Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [25]
As their plans progressed it became clear that he had been cast in another of her youthful fantasies: the Perfect Wedding. Sunlight on the lawn, massed bouquets of flowers, Mozart and Bartók, strawberries, homemade wedding cake and elderflower champagne. Romantic, but still a radical feminist. Roo had, for instance, refused to take his name; nor would she remain Ruth Zimmern. Her relations with her father, L. D. Zimmern, an English professor and critic of some reputation in New York, were friendly; but still, why should any feminist go through life with a patronymic, particularly that of a pater who had walked out on his familias when Roo was a small child? Instead, she used the occasion of her marriage to become legally Ruth March. The new surname was chosen because it was the month of her birth; and also in tribute to the favorite book of her childhood, Little Women, with whose heroine Jo March she had deeply identified. (She was determined that if they had children, the boys would take his ancestral surname and the girls her new one, establishing a matrilineal line of descent.)
Just as Fred is beginning to wonder if the Northern—or as the London papers call it, the Misery—Line has stopped running, a train arrives. He gets into it, is carried by slow stages to Tottenham Court Road station, and makes his way through a series of cold tiled sewerlike tunnels plastered with posters advertising cultural attractions available in London in February. He pays them no heed. Because of the desperate condition of his finances he cannot afford to go to any of these concerts, plays, films, exhibitions, or sporting events; nor can he afford to travel anywhere outside of London. Last fall when he and Roo were planning their trip together, counting on his study leave, both their savings, and the sublet of their apartment, it seemed as if time were the only barrier to their plans for exploring London, and beyond: Oxford, Cambridge; Cornwall, Wales, Scotland; Ireland; the Continent. He wanted to see everything then, to travel forever; he felt that forever was hardly long enough for him and Roo. Now, even if he had the funds, he lacks the spirit to explore Notting Hill Gate.
Roo, for instance, wanted to go to Lapland in June to photograph the midnight sun, the glaciers, the Northern Lights, the reindeer—the whole landscape, she explained, of Andersen’s “Snow Queen.” But there is no point in thinking about Roo, Fred tells himself as he waits on the platform for a westbound train. She cares nothing for him and never did; she has insulted him and probably betrayed him and said she never wants to see him again. And he doesn’t want to see her again; how could he, after what has happened?
But in spite of this he can see her now: her dark eyes wide, her hair electrically springy, talking about the green ice of the glaciers, the mountain flowers—and then, even then, Roo was destroying him, photographing and possibly, probably, fucking—you couldn’t use a more polite word—both of those— And what made it worse, at the exact same time she was photographing and fucking him. She was even more full of energy those last, unseasonably warm November weeks, even more beautiful, alight with joy because she was about to have her first one-woman exhibition in Corinth and because (she thought) she was going with him to London.
Her show, Roo had decided, would be called “Natural Forms” and would include mostly pictures taken in Hopkins County, some of them for her newspaper. She claimed afterward that she had offered to let him see the prints before they were framed, and that he hadn’t taken her up on it. As Fred recalled it, Roo had suggested it would be better if he saw the show as a whole.