Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [87]
Fred’s handsome countenance wore a melancholy, ill-fed expression which brightened only slightly when he saw Vinnie. He invited her to join him on the slatted bench, but agreed only dully with her praise of the day, though the scene before them resembled a British Air travel poster: whipped-cream clouds sailed overhead, the trees were sprinkled with a shiny confetti of new leaves, and the courtyard steamed and glinted with rainbow fragments of light.
“Oh, I’m okay,” he replied to her query, in tones that suggested the reverse. “Maybe you know, Rosemary and I aren’t seeing each other any more.”
“Yes, I heard that.” Vinnie refrained from adding that so had all her London friends, not to mention Private Eye. “I understand she was upset because you have to go back and teach so soon.”
“That’s about it. But she thinks—she acts like I’ve betrayed her or something.” Fred crumpled and uncrumpled his damp paper bag, banging his fist into it in an angry way. “She thinks it’d be easy for me to stay here if I wanted. Damn it, you know that’s not true.”
Vinnie assented emphatically. In case he might be thinking of some such move, she pointed out that his sudden and unexcused withdrawal from the Summer School faculty would annoy and inconvenience a great many people at Corinth University; she began to list these people by name and title.
“You don’t have to tell me,” Fred interrupted. “I explained all that to her. Rosemary’s a wonderful woman, but she just doesn’t listen. When she doesn’t like what you’re saying she just fucking doesn’t listen, excuse me.”
“That’s all right.”
“Christ, I’d stay here if I could. I love her, and I love London,” he exclaimed, shedding crumbs of peanut-butter sandwich. “I don’t know what more I can say.”
“No,” Vinnie agreed, sympathizing with one of Fred’s passions. “It’s always so hard to leave. I know.”
“But why is she being so goddamned unreasonable? We were going to have such a great time together this month, we had tickets to Glyndebourne . . . I never said I was going to be in England forever, or anything like that. I didn’t lie to her. I told her a long time ago I had to go back in June—hell, I know I did.” Fred shook his head while running one hand through his wavy dark hair, a gesture both of puzzlement and of self-reassurance For the first time, Vinnie saw in him what she had often seen in Rosemary Radley: the assumption of very good-looking persons that as they pass through life they are entitled to take—and to leave—whatever they choose when they choose. In both of them it was the stronger for being largely—in Fred’s case perhaps wholly—unconscious.
“Maybe she’ll get over it.”
“Yeh. Maybe,” he replied in a dead, unconvinced voice, frowning at the pigeons that had begun to gather. “Right now she won’t see me, or talk to me on the phone, or anything. Oh, okay.” He dropped a crust from the bag onto the pavement; the fat gray birds jostled and pecked. “She’d better get over it fast; I’ll only be around another three weeks.”
“I certainly hope she does,” Vinnie said, though in fact it mattered nothing to her.
“Me, too.” A kind of geological tremor passed over the stormy, handsome landscape of Fred’s face. “Listen, Vinnie,” he added, controlling the threatened volcanic erruption. “You know Rosemary pretty well.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“Well, anyhow. You see her all the time. I was wondering . . . Maybe if you were to talk to her.”
“Oh, I don’t think—”
“You could explain about summer school; how I can’t just walk out on it.” Fred scattered the rest of his half-eaten sandwich, causing a further invasion of pigeons, dozens of them it seemed, flapping and swooping from all directions.
“I really don’t think I could do that.” To protect her stockings, Vinnie kicked a particularly intrusive lavender-gray bird away with the side