Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [21]
“I don’t know. I haven’t heard from her,” he replies for the fourth time.
“Still haven’t heard, huh.” Behind this seemingly neutral comment and Debby’s neutral question Fred senses hostility. His friends do not know Roo very well or like her very much. On both occasions when they met they had made evident efforts to know and like her, but—as with London—these efforts had not succeeded.
“She was never really right for you,” Debby says, breaking a three-year silence. “We always saw that.”
“Yeh,” Joe agrees. “I mean, she was obviously a decent person. But she was always in overdrive.”
“Those photographs of hers. They were so kind of frantic and weird. And she seemed awful immature compared to you.” Roo, admittedly, is four years younger than Debby and three years younger than Joe and Fred.
“She just wasn’t on the same wavelength.”
“Evidently not.” Fred picks up that morning’s Guardian from the plastic imitation-oak coffee table.
“Listen. Don’t let it get you down,” Joe instructs him.
“Yeh, that’s easy to say,” he replies, turning the pages of the newspaper without seeing them.
“You made a mistake, that’s all,” Debby says. “Anybody can do that; even you.”
“Right,” Joe agrees.
“You know, I’m still really sorry it didn’t work out for you and Carissa,” his wife murmurs. “I’ve always liked her so much. And you know she’s really brilliant.”
“She has a fine mind,” Joe says.
“Mmf,” Fred utters, noticing that Carissa is described in the present tense, whereas Roo by implication not only has a mediocre or coarse mind but has ceased to exist.
“She’s a unique person,” Debby goes on.
A unique person is exactly what Carissa is not, Fred thinks. She is a conventional, frightened academic: intelligent, granted; but forever anxious to seem even more intelligent. Whereas Roo—
“Let’s not talk about it, all right?” he says abruptly.
“Oh, God. I’m sorry—”
“Hey, we didn’t mean—”
It takes Fred nearly ten minutes to convince his friends that he is not really offended, understands their concern, enjoyed dinner, and is looking forward to seeing them again.
As he strides up Flask Walk toward the Underground station through the cold, misty night, Fred’s mood is one of angry discomfort. When things have gone wrong it is no consolation to hear that your friends expected it all along and could have told you so if they hadn’t been so polite.
He doesn’t condemn the Vogelers for their opinion, since when he himself met Roo he also would have said they weren’t on the same wavelength, though in fact the signals she broadcast made him hum like a stereo amplifier. Everything about her seemed to send out an electrical pulse: not only the full round breasts under the orange SOLAR ENERGY T-shirt, but the wide liquid eyes, the flushed tanned skin, and the long braided cable of copper-brown hair from which wiry filaments escaped in every direction.
Their meeting took place during Fred’s second month at Corinth University, at a reception for a visiting lecturer. Roo attended because she had been assigned to take a photograph for the local paper, and Fred because of his admiration for the views of the speaker—which she emphatically did not share, and said so. Their initial impressions of each other were unfavorable, even scornful. Complete polarization was avoided by the discovery of a mutual interest: Roo had been out horseback riding earlier that afternoon, and hadn’t bothered to change; and when Fred learnt that her jodphurs and high waxed boots were functional rather than—or as well as—theatrical, his hostility relaxed. When Roo, with what he would soon come to recognize as her characteristic impulsiveness masked by a deadpan manner, said that if he wanted to go riding with her that weekend he could, he accepted enthusiastically. Roo, as she told him later, was slower to come around. “I was like blown away, I wanted to make it with you so much; but all the time my superego was saying Hey, whoa, wait a minute, this is an uptight woolly liberal professor