Foreign Affairs (34 page)

As for his work, it is in a dead funk. He goes through the motions of scholarship, reading primary and secondary sources, copying down quotations from Gay’s work and from eighteenth-century critical essays, contemporary records, and true-crime narratives, patching them together somehow into a kind of whole, but it is all false and forced. Everything Fred puts into his two battered canvas suitcases reminds him of failure, of waste. Stacks of notes—skimpy and disordered compared to what they should have been—half-empty notebooks, blank three-by-five-inch index cards. Unanswered letters, including one from his mother and two from students asking for recommendations which should have been dealt with weeks ago. A favorite snapshot of Roo at fourteen with a pet rabbit, taken by her with her first time-release camera; the innocent warmth of her smile, the openness, the trust, wrenches his heart: this Roo has never loved him or any man, never been hurt by him—A great lump rises in Fred’s chest; he turns the photograph face down, sets his jaw, goes on with his packing.

Paper, envelopes, manila folders, all unused, mutely accusing. Programs for plays, operas, and concerts he’d attended with Rosemary—why the hell is he still saving these? Fred shoves them in the overloaded wastebasket. The long handwoven tan cashmere scarf that Rosemary gave him for his birthday, winding it round and round his neck with her own hands. A square of pocket mirror with the mauve-pink imprint of her mouth on it, commemorating their first kiss. They had just finished lunch at La Girondelle in the Fulham Road, and Rosemary was renewing her lipstick. Fred, suddenly realizing that they were about to part, leaned over the table toward her, saying something impulsive, passionate. She glanced up, smiling slowly and wonderfully, then blotted her open mouth on the glass to avoid smudging his. How charming, how thoughtful, he had marveled. Later he had put his hand on her wrist to stop her from returning the bit of mirror to her handbag, claiming it as a souvenir. Now it has another meaning: before she kissed him, Rosemary had kissed herself.

Stop thinking about it, Fred tells himself. It’s over, for Christ’s sake; he’s leaving London the day after tomorrow and he will probably never see Rosemary Radley again. Also, as he realized this morning when he emptied his closet, he will never see again his Ragg sweater from L. L. Bean, his blue chambray workshirt, his
Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse
, and his spare toothbrush and razor, all of which he left at Rosemary’s before the day of her party.

But he can’t stop thinking about it. Angry as he is at Rosemary, he hasn’t been able to forget her. Several times in the last two weeks, against his better judgment, and giving himself the lame excuse that he just wants to pick up his sweater, shirt, etc., he has dialed her number. Most of the time it rings on and on, unanswered, though once Mrs. Harris picked it up, growled out, “Nobody home,” and slammed down the receiver. He also tried the answering service, where a falsely refined female voice always informed him that Lady Rosemary was “out of town.” A warble of amused condescension the last time he called suggested to Fred that the female voice knew all about him; that as soon as he hung up she would turn to other females and say: “Guess who just phoned Lady R again, the moron; when will he smarten up?” Though he left his name, Rosemary never called back.

Suppose he were to leave the message that he wasn’t going back to America, would Rosemary call him then? Yes, maybe, Fred thought. Maybe that’s what she’s waiting for. Or maybe not. It has occurred to him that in a way their love affair has reenacted Anglo-American history. Rosemary may have loved him, but she has the colonial mentality; she would do anything for him but grant him independence. When he demanded that, it was war.

Partly in order to stop himself from telephoning Rosemary again and leaving this self-destructive message, Fred has just had his phone cut off. His other, more rational motive was to save money. As it is, he’s going home dead broke, and in debt on both sides of the Atlantic.

He shuffles through a pile of letters from relatives and friends, consigning most to the wastebasket. Among them is a postcard from Roberto Frank in Buffalo. The reverse of the card is a painting from the Albright-Knox Gallery by Sir Joshua Reynolds:
Cupid as Link Boy
, 1774—selected because of Fred’s interest in the period, he had assumed. Now he looks at the picture more closely.

Ostensibly, it is a half-length portrait of one of those urchins who for a small fee used to light travelers through the streets of eighteenth-century London at night. This Cupid is no plump, laughing, naked babe: he is slight, shabbily dressed in contemporary costume, and seems about nine or ten. He is good-looking—indeed, he rather resembles Fred himself at that age—but quite obviously a dark angel. He has small black bat wings, and holds his long smoldering dark torch in a phallic position, braced against his crotch; a spurt of flame and stained smoke rises from it into the sooty air. Cupid, however, looks away from the torch over his shoulder and down to the left, with a brooding, sorrowful expression—regret for what he has done to so many humans, maybe. Behind him, sketchily indicated, is a London street along which an ill-matched couple can be seen walking away: the man tall and stick-thin, the woman grossly fat, like Jack Sprat and his wife.

Yes, Fred thinks: this is the little dark god who has scorched him—he can feel the wound blistered and smoldering still—twice mismatched, to two beautiful angry impossible women he can’t get out of his mind. To be unhappily in love with one woman is bad enough, but to be longing after two alternately is laughable. Roberto certainly would laugh.

Smarten up, he tells himself. Forget about them. Get on with your damn packing. He yanks out the jammed top drawer of the desk angrily, causing it to tilt downward and scatter its contents onto the floor: pencils, paper clips, old bus maps, pamphlets about tourist attractions. Among the avalanche of debris something falls with a heavier, more metallic sound. Fred bends to look and recognizes the keys to Rosemary’s house in Chelsea, which he thought he’d lost weeks ago.

The house is empty now, probably. He could go there this afternoon and reclaim his possessions, which he doesn’t want to lose—especially the book, which is annotated, and his Ragg sweater. Rosemary will never even know he’s been there, or miss anything. Her books are many and disordered, and her closet, being outside Mrs. Harris’ theater of operations, is always in chaos. Okay, let’s go. He jams the drawer back into the desk, and its former contents into the wastebasket, and sets out. At Notting Hill Gate, too impatient to walk, he descends into the tube station.

But as he sits on the Circle Line train being shaken toward South Kensington, its whining roar begins to sound a chorus of doubts. What if somebody is staying at Rosemary’s? What if the lock has been changed? What if one of the neighbors sees him and calls the police?
AMERICAN PROFESSOR HELD IN BURGLARY OF STAR
’
S CHELSEA HOME
.

As he stands in South Kensington Underground Station, still hesitating, a sign pointing the way
TO MUSEUMS
reminds Fred that he has been in London for five months without visiting the Victoria and Albert, so highly recommended by everyone as a repository of eighteenth-century furniture and artifacts. He decides to stop there first while he makes up his mind. If he doesn’t go on to Rosemary’s, at least he will have done something professionally useful.

Five minutes later he has passed from the warm sunny afternoon into the cool, cavernous galleries and halls of the V and A. They are almost deserted, maybe because of the weather outside. Thousands of decorative art objects lie unregarded in a shadowy gloom, through which here and there a dusty band of sunshine slants down from the tall Victorian Gothic windows to spotlight a carved medieval chest or a Georgian silver teapot. No such light strikes into Fred’s psyche: it remains uniformly clouded and chill. Everything before him is handsome, highly finished, the best of its kind; but he is unmoved. These great rooms full of national treasures don’t seem to him rich and complex and historic, but overcrowded, overdecorated—collections of too many expensive old things. He has, as Rosemary and her friends would have put it, gone off England. London especially oppresses him; it seems so crowded with architecture and furniture and tradition that there is no room to move. The city is weighted down with ghosts, haunted by its long history just as he is haunted by his short one: by the history of his affair with Rosemary and by her own past history.

These last weeks in London Fred has felt as lonely and shut out of life as he did his first month here. He has hardly spoken to any of the natives, except as a tourist might; he hasn’t seen a single one of the many people he met through Rosemary. Or, to be more accurate, he hasn’t seen them in the flesh. In the media they are everywhere: explaining the human body and international law on television; appearing in plays and films; giving their opinions about cultural events on the radio; being interviewed by newspapers; answering difficult questions with charm and erudition on quiz shows and current affairs programs. Whenever Fred opens a magazine one of them is telling him what to think about Constable or how best to cook asparagus or support nuclear disarmament. And if they aren’t quoted, they are referred to—most disagreeably, by an item in
Private Eye
noting that “Lady Rosily Raddled,” as it habitually calls her, has “dissolved her Yankee connection,” and making reference to a long list of other melted connections, some of them involving men Fred has met several times but never imagined that Rosemary had once slept with.

Of course he hadn’t thought that she had no past, Fred tells himself as he wanders disconsolate down a long gallery of late-Renaissance furnishings toward a looming pillared structure described on a placard as The Great Bed of Ware and said to have housed up to a dozen sleepers a night. But to be referred to in print as just one of a series—Fred clenches his teeth and focuses again on the Great Bed, associating it in his mind with Rosemary and her lovers. There is room here between these twisted columns for all those mentioned or hinted at in
Private Eye
, and more. And no doubt there were more. He’s only the most recent—by now, maybe not even that. Against his will he sees Rosemary, in her pale satin nightgown scattered with lace butterflies, sporting in the Great Bed with a dozen shadowy naked male figures. The legs, the arms, the cocks, the backsides—her tumbled pale-gold hair—the stained and tumbled bedclothes—the rebound of springs, the smell of sex . . .

To shake off this hallucination, Fred moves nearer and puts his hand on the unwrinkled brocade coverlet, receiving a shock: the Great Bed of Ware is as hard as stone.

But why should he be surprised? Functionally speaking this is no longer a bed. No one will ever sleep or fuck in it again. No one will sit in these high-backed oak chairs: their stringy crimson velvet seats, now faded to pink, are protected from contemporary rear ends by tarnished gilt cords. The engraved goblets in the glass cases will never again hold water or wine; the pewter plates will never be heaped with the roast beef of Old England.

Art museums are better. Paintings and sculptures continue to serve the purpose for which they were made: to be gazed at and admired, to interpret and shape the world. They live on, immortal, but all this sluff is functionally dead; no, worse, fixed in a kind of living death, like his passion for Rosemary Radley. There’s something futile, something hideous, about this immense Victorian junkshop full of expensive household things: all these chairs and dishes and cloths and knives and clocks, so many of them, too many of them, preserved forever in frozen uselessness, just as his passion for Rosemary and his love for Roo are uselessly preserved.

A revulsion from the thousands of undead objects that surround him on all sides seizes Fred, and he starts to walk, then to run toward the staircase and the exit. Outside the vast cocoa-colored mausoleum he takes deep breaths of a living air that smells of auto exhaust and cut grass. Okay, what shall he do now? Is it safe to rescue his clothes from Rosemary’s house, or should he abandon them to a V and A zombie existence?

If Rosemary were only in London—If only he’d found the damn key when she was still around—Yes, then he could have gone to the house whether she’d invited him or not, let himself in, and told her and showed her that he loved her, sworn he wasn’t tired of her. How could he be tired of Rosemary, for Christ’s sake?

If only he’d gone there sooner after their quarrel . . . Or, two weeks ago at the radio station, if only he’d been bolder, if he’d pushed his way into the studios behind some of those other people, found Rosemary, made her listen to him—Why has he become so slow, so cautious, so respectful of rules and conventions and public opinion; why has he become so—yes, that’s it—so goddamn English?

Look at him now: nearly thirty years old, nearly six arid a half feet tall, a professor at a major American university, standing dumbly in front of the V and A shifting from one foot to the other, too fucking chicken to go and get his own goddamn sweater back. For Christ’s sake, stop acting like some British twit, he tells himself, and begins to stride south toward Chelsea.

When Fred reaches Cheyne Square twenty minutes later, he understands his reluctance better. The house looks exactly, painfully the same; it is hard to believe that Rosemary—his real Rosemary, not the phony imitation of the radio station—won’t in a moment open the shiny lavender front door and hold up her heart-shaped face for his kiss. He feels deeply reluctant to enter the familiar rooms again, to pass through them as an intruder. If only it hadn’t all gone wrong he might now, today—A tight choked feeling fills his chest, as if he’d swallowed a wet balloon.

Fighting down the sensation, fixing his mind on the image of a gray sweater, Fred climbs the steps and rings the bell; he hears the two familiar musical notes of the chime within, but nothing more.