Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [35]
When they heard—or heard of—Rosemary’s paean to their unique qualities, most people were pleased, because it’s agreeable to be loved and adored, even casually; and because Rosemary was pretty and well known. Even if they didn’t have the least idea what she meant, there was something awfully attractive in the manner of its delivery. Indeed, some of those who hadn’t ever thus been complimented, like Vinnie, began to feel a little left out.
Others, however, were made uneasy. One can for instance picture Rosemary’s dentist alone in his surgery after his famous patient has left. He twists the magnifying mirror attached to his dental unit toward him and frowns into it. Is there really something unusually lovable about the way his hair curls behind his ears? Or is there, on the other hand, something odd about it, something ugly and bizarre? Had Lady Rosemary been laughing at him?
For days after Edwin’s party, Jane said, Rosemary’s encomium kept sliding into her mind and nagging at her. Finally one day she took a container of leftover salad out of her fridge and went and stood in front of the dining-room mirror, peeled back the plastic wrap, and watched herself eating the spicy oil-soaked lettuce leaves and soggy slices of tomato, trying to discover what was so damned adorable about it, or so different from the way most people ate salad. What on earth had Rosemary meant?
The truth was, Vinnie told her, Rosemary probably hadn’t meant anything. It was just nonsense off the top of her head, a way of focusing attention on herself or changing the topic of conversation, perhaps—a musical noise, that was all. Words don’t matter to actors as they do to a literary person. For them meaning is mainly in expression and gesture; the text is just the libretto, a line of empty glasses that the performer can fill with the golden or silver or bronze liquid of his or her voice. At drama schools, Vinnie has heard, they teach you to say “Please close the door” twenty different ways.
In any social network there are always some people who are as it were “friends” by social compulsion, though if the net fell apart they would seldom or never see each other. It is thus with Vinnie and Rosemary. Because of Edwin they meet fairly often, and always behave on these occasions as if they were perfectly delighted, but they don’t like each other very much. At least, Vinnie does not like Rosemary; and she senses that the feeling is mutual. But nothing can be done about it. Vinnie imagines their social network, or perhaps “web” is more like it—fine-spun, elaborately joined, strung across the rainy city from Fulham to Islington, anchored by isolated threads in Highgate and Wimbledon. She and Rosemary are points of intersection in the web, held there now by many silken twisted strands. If they were to break off cordial relations it would leave gaping sticky holes, distressing to everyone. And they are probably not the only two thus unwillingly joined, Vinnie thinks. Still, the web holds, and spreads its elastic, dew-spangled pattern over London: that is the important thing.
The fading light on the pages of her book tells Vinnie that it is time to leave if she wants to avoid the homebound crowds. Outside the London Library the air is cold, damp, with rain suspended in it rather than falling. Realizing that she is still hungry, and the cupboard in her flat bare of delicacies, she turns up Duke Street and into Fortnum and Mason’s. A clerk in formal morning dress, resembling an Edwardian banker, approaches her with discreet whispered offers of assistance, which she politely declines. No; really it would