Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [20]
“Nearly eight,” Debby says Joe unfolds his long legs and goes to turn on the rented television set that has been installed in the pointed end of the pie-shaped sitting room.
As they move their chairs round and wait with the sound off for this week’s episode of a BBC serial based on a James novel, Fred considers putting forth his own ideas about tourism, but decides against it, realizing that his most important point doesn’t apply to the Vogelers, neither of whom—as their juxtaposition on the ugly sofa demonstrates—is deprived of the sense of touch.
Joe turns up the sound, and a minor-key theme announces the start of the program. Fred, who has missed the earlier episodes, watches with less than his whole attention. Gloomily, he compares the Vogelers’ situation with his own. They have each other and their baby, and apparently they are getting some writing done, whereas his work on John Gay in the British Museum (now referred to by Roo as the BM or Bowel Movement) is going very badly.
Fred is active, energetic, impatient of confinement. When he’s in a library he likes to range through the stacks finding the books he wants, and coming across others he hadn’t known about. In the BM he is forbidden to enter the stacks; he can’t always get what he wants, and he can never get what he doesn’t know he needs. Often he has to wait up to four hours for the constipated digestive system of the ancient library to disgorge a pathetic few of the volumes whose numbers he has copied from the complex, unwieldy catalogue. And even when they arrive all is far from well. Fred is used to working in a study of his own, away from noise and distraction. Now he is surrounded by other readers, many of them eccentric or even possibly insane, to judge by their appearance and mannerisms—filling dusty volumes with multicolored paper slips, tapping with their fingers or feet, mumbling to themselves, conversing in nervous whispers, coughing and blowing their noses in a contagious way.
He also likes to spread out at work, and to move around; at home his notes covered two tables and a bed in the spare room, and books lay open on the carpet. In the BM his tall, muscular frame is cramped into a chair at a narrow section of desk between two other scholars or lunatics and their encroaching heaps of volumes, in an ill-ventilated hall full of identical radiating seats constructed on the same plan as the model prisons designed by Victorian moral philosophers.
Fred is convinced that the BM is having a baleful effect on his work. In order to write decently about John Gay he must (to quote his subject) “take the road.” He must be able to “rove like the bee,” to bring together not only literary criticism and dramatic history but folklore, musicology, and the annals of eighteenth-century crime. Crouched over whatever books he has managed to get that day, in this huge stuffy scholarly prison, it is no wonder the sentences he strains to produce are cramped and heavy. Again and again he rises to consult the catalogue unnecessarily, or to pace about the room. Glimpses of those habitual readers he now knows by sight, or in a few cases is acquainted with, depress him further. Often either Joe or Debby Vogeler is there, steadily grinding away; they went through graduate school together and have a scrupulously egalitarian partnership, sharing the care of little Jakie. The Vogelers are untroubled by working conditions in the Bowel Movement. As he passes, whichever one of them is present is apt to glance up and smile rather patronizingly. Too bad Fred never learnt to concentrate, he can sense them thinking.
The closing theme of the program comes on; the faces of its hero and heroine are frozen between a background of lush Edwardian architecture and a foreground of television credits.
“Well,” Fred says, rising. “I guess I’d better—”
“Hey, don’t go yet,” Joe snuffles.
“Stay and tell us some news. Uh, how is Ruth?” Debby