Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [27]
When he protested, using phrases like “good taste,” Roo started screaming at him. “Yeh, well you know what that is, baby, that’s a pile of chauvinist shit. What about all the male painters and sculptors that’ve been exploiting women’s bodies for thousands of years—and photographers too, posing women to look like fruit or sand-dunes or teacups? A room full of breasts and asses, oh yes, that’s really nice, that’s Art. But don’t let the cunts think they can try the same thing on us. Well, too bad. Goose sauce, sauce for the gander!”
Okay, all right, Fred conceded for the sake of argument. If she wanted to take photographs of good-looking men, their physiques, he guessed he could see the point of that, their chests and shoulders and arms and legs. Or even their asses—“great buns,” he had heard that was the term— But Roo, still fuming, interrupted him. “That’s not where it’s at, pal. Women aren’t interested in men’s behinds, that’s a fag thing.” What they are interested in, she didn’t say, didn’t have to say, was cocks.
At the same time, Roo insisted and kept on insisting that neither of her unknown models had been physically intimate with her. “I don’t know how they got aroused like that. Being photographed turns a lot of people on. You really think if I’d fucked some other guy I’d put a picture of his cock in my show, you think I’m that kind of bitch?”
“I don’t know,” Fred said, angry and weary. “Hell, I don’t know what you might do any more. I mean, what’s the difference?”
Roo looked at him with rage. “Kate and Harriet were right,” she said. “You really are a pig.”
Far below Tottenham Court Road a train pulls up beside the cold dirty platform on which Fred is standing. He gets in, feeling gloomy and tense—as always when, against his better judgment, he allows himself to think of Roo. She is something he has to put behind himself, to forget, to recover from. The marriage is an emotional disaster, a failed adventure which has, inevitably, shrunk his view of himself and of the world; he is wiser, maybe, but at the expense of being that much sourer and sadder.
Fred’s choice of Roo had felt to him like a bold and expansive act, a defiance of conventions—and also of his own conventional self. For years he had been aware that in spite of all his abilities and advantages his life was a little unexciting. From babyhood on he had been what he once heard his father describe as “a very satisfactory child”—bright, good-looking, successful in everything, above all well behaved. His adolescent rebellion was of the most ordinary variety, and gave his parents no serious anxiety. Fred would have liked to worry them a little more—but not at the cost of failing school, scrambling his brains permanently with acid, or wrecking the battered tail-finned Buick he had delivered papers in zero weather and mowed lawns for five years to earn.
Roo was his red flag, his declaration of independence—and in the beginning, the less comfortable his family and more conventional friends were with her, the better pleased he was. Now he feels shamed and enraged to realize that they had judged her more accurately than he. His father, for instance, held the unspoken but clearly evident opinion that Roo was not a lady. Once Fred would have indignantly denied this, or rather condemned the concept as outmoded and meaningless. Now he has to recognize its validity. Even if you suppose, just for the sake of argument, that Roo never slept with either of the two guys whose semi-erect cocks were featured in her show, those photos were pretty vulgar. And worse, she didn’t even know it. As Joe had put it, she wasn’t on the same wavelength; they weren’t, as Debby had said, “coming from the same place”—though in fact they had both grown up in university towns with fathers who were professors.
Possibly it was this similarity of background that had helped mislead him into assuming that Roo and he were, whatever her language and manners,