Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [69]
“I mean, for God’s sake.” She is breathing hard, suddenly enraged. “A white Anglo-Saxon American male, with good health, and no obligations, and more money and free time than you know what to do with. Most people in the world would kill to be in your shoes. But you’re so stupid you don’t even know how to enjoy yourself in London.”
“Yeh? Like forinstance?” Chuck sounds angry now as well as hurt, but Vinnie cannot stop herself.
“Staying in that awful tourist hotel, like forinstance, and eating their terrible food, and going to ersatz American musicals; when the town is full of fine restaurants, and you could be at Covent Garden every night.”
Chuck does not respond, only gapes.
“But of course it’s none of my business,” she adds in a lower tone, astonished at herself. “I didn’t mean to shout at you, but it’s very late, and I have to get up early tomorrow and visit a school in Kennington.”
“Yeh. All right.” Chuck looks at his watch, then stands up slowly; his manner is injured, stuffy, formal. “Okay, Professor, I’m going. Thanks for the drink.”
“You’re welcome.” Vinnie cannot bring herself to apologize further to Chuck Mumpson. She shows him out, washes his glass and her teacup and sets them to dry, gets back into her flannel nightgown, and climbs into bed, noting with disapproval that it is ten minutes past twelve.
But instead of slowing into sleep, her mind continues to revolve with a clogged, grating whir. She is furious at herself for losing her temper and telling Chuck what she thinks of him, as if that could do any good. It is years since she flamed out like that at anyone; her usual expression of anger is a tight-lipped, icy withdrawal.
She is also furious at Chuck: for waking her up and depriving her of necessary sleep, for failing to discover interesting folkloric material in Wiltshire, and for being so large and so unhappy and such a hopeless nincompoop. He and his story remind her of everything she dislikes most about America, and also of things she dislikes in England: its tourist hotels, its tourist shops, its cheapened and exaggerated self-exploitation for the tourist trade, the corruption of many of its citizens by American commercial culture into an almost American illiterate coarseness (“I wish I wuz a seagull, I wish I wuz a duck . . .”).
Why is she being persecuted by transatlantic vulgarity in this awful manner? It really isn’t fair, Vinnie thinks, turning over restlessly. Then, hearing the silent whine in this question, she glances mentally round for Fido. But her imagination, usually so vivid, fails to manifest him. Instead she sees a dirty-white long-haired dog trailing Chuck Mumpson down Regent’s Park Road in the fog from streetlamp to streetlamp, panting at his side in the fuzzy yellow glare as Chuck unsuccessfully tries to hail a taxi.
Fido’s infidelity astonishes Vinnie. For the nearly twenty years of his life in her imagination he has never shown the slightest interest in or even awareness of anyone except her. What does it mean that she should now so vividly picture him following Chuck Mumpson across London, or making sloppy canine love to him? Does it mean, for instance, that she is really sorry for Chuck, perhaps even sorrier than she is for herself? Or are he and she somehow alike? Is there some awful parallel between Chuck’s fantasy of being an English lord and hers of being—in a more subtle and metaphysical sense, of course—an English lady? Might there be someone somewhere as impatiently scornful of her pretensions as she is of his?
Almost as uncomfortable to contemplate is the idea that she is partly responsible for Chuck’s illusion—and, as a logical consequence, for his disillusion. As if she’d ever promised that he would turn out to be a scion of some noble family! She begins to lose her cool again.
Well, after all, as he said, it might have turned out that way: there are plenty of nincompoops in the British aristocracy. Vinnie’s memory provides her at once with examples, including that of Posy Billings, who is not at all what Vinnie means