Foreign Affairs (8 page)

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 anymore 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.

Fred’s choice of Roo had felt to him like a bold and expansive act, a defiance of conventions—and also of his own conventional self. For years he had been aware that in spite of all his abilities and advantages his life was a little unexciting. From babyhood on he had been what he once heard his father describe as “a very satisfactory child”—bright, good-looking, successful in everything, above all well behaved. His adolescent rebellion was of the most ordinary variety, and gave his parents no serious anxiety. Fred would have liked to worry them a little more—but not at the cost of failing school, scrambling his brains permanently with acid, or wrecking the battered tail-finned Buick he had delivered papers in zero weather and mowed lawns for five years to earn.

Roo was his red flag, his declaration of independence—and in the beginning, the less comfortable his family and more conventional friends were with her, the better pleased he was. Now he feels shamed and enraged to realize that they had judged her more accurately than he. His father, for instance, held the unspoken but clearly evident opinion that Roo was not a lady. Once Fred would have indignantly denied this, or rather condemned the concept as outmoded and meaningless. Now he has to recognize its validity. Even if you suppose, just for the sake of argument, that Roo never slept with either of the two guys whose semi-erect cocks were featured in her show, those photos were pretty vulgar. And worse, she didn’t even know it. As Joe had put it, she wasn’t on the same wavelength; they weren’t, as Debby had said, “coming from the same place”—though in fact they had both grown up in university towns with fathers who were professors.

Possibly it was this similarity of background that had helped mislead him into assuming that Roo and he were, whatever her language and manners, essentially in cahoots. It wasn’t his fault; Debby had said so: “Anyone can make a mistake—even you.”