Foreign Affairs (3 page)

However long the flight, Vinnie always tries to avoid striking up acquaintance with anyone, especially on transatlantic journeys. According to her calculations, there is far more chance of having to listen to some bore for seven-and-a-half hours than of meeting someone interesting—and after all, whom even among her friends would she want to converse with for so long?

Besides, this man looks like someone Vinnie would hardly want to converse with for seven-and-a-half minutes. His dress and speech proclaim him to be, probably, a Southern Plains States businessman of no particular education or distinction; the sort of person who goes on package tours to Europe. And indeed the carry-on bag that rests between his oversize Western-style leather boots is pasted with the same
SUN TOURS
logo she had noticed earlier: fat comic-book letters enclosing a grinning Disney sun. Physically too he is of a type she has never cared for: big, ruddy, blunt-featured, with cropped coarse graying red hair. Some women would consider him attractive in a weather-beaten Western way; but Vinnie has always preferred in men an elegant slimness, fair fine hair and skin, small well-cut features—the sort of looks that are an idealized male version of her own.

Half an hour later, as she refolds the
Times
and gets out a novel, she glances again at her companion. He is wedged heavily in his seat, neither dozing nor reading, although the airline magazine lies limp on his broad knees. For a moment she speculates as to what sort of man would embark on a transatlantic flight without reading materials, categorizing him as philistine and as improvident. It was foolish of him to count on passing the time in conversation: even if he didn’t happen to be seated beside someone like Vinnie, he might well have been placed next to foreigners or children. What will he do now, just sit there?

As the plane drones on, Vinnie’s question is answered. At intervals her seatmate gets up and walks toward the rear, returning each time smelling unpleasantly of burnt tobacco. Vinnie, who detests cigarettes, wonders irritably why he didn’t request a seat in the smoking section. He rents headphones from the stewardess, fits the plastic pieces into his large red ears, and listens to the low-grade recorded noise—evidently without satisfaction, since he keeps switching channels. Finally he rises again and, standing in the aisle, converses with a member of his tour group in the seat ahead, and then for even longer with two others in the seats behind. Vinnie realizes that she is surrounded by Sun Tourists, the representatives of all she deplores and despises in her native land and is going to London to get away from.

Though she has no wish to eavesdrop, she cannot avoid hearing them complain in loud drawling guffawing Western voices about their delayed departure, the lack of movies on this flight, and the real bum steer given to them in this matter by their travel agent. As this phrase is repeated, Vinnie visualizes the Real Bum Steer as a passenger on the plane. Scrawny, swaybacked, probably lamed, it stands on three legs in the aisle with a
SUN TOURS
label glued on its scruffy brown haunch.

Unable to concentrate on her novel while the conversation continues, Vinnie gets up and walks toward the rear. She finds a washroom that looks reasonably clean and wipes the seat, first with a wet, then with a dry paper towel. Before leaving, she removes the plastic containers of Blue Grass cologne, skin freshener, and moisturizer from their rack and places them in her handbag, as is her custom. As is her custom, she tells herself that British Airways and Elizabeth Arden expect, perhaps even hope, that some passenger will appropriate these products; that they are offered to the public as a form of advertising.

This kind of confiscation—borrowing, some might call it, though nothing of course is ever returned—is habitual with Professor Miner. Stores are out of bounds—she is no common shoplifter, after all—and the possessions of her acquaintances are usually safe, though you must be careful when lending her your pen, particularly if it has an extra-fine point; she is apt to return it absent-mindedly to her own purse. But planes, restaurants, hotels, and offices are fair game. As a result, Vinnie has a rather nice collection of guest towels, and a very large revolving supply of coasters, matches, paper napkins, coat hangers, pencils, pens, chalk, and expensive magazines of the sort found in expensive doctors’ and dentists’ waiting rooms. She owns quantities of Corinth and University College (London) stationery and a quaint little pewter cream pitcher from a lobster house in Maine, about which her only regret is that she hadn’t taken the matching sugar bowl too. Well, perhaps one day . . .

It should not be imagined that these confiscations are of common occurrence. Weeks or months may pass without Vinnie feeling any need to add to her hoard of unpurchased objects. But when things are not going well she begins to look round, and annexations take place. Each one causes a tiny ascent in her spints, as if she sat on one of a pair of scales so delicately hung that even the weight of a free box of paper clips on the opposite pan would make hers rise in the air.

Now and then, instead of appropriating something she likes that doesn’t belong to her, Vinnie improves her world by getting rid of something she dislikes. During her short marriage, she caused several of her husband’s ties and a camp souvenir ashtray in the shape of a bathtub to vanish completely. Twice she has removed from the women’s faculty washroom in her building at Corinth an offensive sign reading
WASH HANDS BEFORE LEAVING: YOUR HEALTH DEPENDS ON IT
.

None of Vinnie’s acquaintances are aware of these habits of hers, which might best be explained as the consequence of a vague but recurrent belief that life owes her a little something. It is not miserliness: she pays her bills promptly, is generous with her possessions (both bought and borrowed), and scrupulous about splitting the check at lunch. As she sometimes says on these occasions, her salary is perfectly adequate for one person with no dependents.

Her superego does sometimes complain to Vinnie about this do-it-yourself justice, most often when her morale is so low that nothing can raise it. Now, for instance, as she stands in the narrow toilet cubicle surrounded by multilingual scolding and warning signs, a shrill and penetrating interior voice sounds above the roar of the plane. “Petty thief,” it whines. “Neurotic kleptomaniac. Author of a research proposal nobody needs.”

With effort Vinnie pulls her clothes together and returns to her seat. The red-faced man rises to let her in, looking uncomfortable and rumpled. An inexperienced traveler, he has worn a too-tight suit of some synthetically woolly material that crumples under pressure.

“Pain in the neck,” he mutters. “They oughta build these seats farther apart.”

“Yes, that would be nice,” she agrees politely.

“What it is, they’re trying to save dough.” He sits down again heavily. “Packing the customers in like cattle in a damn boxcar.”

“Mm,” Vinnie utters vaguely, picking up her novel.

“I guess they’re all pretty much the same, though, the airlines. I don’t travel all that much myself.”

Vinnie sighs. It is clear to her that unless she takes definite action this Western businessman or rancher or whatever he is will prevent her reading
The Singapore Grip
and make the rest of the flight very boring.

“No, it’s never awfully comfortable,” she says. “Really I think the best thing to do is bring along something interesting to read, so one doesn’t notice.”

“Yeh. I shoulda thought of that, I guess.” He gives Vinnie a sad, baffled look, arousing the irritation she feels at her more helpless students—students on athletic scholarship, often, who should never have come to Corinth in the first place.

“I have some other books with me, if you’d like to look at them.” Vinnie reaches down and pulls from her tote bag
The Oxford Book of Light Verse;
a pocket guide to British flowers; and
Little Lord Fauntleroy
, which she has to reread for a scholarly article. She places the volumes on the middle seat, aware as she does so of their individual and collective inappropriateness.

“Hey. Thanks,” her seatmate exclaims as each one appears. “Wal, if you’re sure you don’t need them now.”

Vinnie assures him that she does not. She is already reading a book, she points out, suppressing a sigh of impatience. Then, with a sigh of relief, she returns to
The Singapore Grip.
For a few moments she is aware of the flipping of pages on her right, but soon she is absorbed.

While the shadows of war darken over Singapore in Jim Farrell’s last completed novel, the atmosphere outside the cabin windows brightens. The damp grayness becomes suffused with gold; the plane, breaking through the cloudbank, levels off in sunlight over an expanse of whipped cream. Vinnie looks at her watch; they are halfway to London. Not only has the light altered, she senses a change in the sound of the engines: a shift to a lower, steadier hum as the plane passes midpoint on its homeward journey. Within too she feels a more harmonic vibration, a brightening of anticipation.

England, for Vinnie, is and has always been the imagined and desired country. For a quarter of a century she visited it in her mind, where it had been slowly and lovingly shaped and furnished out of her favorite books, from Beatrix Potter to Anthony Powell. When at last she saw it she felt like the children in John Masefield’s
The Box of Delights
who discover that they can climb into the picture on their sitting-room wall. The landscape of her interior vision had become life-size and three-dimensional; she could literally walk into the country of her mind. From the first hour England seemed dear and familiar to her; London, especially, was almost an experience of déjà vu. She also felt that she was a nicer person there and that her life was more interesting. These sensations increased rather than diminished with time, and have been repeated as often as Vinnie could afford. Over the past decade she has visited England nearly every year—though usually, alas, for only a few weeks. Tonight she will begin her longest stay yet: an entire six months. Her fantasy is that one day she will be able to live in London permanently, even perhaps become an Englishwoman. A host of difficulties—legal, financial, practical—are involved in this fantasy, and Vinnie has no idea how she could ever solve them all; but she wants it so much that perhaps one day it can be managed.

Many teachers of English, like Vinnie, fall in love with England as well as with her literature. With familiarity, however, their infatuation often declines into indifference or even contempt. If they long for her now, it is as she was in the past—most often, in the period of their own specialization: for the colorful, vital England of Shakespeare’s time, or the lavish elegance and charm of the Edwardian period. With the bitterness of disillusioned lovers, they complain that contemporary Britain is cold, wet, and overpriced; its natives unfriendly; its landscape and even its climate ruined. England is past her prime, they say; she is worn-out and old; and, like most of the old, boring.

Vinnie not only disagrees, she secretly pities those of her friends and colleagues who claim to have rejected England, since it is clear to her that in truth England has rejected them. The chill they complain of is a matter of style. Englishmen and Englishwomen do not open their arms and hearts to every casual passerby, just as English lawns do not flow into the lawns next door. Rather they conceal themselves behind high brick walls and dense prickly hedges, turning their coolest and most formal side to strangers. Only those who have been inside know how warm and cozy it can be there.

Her colleagues’ complaints about the weather and the scenery Vinnie puts down to mere blind pique, issuing as they do from people whose native landscape is devastated by billboards, used-car lots, ice storms, and tornadoes. As for the claim that nothing much ever happens here, this is one of England’s greatest charms for Vinnie, who has just escaped from a nation plagued by sensational and horrible news events, and from a university periodically disrupted by political demonstrations and drunken student brawls. She sinks into her English life as into a large warm bath agitated only by the gentle ripples she herself makes and by the popping of bubbles of foam as some small scandal swells up and breaks, spraying the air with the delightful soapy spume of gossip. In Vinnie’s private England a great deal happens; quite enough for her, at least.

England is also a country in which folklore is an old and honorable study. The three collections of fairytales for children that Vinnie has edited, and her book on children’s literature, have been much better received there than in America, and she is in greater demand as a reviewer. Besides, it now occurs to her, the
Atlantic
is not widely distributed in Britain; and even if by some remote chance her friends there should see Zimmern’s essay, they won’t be much impressed. English intellectuals, she has noticed, have little respect for American critical opinion.

As Vinnie smiles to herself, recalling remarks made by her London friends about the American press, the cabin crew begins to serve lunch—or perhaps, since it is now seven o’clock in London, it should be considered dinner. Vinnie purchases a miniature bottle of sherry, and accepts a cup of tea. As usual, she refuses the plastic tray upon which have been arranged mounds of some tasteless neutral substance (wet sawdust? farina?) that has been colored and shaped to resemble beef stew, Brussels sprouts, mashed potatoes, and lemon pudding. It does not deceive her any longer, though once she assumed that the altitude, or a mild anxiety condition when airborne, was responsible for the taste of airplane food. But the homemade lunches that she now brings with her are just as nice as they would be at sea level.

“Hey, that looks good,” her seatmate exclaims, regarding Vinnie’s chicken sandwich with a longing she has seen before in the eyes of other travelers. “This stuff tastes like silage.”

“Yes, I know.” She gives him a perfunctory smile.