Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [83]
“You may be right,” Vinnie said into the telephone—her usual response to statements she prefers not to challenge. And of course it’s possible that Zimmern has nothing against her personally. His prejudice, rooted no doubt in an unhappy and deprived childhood, may be against childhood itself; or against women in academia, or against folklore, or some combination of all these. But that doesn’t exonerate him. Like all offenders, he must be judged by his actions. And condemned. And punished.
If the world were just, Professor Zimmern and not Professor Miner would now have this cold, this headache, this stuffed-up nose, raw throat, honking cough, and general sense of ill-being. Vinnie imagines him afflicted with all her symptoms, only more so if possible, lying in bed at this very moment under a heavy matted mound of blankets (she denies him her down comforter; they are uncommon in the States anyhow). He is in his New York apartment, which she locates in one of those sooty cavernous stone buildings near to and owned by Columbia University. (Actually, L. D. Zimmern lives on the second floor of a brownstone in the West Village.) He has been ill off and on for weeks, Vinnie imagines—for months—ever since he wrote that revolting article. Since he spoke and voted against renewing Vinnie’s grant, his symptoms have been unremitting.
Zimmern doesn’t know it yet, but he is going to get worse. His cold will turn into bronchitis, his bronchitis into viral pneumonia. Soon he will find himself in one of those huge cold impersonal New York hospitals, at the mercy of impatient anonymous doctors, overworked nurses, and sullen, underpaid, non-English-speaking aides, many of them addicted to drugs. Zimmern will lie in a-semi-private room, not getting any better, and his friends, if he has any friends, will grow tired of visiting him. Vinnie can see this room clearly: its dirty window with a view of stained brick walls; its two high stiff white beds, the other one occupied by a coughing, snoring, incontinent, and smelly elderly man; its TV set, always turned to a game show. She can see Zimmern in his washed-out seersucker hospital gown, weakly pushing aside a frayed months-old copy of Time magazine, reaching for the plastic cup on the bedtray and sucking up stale lukewarm New York water through a plastic caterpillar straw.
No one has been to see Vinnie in her illness either, mainly because she hasn’t encouraged anyone to come. Whenever she’s depressed or under the weather her instinct is always to conceal herself until the skies clear. Even a very young and pretty woman is less charming with a bad cold, and Vinnie knows from the bathroom mirror that she looks plainer than ever now; her disposition, too, is at its worst. And though her acquaintance in London is extensive, it is largely composed of what she thinks of as fair-weather friends (with the exception perhaps of Edwin Francis, but Edwin is now in Japan). Fond as she is of them, she has the belief—or delusion—that their reciprocal fondness is the result of their natural sweetness of temper and general good will rather than of profound affection; she fears to test it under adverse conditions. If her friends weren’t put off by seeing her as she is this morning, they would probably pity her; and though she sometimes feels sorry for herself, Vinnie hates to be pitied by others, even in her own imagination.
When this danger begins to threaten, her usual resource is to dwell on the misfortunes of others and actively pity them. If she had