Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [128]
The one person Vinnie could safely complain to is Chuck Mumpson. He is outside the operations of the magnetic system, and nothing printed in any book can alter his view of her, for it does not depend on her professional reputation or the opinions of others. To Chuck, L. D. Zimmern is a no-account sorehead that nobody in their right mind would pay any attention to. “Who gives a hoot in hell what some creep says in a magazine?” as he once put it. Vinnie finds this ignorance of the ways of the academic world both wonderfully restful and very frustrating, just as she does many things about Chuck. It is this ambivalence, no doubt, that keeps her from fixing a date for her visit to Wiltshire.
Chuck has, for instance, an intellectual resilience she hadn’t suspected earlier. By now, for instance, he has not only managed to reconcile himself to the fact that the Hermit of South Leigh was an illiterate farm laborer, but to take as much pride in him as if he had been a learned earl. When she remarked on this, he generously attributed his change of heart to her. “The way you love me—it makes everything that happens okay,” he said. Vinnie opened her mouth to protest, and then shut it again. “I don’t think I love you,” she had been about to say. But she’s never said she did, and probably Chuck only meant “the way you make love to me.”
That she can accept; can affirm. Physical pleasure of the sort she’s known with Chuck does improve the entire world; it becomes a humming, spinning top in which all the discordant colors are blurred and whirled into a harmony that spirals out from that center. When she is away from him the spin slackens; the top totters, lurches, falls, showing its ugly pattern. Lying alone in bed under only a flowered sheet, these warm short nights of late June when darkness seems merely to blow over the city and the sky begins to flush with light at three-thirty A.M., she longs physically for Chuck. But then morning comes; the telephone gives its characteristic excited double ring, higher-pitched and more rapid than in America. June is a highly social season in London, and Vinnie’s appointment book keeps filling itself up with interesting parties, leaving no room for a trip to Wiltshire.
Besides, if/when she does go, what will it be like staying with Chuck, in his house? It’s ages since Vinnie shared a place with a man—or with anyone. And after all, it is partly by choice that she hasn’t done so. In the score of years since her marriage ended she probably could have found a housemate if she’d wanted one—if not a lover, then some good friend.
“Don’t you ever feel frightened living alone? Don’t you ever get lonely?” say Vinnie’s friends—or rather, her acquaintances, for any friend who asks these questions is instantly, though sometimes only temporarily, demoted to an acquaintance. “Oh no,” Vinnie always replies, concealing her irritation. Of course she feels frightened, of course she gets lonely—how stupid can they be? Obviously she only puts up with it because for her the alternative is worse.
Sometimes, in spite of her disclaimers, her acquaintances go on to suggest that it really isn’t safe for a small aging single woman to live alone, that she ought to get herself a large unfriendly dog. But Vinnie, who dislikes dogs and is unwilling to conform to the stereotype of the lonely old maid, has always refused to do so. Fido has remained her only companion. It has occurred to her that she treats him much as the traditional spinster does her pets: until two months ago he went almost everywhere with her, and was alternately indulged and scolded.
The truth is that Vinnie isn’t temperamentally suited to a shared life. The last time Chuck was in London, nice as that was (she recalls a particular moment when they were lying