Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [129]
And it isn’t only Chuck who makes her feel this way. Whenever she stays with friends, however fond she is of them, she is uncomfortable. So many things about sharing a house bother her: for instance, the unending necessity for politeness, both positive and negative. The Please and Thank You and Excuse Me and Would You Mind If; the daylong restraint of the natural impulse to yawn, to sigh, to scratch her head or pass wind or take off her shoes. Then, there is the sense of being constantly, even if benevolently, observed, making it impossible to do anything odd or impulsive—go for a walk in the rain before breakfast, for instance, or get up at two A.M. to make herself a cup of cocoa and read Trollope—without provoking anxious inquiry. “Vinnie? What are you doing down there? Are you all right?”
And then there is the noise and clutter that’s involved in having someone else always around, walking from room to room, opening and shutting doors, turning on the radio, the television, the record player, the stove, and the shower. Having to negotiate with this someone before you did the simplest thing: having to agree with them about when and where and what to eat, when to sleep, when to bathe, what film to see, where to go on holiday, whom to invite to dinner. Having to ask permission, as it were, to see her friends or hang a picture or buy a plant; having to inform someone every single damn time she felt like taking any action whatsoever.
It had been that way with her husband almost from the start. And even with Chuck, who is wonderfully easygoing, sharing a flat was like playing a permanent game of Grandmother’s Steps. “I think I’m going to have a bath now and go to bed.” “Okay, honey.” “I’m going up to the shops now.” “Okay, honey.” And if you didn’t remember to ask permission before you did anything: “Hey, honey, where were you? You just disappeared—I was kinda worried.” (Go back: you forgot to say “May I?”) And of course the whole thing was reciprocal, so that when whoever you were living with wanted to go to the store, take a bath, move a piece of furniture, or any of a hundred other things, you had to listen to them asking you for your permission.
And then finally, after you had begun to tolerate living like this, because you’d begun loving the other person—after you’d learned even to like it, maybe, and depend on it—they walked out on you. No thanks, Vinnie thinks.
The trouble is, it’s too late to say No thanks. She will go to Wiltshire soon because she wants to go there; she won’t be able to stop herself, because somehow by accident Chuck Mumpson, an unemployed sanitary engineer from Tulsa, Oklahoma, has got into her life in such a way that she cares about him and depends on him to a degree she would be embarrassed to admit to her London friends, and even more to her American ones.
And when she goes down to Wiltshire it will be worse. There is a terrible danger that she will become wholly entangled, caught. Vinnie imagines the English countryside in June—in itself a seduction. Then she imagines walking with Chuck between flowering hedgerows, lying beside him in some grassy flower-strewn glade in the woods . . . All her caution and reservations will give way; she will be lost. She will feel more and more for him, and the more she feels the worse it will be when he comes to his senses later.
Vinnie knows, she has taught herself to know in over thirty years of loss and disappointment, that no man will ever really care for her. It is her belief, almost in an odd way her pride, that she has never been loved in the serious sense of the word. Her husband had once said he loved her, of course, but events soon proved this a delusion. The few other men who claimed to do so had made the assertion when carried away by desire, telling her then, and only then,