Foreign Affairs

by Alison Lurie

“Hey,” he said a little later. “You really mean you never went out riding with anyone before and ended up like this?”

  “Oh, well.” Roo’s breath was warm against his face. “Sure, a couple of times.” She rolled back so that she could look at him. “But it wasn’t the same. A lot of guys I’ve known can’t ride, not worth a damn anyhow—it’s worse when they pretend they can. And the ones who could, they were mostly nice sexless dopes like my stepbrothers . . . I never brought anyone up here before; not to this place.” Her voice thickened, and their glances locked.

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t think you’re so fucking special,” Roo said presently. “I mean, you can’t keep waiting forever for some goddamn prince. I was getting old, you know, and I just figured it was about time.”

  “Yeh. Twenty-two.” Fred stroked her face; but Roo turned away from him, propping her chin on one hand and gazing downhill through the trees toward the horses.

  “Besides, there was Shara. You know, like I told you, I wanted to get the fuck out of the Boston area last spring because my boss on the paper was such a chauvinist shit, and the relationship I was in turned into a real bummer. I didn’t have to come home, though. I could’ve gone to New York or the West Coast—I had some decent leads on jobs. But I wanted to be with Shara. I figure this might be her last good year—she’s nearly as old as I am, and after twenty you never know with a horse. She can still work up a fair speed, but she gets winded. Of course, I could ride one of the other horses, but it wouldn’t be the same. In my fantasies I was always on Shara, and that’s how I wanted it to be, you know? And it’s October already. In a couple of weeks, maybe sooner, it’ll be too cold to fuck outdoors. So in a way it was now or never.” Roo gave an uneven laugh. “So don’t think you’re so special,” she repeated.

  But Fred did think so, and rejoiced in it.

  In other quarters the rejoicing was less. As he paces the bare, freezing, nearly empty London Underground platform Fred hears again in his mind the recent remarks of Joe and Debby, and of other friends and relatives, some of whom hadn’t hesitated to congratulate him on the breakup of his marriage. Most of these people had never been very enthusiastic about Roo from the start. She was not the sort of girl/woman they had expected Fred to become serious about, and their congratulations had been manifested in the conventional form of faint and damning praise.

  By Fred’s father, for instance: “Well, she’s certainly good-looking. And she seems like a very warm-hearted kind of girl. Those photographs she took in the Mexican slums show a lot of feeling for her subject; you know what she thinks, all right.” The photographs were of Mexicans in an upstate New York farmworker’s camp, but Fred had given up trying to correct this error, typical of his father, who prefers to locate all social disagreeableness at the greatest possible mental distance.

  Or as Joe and Debby had put it: “Pretty far out, those disco pictures of Ruth’s. You can see she really knows her stuff technically.” “She’s obviously a high-energy kind of person.” “That was a really unusual dress she was wearing, with the red embroidery and all those mirrors, Albanian or whatever it was.” “She reminds me of some of my students from New York. We were suprised she grew up in a place like Corinth.”

  Translation: Roo is too emotional, too political, too arty, too noisy, and too Jewish. As it happens, Joe himself is Jewish, but from a very different tradition: Princeton-trained, scholarly, retiring.

  Many of Fred’s graduate school friends, and most of his relatives, are obviously relieved that Roo is, as one of them put it, “out of the picture.” They assume or at least hope that she won’t reenter it, but will remain in the more far-out and slummy world of her own photographs. Fred’s mother, on the other hand, very much wants them to get back together. Maybe for sentimental and conventional reasons: he can remember her saying in another context, with a placid pride, “You know, darling, there’s never been a divorce in my family.” But it is not only that she wishes to preserve this record; his mother had taken to Roo from the start, though they could hardly be less alike: Roo so arty, noisy, etc., and Emily Turner such a lady, her tastes so elegant, her voice so well modulated.

  Roo, though more grudgingly, also took to his mother. “I don’t care if it’s raining, I want to go for a walk,” she said as soon as they were alone on the first afternoon of her first visit to his family. “It really gets to me after a while, this whole uptight place. . . . Well, your mother’s okay. She had to put us in separate rooms, so it’d look respectable, but I notice she gave us ones with a connecting bath. And she sure is great-looking; almost as great-looking as you.” Roo leant warmly against Fred. “I bet she’s had a lot of adventures.”

  “How do you mean, adventures?” Fred stopped caressing Roo’s left breast.

  “Like, you know: love affairs and stuff. Well, maybe not a lot,” Roo qualified, registering his expression. “But enough to make her life interesting. I mean, hell, you’d have to do something to stay awake in a place like this.”

  “You’ve got her all wrong,” Fred said. For the first time he considered his mother as a possible adulteress, and recognized that her qualifications for this role were excellent. His memory, without any prompting, even suggested possible partners. There was a visiting professor in History she used to dance with at parties; his father always made sour cracks about him. And of course the old guy that ran the riding stable—it was a family joke how he had a crush on her. And once when he was little (four? five?) he suddenly remembers, there was a man sitting in their dining-room fixing a toaster, and Freddy hates him, and his mother, in a red sweater, is standing too near the man, and Freddy hates her too—what was all that about? No, certainly not; his parents are very happy together. “Not that I don’t think she could have, if she’s ever wanted to, but—”

  “Okay, okay. Forget I said it. She’s your mother, so you want her to be like one of those Virgin Mary statues in your church. Maybe she is, how should I know?”

  “And you’ve got the wrong set of stereotypes,” he said, hugging her. “There are no Virgin Mary statues in our church; it’s all very abstract, very Reformation. Come on, get your coat, I’ll show you.”

  Though he had known Roo for nearly three months at this point, Fred was still intoxicated with her—and not only sexually. As if she had been some mind-expanding drug, he was in a constant state of heightened awareness: what he saw seemed both strange and amazingly familiar. The transformation had begun with her photographs, but did not depend on them. In Roo’s presence at first, and then even when he was alone, Fred saw that farm workers had the expressions and gestures of Gothic carvings—elongated, creased, hollowed; and disco dancers, those of a Francis Bacon painting—all pale, screaming, metamorphosing mouths and limbs. He saw that the gate of the college was a frozen iron flower, and that the university officials resembled a convocation of barnyard fowl. Moreover, he knew that these visions were real—that he now saw the world as it was and always had been: like Roo herself, naked, beautiful, full of meaning.

  Soon he no longer cared if Roo’s pictures and Roo’s conversation shocked his kith or kin. Indeed he privately enjoyed it, as she pointed out later: “You know something: you use me to say things you’re too polite to say yourself. It’s like that ventriloquist I used to watch on TV when I was a little kid. He wore this big crazy puppet on his arm, sort of a woolly yellow bear with goggle eyes and a big pumpkin mouth, that was always making smartass cracks and insulting everybody else on the show. And the guy always pretended to be suprised, like he had nothing to do with it: ‘Ow, that’s awful! I can’t control him, he’s so naughty!’ . . . Hell no, I don’t mind. It’s a good act.”

  “Besides, it’s reciprocal,” Fred told her. “You use me to say all the conventional things you don’t want to say. For instance, last week you got me to tell your mother we were getting married and take the blame for being a square.” The reaction of Roo’s mother was: “Really? How come? I thought nobody your age got married any
more unless—Oh, hey! Are you two having a baby? . . . Well then, I don’t get it, but it’s fine by me if you want to.” (Needless to say, on the one occasion when Roo and Fred had stayed overnight with her mother and stepfather, due to blizzard conditions following a party, they were put in the same room.)

  It had in fact been Fred’s suggestion that they might get married, ostensibly to simplify his relations with his students and hers with his colleagues (“This is Fred’s er-friend.”). But it was also a way of proving to everyone that he took Roo seriously—that she wasn’t just, as one of his cousins had suggested, the kind of girl you can have a lot of fun with for a while. And Roo, he thought, had wanted to marry him because in spite of appearances (her radical views and getups, her tough manner) she was deeply romantic.

  As their plans progressed it became clear that he had been cast in another of her youthful fantasies: the Perfect Wedding. Sunlight on the lawn, massed bouquets of flowers, Mozart and Bartók, strawberries, homemade wedding cake and elderflower champagne. Romantic, but still a radical feminist. Roo had, for instance, refused to take his name; nor would she remain Ruth Zimmern. Her relations with her father, L. D. Zimmern, an English professor and critic of some reputation in New York, were friendly; but still, why should any feminist go through life with a patronymic, particularly that of a pater who had walked out on his familias when Roo was a small child? Instead, she used the occasion of her marriage to become legally Ruth March. The new surname was chosen because it was the month of her birth; and also in tribute to the favorite book of her childhood, Little Women, with whose heroine Jo March she had deeply identified. (She was determined that if they had children, the boys would take his ancestral surname and the girls her new one, establishing a matrilineal line of descent.)

  Just as Fred is beginning to wonder if the Northern—or as the London papers call it, the Misery—Line has stopped running, a train arrives. He gets into it, is carried by slow stages to Tottenham Court Road station, and makes his way through a series of cold tiled sewerlike tunnels plastered with posters advertising cultural attractions available in London in February. He pays them no heed. Because of the desperate condition of his finances he cannot afford to go to any of these concerts, plays, films, exhibitions, or sporting events; nor can he afford to travel anywhere outside of London. Last fall when he and Roo were planning their trip together, counting on his study leave, both their savings, and the sublet of their apartment, it seemed as if time were the only barrier to their plans for exploring London, and beyond: Oxford, Cambridge; Cornwall, Wales, Scotland; Ireland; the Continent. He wanted to see everything then, to travel forever; he felt that forever was hardly long enough for him and Roo. Now, even if he had the funds, he lacks the spirit to explore Notting Hill Gate.

  Roo, for instance, wanted to go to Lapland in June to photograph the midnight sun, the glaciers, the Northern Lights, the reindeer—the whole landscape, she explained, of Andersen’s “Snow Queen.” But there is no point in thinking about Roo, Fred tells himself as he waits on the platform for a westbound train. She cares nothing for him and never did; she has insulted him and probably betrayed him and said she never wants to see him again. And he doesn’t want to see her again; how could he, after what has happened?

  But in spite of this he can see her now: her dark eyes wide, her hair electrically springy, talking about the green ice of the glaciers, the mountain flowers—and then, even then, Roo was destroying him, photographing and possibly, probably, fucking—you couldn’t use a more polite word—both of those— And what made it worse, at the exact same time she was photographing and fucking him. She was even more full of energy those last, unseasonably warm November weeks, even more beautiful, alight with joy because she was about to have her first one-woman exhibition in Corinth and because (she thought) she was going with him to London.

  Her show, Roo had decided, would be called “Natural Forms” and would include mostly pictures taken in Hopkins County, some of them for her newspaper. She claimed afterward that she had offered to let him see the prints before they were framed, and that he hadn’t taken her up on it. As Fred recalled it, Roo had suggested it would be better if he saw the show as a whole.

  Roo also claimed she had warned him to expect surprises, and had said she was worried about whether he would like them; but Fred has no recollection of this. He did remember her saying at one point: “I’m going to use some of the shots I took of you last summer, okay? Your face won’t show much.” To which he must, unfortunately—probably he was working at the time—have replied “Okay.” Certainly she had said more than once that her exhibition was going to bother some people; but there are ways of telling the truth that are worse than an outright lie. Fred knew that Roo’s photographs had always bothered some people, people who didn’t like sharp-focus views of poverty or of the hysterical underside of the American dream.

  On a cold bright afternoon in November, then, an hour before Roo’s show was to open, Fred walked into the gallery. As he stood with her in the first and larger of the two rooms beside a bowl of blood-red punch and symmetrical plates of cheese cubes, each pierced by a toothpick, they exchanged their last warm, untroubled embrace. Around them, Roo’s photographs were hung in groups of two. What she had done was to pair views of natural and manmade objects in such a way as to emphasize their similarity. A few of the combinations he had already seen. Others were new to him: insects waving antennae and TV roof aerials; Shara’s rump and a peach. Some of the juxtapositions were personal and humorous, some strongly political: two overweight politicians and a pair of beef cattle. But the overall tone, in contrast to that of earlier exhibitions, was sympathetic and even lyrical. Three years of happiness, he had thought stupidly as he stood with his arms round his gifted wife, have made her see the comedy and beauty of the world as well as its ugliness and tragedy.

  “Roo, it’s so damn good,” he said. “Really fine.” Then he released her and entered the other room of the gallery.

  What he saw first were photographs of himself, or rather of bits of himself: his left eye, its long lashes magnified, placed next to a magnified spider; his mouth with its slight pout, its infolded curve, likened to a spray of bougainvillea; his reddened knees compared to a basket of reddening apples. He admired the wit, but was somewhat embarrassed. As Roo had promised, his face didn’t really show; nobody could be sure that it was him, though many might guess. He glanced at Roo, whose own face expressed—there was no doubt about it—anxiety and suspense; then at the next two photographs. There, paired with a beautiful color shot of woodland mushrooms, dew-dappled, springing strongly from moss and mold, was an unmistakable portrait of his own erect cock, also holding aloft a drop of dew. Fred recognized the picture—or rather, the photograph from which this detail had been grossly enlarged—but had never thought to see it on public view.

  “Roo. For God’s sake.”

  “I told you.” Her large soft mouth quivered. “I had to put it in, it’s just so beautiful. And anyhow”—her voice modulated, as it did sometimes, into a strained toughness—“who’s going to know it’s yours?”

  “Well, for Christ’s sake, who else’s would it be?”

  Roo didn’t answer. But the question, he soon saw, was not a rhetorical one. On the walls beyond his own partial portraits were others not his own. Including other penises—two others, to be exact. Neither was as fully enlarged (in either sense) as his, but both displayed some interest. One tended to length at the expense of breadth and rose from sparse blond tendrils; it was compared by juxtaposition to a stalk of asparagus. The other, stubbier and mottled a darker red, was displayed next to a high-focus photograph of the heavy, rusted bolt of an ancient barn door.

  The battles that followed this private view were fierce, painful, and prolonged. Roo refused to take down a single one of her photographs before the show opened or at any time thereafter—a decision in which she was upheld by the owners of the gallery, two small, deceptively quiet and pretty radical feminists whom Fred
had once liked very much. She also refused to identify her other models, whose feelings she was evidently more considerate of than her own husband’s. (“Honestly, I can’t, I like swore I wouldn’t say.”)

  When he protested, using phrases like “good taste,” Roo started screaming at him. “Yeh, well you know what that is, baby, that’s a pile of chauvinist shit. What about all the male painters and sculptors that’ve been exploiting women’s bodies for thousands of years—and photographers too, posing women to look like fruit or sand-dunes or teacups? A room full of breasts and asses, oh yes, that’s really nice, that’s Art. But don’t let the cunts think they can try the same thing on us. Well, too bad. Goose sauce, sauce for the gander!”

  Okay, all right, Fred conceded for the sake of argument. If she wanted to take photographs of good-looking men, their physiques, he guessed he could see the point of that, their chests and shoulders and arms and legs. Or even their asses—“great buns,” he had heard that was the term— But Roo, still fuming, interrupted him. “That’s not where it’s at, pal. Women aren’t interested in men’s behinds, that’s a fag thing.” What they are interested in, she didn’t say, didn’t have to say, was cocks.

  At the same time, Roo insisted and kept on insisting that neither of her unknown models had been physically intimate with her. “I don’t know how they got aroused like that. Being photographed turns a lot of people on. You really think if I’d fucked some other guy I’d put a picture of his cock in my show, you think I’m that kind of bitch?”

  “I don’t know,” Fred said, angry and weary. “Hell, I don’t know what you might do any more. I mean, what’s the difference?”

  Roo looked at him with rage. “Kate and Harriet were right,” she said. “You really are a pig.”

  Far below Tottenham Court Road a train pulls up beside the cold dirty platform on which Fred is standing. He gets in, feeling gloomy and tense—as always when, against his better judgment, he allows himself to think of Roo. She is something he has to put behind himself, to forget, to recover from. The marriage is an emotional disaster, a failed adventure which has, inevitably, shrunk his view of himself and of the world; he is wiser, maybe, but at the expense of being that much sourer and sadder.