Foreign Affairs (7 page)

The closing theme of the program comes on; the faces of its hero and heroine are frozen between a background of lush Edwardian architecture and a foreground of television credits.

“Well,” Fred says, rising. “I guess I’d better—”

“Hey, don’t go yet,” Joe snuffles.

“Stay and tell us some news. Uh, how is Ruth?” Debby or her husband ask this question at weekly intervals, alternating as if by prearrangement.

“I don’t know. I haven’t heard from her,” he replies for the fourth time.

“Still haven’t heard, huh.” Behind this seemingly neutral comment and Debby’s neutral question Fred senses hostility. His friends do not know Roo very well or like her very much. On both occasions when they met they had made evident efforts to know and like her, but—as with London—these efforts had not succeeded.

“She was never really right for you,” Debby says, breaking a three-year silence. “We always saw that.”

“Yeh,” Joe agrees. “I mean, she was obviously a decent person. But she was always in overdrive.”

“Those photographs of hers. They were so kind of frantic and weird. And she seemed awful immature compared to you.” Roo, admittedly, is four years younger than Debby and three years younger than Joe and Fred.

“She just wasn’t on the same wavelength.”

“Evidently not.” Fred picks up that morning’s
Guardian
from the plastic imitation-oak coffee table.

“Listen. Don’t let it get you down,” Joe instructs him.

“Yeh, that’s easy to say,” he replies, turning the pages of the newspaper without seeing them.

“You made a mistake, that’s all,” Debby says. “Anybody can do that; even you.”

“Right,” Joe agrees.

“You know, I’m still really sorry it didn’t work out for you and Carissa,” his wife murmurs. “I’ve always liked her so much. And you know she’s really brilliant.”

“She has a fine mind,” Joe says.

“Mmf,” Fred utters, noticing that Carissa is described in the present tense, whereas Roo by implication not only has a mediocre or coarse mind but has ceased to exist.

“She’s a unique person,” Debby goes on.

A unique person is exactly what Carissa is not, Fred thinks. She is a conventional, frightened academic: intelligent, granted; but forever anxious to seem even more intelligent. Whereas Roo—

“Let’s not talk about it, all right?” he says abruptly.

“Oh, God. I’m sorry—”

“Hey, we didn’t mean—”

It takes Fred nearly ten minutes to convince his friends that he is not really offended, understands their concern, enjoyed dinner, and is looking forward to seeing them again.

As he strides up Flask Walk toward the Underground station through the cold, misty night, Fred’s mood is one of angry discomfort. When things have gone wrong it is no consolation to hear that your friends expected it all along and could have told you so if they hadn’t been so polite.

He doesn’t condemn the Vogelers for their opinion, since when he himself met Roo he also would have said they weren’t on the same wavelength, though in fact the signals she broadcast made him hum like a stereo amplifier. Everything about her seemed to send out an electrical pulse: not only the full round breasts under the orange
SOLAR ENERGY
T-shirt, but the wide liquid eyes, the flushed tanned skin, and the long braided cable of copper-brown hair from which wiry filaments escaped in every direction.

Their meeting took place during Fred’s second month at Corinth University, at a reception for a visiting lecturer. Roo attended because she had been assigned to take a photograph for the local paper, and Fred because of his admiration for the views of the speaker—which she emphatically did not share, and said so. Their initial impressions of each other were unfavorable, even scornful. Complete polarization was avoided by the discovery of a mutual interest: Roo had been out horseback riding earlier that afternoon, and hadn’t bothered to change; and when Fred learnt that her jodphurs and high waxed boots were functional rather than—or as well as—theatrical, his hostility relaxed. When Roo, with what he would soon come to recognize as her characteristic impulsiveness masked by a deadpan manner, said that if he wanted to go riding with her that weekend he could, he accepted enthusiastically. Roo, as she told him later, was slower to come around. “I was like blown away, I wanted to make it with you so much; but all the time my superego was saying Hey, whoa, wait a minute, this is an uptight woolly liberal professor type, probably a real pig in disguise; all you’ll get from him is grief, baby.”

Turning off the High Street, Fred plunges into Hampstead Tube Station, buys a ticket to Notting Hill Gate, and enters an ancient iron lift decorated with advertising posters of half-naked young women. As it descends into the cold, damp shaft, so he descends, against his will, into naked memories.

October, over three years ago. He and Roo, whom he had known for three days, were lying in an abandoned apple orchard above her mother’s and stepfather’s farm, while their two horses tore at the long tough autumn grass in a nearby meadow.

“You know something?” Roo said, turning on her side so that sunlight and shadow flowed over her warm tanned skin as they do over ripe hayfields on a partly cloudy day. “It’s a lie that when your childhood fantasies come true it’s always a letdown.”

“Did you use to imagine a scene like this?” Fred did not move, but lay on his back looking past the interlaced limbs of the trees into a sky the burning blue of a gas flame.

“Oh yeh. Some day my prince will come, all that sappy stuff. From about age seven.”

“That young?”

“Sure. I never heard of the latency period till I got to college. I was always trying to get the little boys I knew to play doctor, but mostly they weren’t all that interested. Of course my ideas about what would happen after the prince came were pretty out of focus. I could visualize the scenery all right, and the way the guy would look riding out of the woods, just about exactly like you, only of course at first he was seven years old.”

“Was that when you learnt to ride, when you were seven?”

“No. Not seriously anyhow.” Roo sat up. Her thick dark-russet braid (the same hue, he had realized earlier, as her horse Shara’s coat) had come undone during their recent struggles. Now it spread down her back, uncoiling as if with an inner volition. “I was wild to, but I didn’t get much chance, except for a couple weeks in the summer at day camp. I didn’t really learn till I was thirteen, after Ma met Bernie. What about you?”

“I don’t know exactly. One of the first things I remember is being put up on a pony at my grandfather’s: it seemed miles high, and broad as a sofa. I was two or three, I guess.”

“Lucky bastard.” Roo made a fist and hit him playfully, but not lightly. “I would’ve given anything—I was crazy for horses when I was a kid, and so were most of my friends. We were a little nuts about it really.”

“Yeh, I knew girls like that. Funny social phenomenon. I always thought it must be a reaction against this mechanized world—women maybe mind that more than men do, even as kids.”

“Some women.” Roo shrugged. “Then there’s also the Freudian explanation, but personally I think that’s all crap. I never imagined I was making it with a horse; I thought I
was
a horse. It was the same for the rest of us, I’m positive. Y’know there were two kinds of little girls in my elementary school: the goody-two-shoes types who liked pretty clothes and baking cookies and playing with dolls; and then me and my friends who wanted to run around outside in old jeans and sneakers and get dirty and were crazy about horses. The way I figure it, it was sort of identification with energy and strength and freedom. Wanting to be a different kind of female than everybody wanted us to be.”

“I remember those good little girls,” Fred said. “They were no use for anything.” He pulled Roo down toward him. “Ahh.”

“Hey,” he said a little later. “You really mean you never went out riding with anyone before and ended up like this?”

“Oh, well.” Roo’s breath was warm against his face. “Sure, a couple of times.” She rolled back so that she could look at him. “But it wasn’t the same. A lot of guys I’ve known can’t ride, not worth a damn anyhow—it’s worse when they pretend they can. And the ones who could, they were mostly nice sexless dopes like my stepbrothers . . . I never brought anyone up here before; not to this place.” Her voice thickened, and their glances locked.

“Thank you.”

“Don’t think you’re so fucking special,” Roo said presently. “I mean, you can’t keep waiting forever for some goddamn prince. I was getting old, you know, and I just figured it was about time.”

“Yeh. Twenty-two.” Fred stroked her face; but Roo turned away from him, propping her chin on one hand and gazing downhill through the trees toward the horses.

“Besides, there was Shara. You know, like I told you, I wanted to get the fuck out of the Boston area last spring because my boss on the paper was such a chauvinist shit, and the relationship I was in turned into a real bummer. I didn’t have to come home, though. I could’ve gone to New York or the West Coast—I had some decent leads on jobs. But I wanted to be with Shara. I figure this might be her last good year—she’s nearly as old as I am, and after twenty you never know with a horse. She can still work up a fair speed, but she gets winded. Of course, I could ride one of the other horses, but it wouldn’t be the same. In my fantasies I was always on Shara, and that’s how I wanted it to be, you know? And it’s October already. In a couple of weeks, maybe sooner, it’ll be too cold to fuck outdoors. So in a way it was now or never.” Roo gave an uneven laugh. “So don’t think you’re so special,” she repeated.

But Fred did think so, and rejoiced in it.

In other quarters the rejoicing was less. As he paces the bare, freezing, nearly empty London Underground platform Fred hears again in his mind the recent remarks of Joe and Debby, and of other friends and relatives, some of whom hadn’t hesitated to congratulate him on the breakup of his marriage. Most of these people had never been very enthusiastic about Roo from the start. She was not the sort of girl/woman they had expected Fred to become serious about, and their congratulations had been manifested in the conventional form of faint and damning praise.

By Fred’s father, for instance: “Well, she’s certainly good-looking. And she seems like a very warm-hearted kind of girl. Those photographs she took in the Mexican slums show a lot of feeling for her subject; you know what she thinks, all right.” The photographs were of Mexicans in an upstate New York farmworker’s camp, but Fred had given up trying to correct this error, typical of his father, who prefers to locate all social disagreeableness at the greatest possible mental distance.

Or as Joe and Debby had put it: “Pretty far out, those disco pictures of Ruth’s. You can see she really knows her stuff technically.” “She’s obviously a high-energy kind of person.” “That was a really unusual dress she was wearing, with the red embroidery and all those mirrors, Albanian or whatever it was.” “She reminds me of some of my students from New York. We were suprised she grew up in a place like Corinth.”

Translation: Roo is too emotional, too political, too arty, too noisy, and too Jewish. As it happens, Joe himself is Jewish, but from a very different tradition: Princeton-trained, scholarly, retiring.

Many of Fred’s graduate school friends, and most of his relatives, are obviously relieved that Roo is, as one of them put it, “out of the picture.” They assume or at least hope that she won’t reenter it, but will remain in the more far-out and slummy world of her own photographs. Fred’s mother, on the other hand, very much wants them to get back together. Maybe for sentimental and conventional reasons: he can remember her saying in another context, with a placid pride, “You know, darling, there’s never been a divorce in my family.” But it is not only that she wishes to preserve this record; his mother had taken to Roo from the start, though they could hardly be less alike: Roo so arty, noisy, etc., and Emily Turner such a lady, her tastes so elegant, her voice so well modulated.

Roo, though more grudgingly, also took to his mother. “I don’t care if it’s raining, I want to go for a walk,” she said as soon as they were alone on the first afternoon of her first visit to his family. “It really gets to me after a while, this whole uptight place. . . . Well, your mother’s okay. She had to put us in separate rooms, so it’d look respectable, but I notice she gave us ones with a connecting bath. And she sure is great-looking; almost as great-looking as you.” Roo leant warmly against Fred. “I bet she’s had a lot of adventures.”

“How do you mean, adventures?” Fred stopped caressing Roo’s left breast.

“Like, you know: love affairs and stuff. Well, maybe not a
lot
,” Roo qualified, registering his expression. “But enough to make her life interesting. I mean, hell, you’d have to do something to stay awake in a place like this.”

“You’ve got her all wrong,” Fred said. For the first time he considered his mother as a possible adulteress, and recognized that her qualifications for this role were excellent. His memory, without any prompting, even suggested possible partners. There was a visiting professor in History she used to dance with at parties; his father always made sour cracks about him. And of course the old guy that ran the riding stable—it was a family joke how he had a crush on her. And once when he was little (four? five?) he suddenly remembers, there was a man sitting in their dining-room fixing a toaster, and Freddy hates him, and his mother, in a red sweater, is standing too near the man, and Freddy hates her too—what was all that about? No, certainly not; his parents are very happy together. “Not that I don’t think she could have, if she’s ever wanted to, but—”

“Okay, okay. Forget I said it. She’s your mother, so you want her to be like one of those Virgin Mary statues in your church. Maybe she is, how should I know?”

“And you’ve got the wrong set of stereotypes,” he said, hugging her. “There are no Virgin Mary statues in our church; it’s all very abstract, very Reformation. Come on, get your coat, I’ll show you.”