt that Fred could pick up women if he tried—that any initial awkwardness would be overlooked by most of those he might approach. But there is another and worse problem. Every woman or girl Fred sees in London has something wrong with her: she is not Roo. He knows it’s stupid and counterproductive to go on feeling this way about somebody who has cut you out of her life, to go on remembering and fantasizing As his childhood friend Roberto Frank said once, all you get from carrying a torch is sore fingers.

If Roberto were here now, instead of teaching French in Wisconsin, he would advise Fred to move in on the girl in the green cape and try to score tonight. As far back as junior high Roberto had begun recommending casual sex as a panacea. “What you need is a good fast fuck,” he would declare when any chum complained of being bummed out because of a cold, a sprained ankle, too much homework, unsympathetic parents, a bike or a car on the fritz—or any sort of jealousy, infidelity, or sexual reluctance on the part of a current steady. Since then, Roberto has collected women as he once collected baseball cards, always preferring quantity to quality: in grade school he once traded Mickey Mantle to Fred for three obscure and inept Red Sox. It is his contention that the world is full of good-looking horny women who are interested in a no-strings relationship. “I’m not saying you have to sweet-talk them or pull a fast one. When I meet a mama who turns me on, I lay it on the line. If she doesn’t want to play by those rules, okay; so long, no hard feelings.” Fred doesn’t agree. In his experience, no matter what is said in the preliminary negotiations, there are always strings. After even one or two dates he often felt like a tomcat entangled in an emotional ball of red yarn.

Yeh, Fred thinks, but maybe Roberto is right in a way, maybe if he could meet somebody—

The train stops at Tottenham Court Road. Fred gets off to change to the Northern Line, and so does the young woman in the green cape; he notices that she has been reading Joseph Conrad’s
Chance
. He quickens his pace, for he is a Conrad fan; then, uncertain of what he’s going to say to her, slows down. The young woman gives him a regretful backward glance as she turns toward the stairs to the southbound platform.

An opening remark has formed in Fred’s mind, and he starts to follow her in order to deliver it; but then he remembers that he is supposed to be on his way to supper in Hampstead with Joe and Debby Vogeler, who will take it badly if he doesn’t turn up. The Vogelers, who were in graduate school with him, are the only people of his own age he knows in London, and their continued good will is therefore important. Fred’s other acquaintances here consist of several middle-aged friends of his parents, and a member of his own department: an aging spinster named Virginia Miner who is also on leave and working in the British Museum. Toward the former he feels a polite obligation, but no social enthusiasm; in the case of Professor Miner his instinct is toward avoidance. Although she has never had a serious conversation with him on any topic, Professor Miner will presently vote on whether Fred is allowed to stay on at the University or cast into outer joblessness. She is known to be eccentric and touchy, and is also a devout Anglophile. In any encounter Fred probably has more of a chance of alienating her than of pleasing her; and if he admits his depression and his dislike of London and of the British Museum, her opinion of him, whatever it may be now, will sink. On top of all this, he doesn’t know whether he should address her as Professor Miner, Miss Miner, Ms. Miner, Virginia, or Vinnie. In order to avoid offense, he accepted her invitation to a “drinks party” later this week, but he plans to call up and say he is sick—no, he corrects himself,
ill
—to say you are sick in this country means you are about to vomit.

Another reason for not disappointing Joe and Debby is that they will give him a free dinner—and since Debby is a competent if unimaginative cook, a good one. For the first time in his life, Fred is broke. He hadn’t known how expensive London would be, or how long it would take his salary checks to clear. The flat he and Roo had rented by mail costs too much for one person, and he has never learnt to cook. At first he ate out, in cheaper and cheaper restaurants and pubs, to the detriment of his budget and digestion; now he exists mainly on bread and cheese, canned beans, soup, boiled eggs, and paper cartons of orange juice. If his financial situation gets desperate, he can cable or write his parents for money, but this will suggest a childish improvidence. After all, for Christ’s sake, he is nearly twenty-nine and has a Ph.D.

“Have some more chocolate pie,” Debby says.

“No thanks.”

“It doesn’t taste right, does it?” A vertical dent appears in Debby’s round face, between her nearly invisible eyebrows.

“No, it was great, it’s just that—”

“The crust is different, I think,” says Joe, delivering this opinion with his usual philosophical detachment.

“Yeh, it’s kind of soggy,” Debby agrees. “And the filling’s much too sweet. Those were the wrong kind of cookies, and I couldn’t get real baking chocolate in any of the stores. But that’s how it is with everything here, you know?”

Fred does not answer. He should know by now, since Debby and Joe have spent most of the evening telling him, describing with warm indignation (Debby) or ironic resignation (Joe) their disillusion with England in general and London in particular. After making a big effort for over a month they have given up on the whole scene. They are also really pissed off at themselves for having been dumb enough to come here on leave from the adjacent Southern California colleges at which they teach, with a year-old baby on top of everything. They were warned, but they had been brainwashed by their admiration for British literature (Debby) and British philosophy (Joe). Why hadn’t they listened to their friends? they keep asking each other. Why hadn’t they gone to Italy or to Greece, or even stayed home in Claremont, for God’s sake? Britain might have been great in the past, all right, but in their opinion modern London sucks.

“For instance, the way they are in the stores. That man at the grocery was really disagreeable, as if I’d insulted him or something by saying he ought to carry unsweetened baking chocolate, and he was glad he’d never heard of it.”

“They’re in collusion. That’s what we decided,” Joe says. “They meet once a week in some local pub. ‘Okay, let’s get those dumb young American professors,’ they say, ‘the ones who were so bloody pleased with themselves for being in London.’” He laughs, then blows his nose.

“That’s why the plumber didn’t come when our kitchen sink clogged up. He refused to say when he could get here, or if he would ever even come at all.”

“Or like today, that woman at the dry cleaners. She looked at my pants as if they had a smell. ‘No, sir, we couldn’t do anything with those oily spots, one pound ten please.’” Joe’s imitation of a phony-refined British accent is marred by a natural tin ear and a bad cold.

“It’s so ugly, that’s what I think I mind the most,” Debby says. “Everything’s so gray and damp, and of course all the modern buildings are absolutely hideous. And they put up public housing and hamburger restaurants and billboards right in the middle of the most beautiful old streets. What’s happened to their aesthetic sense?”

“Frozen out of them,” her husband says. Joe, a native of California, is thin, narrow-chested, and easily chilled; he has been ill ever since he arrived in London and sometimes sick as well. At first he tried to ignore the whole thing, he tells Fred while Debby is below in the dark, damp kitchen making coffee. Then he went to bed and waited for four days to feel better; finally, despairing of recovery, he got up again. At present he has a fever, a headache, a sore throat, a cough, and blocked sinuses. What he wants most is to go upstairs, lie down, and pass out; but he is a student and professor of philosophy and a natural stoic. Debby and their baby Jakie also have colds.

“The real downer is the climate,” says Joe, hauling on the ropes of the dumbwaiter in response to his wife’s shout. “They probably fix that too.”

“When I think what the weather’s like right now in Claremont!” Debby exclaims a moment later, pouring coffee. “It makes me feel really stupid and cheated. Well, hell, we
were
cheated. You know, maybe I told you before”—she has—“we rented this house by mail; the agent sent us a photograph and description. The morning we got here, off the plane, Flask Walk was so pretty: the sun was shining for once, and when the taxi stopped it looked just like the picture, only better because it was in color, a perfect Georgian cottage. And I thought well, damn it, it’s really worth all that rent and plane fare and those eight hellish hours with Jakie on the plane. And then we went inside, and the back of the house wasn’t there, like it had been sliced off. Of course the real estate agent hadn’t said anything about that.” The Vogeler’s house is on a sharp-angled corner; it consists of a basement kitchen, a sitting room, and two bedrooms, one above the other. Each room is narrowly triangular, the shape of a piece of pie cut far less generously than those Debby has just served.

“‘Drawing room eighteen by twelve feet
at best
,’ the description said,” she goes on. “I thought that meant not counting the baseboards or the closets or something. And this awful plastic furniture, squeezed into the corners. And of course there wasn’t any garden. It made me feel kind of dizzy and kind of crazy, all at the same time. I just burst out crying, and then of course Jakie started bawling too, the way babies do when you’re upset.”

“We were totally disoriented, no kidding,” Joe admits. “Partly jet lag, I guess. Only it’s been nearly six weeks, and we’re not recovered.”

“I know what you mean.” Fred holds out his cup for more coffee. “I get the weird idea sometimes that I’m not really in London; that this place isn’t London, it’s some kind of imitation.”

“That’s just how we felt when we first got here.” Debby leans forward, her square-cut brown hair swinging. “Especially every time we went to look at something, say Westminster Abbey or the Houses of Parliament or whatever. They were always smaller than we expected, and overrun with busloads of American and French and German and Japanese tourists. So we decided, the hell with it.”

“Of course that’s inevitable anywhere,” her husband explains. “Tourism is a self-degrading process, kind of like oxidation of iron.” Joe has a fondness for scientific metaphor, the precipitate of undergraduate years as a biochemistry major. “Some place is designated a sight because it’s typical or symbolic—it stands for the ideal Britain. So hundreds of tourists go there, and then of course all they see is other tourists.”

“And when you get to a sight it probably doesn’t look right anyhow,” Debby adds, “because you’ve already seen a prettied-up picture of it, taken on some bright summer day with all the tour buses and candy-wrappers and cigarette butts swept away. So the real place seems kind of dirty and shabby in comparison. We’ve just about given up sightseeing. Well, at least it prevents distractions.”

“Right,” Joe says. “And if you don’t go looking at things, in a climate like this, you’re bound to write a lot. Nothing else to do but play with the baby or watch TV—Hey, what time is it?”

“Nearly eight,” Debby says Joe unfolds his long legs and goes to turn on the rented television set that has been installed in the pointed end of the pie-shaped sitting room.

As they move their chairs round and wait with the sound off for this week’s episode of a BBC serial based on a James novel, Fred considers putting forth his own ideas about tourism, but decides against it, realizing that his most important point doesn’t apply to the Vogelers, neither of whom—as their juxtaposition on the ugly sofa demonstrates—is deprived of the sense of touch.

Joe turns up the sound, and a minor-key theme announces the start of the program. Fred, who has missed the earlier episodes, watches with less than his whole attention. Gloomily, he compares the Vogelers’ situation with his own. They have each other and their baby, and apparently they are getting some writing done, whereas his work on John Gay in the British Museum (now referred to by Roo as the BM or Bowel Movement) is going very badly.

Fred is active, energetic, impatient of confinement. When he’s in a library he likes to range through the stacks finding the books he wants, and coming across others he hadn’t known about. In the BM he is forbidden to enter the stacks; he can’t always get what he wants, and he can never get what he doesn’t know he needs. Often he has to wait up to four hours for the constipated digestive system of the ancient library to disgorge a pathetic few of the volumes whose numbers he has copied from the complex, unwieldy catalogue. And even when they arrive all is far from well. Fred is used to working in a study of his own, away from noise and distraction. Now he is surrounded by other readers, many of them eccentric or even possibly insane, to judge by their appearance and mannerisms—filling dusty volumes with multicolored paper slips, tapping with their fingers or feet, mumbling to themselves, conversing in nervous whispers, coughing and blowing their noses in a contagious way.

He also likes to spread out at work, and to move around; at home his notes covered two tables and a bed in the spare room, and books lay open on the carpet. In the BM his tall, muscular frame is cramped into a chair at a narrow section of desk between two other scholars or lunatics and their encroaching heaps of volumes, in an ill-ventilated hall full of identical radiating seats constructed on the same plan as the model prisons designed by Victorian moral philosophers.

Fred is convinced that the BM is having a baleful effect on his work. In order to write decently about John Gay he must (to quote his subject) “take the road.” He must be able to “rove like the bee,” to bring together not only literary criticism and dramatic history but folklore, musicology, and the annals of eighteenth-century crime. Crouched over whatever books he has managed to get that day, in this huge stuffy scholarly prison, it is no wonder the sentences he strains to produce are cramped and heavy. Again and again he rises to consult the catalogue unnecessarily, or to pace about the room. Glimpses of those habitual readers he now knows by sight, or in a few cases is acquainted with, depress him further. Often either Joe or Debby Vogeler is there, steadily grinding away; they went through graduate school together and have a scrupulously egalitarian partnership, sharing the care of little Jakie. The Vogelers are untroubled by working conditions in the Bowel Movement. As he passes, whichever one of them is present is apt to glance up and smile rather patronizingly. Too bad Fred never learnt to concentrate, he can sense them thinking.