Foreign Affairs (30 page)

“Right,” Joe puts in. “For instance, somebody like Carissa.”

“Carissa wouldn’t ever have behaved in such a flighty, irrational way. You always know exactly where you are with Carissa. She’s really up front; I remember once when she—”

“Look, Debby,” Fred interrupts, halting and turning to face her. “Do me a favor: quit mentioning Carissa to me. Carissa is not the point.”

“But she is the point,” says Joe. “Oh, all right,” he concedes, registering Fred’s expression. “If that’s the way you feel.”

“That’s the way I feel, God damn it,” Fred says. It occurs to him that he and the Vogelers are on the verge of a real quarrel—maybe of a break in their seven-year friendship. But in his present mood he doesn’t give a shit.

All of them are stopped on the towpath now, facing one another. But the slippery greenish water still pours by, bearing its flotsam and jetsam. Jakie, gazing over his father’s shoulder, sees his lost prize approaching and begins to babble excitedly. “Oooh! Oo-ah-um! Ba—boo—ball!”

“Ball!” Joe cries. “He said ‘ball,’ Debby!”

“I heard him!” Debby’s cross, set face breaks into a delighted grin. “Jakie, darling. Say it again. Say ‘ball.’”

“Boo-uh-aw! Bah-aw. Ball!” The baby strains toward his object of desire as it floats by, surrounded by waterlogged crap.

“He said ‘ball,’” his mother declares with triumph.

“His first word.” His father’s voice trembles.

“Ball,” Debby breathes. “Did you hear that, Fred? He said ‘ball.’” But she and Joe hardly wait for an answer; forgetting Fred, they gaze at their son with relief and awe, then clasp him in a double embrace and cover him with happy kisses.

Fred’s confrontation with Rosemary the next day has been planned without her knowledge or consent. A listing in the Sunday papers had informed him that she was appearing on a radio program featuring the newly published memoirs of her friend Daphne Vane, and he had determined to be there. After a morning of trying (without success) to work on his book, he checks the time and the address again and sets out.

The studio, when he finds it, is discouraging—not the sort of place anyone would choose for a lovers’ meeting. Fred would have preferred the BBC building in Portland Place, where he once went with Rosemary: a comic temple of art deco design with a golden sunburst over the door and a bank of gilded elevators. Behind them was a warren of corridors down which eccentric-looking persons hurried with White Rabbit expressions. The sound rooms were cosy burrows furnished with battered soft leather chairs and historical-looking microphones and switchboards; the Battle of Britain still seemed to reverberate in the smoky air.

This commercial station is cold and anonymous and ultra-contemporary; its glass-fronted lobby is decorated in Madison Avenue minimalism. A dozen or so teenagers slump on plastic divans, chewing gum and jiggling their knees to the pounding beat of rock music.

“I’m here to meet Rosemary Radley,” Fred shouts through the din at a sexy young receptionist with magenta lips and greasy-green iridescent eyelids. “She’s going to be on the Lively Arts program at four.”

“What name, please?”

Fred pronounces it, thinking a second later that maybe he should have claimed to be somebody else.

“Just a sec, baby; see what I can do.” She gives him an openly admiring look and a glossy ripe-plum smile, and lifts a red telephone. “They’re trying to locate her.” She smiles at Fred again. “You from America?”

“That’s right.”

“I thought so. That’s my dream, to go to the States.” She listens to the phone again, her smile tightening from plum to prune; finally she shakes her head.

“Tell her it’s important. Very important.”

The receptionist gives him a different sort of look, equally admiring but less respectful; Fred realizes that she has reclassified him from VIP to groupie. She speaks again into the shiny red phone.

“Sorry. Nothing doing,” she says finally. “I’d let you in, but they’d give me hell.”

“I’ll wait till the program’s over.” Fred makes for a cube covered in shiny black imitation leather. As he sits on its edge, waiting, other visitors approach the desk; after checking by phone the receptionist presses a buzzer, allowing them to pass through the quilted, metal-studded imitation-leather doors behind her. The rock music continues, then blares to a crescendo, inspiring some of the lounging teenagers to rise and dance with hysterical, jerky motions.

The music crashes to a halt and is followed by a string of deafening commercials. The teenagers swarm toward the rear of the lobby, some of them holding out what look like autograph books.

“Don’t miss this amazing opportunity! Call
NOW
! . . . Stay tuned now for The Lively Arts.” There is a surge of mood-music.

“Welcome again to The Lively Arts.” A different voice, fluty and confiding. “I am your host, Dennis Wither. This afternoon we have a real treat in store: we’re going to be talking to Dame Daphne Vane, whose autobiography,
Vane Pursuits: A Life in the Theatre
, has just been published by Heinemann. Dame Daphne is here in the studio, and with her is Lady Rosemary Radley, star of the prizewinning television series
Tallyho Castle
 . . .”

The punk teenagers look grossed-out at this news; some groan, one pantomimes nausea. Fred gives him a hostile look. He knows that Rosemary’s show, popular as it is, has detractors. Some highbrow liberals, for instance, consider its picture of village life sentimental and snobbish. But these idle, loud-mouth kids, pretending to vomit at Rosemary’s name—He’d like to murder them.

“We’ll be back in a moment.” While an idiotic musical plug for shampoo (“Dreamier—lovelier!”) reverberates round the lobby, a skinny man in a nail-studded white leather coverall pushes his way out through the doors behind the reception desk, followed by two fatter men in cheap suits. The teenagers converge on him with shrill cries.

The celebrity, whoever he is, moves on across the lobby, smiling tensely. He stops to sign a few autographs, then breaks for the street doors and a waiting limousine, while the fat men run interference. I might as well be back in New York already, Fred thinks, watching this scene with distaste.

Suddenly Rosemary’s beautiful trilling laugh, electronically magnified to three times life size, fills the room. Fred’s heart flops like a fish.

“Thank you, Dennis darling, and I think it’s quite marvelous to be here.” Her sweet, clear, perfectly modulated upper-class voice echoes from one wall to another, as if an invisible Rosemary Radley sixteen feet tall were floating in the air above his head.

Fred sits listening, becoming more and more angry. Rosemary’s praise of Daphne’s autobiography is fervent but, he knows, false—she has already described it to him as “a silly picture book” and made fun of Daphne for being too tight to hire a really good ghostwriter. Now she announces to anyone tuned to this station in Greater London—or, for all he knows, anywhere in Britain—that she “was absolutely bowled over” by Daphne’s “wonderful charm and wit.” How can she tell such lies? How can she chatter on like that, laugh like that, exchange trivial theatrical reminiscences with Daphne and those other fools? Obviously she isn’t in the same kind of pain he is. She really doesn’t give a fuck; she’s forgotten he exists. Well, as soon as the show is over he’ll remind her.

The closing theme begins; Fred approaches the padded doors. Five minutes pass, but Rosemary doesn’t appear, nor do any of the other people who were on the program with her.

“Hey!” The receptionist calls to him through a renewed blast of popular music. “Hey, you.”

“Yeh?” Fred looks round.

“You still waiting for Rosemary Radley?”

“Yes.”

“You’re wasting your time. The talent doesn’t use this way out, ’less they want to see their fans or something.”

“Thank you.” Fred approaches her desk, leans on it with both elbows, and projects as much sexual charm as he can manage in his present mood. “What way out do they use?”

“Round the back, by the parking lot. But they’re probably all gone by now.” She lowers her slime-green, thick-lashed eyelids, leans toward him. “Anyhow, what does a hunk like you want with a bag that age?”

“I—” Fred suppresses the impulse to defend his love; there’s no time to lose. “Excuse me.” He runs across the lobby, shoves open a thick glass door, and circles the block. Behind the studio building he finds another entrance, but the glass doors here refuse to open.

His heart thumping, he stands beside a stack of empty packing cases watching for Rosemary to come out—with Daphne and those other fools probably, he realizes. But he won’t bother about them, he’ll pull her away, he’ll say . . . Slowly, as Fred rehearses his prepared speech, time leaks out of the air; slowly he realizes that Rosemary has left without waiting for him.

Furious with blocked impulse, Fred curses aloud. “Goddamned bitch,” he cries to the empty parking lot, and much more. He says to himself that Rosemary is cold-hearted, cruel; that all her words and gestures—some rise to consciousness, but he shoves them down again—were false, theatrical. The Lively Arts, he thinks: so lively, so arty . . . Ah, fuck it. He kicks the side of a damp-stained packing case several times, stoving it in.

Maybe he should have used more lively art himself. He should have lied to Rosemary, told her that he’d resigned his summer-school job, enjoyed himself for the next four weeks, and then got on the plane—been the Yankee skip-jack Mrs. Harris claimed he was.

But he couldn’t have kept up the act; he’s no thespian. Anyhow the whole idea of it makes him sick. It wouldn’t have been love any longer, it would have been calculation, exploitation. Rosemary could have managed that maybe, if she’d wanted . . .

And now a smog of suspicion and jealousy descends on Fred, as if the saturated smoky-purple clouds that hang over the parking lot had suddenly descended, blotting out London. Maybe Rosemary was faking all along. Maybe she staged that quarrel with him after her party deliberately; maybe she’d just met or renewed a connection with someone she likes better. Maybe even now she is in the arms of this man, whispering to him in her soft voice, giving her intimate trilling laugh. Again the idea that he has fallen into a Henry James novel occurs to Fred; but now he casts Rosemary in a different role, as one of James’ beautiful, worldly, corrupt European villainesses.

What if it was all false, everything she’d ever said to him, everything he’d believed about her? What if, even, Debby was right, and Rosemary is really years older than she’d said? She doesn’t even look thirty-seven, but Nico had claimed that she’d had more than one face-lift, that all actresses did as a matter of course. Fred had assumed this was just fag spitefulness. But suppose it’s true, what difference does it make? Whatever her age, isn’t she still Rosemary, whom he loves? Who doesn’t love him, probably, who may never have loved him, who won’t even speak to him now; who lied to him, maybe, the whole fucking time.

What an asshole he is, standing here among the rubbish, like some lovelorn groupie waiting at the stage door for a star who isn’t even there. Fred scowls at the smashed packing case, at the debris blown against the wall: scraps of soiled paper and foil, an empty beer can, a length of twisted red yarn of the sort Roo used to tie round her hair.

And suddenly, for the first time in weeks, he sees Roo clearly in his mind. She is sitting naked on the edge of their unmade bed in the apartment in Corinth, her round tanned arms raised to gather the heavy weight of her dark chestnut hair. Then she separates it into three parts and, with an unconscious half smile of concentration, begins to plait them in and out to form a single thick, shining cable like the hawser of some sea-going ship. As the glossy rope lengthens, she pulls it forward and braids on till only about six inches of loose hair remain. Then she stretches a rubber band three times round the end of the plait, and over that a twist of scarlet wool. Finally, with a toss of her head, she flips the finished braid and its soft tail of coppery filaments back over her bare brown shoulder.

Fred feels a rush of longing; he thinks that, whatever her faults, Roo is incapable of calculated theatrical falsity. The seas will all go dry and the rocks melt with the sun, to quote one of her favorite folksongs, before he will ever hear her voice announcing that it is quite marvelous to be in some fucking radio station.

Next he feels a rush of guilt, remembering Roo’s letter, which is still lying desolate and unanswered on top of a pile of unread scholarly books in his flat in Notting Hill Gate. He’ll write her now, Fred thinks as he turns his back on the studio and starts home. This afternoon.

But the mails are slow; it will take ten days for a letter to reach Roo. Maybe he should phone; the hell with the cost. But after such a long silence—over four weeks since she wrote, he remembers with a groan—Roo could be furious with him again; she has a right to be. She could hang up on him, scream at him. Or there could be somebody with her when he calls, some other guy. She has a right to that too, damn it. No. He’ll send a telegram.

9

A
T
the London Zoo, Vinnie Miner sits on a slatted bench watching the polar bears. Several of them are visible: one splashing lazily in the artificial rock-pool; one asleep on its side at the entrance of a stone cave, looking like a heap of damp yellowish-white fur rugs; and a third padding back and forth nearby, occasionally turning its heavy muzzle, on which the coarse hair has separated into spiky clumps, to give her an inquiring glance from its small glittering dark eyes.

Though she lives only a few blocks from the Zoo, this is the first time Vinnie has visited it all year, and she’s only here now because some American cousins insisted on coming. These cousins, who are frantically “doing London” in three days, have already gone on to the National Gallery. Vinnie lingers here partly from the sense that, having paid several pounds to enter the Zoo, she might as well get her money’s worth, and partly because it’s a fine day and her project is ahead of schedule. All her London data has been collected; she has read most of the relevant background material, and she has traveled to Oxford, Kent, Hampshire, and Norfolk to talk with experts in children’s literature and folklore.