Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [111]
The problem is that if her friends find out that Vinnie is mixed up with Chuck, they will begin to mix her up with him, to redefine her. This mental process isn’t typically British, of course, but universal. In certain cases the confusion of identities affects the lovers themselves: transported by passion, they believe that their souls have merged, or were always identical. As an American friend of hers once put it at a high point of their brief relationship, crossing the town park in Saratoga Springs: “Sometimes I think we’re the same person.” “Oh, I know,” Vinnie had replied, equally deluded. (She hasn’t been affected by any such hallucination in this case—rather the reverse: when she is with Chuck she feels more than usually small, intellectual, and timid.)
Even more often, outsiders conflate the couple, and credit them with each other’s characteristics. If a radical takes up with a conservative, both will be perceived as more moderate politically, regardless of whether their views have in fact altered. The man or woman who becomes involved with a much younger person seems younger, the latter more mature.
Vinnie doesn’t want her London friends to confuse her with Chuck, to think of her as after all rather simple, vulgar, and amusing—a typical American. She wants them to accept her, to take her for granted. She wants to be, believes she has been considered up to now, one of them. Subject, not object; observer, not observed, she thinks, stopping by the wildfowl enclosure, which resembles a gigantic wire-mesh mosquito net held up here and there by long aluminum poles. She is content, and more than content, to be one of the smaller, less noticeable brownish birds she can see swimming or wading among the rustling marsh grasses beyond the netting, looking busy, pleased with themselves, and totally at home. She has no ambition—rather a horror—of resembling one of the outsize, peculiarly colored and feathered exotic waterfowl at whom a knot of cockneys are now pointing and giggling.
The brilliant birds, and their audience, remind Vinnie of Daphne Vane, and of the publisher’s party that is being given in less than an hour to launch her largely ghost-written memoirs. If Vinnie is to attend it in more appropriate dress and with clean hair, she must hurry. Luckily the party’s in Mayfair, and easily accessible by the 74 or Zoo bus, which stops outside her front door.
Daphne’s party, in an elegant converted Georgian house, is well under way when Vinnie arrives. For the first half-hour she experiences it as lively and thronged; then it begins to seem noisy and crowded. Stand-up events are always hard on her because of her height: most conversations take place a foot above her head, and when she wants to move she feels like a child trying to make its way to a familiar face through a mob of unseeing adults, all heavy rumps and sharp elbows. And today many of the faces that at first seem familiar turn out not to be acquaintances, but only actors she has seen at some time on stage or television—and, like most actors, uninterested in meeting anyone not in their own profession.
“Having a good time?” inquires an actual acquaintance, William Just, looking down at her.
“Oh yes. Well, perhaps not especially. The publisher’s party isn’t quite my favorite social occasion.”
“It isn’t a social occasion at all,” William says, reaching for a plate of hot hors d’oeuvres and offering some to Vinnie. “Almost everyone here was invited for some ulterior purpose, as usual. They’re connected with the firm, or with some paper, or they’re in the theater—though I hear Nigel’s very disappointed because