Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [72]
Though he knows this rule, several days more and more often intervene between Fred’s visits to the library, and more and more of the books he has been using have now disappeared somewhere within the system; the slips come back marked NOT ON SHELF, DESTROYED BY BOMBING, or—most infuriatingly of all—OUT TO F. TURNER. Meanwhile there is so much to do in London, so many plays and films and exhibitions to see with Rosemary, so many parties. The hell with it, Fred tells himself almost every day. He’ll learn a lot more about British theatrical history and tradition by listening to Rosemary and her friends than by sitting in a library—something that, Christ knows, there’ll be time enough for back in Corinth.
The other weight on Fred’s mind is heavier, though it consists not of a stack of books but of an airletter almost lighter than air. The letter is from his estranged wife Roo, and is her first in four months—though Fred has written her several times: asking her to forward his mail, returning her health insurance card, and inquiring for the address of a friend who’s supposed to be at the University of Sussex. Roo, as he might have expected, hasn’t forwarded the mail, acknowledged the card, or provided the address.
But now, like a tardy bluebird of peace returning late to a deserted ark after three times forty days and nights, this blue airletter has flapped its way across the ocean to him. In its beak it holds, no question about that, a fresh olive branch.
. . . The thing is [Roo writes] I guess I should have told you I was going to put your cock and the rest of those pictures in my show. I’m not sure I would have taken them down even if you raised hell—but I didn’t need to make it such a big surprise. If it’d been me, I mean say my pussy, I probably would have freaked out too. Kate says I must have been pissed off at you for something, maybe for being so wound up with school. Or maybe I was scared I wouldn’t have the guts to show the photos if you said not to.
Anyhow I wanted to tell you this, okay?
Nothing much happening here, the weather is still foul. I won second prize in the Gannett contest for those 4-H pictures, Collect $250 but do not pass Go. The emergency room ones were better but not so heart-warming. Everybody misses you. I hope London is fabulous and you’re getting your shit together in the BM. Love, Roo.
Here, four months late, is the letter Fred had imagined and desired so often during the dark emptiness of January and February—the letter he had so often fantasized finding on the scratched mahogany table in the front hall of his building, tearing open, laughing and shouting over, cabling or telephoning in response to. He had imagined changing the sheets on his bed, meeting Roo’s plane—
Faced with this evidence of Roo’s contrition and candor—he has never known her to tell a lie, even when it would have been socially convenient—Fred has to admit that he had accused her falsely. If Roo had had an affair he would have been the first to hear about it, from her. She was telling the truth when she said she never had anything to do with those two other cocks in the exhibit except to photograph them. More than likely they belonged to an old friend of hers from art school who is now working in New York, and his homosexual lover. In fact, she was guilty of nothing worse than bad taste.
But in Rosemary’s world bad taste is not nothing: it