Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [23]
“Yeh. Twenty-two.” Fred stroked her face; but Roo turned away from him, propping her chin on one hand and gazing downhill through the trees toward the horses.
“Besides, there was Shara. You know, like I told you, I wanted to get the fuck out of the Boston area last spring because my boss on the paper was such a chauvinist shit, and the relationship I was in turned into a real bummer. I didn’t have to come home, though. I could’ve gone to New York or the West Coast—I had some decent leads on jobs. But I wanted to be with Shara. I figure this might be her last good year—she’s nearly as old as I am, and after twenty you never know with a horse. She can still work up a fair speed, but she gets winded. Of course, I could ride one of the other horses, but it wouldn’t be the same. In my fantasies I was always on Shara, and that’s how I wanted it to be, you know? And it’s October already. In a couple of weeks, maybe sooner, it’ll be too cold to fuck outdoors. So in a way it was now or never.” Roo gave an uneven laugh. “So don’t think you’re so special,” she repeated.
But Fred did think so, and rejoiced in it.
In other quarters the rejoicing was less. As he paces the bare, freezing, nearly empty London Underground platform Fred hears again in his mind the recent remarks of Joe and Debby, and of other friends and relatives, some of whom hadn’t hesitated to congratulate him on the breakup of his marriage. Most of these people had never been very enthusiastic about Roo from the start. She was not the sort of girl/woman they had expected Fred to become serious about, and their congratulations had been manifested in the conventional form of faint and damning praise.
By Fred’s father, for instance: “Well, she’s certainly good-looking. And she seems like a very warm-hearted kind of girl. Those photographs she took in the Mexican slums show a lot of feeling for her subject; you know what she thinks, all right.” The photographs were of Mexicans in an upstate New York farmworker’s camp, but Fred had given up trying to correct this error, typical of his father, who prefers to locate all social disagreeableness at the greatest possible mental distance.
Or as Joe and Debby had put it: “Pretty far out, those disco pictures of Ruth’s. You can see she really knows her stuff technically.” “She’s obviously a high-energy kind of person.” “That was a really unusual dress she was wearing, with the red embroidery and all those mirrors, Albanian or whatever it was.” “She reminds me of some of my students from New York. We were suprised she grew up in a place like Corinth.”
Translation: Roo is too emotional, too political, too arty, too noisy, and too Jewish. As it happens, Joe himself is Jewish, but from a very different tradition: Princeton-trained, scholarly, retiring.
Many of Fred’s graduate school friends, and most of his relatives, are obviously relieved that Roo is, as one of them put it, “out of the picture.” They assume or at least hope that she won’t reenter it, but will remain in the more far-out and slummy world of her own photographs. Fred’s mother, on the other hand, very much wants them to get back together. Maybe for sentimental and conventional reasons: he can remember her saying in another context, with a placid pride, “You know, darling, there’s never been a divorce in my family.” But it is not only that she wishes to preserve this record; his mother had taken to Roo from the start, though they could hardly be less alike: Roo so arty, noisy, etc., and Emily Turner such a lady, her tastes so elegant, her voice so well modulated.
Roo, though more grudgingly, also took to his mother. “I don’t care if it’s raining, I want to go for a walk,” she said as soon as they were alone on the first afternoon of her first visit to his family. “It really gets to me after a while, this whole uptight place. . . . Well, your mother’s okay. She had to put us in separate rooms, so it’d look respectable, but I notice