Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [110]
In over forty years Vinnie has held a lot of losing tickets. But when she’s with Chuck she feels like one of those lottery winners who are occasionally pictured in the newspapers grinning dizzily, astounded at their own luck. She has had this experience before, but she never expected to have it again. Even though it has happened four times, she hardly believes it.
Her disbelief, Vinnie realizes, is the consequence not only of English literature but of contemporary culture. The media convention is that people like Chuck and Vinnie—especially Vinnie—don’t enjoy sex very much or experience it very often. This convention may date from an earlier era, when most women were physically worn out, if not dead, at fifty. Or it may reflect the distaste many people seem to feel for the idea of their parents as lovers. Superego figures are supposed to be dignified and disembodied; above all that.
Of course, elderly couples can now and then be seen hugging or kissing in a friendly manner. The public regards this indulgently, as visitors to the Zoo do the two damp-stained polar bears across the way from Vinnie, who are now nuzzling each other with a playful, clumsy affection. Anything more serious on their part, however, and most spectators would sidle off embarrassed, dragging their children with them, though perhaps with a prurient backward glance. To imagine these bears—or Chuck and Vinnie—really going at it would cause mental discomfort. In books, plays, films, advertisements, only the young and beautiful are portrayed as making love. That the relatively old and plain do so too, often with passion, is a well-kept secret.
Now that Chuck has been gone nearly a week, Vinnie misses him acutely. She misses the way he strokes her back and behind, remembering all the right places; the slow, delicious way he licks her breasts, first one and then the other; the size, shape, and color of his most private part, and its amazing motility—it can, uniquely in Vinnie’s experience, nod or shake its head in reply to a question. Remembering all this, and more, as she sits on the bench, she wants him back so much that it is acutely painful. On the other hand, his presence creates a difficult social dilemma.
For the sake of her London reputation, Vinnie believes, she would do best to remain, or at least seem, romantically uninvolved. In Edwin’s set—among people like Rosemary Radley and Posy Billings—occasional love affairs are forgiven. But her social world overlaps Edwin’s only slightly. Most of her English friends are rather old-fashioned in their views: even if they approved of Chuck, they would look askance at adultery. In their opinion, casual affairs are perhaps all very well for actors, students, secretaries, and people like that; but a woman of Vinnie’s age and professional reputation, if not celibate, ought to be married—or at least permanently living with another respectable educated person.
Vinnie has no regrets about having taken Chuck into her bed—much the reverse—but she doesn’t want anyone to find out that he’s been there. Unfortunately, since they became lovers Chuck’s public manner toward her has altered. He has developed a way of looking at her, a way of taking her arm, that—agreeable though they may be—are a dead giveaway, or would certainly have become so if he had stayed in London much longer. When he returns next weekend the public danger as well as the private pleasure will be renewed. Vinnie can hardly ask him to behave more formally toward her when other people are around: that would involve uncomfortable explanations of her motives, or even more uncomfortable lies. And to prevent him from meeting anyone she knows will be inconvenient—maybe impossible. At the same time, she can’t go around explaining to all her acquaintances that in spite of appearances, she isn’t sleeping with Chuck Mumpson, especially when it is no longer true.
Vinnie rises from her bench and walks on, as if her contemplation