Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [98]
“For four weeks.”
“Yes,” he says, distracted by the contrasting stiffness and softness of Rosemary’s body: the heavy, slippery watered silk and frail net and lace; the feel of corseting underneath and soft yielding flesh beneath that; he presses her harder to him.
“You little shit,” says Rosemary in coarse, unfamiliar tones, using a word he has never heard or expected to hear from her. “Take your bloody hands off me.” Jolted, he steps back.
“I should have listened to Mrs. Harris,” she goes on in a voice that is her own, but charged with fury. “She warned me not to trust you.” She is facing him now, her great fringed eyes narrowed. “‘He’s a Yankee skip-jack,’ she told me a long time ago. ‘He’s a low-life deceiver of women.’”
“Rosemary, darling—”
“Excuse me, please. I have to get my makeup repaired.” With a swish of her satin fishtail skirt, Rosemary is out the door and tripping down the street.
Fred stands a moment, stunned; then he races after her. “Rosemary, please—”
Rosemary halts. She looks round coldly at him, then calls to one of the attendant policemen. “Oh, officer!”
“Yes, Miss?” He approaches, smiling.
“Could you move this man away, please?” She indicates Fred with a toss of her head. “He’s bothering me.”
“Right you are, Miss.”
“Thank you.” She gives him a smile made more dazzling by the sooty dampness of her great blue-gray eyes, and trips off.
“All right, you don’t have to shove me, I’m going,” Fred says, shaking the policeman’s hand from his arm. He picks his way through the electrical snakes, round the barricade, and past a large crowd of spectators. Then he turns and looks back over their heads to the house bathed in brazen unnatural light. In its front courtyard a man with a bucket and brush is methodically painting the plastic roses a brilliant, glamorous crimson.
Even after this scene Fred isn’t wholly discouraged. He has never in his life been rejected by any girl or woman he seriously cared for, and he is almost as certain of Rosemary’s feelings as he is of his own. Hadn’t she been crying at the idea of parting from him?
Not that he takes her tears all that seriously. He has seen his love weep before: at a sad film, or for the death of some actor she barely knew; and then, half an hour later, he has seen her dissolved in laughter at some scandal about the same actor relayed by a friend. The theatrical temperament, he suspects, enjoys emotional scenes and tangles of misunderstanding, just as it later enjoys their untangling. The climate of their affair had always been, not stormy, but dramatically various, as changeable as the English spring weather—sunshine succeeding showers with a breezy, careless rapidity.
But as the days pass and he still can’t reach Rosemary, Fred becomes more and more tense and desperate. From one hour to the next his mood changes. He is enraged at Rosemary and never wants to see her again; he wants to see her, but only to tell her off, to let her know how angry he is; he wants to break into her house, to force his love upon her; he wants to plead with her: Hasn’t she shut him out long enough? There are so few weeks left; it is perverse and wasteful of her to squander them this way.
Also, for the first time, he seriously asks himself if he should do as Rosemary demands. Should he cable or telephone to the Summer School office in Corinth and say that he won’t be able to teach this year—maybe say he is ill? Isn’t two months in England with Rosemary worth it—worth angering his senior colleagues and risking his promotion? But if he doesn’t teach this summer, what the hell is he going to live on? He’s practically broke now, and if he stays on he’ll be—there’s no getting round it—living on Rosemary, in her house; letting her buy his meals and, when they go to Wales or to Ireland, his train