Foreign Affairs (11 page)

When they heard—or heard of—Rosemary’s paean to their unique qualities, most people were pleased, because it’s agreeable to be loved and adored, even casually; and because Rosemary was pretty and well known. Even if they didn’t have the least idea what she meant, there was something awfully attractive in the manner of its delivery. Indeed, some of those who hadn’t ever thus been complimented, like Vinnie, began to feel a little left out.

Others, however, were made uneasy. One can for instance picture Rosemary’s dentist alone in his surgery after his famous patient has left. He twists the magnifying mirror attached to his dental unit toward him and frowns into it. Is there really something unusually lovable about the way his hair curls behind his ears? Or is there, on the other hand, something odd about it, something ugly and bizarre? Had Lady Rosemary been laughing at him?

For days after Edwin’s party, Jane said, Rosemary’s encomium kept sliding into her mind and nagging at her. Finally one day she took a container of leftover salad out of her fridge and went and stood in front of the dining-room mirror, peeled back the plastic wrap, and watched herself eating the spicy oil-soaked lettuce leaves and soggy slices of tomato, trying to discover what was so damned adorable about it, or so different from the way most people ate salad. What on earth had Rosemary meant?

The truth was, Vinnie told her, Rosemary probably hadn’t meant anything. It was just nonsense off the top of her head, a way of focusing attention on herself or changing the topic of conversation, perhaps—a musical noise, that was all. Words don’t matter to actors as they do to a literary person. For them meaning is mainly in expression and gesture; the text is just the libretto, a line of empty glasses that the performer can fill with the golden or silver or bronze liquid of his or her voice. At drama schools, Vinnie has heard, they teach you to say “Please close the door” twenty different ways.

In any social network there are always some people who are as it were “friends” by social compulsion, though if the net fell apart they would seldom or never see each other. It is thus with Vinnie and Rosemary. Because of Edwin they meet fairly often, and always behave on these occasions as if they were perfectly delighted, but they don’t like each other very much. At least, Vinnie does not like Rosemary; and she senses that the feeling is mutual. But nothing can be done about it. Vinnie imagines their social network, or perhaps “web” is more like it—fine-spun, elaborately joined, strung across the rainy city from Fulham to Islington, anchored by isolated threads in Highgate and Wimbledon. She and Rosemary are points of intersection in the web, held there now by many silken twisted strands. If they were to break off cordial relations it would leave gaping sticky holes, distressing to everyone. And they are probably not the only two thus unwillingly joined, Vinnie thinks. Still, the web holds, and spreads its elastic, dew-spangled pattern over London: that is the important thing.

The fading light on the pages of her book tells Vinnie that it is time to leave if she wants to avoid the homebound crowds. Outside the London Library the air is cold, damp, with rain suspended in it rather than falling. Realizing that she is still hungry, and the cupboard in her flat bare of delicacies, she turns up Duke Street and into Fortnum and Mason’s. A clerk in formal morning dress, resembling an Edwardian banker, approaches her with discreet whispered offers of assistance, which she politely declines. No; really it would be foolish to buy anything here; the prices are ridiculous. As she stands debating before a Tower of Babel of international jams and jellies, a much louder voice, much less refined—in fact, blaringly mid-American—hails her.

“Wal, hey! Aren’t you, uh, Professor Miner?’

Vinnie turns. A very large man is grinning at her; he wears a semitransparent greenish plastic raincoat of the most repellent American sort, and locks of graying reddish-brown hair are plastered to his broad, damp red forehead.

“Metchoo on the plane last month. Chuck Mumpson.”

“Oh, yes,” she agrees without enthusiasm.

“How’s it going?” He blinks at her in the slow way she recalls from the flight.

It? Presumably, her work. Or life in general, perhaps? “Very well, thank you. How about you?”

“Oh, doing okay.” There is no enthusiasm in his voice. “Been shopping.” He holds up a damp-stained paper shopping bag. “Stuff for the folks at home, wouldn’t dare go back without it.” He laughs in a way that strikes Vinnie as nervous and unreal. Either it is in fact the case that Mr. Mumpson would be afraid to return to his “folks” without gifts, or, more likely, the remark is just an example of the debased and meaningless jesting common among half-literate middle Americans.

“Hey, glad I ran into you,” Mumpson continues. “Wanted to ask you something; you know this country lots better than I do. How about a cup of coffee?”

Though she isn’t especially glad that Chuck Mumpson has run into her, Vinnie is moved by the appeal to her expertise and the prospect of immediate refreshment. “Yes; why not.”

“Great. A drink’d be more like it, but I guess everything’s shut now, crazy regulations they have here.”

“Until five-thirty,” Vinnie confirms, glad for once of the licensing laws. She doesn’t care for city pubs, and would especially not care to be seen drinking in one with someone dressed like Mumpson. “There’s a tearoom here in the store, but it’s awfully expensive.”

“No sweat. I’m taking you.”

“Well. All right.” Vinnie leads the way past elaborate ziggurats of biscuits and candied fruits and up the steps to the mezzanine.

“Hey, did you see those guys?” Mumpson says in a loud whisper, jerking his head back at the small table at the head of the stairs where two Fortnum’s employees in Regency dress are having tea and playing chess. “Weird.”

“What? Oh, yes.” She moves on to a more polite distance. “They’re often here. They represent Mr. Fortnum and Mr. Mason; the founders of the store, you know.”

“Oh, yeh.” Turning, Mumpson gives the executives the slow rude animal stare characteristic of tourists. “I get it. A kinda advertising gimmick.”

Vinnie, irritated, does not assent. Of course it is in a sense an “advertising gimmick;” but she has always thought of it as an agreeable tradition. She regrets having accepted Mumpson’s invitation; for one thing, if she isn’t careful she will have to listen for at least half an hour to his tourist experiences, to hear about everything he has seen, bought, and eaten, and what is wrong with his hotel.

“I didn’t realize you were planning to be in England so long,” she says, settling herself on one of the pale-green butterfly-design metal chairs that give Fortnum’s tearoom the look of an Edwardian conservatory.

“Yeh, wal, I wasn’t.” Chuck Mumpson peels off his plastic raincoat, revealing a brown Western-cut leather jacket trimmed with leather fringe, a shiny-looking yellow Western-cut shirt with pearlized studs instead of buttons, and a leather string tie He hangs the raincoat on an empty chair, where it continues to drip onto the crimson carpet, and sits down heavily. “Yeh, the rest of them all went home last month. But I figured once I was here, there was plenty I hadn’t seen; hell, I might as well stay on a while. I was doing the sights with this couple from Indiana I met at the hotel, but they left Monday.”

“I’ve never seen the point of those fourteen-day tours,” Vinnie says. “If you’re going to visit England, you really should allow a month at least. If you can spare the time from your work, of course,” she adds, reminding herself that most people do not enjoy an academic schedule.

“Yeh. Wal, no.” He blinks. “Matter of fact, I don’t have to worry about that. I’m retired.”

“Oh, yes?” Vinnie doesn’t remember his mentioning this on the plane, but no doubt she wasn’t listening. “You retired early,” she adds, since he doesn’t look sixty-five.

“Yeh.” Mumpson shifts about on the pale-green iron chair, which is much too small for his bulk. “That’s what they called it: an early retirement. Wasn’t my idea. I was chucked out, you could say.” He laughs in the too-loud manner of someone joining in a joke of which he is the butt.

“Really.” Vinnie recalls articles she has read about the growing trend toward forced obsolescence among middle-aged executives, and congratulates herself on her university’s tenure system.

“Yeh, chucked on the heap at fifty-seven,” he repeats, in case she hasn’t gotten the pun—after all, she didn’t laugh, he is probably thinking. “Okay, uh—Virginia, what’ll you have?”

“Vinnie,” she corrects automatically, then realizes she has tacitly given Mumpson—Chuck—permission to use her first name. She would prefer Professor Miner, Ms. Miner, or even Miss, but to say so now would be intolerably rude by the informal standards of middle America.

“Chuck” orders coffee; Vinnie tea and apricot tart. Then, wishing to divert him from, if not console him for, his professional misfortunes, she persuades him to try the trifle.

“I’m sure there are advantages in not having to go to work every day,” she remarks brightly after the waitress has left. “For instance, you’ll have time to do many more things now.” What things? she wonders, realizing she has no idea of the probable recreations of someone like Chuck. “Travel, visit your friends, read”—Read? Is this likely?—”play golf, go fishing”—Are there any fish in Oklahoma?—”take up some hobbies—”

“Yeh, that’s what my wife tells me. Problem is, you play golf every day, you get damn sick of it. And I don’t go in much for sports otherwise. Used to really enjoy baseball; but I’m pretty well past that now.”

A person without inner resources who splits infinitives, Vinnie thinks. “It’s too bad your wife can’t be here with you,” she remarks.

“Yeh, wal. Myrna’s in real estate, like I told you, and property is pretty hot now in Tulsa. She’s working her a—” Chuck, in deference to Vinnie’s—or the room’s—air of old-fashioned gentility, displaces the metaphor from below to above—“head off. Raking it in, too.” He makes a loose raking gesture with his broad freckled hand, then lets it fall heavy onto the table.

“Really.”

“Yeh, she’s a real powerhouse. Matter of fact, the way things are going, she’s probably just as glad not to have me hanging round home at loose ends for a while. Can’t really blame her.”

“Mm,” says Vinnie, connecting Chuck’s loose ends in her mind with the dangling rawhide thongs of his tie, which is fastened by a vulgarly large silver-and-turquoise clasp of the sort favored by elderly ranchers and imitation ranchers in the Southwest. She too does not blame Myma for wanting him out of the house. It is also clear to her that after many days alone in what to him is a strange foreign city Chuck is determined to unburden himself to someone; but she is equally determined not to be this someone. Deliberately she steers the conversation toward neutral tourist subjects, the very subjects she had earlier planned to avoid.

In Chuck’s opinion, London isn’t much of a place. He doesn’t mind the weather: “Nah. I like the variety. Back home it’s the same goddamn thing every day. And if you don’t water, the earth dries up hard as rock. When I first got here I couldn’t get over how damn green England is, like one of those travel posters.”

On the other hand, he complains, the beds in his hotel are lumpy and the supply of hot water limited. English food tastes like boiled hay; if you want a half-decent meal, you have to go to some foreign restaurant. The traffic is nuts, everybody driving on the wrong side of the road; and he has a hell of a time understanding the natives, who talk English real funny. Vinnie is about to correct his linguistic error rather irritably and suggest that it is in fact we Americans who talk funny, when their tea arrives, creating a diversion.

“Hey, what’d you say this thing was called?” Chuck points with his spoon at the tumulus of fruit, custard, jam, rum-soaked sponge cake, and whipped cream that has just appeared on the marble-topped table before him.

“Trifle.”

“Some trifle. It’s bigger than a banana split.” He grins and digs in. “Not bad, though. And they sure give you a spoon to match.” Vinnie, enjoying her tart, politely refrains from pointing out that in Britain dessert spoons are always of this size.

Unlike Edwin, Chuck eats rapidly and without style, shoveling in the elaborate dessert as if it were so much alfalfa, while he continues his narration. He has seen most of the standard tourist attractions, he tells Vinnie, but none of them impressed him much. Some actually seem to have offended him—for example, the Tower of London.

“Hell, when you get right down to it, it’s nothing but an old abandoned prison. From what the guide told us, it sounded like a lot of the historical characters they shut up in there shouldn’t have been in jail in the first place. They were good guys mostly. But they jammed them into those little stone cells about the size of a horse stall, without any heat or light to speak of. Most of them never got out again either, from what he said. They died of some sickness, or they were poisoned or choked to death or had their heads chopped off. Women and little kids too. I can’t figure out why they’re so damn proud of the place. If you’ve ever been in jail it could really give you the willies.”

“I see what you mean,” Vinnie agrees politely, wondering if Chuck has ever been in jail.

“And those big black ravens out in the yard, prowling around like spooks.” Chuck makes his thick hands into talons and walks them slowly across the green-veined marble. “Jailbirds, I guess you’d call them.”

“Yes.” Vinnie smiles.

“Where I come from, birds like that mean real bad luck. I figured maybe that’s what they put them there for, the guys that built the place. So I asked the guide, was I right.”

“And what did he say?” Vinnie is beginning to find Chuck rather entertaining.

“Aw, he had no idea. He didn’t know anything, he just had this spiel memorized. He showed us what he claimed was the crown jewels, we had to pay extra for that. Wal, it turned out they were only copies, fakes; the jewels were colored glass. The real stuff is locked up somewhere else. Hell, anybody could see that: the crowns and all look like what guys in the Shriners or Masons would wear to some big do.”