Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [68]
“Yes,” Vinnie prompts after a minute, but he does not continue. “An accident? Were you hurt?”
“Naw; nothing much. I—. Never mind. It was bad. I totaled the car, and the cops took me in for DWI. That about finished it for Myrna. She used to like me pretty well once, but after that she didn’t even want to look at me. She couldn’t wait to get me on that plane. She’s ashamed of me now, they all are. Greg and Barbie too.” Fido, triumphant, puts his paws on Chuck’s shoulders and enthusiastically licks his broad weatherbeaten face.
“Oh, I don’t think—” Vinnie says, and stops. Maybe Chuck’s wife and grown children are ashamed of him; how should she know?
“That’s why I didn’t go home with the damn package tour. I was sick as hell of London, but I couldn’t face Tulsa again. I kept thinking, the best thing for everybody would be if I never came back. Myrna would carry on, but she’d be relieved really. She’d be free, and she’d be respectable. There’s this developer, this fat guy she sold a big land parcel to for a shopping plaza, that has a crush on her and a lot of dough and big political ambitions. Myrna would take to that: she always wanted me to run for some office. Her family would’ve put up the cash, only I couldn’t see it; I never liked politicians. But this guy’s also got born-again Christian principles, and real conservative fundamentalist backing. He could marry a widow, but not a divorcee.
“Anyhow, I kept thinking, if I was out of the way Myrna could cut her losses. Wal, y’know, I couldn’t get the hang of the traffic over here, those tinny little cars they have that you can’t hardly see coming at you, and the crazy two-story buses. I tried to remember to look in the wrong direction and do everything backward, but I couldn’t concentrate on it. A couple of times it was a damn near thing. I didn’t care; I used to think, okay, why not—I’ve had a pretty fair life.”
A strange impulse comes over Vinnie, an impulse to emulate Fido, to embrace and comfort this large stupid semiliterate man. She is irritated at herself, then at him.
“Oh, come on. Don’t overdramatize,” she says to both of them.
“Naw. That’s what I thought, honest. Only once I’d talked to you in that restaurant, and ‘specially after I located South Leigh, I started to feel better. I thought, okay, maybe I’ll show them yet. I’ll come home with fancy English relations, a castle, maybe a set of those plates they sell here, with gold rims and a coat of arms painted on them. Hey, look, I’ll say to Myrna, I’m not such a worthless bum as you thought. Let’s tell your mother and your pissfaced sister about my ancestors, honey. And the kids, they’d like it too. It’d be something I could give them, make it up to them, kinda. This afternoon down in South Leigh I mailed Myrna a card; it said ‘Hot on the trail of Lord Charles Mumpson the First, looks like Grampa was right.’ Wait till she finds out. I’ll never hear the last of it. Myrna loves a good joke, ‘specially if it’s on me.”
“Does she,” says Vinnie, forming an even more negative opinion of Chuck’s wife.
“Runs in the family. Her Uncle Mervin, he’ll work a gag to death. All he needs is a fall guy.”
“Really.” It is a long time since Vinnie has heard this term. She imagines Chuck as a fall guy, a kind of debased stuntman made to perform over and over again for the amusement of his wife’s relatives. “Well, if it’s going to be like that, don’t tell them.”
“Yeh-uh.” He sits forward. “Naw. What about the goddamn postcard?”
“Say it was a mistake, a false lead. For heaven’s sake, Chuck, show a little initiative!”
“Yeh. That’s what Myrna always tells me.” He sags back into the cushions, hugging Fido to him.
“All right then, don’t show a little initiative,” Vinnie says, losing her temper. “Lie down in the street and let a bus run over you if you want to. Only stop being so damn sorry for yourself.”
Chuck’s square,