Foreign Affairs (25 page)

“Why not,” Vinnie echoed, marveling at the long fuse of chance that had blasted this unhappy jobless ex-delinquent from rural Oklahoma into the seat next to hers at Covent Garden. She felt a rush of condescending pity, and congratulated herself on her good luck in being born to educated, affectionate, sober, and solvent parents.

In the days that followed that evening at the opera, however, Chuck gradually became less pitiable. Because he was bored and miserable, he was willing to go anywhere, eat anything, and look at anything Vinnie suggested. Sometimes he seemed to enjoy it, or at least find it interesting. After
Fidelio
, for instance, he remarked that it sure wasn’t much like real life, but maybe we’d all be better off if when things went wrong we stood around and screamed for a while. His grandad used to do that, he said. “When he got really riled up he’d stop whatever he was doing and just cuss everybody and everything for maybe ten, fifteen minutes, till he was out of breath.”

Somewhat to Vinnie’s embarrassment, Chuck insisted on paying for everything they did together, and thanking her for it as well. From the start he has had a wrong idea of her as helpful and kindly—a misconception born on the flight to London, when all she was really trying to do was protect herself from having to talk to him, and confirmed when she made a few simple suggestions about genealogical research. “You think I’m a nice person, but I’m not,” she occasionally wants to say, but refrains.

Apart from his misunderstanding of her character and motives, Vinnie decided presently, Chuck wasn’t really stupid so much as badly educated—hardly educated at all in her sense of the word. But at least he was willing to learn. Since he’d read practically nothing, she decided to start him at the beginning, with the classics of children’s literature: Stevenson, Grahame, Barrie, Tolkien, White. She bought him the books to ensure that he had decent editions, and to make some sort of return for the dinner and theater tickets he kept buying her.

Going with Chuck to the best current plays, films, concerts, and exhibitions, Vinnie of course risked meeting some of her London acquaintances. And indeed, on only their third excursion—to the National Theatre—they ran into Rosemary Radley. Vinnie quailed inwardly as she introduced Chuck, and took him off as soon as was reasonably polite. His subsequent comment was predictable: “A Lady, is she? Wal, anyhow, I got to meet one real aristocrat over here. Handsome gal, too.”

But Vinnie was astonished when at a lunch party a few days later Rosemary, without any appearance of irony, regretted that she had rushed her “amusing cowboy friend” away so fast, and declared that she positively must bring him to her house the following week. Vinnie said she would try, at first resolving not to. She might not think all that much of Chuck, but she wasn’t going to take him to a Chelsea party to be laughed at. But then, Chuck probably wouldn’t notice if someone like Rosemary was laughing at him; and if she was showing him London, shouldn’t he see more than just its tourist attractions?

So again Vinnie broke her rule about not mixing English and American acquaintances: she took Chuck to Rosemary’s party, hoping that it would be large and various enough to muffle his impact somewhat. To her surprise, his Western costume and Western drawl were an instantaneous hit. Though he explained that he hadn’t worked on a ranch since he was a kid, the British clustered round him, inquiring in sentences bristling with invisible quotation marks how exactly one went about roping and branding cattle, and whether there were still many Red Indians on the range. “I adore your Mr. Mumpson,” Daphne Vane, the actress, said to Vinnie. “He’s definitely the real thing, isn’t he?” And Posy Billings, pronouncing Chuck “awfully amusing,” declared that he and Vinnie must come to stay with her soon in Oxfordshire. Vinnie realized that over here Chuck wasn’t a banal regional type, but original, even exotic—just as, for instance, a Scots sanitation engineer in a kilt would be in New York.

Chuck’s London season was brief, however. Ten days after Rosemary’s party he decided to return to Wiltshire, largely because of something Edwin Francis had said. Instead of sympathizing with Chuck’s disappointment over Old Mumpson, Edwin had congratulated him. “Fascinating! A real Hardy character, he sounds. You’re so lucky; most of my forebears are dreary beyond words, all lawyers and parsons. You
must
find out more.”

“I’ve been thinking,” Chuck told Vinnie later. “I figure Mr. Francis has a point. I oughta learn all I can about the old guy. After all, he was family, whatever else he was.”

So, leaving most of his possessions with Vinnie, Chuck departed. She gave him a book for the train journey and packed him a lunch—well, why not? He’d certainly bought her enough meals in the last few weeks, and British Rail food is famously dreadful. Besides, by now—at least in Chuck’s view—they are friends. Many of Vinnie’s acquaintances, she is irritatingly aware, suspect that they are also lovers, in spite or even because of her perfectly truthful statements to the contrary.

In all the years she has been coming to England, Vinnie has never made love with an Englishman. Of course her previous visits have been brief, a few weeks at the most. This time, however, she had rather hoped for an adventure; and she had, as always on these trips, recast her fantasies to feature British intellectuals rather than American ones. Not of course that she really expected a romantic interlude with any of these well-known dons, critics, folklorists, or writers. But she certainly hadn’t come all the way to London to make it with a sunbelt polyester American left behind by a two-week guided tour, an unemployed sanitary engineer who wears a transparent plastic raincoat and cowboy boots and had never heard of Harold Pinter, Henry Purcell, or William Blake until he was fifty-seven years old and she told him about them. To be suspected unjustly of such a connection causes Vinnie much social discomfort—and also, it must be admitted, a certain amount of irrational pique. Of course she’d turn Chuck down if he made a move, but why hasn’t he done so? Either because he foresees her response—unlikely, since he isn’t the intuitive type—or because, though he likes her, he finds her unattractive.

The whole situation was beginning to make Vinnie cross and uncomfortable, and she was therefore positively glad to see Chuck leave London. She quite enjoyed imagining him traveling down on the train to Bristol, where he would pick up his rental car: a large red-faced American in a cowboy hat and a fringed leather jacket, eating her excellent ham sandwiches and, to the surprise of the other first-class passengers, reading Jacobs’
English Fairy Tales
. But now that he’s gone, though Vinnie doesn’t much like to admit it, she misses him. She almost looks forward to the frequent phone calls in which he reports on his research and thanks her for sending on his mail. Most of this seems to be concerned with business: as far as she can tell there has been almost nothing from his wife or his children. Nevertheless, on the phone Chuck sounds in reasonable spirits, sometimes almost cheerful.

Since Chuck is no longer a useful object of pity, Vinnie, lying in bed with her nasty cold, considers pitying Fred Turner. Certainly he seemed miserable enough the last time she saw him.

Lately, Fred hasn’t been at any of the parties Vinnie has attended. She met him instead at the British Museum, just before the descent of her cold. It was the first time in weeks that she had gone there, for most of her research is complete and she dislikes the Reading Room—especially in the spring and summer when all the tourists and lunatics come out and it becomes intolerably stuffy, and the staff (perhaps understandably) is harassed and grumpy.

She was crossing the wet cobbled forecourt after a sudden spatter of rain when she saw Fred sitting under the portico eating a sandwich. Her first thought was that as a single man on a fairly generous study leave he should have no need for such economies. Either he didn’t want to wrench himself away from his research for more than a few minutes, or—more likely—the purchase of theater tickets, flowers, and expensive meals for Rosemary Radley had greatly depleted his bank account.

Fred’s handsome countenance wore a melancholy, ill-fed expression which brightened only slightly when he saw Vinnie. He invited her to join him on the slatted bench, but agreed only dully with her praise of the day, though the scene before them resembled a British Air travel poster: whipped-cream clouds sailed overhead, the trees were sprinkled with a shiny confetti of new leaves, and the courtyard steamed and glinted with rainbow fragments of light.

“Oh, I’m okay,” he replied to her query, in tones that suggested the reverse. “Maybe you know, Rosemary and I aren’t seeing each other any more.”

“Yes, I heard that.” Vinnie refrained from adding that so had all her London friends, not to mention
Private Eye.
“I understand she was upset because you have to go back and teach so soon.”

“That’s about it. But she thinks—she acts like I’ve betrayed her or something.” Fred crumpled and uncrumpled his damp paper bag, banging his fist into it in an angry way. “She thinks it’d be easy for me to stay here if I wanted. Damn it, you know that’s not true.”

Vinnie assented emphatically. In case he might be thinking of some such move, she pointed out that his sudden and unexcused withdrawal from the Summer School faculty would annoy and inconvenience a great many people at Corinth University; she began to list these people by name and title.

“You don’t have to tell me,” Fred interrupted. “I explained all that to her. Rosemary’s a wonderful woman, but she just doesn’t listen. When she doesn’t like what you’re saying she just fucking doesn’t listen, excuse me.”

“That’s all right.”

“Christ, I’d stay here if I could. I love her, and I love London,” he exclaimed, shedding crumbs of peanut-butter sandwich. “I don’t know what more I can say.”

“No,” Vinnie agreed, sympathizing with one of Fred’s passions. “It’s always so hard to leave. I know.”

“But why is she being so goddamned unreasonable? We were going to have such a great time together this month, we had tickets to Glyndebourne . . . I never said I was going to be in England forever, or anything like that. I didn’t lie to her. I told her a long time ago I had to go back in June—hell, I know I did.” Fred shook his head while running one hand through his wavy dark hair, a gesture both of puzzlement and of self-reassurance For the first time, Vinnie saw in him what she had often seen in Rosemary Radley: the assumption of very good-looking persons that as they pass through life they are entitled to take—and to leave—whatever they choose when they choose. In both of them it was the stronger for being largely—in Fred’s case perhaps wholly—unconscious.

“Maybe she’ll get over it.”

“Yeh. Maybe,” he replied in a dead, unconvinced voice, frowning at the pigeons that had begun to gather. “Right now she won’t see me, or talk to me on the phone, or anything. Oh, okay.” He dropped a crust from the bag onto the pavement; the fat gray birds jostled and pecked. “She’d better get over it fast; I’ll only be around another three weeks.”

“I certainly hope she does,” Vinnie said, though in fact it mattered nothing to her.

“Me, too.” A kind of geological tremor passed over the stormy, handsome landscape of Fred’s face. “Listen, Vinnie,” he added, controlling the threatened volcanic erruption. “You know Rosemary pretty well.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“Well, anyhow. You see her all the time. I was wondering . . . Maybe if you were to talk to her.”

“Oh, I don’t think—”

“You could explain about summer school; how I can’t just walk out on it.” Fred scattered the rest of his half-eaten sandwich, causing a further invasion of pigeons, dozens of them it seemed, flapping and swooping from all directions.

“I really don’t think I could do that.” To protect her stockings, Vinnie kicked a particularly intrusive lavender-gray bird away with the side of her shoe.

“She’d listen to you, I bet. All right, get lost! There isn’t any more, for Christ’s sake.” He stood up, lifting a loaded briefcase. “Please, Vinnie.”

Vinnie rose too, and retreated several steps from the crowd of pigeons. She looked at Fred Turner standing on the porch of the British Museum, waiting for her answer in a clutter of equally demanding and unreasonable iridescent birds, with his tall athletic figure thrown off-balance by overloaded feelings and an overloaded briefcase. At that moment she realized that he had enrolled himself in the class of persons (usually but not always ex-students) who take it for granted that Vinnie will write them recommendations, give them letters of introduction to colleagues abroad, read their books and articles, and take an interest in their personal and professional happiness. Typically, the fulfillment of any such request does not discharge the obligation, but rather recharges it, just as the use of an automobile recharges its battery. The academic relation of protéger to protégé is a closed electrical circuit not subject to the law of entropy; often it sends out sparks until death.

For Vinnie, one of the advantages of being in England is that she can escape most of these parasites (though a few, of course, have pursued her by mail). Now here is Fred, who has elected himself her protégé simply because they are in the same department, and in the same foreign city, and she is a quarter-century older. And also probably because, quite without having intended it, she is in a sense responsible for his present situation. She was on the department committee that granted him a study leave, and she had invited him to the party at which he met Rosemary Radley.

Sighing, Vinnie told Fred that if the opportunity arose she would try to talk to Rosemary. She had little expectation of succeeding in this assignment, and privately wished that she might have no chance to carry it out. Since she became ill the next day, that wish was granted, though not in a very pleasant manner. But as Vinnie has often noted, both in folklore and in real life, that is the way with most wishes.