Foreign Affairs

by Alison Lurie

“Really, Chuck,” she exclaimed, following him. “You can see it isn’t here.”

  “Maybe.” He looked behind her bedroom door; then he pulled out the drawers of her chest, glanced in, and banged them shut again. “Okay, honey. A joke is a joke. Hand it over now, and I promise I won’t wear it to the theater tonight.”

  “It’s not here any more. I mean, it never was.”

  A loud guffaw burst from Chuck. “You swiped my raincoat,” he said. “That really beats all. A nice sweet lady professor like you. And where is it now?”

  “Honestly, I didn’t—” But Vinnie was unable to sustain the pretense. “The dustmen took it away yesterday,” she said weakly. “And good riddance.”

  “Great. And what am I supposed to do next time it rains?”

  “Well-uh.” Vinnie realized she was flushing. “I’ll buy you another one.”

  “Okay; sure.” Chuck began laughing again. “You can just do that.”

  “But not the same kind,” she insisted.

  “Any kind you like.” Chuck gave a final whoop of laughter, then folded Vinnie in a generous hug.

  As she accepted and then, relaxing, returned Chuck’s embrace, Vinnie said to herself that of course he wasn’t serious. He would, she hoped, take her advice on the purchase of a new raincoat. But he would hardly expect her to pay for it—or at least, to be fair, he wouldn’t expect her to pay more than the cost of the dead fish.

  These were still her assumptions the following day in Harrods, when Chuck removed the very expensive trenchcoat she’d said she liked best and told the sales clerk that it would do fine.

  “Shall I wrap it for you, sir?”

  “No thanks, sir,” Chuck returned. “I’ll wear it. And the lady will pay,” he added. Then he stood there calmly, grinning, while Vinnie helplessly allowed nearly a hundred pounds to be charged to her Barclaycard, wondering meanwhile what on earth the man must think. That Chuck’s some sort of kept man, perhaps, she decided, signing the receipt as if under a bad spell. Or perhaps that I’m his bossy, money-managing wife. She hardly knew which would be worse.

  But she couldn’t get up her nerve to protest; after all, she’d brought this on herself. Besides, if you added up all the lunches and dinners and theater tickets Chuck had bought her, she was probably still ahead. Nevertheless she felt tricked, cheated; she remembered that Chuck Mumpson was a former juvenile delinquent—an old con, as he put it.

  “Wal, thanks a lot,” he said—to her or to the sales clerk? It was ambiguous—offering Vinnie his arm, which she pretended not to see. She was struggling to frame a graceful request for at least partial repayment, a tactful way of saying that it was all a good joke, of course, wasn’t it, but now . . . But no words came to her.

  “I’m real glad we came here,” said Chuck as they waited for the elevator. “This is a damn good-looking coat, huh?”

  “Yes,” Vinnie agreed helplessly.

  “And you’re a real good sport, too.” Chuck grinned; it was at this moment that, clad in his new pale-tan Burberry, that he most resembled the polar bear. “The way you signed that receipt! Not a squeak out of you!”

  “No,” Vinnie squeaked, smiling uncomfortably.

  “Okay, we’re quits. Now I’ll buy you one.’”

  “Me? But I don’t need a raincoat.”

  “Sure you do.”

  She protested, but Chuck was determined. “You want to make me feel like a creep, a moocher, a traveling salesman, is that it?”

  “No, of course not,” Vinnie said; and the result was the coat she’s wearing now, with its romantic gathered hood and designer label—the most beautiful garment she’s owned in years.

  Vinnie’s raincoat isn’t the only surprising thing Chuck has given her. He has turned out to be wonderful in bed; so wonderful that Vinnie had broken her promise to herself and allowed—no, rather welcomed—him back once, twice, three times—almost every day until he left for Wiltshire again. And to think that if it hadn’t been for Posy Billings’ watercress-and-avocado soup, she might never have known . . .

  Sometimes Vinnie wonders why any woman ever gets into bed with any man. To take off all your clothes and lie down beside some unclothed larger person is a terribly risky business. The odds are stacked almost as heavily against you as in the New York state lottery. He could hurt you; he could laugh at you; he could take one look at your naked aging body and turn away in ill-concealed, embarrassed distaste. He could turn out to be awkward, selfish, inept—even totally incompetent. He could have some peculiar sexual hangup: a fixation on your underclothes to the exclusion of you, for instance, or on one sexual variation to the exclusion of all else. The risks are so high that really no woman in her right mind would take such a chance—except that when you do take such a chance you’re usually not in your right mind. And if you win, just as with the state lottery (which Vinnie also plays occasionally) the prize is so tremendous.

  In over forty years Vinnie has held a lot of losing tickets. But when she’s with Chuck she feels like one of those lottery winners who are occasionally pictured in the newspapers grinning dizzily, astounded at their own luck. She has had this experience before, but she never expected to have it again. Even though it has happened four times, she hardly believes it.

  Her disbelief, Vinnie realizes, is the consequence not only of English literature but of contemporary culture. The media convention is that people like Chuck and Vinnie—especially Vinnie—don’t enjoy sex very much or experience it very often. This convention may date from an earlier era, when most women were physically worn out, if not dead, at fifty. Or it may reflect the distaste many people seem to feel for the idea of their parents as lovers. Superego figures are supposed to be dignified and disembodied; above all that.

  Of course, elderly couples can now and then be seen hugging or kissing in a friendly manner. The public regards this indulgently, as visitors to the Zoo do the two damp-stained polar bears across the way from Vinnie, who are now nuzzling each other with a playful, clumsy affection. Anything more serious on their part, however, and most spectators would sidle off embarrassed, dragging their children with them, though perhaps with a prurient backward glance. To imagine these bears—or Chuck and Vinnie—really going at it would cause mental discomfort. In books, plays, films, advertisements, only the young and beautiful are portrayed as making love. That the relatively old and plain do so too, often with passion, is a well-kept secret.

  Now that Chuck has been gone nearly a week, Vinnie misses him acutely. She misses the way he strokes her back and behind, remembering all the right places; the slow, delicious way he licks her breasts, first one and then the other; the size, shape, and color of his most private part, and its amazing motility—it can, uniquely in Vinnie’s experience, nod or shake its head in reply to a question. Remembering all this, and more, as she sits on the bench, she wants him back so much that it is acutely painful. On the other hand, his presence creates a difficult social dilemma.

  For the sake of her London reputation, Vinnie believes, she would do best to remain, or at least seem, romantically uninvolved. In Edwin’s set—among people like Rosemary Radley and Posy Billings—occasional love affairs are forgiven. But her social world overlaps Edwin’s only slightly. Most of her English friends are rather old-fashioned in their views: even if they approved of Chuck, they would look askance at adultery. In their opinion, casual affairs are perhaps all very well for actors, students, secretaries, and people like that; but a woman of Vinnie’s age and professional reputation, if not celibate, ought to be married—or at least permanently living with another respectable educated person.

  Vinnie has no regrets about having taken Chuck into her bed—much the reverse—but she doesn’t want anyone to find out that he’s been there. Unfortunately, since they became lovers Chuck’s public manner toward her has altered. He has developed a way of looking at her, a way of taking her arm, that—agreeable though they may be—are a dead giveaway, or would certainly have become so if he had stayed in Lond
on much longer. When he returns next weekend the public danger as well as the private pleasure will be renewed. Vinnie can hardly ask him to behave more formally toward her when other people are around: that would involve uncomfortable explanations of her motives, or even more uncomfortable lies. And to prevent him from meeting anyone she knows will be inconvenient—maybe impossible. At the same time, she can’t go around explaining to all her acquaintances that in spite of appearances, she isn’t sleeping with Chuck Mumpson, especially when it is no longer true.

  Vinnie rises from her bench and walks on, as if her contemplation of the bear who looks so much like Chuck might in itself incriminate her, should some acquaintance appear. To be suspected of having a lover would be difficult enough, she thinks; to be suspected of sleeping with what, from the British point of view, is practically a polar bear, would be worse. It isn’t that her British friends dislike Chuck. They like him: they find him amusingly original; they are vastly entertained by his American simplicity and vulgarity.

  The problem is that if her friends find out that Vinnie is mixed up with Chuck, they will begin to mix her up with him, to redefine her. This mental process isn’t typically British, of course, but universal. In certain cases the confusion of identities affects the lovers themselves: transported by passion, they believe that their souls have merged, or were always identical. As an American friend of hers once put it at a high point of their brief relationship, crossing the town park in Saratoga Springs: “Sometimes I think we’re the same person.” “Oh, I know,” Vinnie had replied, equally deluded. (She hasn’t been affected by any such hallucination in this case—rather the reverse: when she is with Chuck she feels more than usually small, intellectual, and timid.)

  Even more often, outsiders conflate the couple, and credit them with each other’s characteristics. If a radical takes up with a conservative, both will be perceived as more moderate politically, regardless of whether their views have in fact altered. The man or woman who becomes involved with a much younger person seems younger, the latter more mature.

  Vinnie doesn’t want her London friends to confuse her with Chuck, to think of her as after all rather simple, vulgar, and amusing—a typical American. She wants them to accept her, to take her for granted. She wants to be, believes she has been considered up to now, one of them. Subject, not object; observer, not observed, she thinks, stopping by the wildfowl enclosure, which resembles a gigantic wire-mesh mosquito net held up here and there by long aluminum poles. She is content, and more than content, to be one of the smaller, less noticeable brownish birds she can see swimming or wading among the rustling marsh grasses beyond the netting, looking busy, pleased with themselves, and totally at home. She has no ambition—rather a horror—of resembling one of the outsize, peculiarly colored and feathered exotic waterfowl at whom a knot of cockneys are now pointing and giggling.

  The brilliant birds, and their audience, remind Vinnie of Daphne Vane, and of the publisher’s party that is being given in less than an hour to launch her largely ghost-written memoirs. If Vinnie is to attend it in more appropriate dress and with clean hair, she must hurry. Luckily the party’s in Mayfair, and easily accessible by the 74 or Zoo bus, which stops outside her front door.

  Daphne’s party, in an elegant converted Georgian house, is well under way when Vinnie arrives. For the first half-hour she experiences it as lively and thronged; then it begins to seem noisy and crowded. Stand-up events are always hard on her because of her height: most conversations take place a foot above her head, and when she wants to move she feels like a child trying to make its way to a familiar face through a mob of unseeing adults, all heavy rumps and sharp elbows. And today many of the faces that at first seem familiar turn out not to be acquaintances, but only actors she has seen at some time on stage or television—and, like most actors, uninterested in meeting anyone not in their own profession.

  “Having a good time?” inquires an actual acquaintance, William Just, looking down at her.

  “Oh yes. Well, perhaps not especially. The publisher’s party isn’t quite my favorite social occasion.”

  “It isn’t a social occasion at all,” William says, reaching for a plate of hot hors d’oeuvres and offering some to Vinnie. “Almost everyone here was invited for some ulterior purpose, as usual. They’re connected with the firm, or with some paper, or they’re in the theater—though I hear Nigel’s very disappointed because so few of our leading dramatis personae have shown up. I’m meant to get Daphne’s book discussed on the BBC, and you’re supposed to tell everyone in America how thrilling it is.”

  “Yes, I suppose you’re right.” Vinnie cannot think of anything clever to say. Her head has begun to ache and her stomach to complain of the strong punch and the spicy canapés. She says goodbye to William and starts to move toward the door, stopping to greet the few people she knows. One of these, as might be expected, is Rosemary Radley.

  “Lovely, isn’t it all?” Though elegantly dressed and perfectly—if rather over-elaborately—made up, Rosemary seems somehow scatty and distracted, perhaps a bit tipsy.

  “Oh yes.” Vinnie remembers that there’s something she’s supposed to tell Rosemary—what? Yes: she’s promised to explain that Fred Turner really loves her and is going back to America against his true desire. The commission is uncomfortable, and this crowded room hardly the place to carry it out. Besides, what’s the point? In Vinnie’s opinion, the breakup of their affair isn’t surprising; it was inappropriate from the start. Of course Rosemary is beautiful, and her life no doubt very glamorous, if you like that sort of thing. But she’s much too complicated for someone like Fred, and probably bad for him as well: frivolous, egotistic, temperamental, and full of expensive false values. To reconcile them—even if anyone could, which seems very unlikely—hardly seems desirable.

  Buf fate, perversely, provides Vinnie with the opportunity to carry out her promise. As she collects her coat, Rosemary reappears and asks if she needs a lift; she is going to a dinner party in Gloucester Crescent, and can easily drop Vinnie off. Feeling ashamed of her recent thoughts, Vinnie hesitates; but her increasing headache and the knowledge that the 74 bus becomes rare, almost extinct, as soon as the Zoo closes, change her mind.

  Though it is always hard to find a cab in Mayfair at that hour, Rosemary spies one. Sprinting a little unsteadily down Upper Grosvenor Street in her high-heeled silver sandals, with her long pink cape billowing behind, she beats out two men in bowler hats who have already hailed the taxi. They begin to expostulate, but Rosemary, dazzling them with her smile, pulls open the door and waves Vinnie on. Once inside, however, she and her cape collapse into the corner with a sigh like a pricked balloon.

  “Stupid party,” she announces in her sweet, well-modulated voice. “Imbecile dons, think they know everything about the theater because they once read a play.”

  Vinnie, who has recognized no dons beside herself at the party, and wonders if this comment is meant maliciously, makes no comment.

  “Disgusting drink,” Rosemary continues. “Nothing to eat, either.”

  “Oh, no,” Vinnie corrects her. “There was quite a lot of food.”

  “Really? No one offered me any.” She laughs musically. “Pigging it all for themselves, most likely.”

  Unsure whether this is an accusation, Vinnie again says nothing. Rosemary too is silent, sulking within her silk cocoon.

  Traffic is heavy; the taxi jerks forward and halts along South Audley Street; jerks and halts. At this rate it will take hours to reach Regent’s Park Road; whereas if Vinnie were to get out now and walk to Bond Street Tube Station—But before she can solidify this intention Rosemary turns to her and begins to complain of what she calls “your friend Fred”—thus simultaneously denying that she is Fred’s friend and assigning responsibility for him to Vinnie.

  “I’m not a complete simpleton,” she declares. “I know your friend Fred doesn’t really have to go back to that silly old college this summer.”

  Annoyed
, but bowing to fate, Vinnie assures Rosemary that he does; she begins to explain why. Rosemary listens with an ill grace, tapping her silver-sandaled toe on the floor of the cab and gazing away out the window.

  “Oh, come on, Vinnie,” she interrupts. “I don’t need to hear all that drivel again. I know there’s more to it; he’s going back to that stupid wife of his, isn’t he?’”

  Vinnie assures her that as far as she knows Fred isn’t going back to his wife, all that is long over. “It’s you he cares for,” she adds, noticing that her headache is worse and wishing she could get out of the taxi. “He thinks you’re a wonderful woman.”

  “Oh he does, does he.” Rosemary’s voice has thickened and coarsened oddly; if they hadn’t been alone Vinnie would have looked round to see who else was speaking.

  “Yes, he told me so. And I believe him,” she adds.

  “I suppose you might,” Rosemary says, again in her characteristic upper-class drawl. “But you don’t know much about men, Vinnie. They’re liars, the lot of them.”

  Vinnie glances nervously at the back of the taxi-driver’s head; then she sits forward and tugs the glass panel shut.

  “Listen, sweetie, when they’re making up excuses to leave you, men always start telling everyone you’re a wonderful woman.” Rosemary’s accent continues to alternate disconcertingly between refined and vulgar, as if she were trying out for some inappropriate low-comedy role but was unable to sustain the illusion. “That’s what they always say, the bastards. It’s a kind of omen.”

  “It’s not an excuse, really. You’ve got to understand . . .” With increasing weariness Vinnie begins to explain the tenure system in American universities.

  “You’re wastin’ your breath, dearie,” Rosemary interrupts. “I don’t give a fart for all that. All I know is he’s sneakin’ out on me,” she says in her low-comedy voice—a voice Vinnie has heard before, but where?

  “Fred isn’t sneaking—” she begins.

  “1 need him, Vinnie,” Rosemary wails, pathetically ladylike again, with a half sob. “You tell him to forget his silly job. If he doesn’t come back and stay with me, I’ll be all alone again. You don’t know what that’s like for me.” She leans toward Vinnie as she speaks—breathes toward her; and Vinnie realizes what she should have realized sooner: that Rosemary isn’t merely tipsy, but quite drunk.