Foreign Affairs (12 page)

Vinnie laughs. “I remember thinking the same thing, years ago. Costume jewelry, I thought.”

“Yeh, right. I complained to the guide, said he must think we were suckers, charging extra for something like that. He got real nervous and huffy; he was kind of a dope anyhow. But I have to admit he was the exception. Most of the people I’ve met here, they wouldn’t mind that kind of talk. They don’t keep telling you how great they are, how they’ve got the biggest and best of everything. They kinda make fun of themselves, even; you can see that from the newspapers.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“Y’know, we’ve got a lot of boosters back in Tulsa. Smile, accentuate the positive, keep your eye on the doughnut, that kind of thing. It can get you down, ‘specially if you’re down already. Oral Roberts University, you ever hear of that?”

“No,” says Vinnie, who has but can’t remember why.

“Wal, it’s this college we have in Tulsa, founded by one of those TV preachers. Their idea is, if you’re a Jesus-fearing man or woman and go to church regular you’ll get ahead in life, win prizes, succeed in business, anything you want. It used to sound pretty harmless to me. You lose your job, you see the flip side of the pitch. If you aren’t producing, you’re some kind of sad Christ-forsaken weirdo. Hey, that reminds me. What I wanted to ask you in the first place.” Chuck lowers his spoon. “I got this idea from that book you lent me on the plane, about the American kid who goes back to England, where his grandfather is a duke or something. I forget the name.”

“Yeh. That’s right. Wal, it reminded me of my grandfather when I was a kid, when I was working on a ranch with him summers. He used to talk about how we were descended from some English lord, too.”

“Really.”

“I’m not kidding. Most of our ancestors back in England were just plain folks, he said, but there was one called Charles Mumpson, the same name as him and me, back around Revolutionary times, who was some kind of great lord. He lived on a big estate down in the southwestern part of the country and was a famous local character. Kind of a wise man. He didn’t sleep in his castle, my grandfather said; he stayed in a cave out in the woods. And he wore a special costume, sort of a long coat made from the fur of about a dozen different animals. He was called The Hermit of Southley, and people came from all over the countryside to see him.”

“Really,” Vinnie says again, but with a different intonation. For the first time she feels a professional interest in Chuck Mumpson.

“So anyway, I got the notion that while I’m here I should try and look up this guy and find out more about him and all our ancestors over here. Except I don’t know how to proceed. I went to the public library, but I couldn’t locate anything, I didn’t even know where to start. The trouble is, these dukes and knights and things have a lot of different names, sometimes three or four to a family. And there isn’t any place in that part of the country called Southley.” He grins, shrugs. “I tried to phone you, to get some help, but I must have taken down the number wrong. I got a laundry instead.”

“Mm.” Vinnie naturally doesn’t explain that she had deliberately altered one digit of her number. “Well, there are some standard places you might look,” she says. “There’s the Society of Genealogists, for instance.”

While Chuck writes down her suggestions, Vinnie thinks that his quest is also standard: the typical middlebrow, middleclass, nominally democratic American search for a connection with the British aristocracy—for “ancestors,” a family history, a coat of arms, a local habitation, and a noble name.

Conventional, tiresome. But the particular details of Chuck’s family legend are intriguing to a folklorist: the eccentric lord and local sage clothed in a patchwork of furs in his woodland cave. Mad deistic philosopher? Follower of Rousseau? Herb doctor? Wizard? Or even possibly, in the local folk imagination, the incarnation of some pagan god of the forest, part beast and part man? Half-formed wraiths of a short but rather interesting article stir in her mind. It also amuses her to think of Chuck as, in a debased and transatlantic form, the final incarnation of this classic folk figure—by coincidence, from the southwestern part of his own country and dressed in assorted animal skins.

When the bill arrives, Vinnie, as usual, insists upon paying her share. Some of her friends attribute this to feminist principles; but though Vinnie accepts their interpretation her policy well predates the women’s movement. Essentially, it reflects a deep dislike of being under obligation to anyone. Chuck protests that he owes her something anyhow for her advice; but she reminds him that he got her a ride to London on the Sun Tour bus, so they are now quits.

“Wal. All right.” Chuck crumples up Vinnie’s pound notes in his large red fist. “You know, you remind me of a teacher I had once in fourth grade. She was real nice. She . . .”

Vinnie listens to Chuck’s recollections without comment. It is her fate to remind almost everyone she meets of a teacher they had once.

“Anyhow. What I wanted to say is, it looks like I’m going to be in London a while longer. Maybe we could get together again sometime, have lunch.”

Vinnie declines tactfully; she’s awfully busy this week, she lies. But why doesn’t Chuck let her know how he gets on with his research? She gives him her telephone number—correctly this time—and also her address. If he really wants to find out anything, she adds, he’ll probably have to go to the town or village his ancestors lived in, once he discovers where it is.

“Sure, I could do that,” Chuck agrees. “I could rent a car, maybe, and drive down there.”

“Or you might be able to take a train. Hiring an automobile is frightfully expensive here, you know.”

“That’s okay. Money’s no problem. When Amalgamated threw me out, I got to admit, they threw a lot of stock after me.”

Money is no problem to Chuck Mumpson, Vinnie thinks as she boards the bus to Camden Town, having declined his offer to find her a taxi; and obviously time is no problem either, except in terms of oversupply. The problems are loneliness, boredom, anomie, and loss of self-esteem, somewhat disguised by a hearty manner which was probably at one time more congruous with his actual condition.

For a moment Vinnie considers adding a fifth problem, sexual frustration, to her list. It is suggested to her by the warm, determined way Chuck grasped her arm—or rather, the arm of her raincoat—just above the elbow as he guided her through Piccadilly Circus toward her bus stop. After all, he is a large, healthy, muscular man; and without those silly, rather vulgar cowboy clothes he would probably not look too bad in a bedroom. Possibly this was what he was, in a blurry way, trying to convey.

But on reflection Vinnie decides this is unlikely. Chuck Mumpson is so obviously a typical middle-American businessman, the sort of person who, if he needs what Kinsey et al. have unromantically called an “outlet”—when she hears the word Vinnie always thinks of an electrical wall socket—will simply purchase one. And Chuck probably already has purchased this wall socket several times, in the hardware and software markets of Soho, no doubt getting stinking drunk beforehand on each occasion as an excuse. (“I was bombed out—didn’t know what I was doing.”) Men of this type never think of anyone like Vinnie in connection with sex; they think of some “cute babe” or “hot little number”—ideally, a number under thirty. What Chuck was pressing for was sympathy, companionship, an understanding listener. It’s probably not very satisfying to talk to whores, and apart from them she is the only woman he knows in Britain.

This conclusion, though unflattering and even, in a very familiar way, irritating and depressing, also reassures Vinnie. There will be no need to fend off the advances of Chuck Mumpson; she only imagined there might be because she is used to thinking of friendship and sex as linked.

As related earlier, Vinnie has throughout her life slept mainly with men whose interest in her was casual and comradely rather than romantic. They seldom used the word “love” to her except in moments of passionate confusion; instead they told her that they were “very fond” of her and that she was great in bed and a real pal. (Possibly as a result, Vinnie detests the word “fond,” which always suggests to her its archaic or folk meaning of “foolish” or “silly.”)

In her youth Vinnie made the painful error of allowing herself to care seriously for some of these people. Against her better judgment, she even married one of them who was on the tearful rebound from a particularly aggravating beauty and, like a waterlogged tennis ball, had rolled into the nearest hole. Over the three subsequent years Vinnie had the experience of seeing her husband gradually regain his confidence and elasticity, begin to bounce about at parties, flirting and dancing with prettier women; hop briefly into the arms of one of his students; and eventually soar entirely beyond the boundaries of marriage, where he was caught and carried off by someone she had once thought of as a good friend.

After her divorce, Vinnie protected herself against emotional attachment to her occasional bed partners by declaring an extramural involvement of her own. She too was in love with someone else, she would hint, someone in another city—though unlike them she never went into details. This strategy was brilliantly successful. The more generous and sensitive of her lovers were relieved of the fear that Vinnie might take them too seriously, and suffer as a consequence; the less generous and sensitive were relieved of the fear that she might “make trouble.”

Moreover, as was perhaps necessary for the ploy to work, it wasn’t quite a lie. As she had done in early adolescence, Vinnie allowed herself to fix her romantic desires on men she hardly knew and seldom saw. These were not, as previously, film stars, but writers and critics whose work she had read, whom she had heard speak or even briefly met at the receptions that generally follow university readings or lectures. She had thus over the years enjoyed imaginary relationships with, among others, Daniel Aaron, M. H. Abrams, John Cheever, Robert Lowell, Arthur Mizener, Walker Percy, Mark Schorer, Wallace Stegner, Peter Taylor, Lionel Trilling, Robert Penn Warren, and Richard Wilbur. As this list shows, she rather preferred older men; and she insisted on intellectuals. When several members of a women’s group she belonged to in the early seventies confessed that they had passionate fantasies about their carpenter, their gardener, or the mechanic at the service station, Vinnie was astonished and a little repelled. What would be the point of going to bed with someone like that?

Vinnie’s fantasy affairs tended to be of brief duration, though under the influence of a brilliant new book or lecture she sometimes returned to an earlier passion. When, by coincidence, one or two of these distinguished people came to teach for a term at her own university and established cordial relations with Vinnie, she at once broke off her private affair with him. It wasn’t difficult; after all, seen at close range, this man was nothing extraordinary, not a patch on Daniel Aaron, M. H. Abrams, or whoever was center stage at the moment.

After the disastrous experience of her marriage, Vinnie always ended her real affairs whenever she found her current lover getting into her bedtime home movies, or when one of them began to use the word “love” casually, or to announce that he could really imagine getting seriously involved with her. No thanks, chum; I was caught that way once before, she would think to herself. Not that there was always a current lover. For long periods Vinnie’s only companions were the shades of Richard Wilbur, Robert Penn Warren, etc., who faithfully every evening appeared to admire and embrace her, commending her wit, charm, intelligence, scholarly achievement, and sexual inventiveness.

In all the years she has been coming to England, Vinnie has never found a lover there. Nor is there any sign of one appearing now. And perhaps that’s for the best, she thinks. Because really, isn’t it time? In the popular imagination, and (more importantly) in English literature, to which in early childhood Vinnie had given her deepest trust—and which for half a century has suggested to her what she might do, think, feel, desire, and become—women of her age seldom have any sexual or romantic life. If they do, it is either embarrassingly pathetic or vulgarly comic or both.

In the last year or so Vinnie had begun to think more and more often that what she does with her pals is inappropriate—unbecoming to her station on the railway line of life. The fact that at fifty-four she still had erotic impulses and indulged them with such abandon seemed to her almost shameful. It has been something of a relief for her to be away from home, and chaste; to be as it were on sabbatical from sex—one which might well develop into a long leave of absence or even an early retirement. She is therefore embarrassed and irritated at herself for having, even briefly, imagined Chuck Mumpson standing naked by her bed in Regent’s Park Road. She tells herself to act and feel her age, for heaven’s sake. She certainly doesn’t want someone like Chuck, she tells herself; she doesn’t even want her brilliant, handsome, charming imaginary lovers very much.

As the bus carries her north through the darkening city, away from the sensual attractions of Fortnum and Mason’s and the erotic throbbing noises and flashing colored lights of Piccadilly Circus, into the quiet dim elegant streets around Regent’s Park, Vinnie tells herself again that it is time, and past time, to leave what her mother used to refer to as All That behind. It is time to steer past the Scylla and Charybdis of elderly sexual farce and sexual tragedy into the wide, calm sunset sea of abstinence, where the tepid waters are never troubled by the burning heat and chill, the foamy backwash and weed-choked turbulence of passion.

4

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the hard-lit, almost empty lobby of a small theater in Hammersmith Fred Turner is waiting for Rosemary Radley, who is late as usual. Each time the doors fling open and let in some meaningless person and a gust of damp March evening, he sighs, like a gardener who sees his flowers blowing away in a storm; for each minute that passes is one less alone with her.