Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [105]
But he couldn’t have kept up the act; he’s no thespian. Anyhow the whole idea of it makes him sick. It wouldn’t have been love any longer, it would have been calculation, exploitation. Rosemary could have managed that maybe, if she’d wanted . . .
And now a smog of suspicion and jealousy descends on Fred, as if the saturated smoky-purple clouds that hang over the parking lot had suddenly descended, blotting out London. Maybe Rosemary was faking all along. Maybe she staged that quarrel with him after her party deliberately; maybe she’d just met or renewed a connection with someone she likes better. Maybe even now she is in the arms of this man, whispering to him in her soft voice, giving her intimate trilling laugh. Again the idea that he has fallen into a Henry James novel occurs to Fred; but now he casts Rosemary in a different role, as one of James’ beautiful, worldly, corrupt European villainesses.
What if it was all false, everything she’d ever said to him, everything he’d believed about her? What if, even, Debby was right, and Rosemary is really years older than she’d said? She doesn’t even look thirty-seven, but Nico had claimed that she’d had more than one face-lift, that all actresses did as a matter of course. Fred had assumed this was just fag spitefulness. But suppose it’s true, what difference does it make? Whatever her age, isn’t she still Rosemary, whom he loves? Who doesn’t love him, probably, who may never have loved him, who won’t even speak to him now; who lied to him, maybe, the whole fucking time.
What an asshole he is, standing here among the rubbish, like some lovelorn groupie waiting at the stage door for a star who isn’t even there. Fred scowls at the smashed packing case, at the debris blown against the wall: scraps of soiled paper and foil, an empty beer can, a length of twisted red yarn of the sort Roo used to tie round her hair.
And suddenly, for the first time in weeks, he sees Roo clearly in his mind. She is sitting naked on the edge of their unmade bed in the apartment in Corinth, her round tanned arms raised to gather the heavy weight of her dark chestnut hair. Then she separates it into three parts and, with an unconscious half smile of concentration, begins to plait them in and out to form a single thick, shining cable like the hawser of some sea-going ship. As the glossy rope lengthens, she pulls it forward and braids on till only about six inches of loose hair remain. Then she stretches a rubber band three times round the end of the plait, and over that a twist of scarlet wool. Finally, with a toss of her head, she flips the finished braid and its soft tail of coppery filaments back over her bare brown shoulder.
Fred feels a rush of longing; he thinks that, whatever her faults, Roo is incapable of calculated theatrical falsity. The seas will all go dry and the rocks melt with the sun, to quote one of her favorite folksongs, before he will ever hear her voice announcing that it is quite marvelous to be in some fucking radio station.
Next he feels a rush of guilt, remembering Roo’s letter, which is still lying desolate and unanswered on top of a pile of unread scholarly books in his flat in Notting Hill Gate. He’ll write her now, Fred thinks as he turns his back on the studio and starts home. This afternoon.
But the mails are slow; it will take ten days for a letter to reach Roo. Maybe he should phone; the hell with the cost. But after such a long silence—over four weeks since she wrote, he remembers with a groan—Roo could be furious with him again; she has a right to be. She could hang up on him, scream at him. Or there could be somebody with her when he calls, some other guy. She has a right to that too, damn it. No. He’ll send a telegram.
9
* * *
I’ll tell you the truth,
Don’t think I’m lying:
I have to run backwards
To keep from flying.
Old rhyme
AT the London Zoo, Vinnie