Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [71]
For Fred has won their argument, and Rosemary has hired a cleaning lady. He hasn’t met her yet, but she sounds great. According to Rosemary she is a hard worker and very thorough: she gets right down on her hands and knees to wax the floors. What’s more, she doesn’t talk Rosemary’s ear off about her husband or her children or her pets: she has no children or pets, and she is long divorced from her drunken husband.
Insisting that she hire Mrs. Harris is one good thing Fred has done for Rosemary. She has done much more for him: she has transformed him from a depressed, disoriented visiting scholar to his normal confident self. His earlier anomie, Fred realizes now, was occupational. Psychologically speaking, tourists are disoriented, ghostly beings; they walk London’s streets and enter its buildings in a thin ectoplasmal form, like a double-exposed photograph. London isn’t real to them, and to Londoners they are equally unreal—pale, featureless, two-dimensional figures who clog up the traffic and block the view.
Before he met Rosemary, Fred didn’t really exist for anyone here except a few other academic ghosts. Nor did London really exist for him. He wasn’t so much living in Notting Hill Gate as camping out there so that he could walk every day to the British Museum and sit before a heap of damp-stained, crumbling leather-bound books and foxed pamphlets. Now the city is alive for him and he is alive in it. Everything pulses with meaning, with history and possibility, and Rosemary most of all. When he is with her he feels he holds all of England, the best of England, in his arms.
He has wholly recovered from the panic that seized him last month in Oxfordshire, when he was frightened by a few topiary birds and a too-vivid memory of the novels of Henry James into condemning an entire society. His distrust of Edwin and Nico remains—homosexuals have always made Fred uneasy, maybe because so many of them have propositioned him. But he feels fine about Posy Billings and William Just; he looks back on his moral indignation that night as priggish and provincial.
Among Rosemary’s long-married friends, he has found, arrangements like that of the Billings are common. More often than not, husbands and wives have agreed to allow each other a discreet sexual freedom, which their friends then take for granted. Everyone knows who Jack or Jill is “seeing” at the moment, but no one mentions it—except maybe to ask whether Jill would rather have her husband or her lover invited with her to some party. The couples remain amicable, sharing a house or houses, concerned for each other’s welfare and that of their children, giving dinners and celebrating holidays together. As Rosemary says, it’s a much more civilized way of coping with passionate impulse than the American system. One avoids open scandal, and also the tantrums of self-righteous possessive jealousy—which, as she points out, usually end in dreadful messy scenes, economically vindictive divorces, and the destruction of homes, children, reputations, and careers. Nor is there any of the frantic defensiveness and public display of the so-called open marriages that she’s seen among actors in the States (and Fred, now and then, among graduate students)—and which, as Rosemary remarks, never work anyhow. “It’s exactly like leaving all the doors and windows open in a house. You get nasty drafts, and very likely you’ll have burglars.”
The strain on Fred’s budget has also been eased—at least temporarily—by a loan from the Corinth University Credit Union, arranged by mail with some difficulty. With luck it will just about last until he leaves. He can go to restaurants with Rosemary now without always ordering salad; he can buy her the flowers she loves so much. If he has to skimp and save for the next year or so, hell, it’s worth it.
Only two things currently trouble Fred. One is the fact that his work on John Gay isn’t getting on too fast. When he was first in London, depression slowed him down;