Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [102]
“Oh, come on. She is not.” He laughs angrily.
“I read it in the Sunday Times.”
“So what; that doesn’t make it true,” Fred says, recalling how often his love had complained of the disgusting lies printed about her and other actors. “Screw them.”
“All right, don’t believe it.” Debby’s tone combines annoyance and condescension. “No, no Jakie! You don’t really want that.” She stoops and pries from her baby’s fingers a half-squashed rubber ball with a cracked and faded Union Jack pattern. “Nasty, dirty thing. Joe, would you hold onto him a moment?” Debby transfers the struggling baby’s hand to his father, then hurls the ball away up the weedy slope. Jakie stares after it, then lets out a surprised howl.
“Look, Jakie, look!” his father cries, trying to distract him. “See the, uh, boat.” He points to a painted dinghy moored on the farther shore. “Oh, hell.”
The squashed rubber ball has reemerged from the weeds; it bounces across the path ahead of them and into the sliding frog-green water of the canal, where it joins a flotilla of debris that includes a plastic bleach bottle, half an orange, and bits of waterlogged wood and straw. “No, Jakie!” He holds the straining, screaming child back. “Bad germs. All gone now.”
“You don’t want that dirty old ball,” Debby insists—an obvious lie, Fred thinks. “Stop that right now!” The baby, in a paroxysm of frustrated desire, is kicking and screaming at the top of his lungs; his face is distorted into a red gargoyle mask.
“Oh, shit,” Joe sighs. “Come on now, Jakie. Up you go.” He hoists the struggling, howling gnome to his shoulder. “A-one, a-two.” Joe begins to bounce his son in what Fred supposes is meant to be a soothing manner, at the same time striding rapidly down the towpath, followed by Debby and the stroller. “A-one, a-two. That’s-a-baby.”
“Listen, I’m sorry if what I said annoyed you,” Debby remarks, as they outdistance the floating ball and Jakie’s screams diminish to a fretful gurgle.
“That’s all right,” says Fred, feeling magnanimously sorry for the Vogelers, parents of a retarded infant troll.
“It’s just like, I don’t like to see you so down over something like this.”
“Like okay,” Fred says. “It’ll pass,” he adds, thinking that with luck he and his love will be together again by this time tomorrow.
“Sure it will,” Joe tells him. “Rosemary Radley’s not what you really want anyhow.”
“Once you’re back in America, I bet you’ll read the whole experience a lot differently,” says his wife.
“Mh,” Fred mutters; it has just occurred to him that to the Vogelers his passion for Rosemary is more or less exactly equivalent to Jakie’s passion for an old rubber ball.
“That’s right,” Debby agrees. “You need a woman with some real intellectual substance. That’s what I’ve always thought,” she continues, mistaking Fred’s silence for receptivity. “Someone you can really communicate with on your own level. Share your ideas with.”
“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.