Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [22]
Turning off the High Street, Fred plunges into Hampstead Tube Station, buys a ticket to Notting Hill Gate, and enters an ancient iron lift decorated with advertising posters of half-naked young women. As it descends into the cold, damp shaft, so he descends, against his will, into naked memories.
October, over three years ago. He and Roo, whom he had known for three days, were lying in an abandoned apple orchard above her mother’s and stepfather’s farm, while their two horses tore at the long tough autumn grass in a nearby meadow.
“You know something?” Roo said, turning on her side so that sunlight and shadow flowed over her warm tanned skin as they do over ripe hayfields on a partly cloudy day. “It’s a lie that when your childhood fantasies come true it’s always a letdown.”
“Did you use to imagine a scene like this?” Fred did not move, but lay on his back looking past the interlaced limbs of the trees into a sky the burning blue of a gas flame.
“Oh yeh. Some day my prince will come, all that sappy stuff. From about age seven.”
“That young?”
“Sure. I never heard of the latency period till I got to college. I was always trying to get the little boys I knew to play doctor, but mostly they weren’t all that interested. Of course my ideas about what would happen after the prince came were pretty out of focus. I could visualize the scenery all right, and the way the guy would look riding out of the woods, just about exactly like you, only of course at first he was seven years old.”
“Was that when you learnt to ride, when you were seven?”
“No. Not seriously anyhow.” Roo sat up. Her thick dark-russet braid (the same hue, he had realized earlier, as her horse Shara’s coat) had come undone during their recent struggles. Now it spread down her back, uncoiling as if with an inner volition. “I was wild to, but I didn’t get much chance, except for a couple weeks in the summer at day camp. I didn’t really learn till I was thirteen, after Ma met Bernie. What about you?”
“I don’t know exactly. One of the first things I remember is being put up on a pony at my grandfather’s: it seemed miles high, and broad as a sofa. I was two or three, I guess.”
“Lucky bastard.” Roo made a fist and hit him playfully, but not lightly. “I would’ve given anything—I was crazy for horses when I was a kid, and so were most of my friends. We were a little nuts about it really.”
“Yeh, I knew girls like that. Funny social phenomenon. I always thought it must be a reaction against this mechanized world—women maybe mind that more than men do, even as kids.”
“Some women.” Roo shrugged. “Then there’s also the Freudian explanation, but personally I think that’s all crap. I never imagined I was making it with a horse; I thought I was a horse. It was the same for the rest of us, I’m positive. Y’know there were two kinds of little girls in my elementary school: the goody-two-shoes types who liked pretty clothes and baking cookies and playing with dolls; and then me and my friends who wanted to run around outside in old jeans and sneakers and get dirty and were crazy about horses. The way I figure it, it was sort of identification with energy and strength and freedom. Wanting to be a different kind of female than everybody wanted us to be.”
“I remember those good little girls,” Fred said. “They were no use for anything.” He pulled Roo down toward him. “Ahh.”
“Hey,” he said a little later. “You really mean you never went out riding with anyone before and ended up like this?”
“Oh, well.” Roo’s breath was warm against his face. “Sure, a couple of times.” She rolled back so that she could look at him. “But it wasn’t the same. A lot of guys I’ve known can’t ride, not worth a damn anyhow—it’s worse when they pretend they can. And the ones who could, they were mostly nice sexless dopes like my stepbrothers . . . I never brought anyone up here before; not to this place.” Her voice thickened, and their glances locked.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t think you’re so fucking special,” Roo said presently.