Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [41]
Moreover, as was perhaps necessary for the ploy to work, it wasn’t quite a lie. As she had done in early adolescence, Vinnie allowed herself to fix her romantic desires on men she hardly knew and seldom saw. These were not, as previously, film stars, but writers and critics whose work she had read, whom she had heard speak or even briefly met at the receptions that generally follow university readings or lectures. She had thus over the years enjoyed imaginary relationships with, among others, Daniel Aaron, M. H. Abrams, John Cheever, Robert Lowell, Arthur Mizener, Walker Percy, Mark Schorer, Wallace Stegner, Peter Taylor, Lionel Trilling, Robert Penn Warren, and Richard Wilbur. As this list shows, she rather preferred older men; and she insisted on intellectuals. When several members of a women’s group she belonged to in the early seventies confessed that they had passionate fantasies about their carpenter, their gardener, or the mechanic at the service station, Vinnie was astonished and a little repelled. What would be the point of going to bed with someone like that?
Vinnie’s fantasy affairs tended to be of brief duration, though under the influence of a brilliant new book or lecture she sometimes returned to an earlier passion. When, by coincidence, one or two of these distinguished people came to teach for a term at her own university and established cordial relations with Vinnie, she at once broke off her private affair with him. It wasn’t difficult; after all, seen at close range, this man was nothing extraordinary, not a patch on Daniel Aaron, M. H. Abrams, or whoever was center stage at the moment.
After the disastrous experience of her marriage, Vinnie always ended her real affairs whenever she found her current lover getting into her bedtime home movies, or when one of them began to use the word “love” casually, or to announce that he could really imagine getting seriously involved with her. No thanks, chum; I was caught that way once before, she would think to herself. Not that there was always a current lover. For long periods Vinnie’s only companions were the shades of Richard Wilbur, Robert Penn Warren, etc., who faithfully every evening appeared to admire and embrace her, commending her wit, charm, intelligence, scholarly achievement, and sexual inventiveness.
In all the years she has been coming to England, Vinnie has never found a lover there. Nor is there any sign of one appearing now. And perhaps that’s for the best, she thinks. Because really, isn’t it time? In the popular imagination, and (more importantly) in English literature, to which in early childhood Vinnie had given her deepest trust—and which for half a century has suggested to her what she might do, think, feel, desire, and become—women of her age seldom have any sexual or romantic life. If they do, it is either embarrassingly pathetic or vulgarly comic or both.
In the last year or so Vinnie had begun to think more and more often that what she does with her pals is inappropriate—unbecoming to her station on the railway line of life. The fact that at fifty-four she still had erotic impulses and indulged them with such abandon seemed to her almost shameful. It has been something of a relief for her to be away from home, and chaste; to be as it were on sabbatical from sex—one which might well develop into a long leave of absence or even an early retirement. She is therefore embarrassed and irritated at herself for having, even briefly, imagined Chuck Mumpson standing naked by her bed in Regent’s Park Road. She tells herself to act and feel her age, for heaven’s sake. She certainly doesn’t want someone like Chuck, she tells herself; she doesn’t even want her brilliant, handsome, charming imaginary lovers very much.
As the bus carries her north through the darkening city, away from the sensual attractions of Fortnum and Mason’s and the erotic throbbing noises and flashing colored lights