Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [104]
“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,