Foreign Affairs (20 page)

Research has its dangers, Vinnie thinks, looking at him. The study of children’s literature, for instance, has revealed to her a number of things she is glad she did not know as a child and is not very glad to know now: for instance, that Christopher Robin Milne’s schooldays were made miserable by his association with the Pooh books; or that
The Wind in the Willows
is full of Tory paranoia about the working class. Some adult fantasies, such as Chuck Mumpson’s belief in an aristocratic ancestor, might also be better left alone.

“Well, of course it’s a disappointment.” Vinnie speaks briskly so as not to encourage Fido. “But I can’t really see why you’re so upset. After all, most people don’t have ancestors. Some of them don’t even have descendants.” Fido turns his head and gives Vinnie a hopeful look. “I mean, you’re no worse off now than you were before.”

“That’s what you think.” Chuck gives a suppressed groan that reengages Fido’s total attention. “You don’t know what it’ll mean for me back in Tulsa. Myrna’s relations, they’re high-class people: got charts of their family going back to before the Revolution. They’ve always snooted me. They didn’t like what I came from or my language or the kinda jobs I had. Sanitary engineer, Myrna’s mother thought that was a dirty word. She told Myrna once it always reminded her of sanitary napkin.”

“Really,” says Vinnie, forming a negative opinion of Myrna’s relatives’ claims to gentility.

“And her sister, she’s a psychologist, got a degree from Stanford University. She said to Myrna the reason I missed my job so bad was my mind was stuck at the age of three, and secretly all I wanted was an excuse to play with my poo-poo.”

“Really.” Vinnie says again, but this time with some indignation.

“After Amalgamated flushed me out it was worse. It was ‘Wal, Myrna, I always told you so.’”

“I suppose everyone has relatives like that,” Vinnie says, though in fact she does not. It was her so-called friends, rather, who had warned her that her husband was still carrying the torch for his former girlfriend and that her marriage wouldn’t last—and had later reminded her of how prescient they had been. “You’ve simply got to ignore them.”

“Yeh. I try. But Myrna doesn’t. When I couldn’t find another job she figured her sister was right all along. Thought I wasn’t making an effort. Hell, I must’ve sent out near a hundred inquiries and résumés. But the thing of it is, nobody wants to hire a guy who’s fifty-six, fifty-seven. The benefit package is too expensive, and you naturally figure he’s past his best effort. Hell, I used to think that way myself.”

“Mm,” Vinnie says, remembering certain meetings of the tenure staff of her department. “I suppose many people do.”

“After a while I about gave up. I started drinking too much, mostly at night at first, when I couldn’t sleep. It was better then. The place was quiet, and I didn’t have to talk to Myrna, or watch the maid hustling around, following me all over the house with the damn vacuum cleaner. If I felt real bad, I’d keep at the booze till I passed out. Some days I didn’t get out of bed till the middle of the next afternoon. Or I’d get in the car and drive, most of the night sometimes, going nowhere like a goddamn rat out of hell. I mean bat.” Chuck laughs awkwardly. “So then I was in this smashup.”

“Yes,” Vinnie prompts after a minute, but he does not continue. “An accident? Were you hurt?”

“Naw; nothing much. I—. Never mind. It was bad. I totaled the car, and the cops took me in for DWI. That about finished it for Myrna. She used to like me pretty well once, but after that she didn’t even want to look at me. She couldn’t wait to get me on that plane. She’s ashamed of me now, they all are. Greg and Barbie too.” Fido, triumphant, puts his paws on Chuck’s shoulders and enthusiastically licks his broad weatherbeaten face.

“Oh, I don’t think—” Vinnie says, and stops. Maybe Chuck’s wife and grown children are ashamed of him; how should she know?

“That’s why I didn’t go home with the damn package tour. I was sick as hell of London, but I couldn’t face Tulsa again. I kept thinking, the best thing for everybody would be if I never came back. Myrna would carry on, but she’d be relieved really. She’d be free, and she’d be respectable. There’s this developer, this fat guy she sold a big land parcel to for a shopping plaza, that has a crush on her and a lot of dough and big political ambitions. Myrna would take to that: she always wanted me to run for some office. Her family would’ve put up the cash, only I couldn’t see it; I never liked politicians. But this guy’s also got born-again Christian principles, and real conservative fundamentalist backing. He could marry a widow, but not a divorcee.

“Anyhow, I kept thinking, if I was out of the way Myrna could cut her losses. Wal, y’know, I couldn’t get the hang of the traffic over here, those tinny little cars they have that you can’t hardly see coming at you, and the crazy two-story buses. I tried to remember to look in the wrong direction and do everything backward, but I couldn’t concentrate on it. A couple of times it was a damn near thing. I didn’t care; I used to think, okay, why not—I’ve had a pretty fair life.”

A strange impulse comes over Vinnie, an impulse to emulate Fido, to embrace and comfort this large stupid semiliterate man. She is irritated at herself, then at him.

“Oh, come on. Don’t overdramatize,” she says to both of them.

“Naw. That’s what I thought, honest. Only once I’d talked to you in that restaurant, and ‘specially after I located South Leigh, I started to feel better. I thought, okay, maybe I’ll show them yet. I’ll come home with fancy English relations, a castle, maybe a set of those plates they sell here, with gold rims and a coat of arms painted on them. Hey, look, I’ll say to Myrna, I’m not such a worthless bum as you thought. Let’s tell your mother and your pissfaced sister about
my
ancestors, honey. And the kids, they’d like it too. It’d be something I could give them, make it up to them, kinda. This afternoon down in South Leigh I mailed Myrna a card; it said ‘Hot on the trail of Lord Charles Mumpson the First, looks like Grampa was right.’ Wait till she finds out. I’ll never hear the last of it. Myrna loves a good joke, ‘specially if it’s on me.”

“Does she,” says Vinnie, forming an even more negative opinion of Chuck’s wife.

“Runs in the family. Her Uncle Mervin, he’ll work a gag to death. All he needs is a fall guy.”

“Really.” It is a long time since Vinnie has heard this term. She imagines Chuck as a fall guy, a kind of debased stuntman made to perform over and over again for the amusement of his wife’s relatives. “Well, if it’s going to be like that, don’t tell them.”

“Yeh-uh.” He sits forward. “Naw. What about the goddamn postcard?”

“Say it was a mistake, a false lead. For heaven’s sake, Chuck, show a little initiative!”

“Yeh. That’s what Myrna always tells me.” He sags back into the cushions, hugging Fido to him.

“All right then, don’t show a little initiative,” Vinnie says, losing her temper. “Lie down in the street and let a bus run over you if you want to. Only stop being so damn sorry for yourself.”

Chuck’s square, heavy jaw falls; he stares at her dumbly.

“I mean, for God’s sake.” She is breathing hard, suddenly enraged. “A white Anglo-Saxon American male, with good health, and no obligations, and more money and free time than you know what to do with. Most people in the world would kill to be in your shoes. But you’re so stupid you don’t even know how to enjoy yourself in London.”

“Yeh? Like forinstance?” Chuck sounds angry now as well as hurt, but Vinnie cannot stop herself.

“Staying in that awful tourist hotel, like forinstance, and eating their terrible food, and going to ersatz American musicals; when the town is full of fine restaurants, and you could be at Covent Garden every night.”

Chuck does not respond, only gapes.

“But of course it’s none of my business,” she adds in a lower tone, astonished at herself. “I didn’t mean to shout at you, but it’s very late, and I have to get up early tomorrow and visit a school in Kennington.”

“Yeh. All right.” Chuck looks at his watch, then stands up slowly; his manner is injured, stuffy, formal. “Okay, Professor, I’m going. Thanks for the drink.”

“You’re welcome.” Vinnie cannot bring herself to apologize further to Chuck Mumpson. She shows him out, washes his glass and her teacup and sets them to dry, gets back into her flannel nightgown, and climbs into bed, noting with disapproval that it is ten minutes past twelve.

But instead of slowing into sleep, her mind continues to revolve with a clogged, grating whir. She is furious at herself for losing her temper and telling Chuck what she thinks of him, as if that could do any good. It is years since she flamed out like that at anyone; her usual expression of anger is a tight-lipped, icy withdrawal.

She is also furious at Chuck: for waking her up and depriving her of necessary sleep, for failing to discover interesting folkloric material in Wiltshire, and for being so large and so unhappy and such a hopeless nincompoop. He and his story remind her of everything she dislikes most about America, and also of things she dislikes in England: its tourist hotels, its tourist shops, its cheapened and exaggerated self-exploitation for the tourist trade, the corruption of many of its citizens by American commercial culture into an almost American illiterate coarseness (“I wish I wuz a seagull, I wish I wuz a duck . . .”).

Why is she being persecuted by transatlantic vulgarity in this awful manner? It really isn’t fair, Vinnie thinks, turning over restlessly. Then, hearing the silent whine in this question, she glances mentally round for Fido. But her imagination, usually so vivid, fails to manifest him. Instead she sees a dirty-white long-haired dog trailing Chuck Mumpson down Regent’s Park Road in the fog from streetlamp to streetlamp, panting at his side in the fuzzy yellow glare as Chuck unsuccessfully tries to hail a taxi.

Fido’s infidelity astonishes Vinnie. For the nearly twenty years of his life in her imagination he has never shown the slightest interest in or even awareness of anyone except her. What does it mean that she should now so vividly picture him following Chuck Mumpson across London, or making sloppy canine love to him? Does it mean, for instance, that she is really sorry for Chuck, perhaps even sorrier than she is for herself? Or are he and she somehow alike? Is there some awful parallel between Chuck’s fantasy of being an English lord and hers of being—in a more subtle and metaphysical sense, of course—an English lady? Might there be someone somewhere as impatiently scornful of her pretensions as she is of his?

Almost as uncomfortable to contemplate is the idea that she is partly responsible for Chuck’s illusion—and, as a logical consequence, for his disillusion. As if she’d ever promised that he would turn out to be a scion of some noble family! She begins to lose her cool again.

Well, after all, as he said, it might have turned out that way: there are plenty of nincompoops in the British aristocracy. Vinnie’s memory provides her at once with examples, including that of Posy Billings, who is not at all what Vinnie means by “a real English lady.” On the other hand, Rosemary Radley, annoying as she sometimes is, has to be granted the epithet. Rosemary would never have flown into a rage as Vinnie did this evening; she wouldn’t have made Chuck Mumpson feel even worse and more stupid than he felt when he arrived. If she had been there to witness the scene, she would have turned her face away as from any unkindness, any unpleasantness.

And what about Chuck himself? Though he probably has only the most conventional idea of what a lady is, he will hardly think of Vinnie as one now. He will think instead that she is uncontrolled and unfeeling—in other words, both messy and cold.

Of course in a way it doesn’t matter, Vinnie tells herself, turning over in bed, since she will obviously never see Chuck Mumpson again. She has thoroughly depressed and offended him, and presently he will go and do himself in—or, far more likely, lumber on back to Oklahoma—with disagreeable if fading memories both of England and of Professor Miner.

It is 12:39 by the poison-green light of the digital alarm clock. Vinnie sighs and turns over in bed again, causing her nightgown to twist itself round her into a tight, wrinkled husk that resembles her thoughts. With an effort she revolves in the opposite direction, unwinding herself physically; then she begins to breathe slowly and rhythmically in an attempt to unwind herself mentally. One-out. Two-out. Three-out. Four—

The telephone rings. Vinnie startles, lifts her head, crawls across the bed, and gropes in the dark toward the extension, which rests on the carpet because her landlord has never provided a bedside table. Where the hell is it?

“Hello,” she croaks finally, upside down and half out of the covers.

“Vinnie? This is Chuck. I guess I woke you up.”

“Well yes, you did,” she lies; then, abashed at the sound of this, adds, “Are you all right?”

“Yeh, sure.”

“I hope you’re not still upset about what I said. I don’t know why I blew up like that; it was rude of me.”

“No it wasn’t,” Chuck says. “I mean, that’s why I called. I figure maybe you were right: maybe I oughta give London another chance before I lie down in front of a bus . . . Wal, so, if you’re free sometime this week, I’ll take you anywhere you say. You can pick a restaurant. I’ll even try the opera, if I can get us some decent seats.”

“Well . . .” With considerable difficulty Vinnie rights herself and crawls backward into bed, dragging the telephone and the comforter with her. “I don’t know.” If she refuses, she thinks, Chuck will go back to Oklahoma with his low opinion of London and of Vinnie Miner intact; and she will never see him again. Also she will miss a night at Covent Garden, where “decent seats” cost thirty pounds.

“Yes, why not,” she hears herself say. “That’d be very nice.”

For heaven’s sake, what’d I do that for? Vinnie thinks after she has hung up. I don’t even know what’s on this week at Covent Garden. I must be half asleep, or out of my mind. But in spite of herself she is smiling.