Though he has been in London for three weeks, this is the first time Fred has used the Underground. Usually he walks everywhere, regardless of the distance or the weather, in imitation of the eighteenth-century author John Gay, about whom he is supposed to be writing a book. In Gay’s long poem, Trivia, or the Art of Walking the Streets of London, mechanical transport is scorned:

Most of the other people on the Underground platform are not gazing at the advertisements, but—more or less covertly—at Fred Turner. They are wondering if they haven’t seen him somewhere before, maybe in some film or on the telly. A miniskirted billing clerk thinks he looks exactly like the hero on the cover of The Secret of Rosewyn, one of her favorite Gothics. A grammar-school teacher, collapsed on a bench with a bulging string bag, believes she saw him in Love’s Labour’s Lost at Stratford last summer, in one of the main supporting roles. The manager of a small menswear shop, professionally noting the transatlantic cut of Fred’s duffel coat, wonders if he was in that American detective series his kids always watch. None of Fred’s fellow passengers connect him with a comedy or a game show: something in the tense set of his broad shoulders, the angle of his jaw, and the way the dark arches of his eyebrows are drawn together precludes these associations.

Fred is not embarrassed by this attention. He is used to it, regards it as normal, doesn’t in fact realize that few other humans are gazed at so often or so intensely. Since babyhood his appearance has attracted admiration, and often comment. It was soon clear that he had inherited his mother’s brunette, lushly romantic good looks: her thick wavy dark hair, her wide-set cilia-fringed brown eyes (“wasted on a boy,” many remarked). If anything, Fred is less conscious of being observed now than he was at home, for the polite British are taught as children that it is rude to stare, and have learnt to disguise their public curiosity. They are also taught not to speak to strangers; and as yet no citizen has broken this rule in Fred’s case—though two Canadians stopped him on the street last week to ask if he wasn’t the guy that fought the giant man-eating extraterrestrial cabbage in The Thing from Beyond.

Fred Turner knows, of course, that he is a handsome, athletic-looking young man, the type that directors employ to battle carnivorous vegetables. It would be going too far to say that he has never derived any satisfaction from this fact, but he has often wished that his appearance was less striking. He has the features, and the physique, of an Edwardian hero: classically sculptured, over-finished, like the men in Charles Dana Gibson’s drawings. If he had lived before World War II, he might have been more grateful for his looks; but since then it has not been fashionable for Anglo-Saxon men to be handsome in this style unless they are homosexual. For modern straight tastes his chin is too firmly rounded and cleft, his carriage too erect, his hair too wavy, and his eyelashes much too long.

Were Fred in fact an actor his appearance might be an asset. But he has no histrionic ability or ambition; and in his profession beauty is a considerable handicap, as he has been made to realize over the last five years. While he was in school there was no problem. Boys are allowed to be handsome, as long as that is not their only asset, and Fred was an all-round achiever: energetic, outgoing, good at both lessons and games; the sort of child teachers naturally favor. Later he became the kind of prep-school boy who is elected class president and the kind of undergraduate and graduate student who is described in letters of recommendation as “incidentally, also a most attractive young man.”

The real disadvantages of Fred’s appearance did not surface until he began to teach. As anyone who has been to college knows, most professors are not especially strong or beautiful; and though they may appreciate or at least forgive these qualities in their students they do not much care for them in their peers. If Fred had been in Theater Arts or Painting and Design, he might not have stood out so from his colleagues or had so much trouble with them. In English, his appearance was held against him: he was suspected, quite unfairly, of being vain, self-centered, unintellectual, and unserious.

Fred’s looks also interfered with his teaching. In his first term as a TA at least a third of his female students, and one or two of the males as well, developed crushes on him. When he called on these students they went all woozy and breathless and became quite incapable of concentrating on the topic of discussion. They hung round him after class, followed him to his office, leant over his desk in tight sweaters or shirts open nearly to the waist, clutched his arm in mute appeal, and in some cases openly declared their passion either in notes or in person (“I just think about you all the time, it’s really screwing up my head”). But Fred had no wish to sleep with ten screwed-up freshmen, or even with one carefully selected well-balanced freshman. He wasn’t attracted to puppy fat and unformed minds; and though in a couple of cases he was tempted, he had a strong sense of professional ethics. He also suspected correctly that if he fell and was found out he might be in serious professional trouble.

During that first year of teaching, Fred learnt to put more social distance between himself and his students; for one thing, though with irritation and regret, he stopped asking them to call him Fred. As time passed, the emotional and sexual pressure moderated—especially after he had met a woman whose appearance and temperament kept him fully occupied. But he still feels uncomfortable in the classroom. It bothers him to be “Professor Turner,” to have to maintain at all times a cool distance from his students, a dry manner, to give up hope of achieving the warm, relaxed, but in no way steamy and loose pedagogic climate enjoyed by his less-attractive colleagues. Time will solve his problem, but not for perhaps a quarter of a century, which from the perspective of twenty-eight might as well be forever. Meanwhile he has to put up with the belief of students that he is cold and formal—a belief promulgated every fall in the student-published Confidential Guide to Courses.

At the moment these academic difficulties are far from Fred’s mind, which is fixed, as it has been intermittently for the past two months, on the collapse of his marriage. Before that, he had assumed that his wife Ruth, known to him as Roo, would be coming abroad with him. They had prepared for the trip together, read books, studied maps, consulted all their friends—Roo even more excited by their plans than he was.

But a domestic storm had blown up: thunder, lightning, and a torrential downpour of tears. Just before Christmas Fred and Roo parted in a cloudy, electrically charged atmosphere for what was announced to their friends and relatives as a “trial separation.” Privately Fred suspects that the trial is already over, the verdict Guilty, and the sentence on their marriage Death.

No good thinking about it, going over the bad memories of a bad time. Roo is not here and she won’t ever be here. She hasn’t answered either of his brief but carefully composed, neutrally friendly letters, and she probably isn’t going to. Fred is alone for five months in a London empty of joy and meaning, where a cold drizzly rain seems to fall perpetually both within and without. He is more steadily miserable than he has ever been in his life.

He had come here prepared, even without Roo, to have an intense, vivid experience of the city of John Gay—and of Johnson, Fielding, Hogarth, and many more. Dutifully and mechanically, he has gone alone on foot to the places he and she had planned to visit together: St. Paul’s, London Bridge, Dr. Johnson’s house, and the rest. But everything he saw looked false and empty: façades of cardboard brick and stone, hollow, without meaning. Physically he is in London, but emotionally he remains in Corinth, in a part of his life that’s ceased to exist. He is living in the historic past, as he had planned and hoped to do—but not in eighteenth-century London. Instead he inhabits a more recent, private, and dismal era of his own history.

But Fred doesn’t believe that there is no real and desirable London. That city exists: he dwelt there for six months as a child of ten, and last week he revisited it. Though some of its landmarks have vanished, those that remain shimmer with meaning and presence as if benignly radioactive. The house his family once lived in is gone; the jungly, catacombed, sunken bomb-site where he and his grammar-school friends played Nazis and Allies or Cops and Villains has been built over with council flats. But there is the sweetshop on the corner, thick with the odor of anise, cinnamon drops, and slabs of milk chocolate; there are the wide, shallow, unevenly worn stone steps in the passageway beside the church where Freddy (as he was then known) often stopped on his way home to eat shiny twisted black ropes of licorice from a paper bag and read Beano comics, unable to postpone either pleasure.

Across the road is the surgery to which Freddy was carried by his father when he fell off his bike, where an old-lady doctor with chopped-off white hair put three prickly black stitches in his chin and called him a “brave handsome Yankee lad”—giving him, he realizes now, not only an encomium but an identity. The name on the brass plate is unfamiliar, but the heavy door with its stained-glass panel of haloed tomatoes is intact, and still seems to be a sign that this house is a kind of church—though now he knows the glass to be Art Nouveau and the holy tomatoes pomegranates. For a few hundred feet along one road in Kensington, Fred’s senses and his sensibility function supernormally; everywhere else London remains cold, dim, flat, and flavorless.

He doesn’t blame his inability to have an authentic experience of the city entirely on the loss of Roo. Partly he attributes it to tourist disorientation; he has noticed the same reaction in other Americans who have recently arrived, and back home he has seen it in friends and relatives returned from abroad. The main problem is, he thinks, that visitors to a foreign country are allowed the full use of only two of their five senses. Sight is permitted—hence the term “sightseeing.” The sense of taste is also encouraged, and even takes on a weird, almost sexual importance: consumption of the native food and drink becomes a highly charged event, a proof that you were “really there.”

But hearing in the full sense is blocked. Intelligible foreign sounds are limited to the voices of waiters, shopkeepers, professional guides, and hotel clerks—plus snatches of dubiously “native” music. Even in Britain, accent, intonation, and vocabulary are often unfamiliar; tourists do not recognize many of the noises they hear, and they speak mostly to functionaries. The sense of smell still operates; but it is likely to be baffled or disgusted by many foreign odors. Above all, the sense of touch is frustrated; visible or invisible Keep Off signs appear on almost everything and everyone.

Two senses aren’t enough for contact with the world, and as a result places visited as a tourist tend to be experienced as blurry silent areas spotted with flashes of light. A window box bursting with purple-veined white crocuses; the shouting, anger-gorged red face of a taxi driver; a handful of hot fish-and-chips wrapped in the News of the World—these rare moments of sensation stand out in Fred’s memory of the past month like colored snapshots against the gray blotting-paper of an old photograph album. Appropriately—for what tourists take home are, typically, snapshots.

Tourists also bring back special meretricious objects called “souvenirs”—which as the word suggests are not so much actual things as embodied memories; and like all memories somewhat exaggerated and distorted. Souvenirs have little in common with anything actually made for and used by the natives—who’s ever seen a real Greek woman in a headscarf bordered by fake tinny gold coins, or a French fisherman wearing the kind of Authentic Fisherman’s Smock sold in tourist shops? But these false symbolic objects are meant to indemnify the tourist for having been, for weeks or months, cut off from an authentic experience of the world, from physical contact with other human beings—

Yeh, that’s where it’s at. If Roo were here, he wouldn’t be having these theories, probably. His state of mind is unnatural, the grayness of London projection. What he probably ought to do is find someone who would not replace Roo or make him forget her—that’s impossible—but distract him and warm him.

Preceded by a rush of chilly air, a hollow roar, the inbound Underground train arrives. It is more than half empty, for it’s after six in the evening and most travelers are on their way home to the suburbs. Several of the people in the car glance with interest at Fred as he sits down. Directly across from him a pretty young woman in a dark-green wool cape gives him a half smile as their eyes meet, and then looks down at her book. Here, and not for the first time, is a good example of what Fred probably needs in London, but he doesn’t feel able to do anything about it.

Two things stand in the way of his taking any useful action. One is inexperience. Unlike most moderately attractive or positively unattractive men, Fred has never learnt to pick up women. He has never had to learn, because since he was very young there have always been plenty of females among his acquaintance who were ready, even eager, to know him better. It wasn’t his looks alone that interested them, but his high spirits, his good manners, his casual and modest skill in sports, his excellent but never arrogant intelligence. All he has ever had to do, really, is indicate a choice.

Even now, when his spirits are so low, there is no doubt that Fred could pick up women if he tried—that any initial awkwardness would be overlooked by most of those he might approach. But there is another and worse problem. Every woman or girl Fred sees in London has something wrong with her: she is not Roo. He knows it’s stupid and counterproductive to go on feeling this way about somebody who has cut you out of her life, to go on remembering and fantasizing As his childhood friend Roberto Frank said once, all you get from carrying a torch is sore fingers.

If Roberto were here now, instead of teaching French in Wisconsin, he would advise Fred to move in on the girl in the green cape and try to score tonight. As far back as junior high Roberto had begun recommending casual sex as a panacea. “What you need is a good fast fuck,” he would declare when any chum complained of being bummed out because of a cold, a sprained ankle, too much homework, unsympathetic parents, a bike or a car on the fritz—or any sort of jealousy, infidelity, or sexual reluctance on the part of a current steady. Since then, Roberto has collected women as he once collected baseball cards, always preferring quantity to quality: in grade school he once traded Mickey Mantle to Fred for three obscure and inept Red Sox. It is his contention that the world is full of good-looking horny women who are interested in a no-strings relationship. “I’m not saying you have to sweet-talk them or pull a fast one. When I meet a mama who turns me on, I lay it on the line. If she doesn’t want to play by those rules, okay; so long, no hard feelings.” Fred doesn’t agree. In his experience, no matter what is said in the preliminary negotiations, there are always strings. After even one or two dates he often felt like a tomcat entangled in an emotional ball of red yarn.

Yeh, Fred thinks, but maybe Roberto is right in a way, maybe if he could meet somebody—

The train stops at Tottenham Court Road. Fred gets off to change to the Northern Line, and so does the young woman in the green cape; he notices that she has been reading Joseph Conrad’s Chance. He quickens his pace, for he is a Conrad fan; then, uncertain of what he’s going to say to her, slows down. The young woman gives him a regretful backward glance as she turns toward the stairs to the southbound platform.

An opening remark has formed in Fred’s mind, and he starts to follow her in order to deliver it; but then he remembers that he is supposed to be on his way to supper in Hampstead with Joe and Debby Vogeler, who will take it badly if he doesn’t turn up. The Vogelers, who were in graduate school with him, are the only people of his own age he knows in London, and their continued good will is therefore important. Fred’s other acquaintances here consist of several middle-aged friends of his parents, and a member of his own department: an aging spinster named Virginia Miner who is also on leave and working in the British Museum. Toward the former he feels a polite obligation, but no social enthusiasm; in the case of Professor Miner his instinct is toward avoidance. Although she has never had a serious conversation with him on any topic, Professor Miner will presently vote on whether Fred is allowed to stay on at the University or cast into outer joblessness. She is known to be eccentric and touchy, and is also a devout Anglophile. In any encounter Fred probably has more of a chance of alienating her than of pleasing her; and if he admits his depression and his dislike of London and of the British Museum, her opinion of him, whatever it may be now, will sink. On top of all this, he doesn’t know whether he should address her as Professor Miner, Miss Miner, Ms. Miner, Virginia, or Vinnie. In order to avoid offense, he accepted her invitation to a “drinks party” later this week, but he plans to call up and say he is sick—no, he corrects himself, ill—to say you are sick in this country means you are about to vomit.

Another reason for not disappointing Joe and Debby is that they will give him a free dinner—and since Debby is a competent if unimaginative cook, a good one. For the first time in his life, Fred is broke. He hadn’t known how expensive London would be, or how long it would take his salary checks to clear. The flat he and Roo had rented by mail costs too much for one person, and he has never learnt to cook. At first he ate out, in cheaper and cheaper restaurants and pubs, to the detriment of his budget and digestion; now he exists mainly on bread and cheese, canned beans, soup, boiled eggs, and paper cartons of orange juice. If his financial situation gets desperate, he can cable or write his parents for money, but this will suggest a childish improvidence. After all, for Christ’s sake, he is nearly twenty-nine and has a Ph.D.

“No thanks.”

“It doesn’t taste right, does it?” A vertical dent appears in Debby’s round face, between her nearly invisible eyebrows.

“No, it was great, it’s just that—”

“The crust is different, I think,” says Joe, delivering this opinion with his usual philosophical detachment.

“Yeh, it’s kind of soggy,” Debby agrees. “And the filling’s much too sweet. Those were the wrong kind of cookies, and I couldn’t get real baking chocolate in any of the stores. But that’s how it is with everything here, you know?”

Fred does not answer. He should know by now, since Debby and Joe have spent most of the evening telling him, describing with warm indignation (Debby) or ironic resignation (Joe) their disillusion with England in general and London in particular. After making a big effort for over a month they have given up on the whole scene. They are also really pissed off at themselves for having been dumb enough to come here on leave from the adjacent Southern California colleges at which they teach, with a year-old baby on top of everything. They were warned, but they had been brainwashed by their admiration for British literature (Debby) and British philosophy (Joe). Why hadn’t they listened to their friends? they keep asking each other. Why hadn’t they gone to Italy or to Greece, or even stayed home in Claremont, for God’s sake? Britain might have been great in the past, all right, but in their opinion modern London sucks.

“For instance, the way they are in the stores. That man at the grocery was really disagreeable, as if I’d insulted him or something by saying he ought to carry unsweetened baking chocolate, and he was glad he’d never heard of it.”

“They’re in collusion. That’s what we decided,” Joe says. “They meet once a week in some local pub. ‘Okay, let’s get those dumb young American professors,’ they say, ‘the ones who were so bloody pleased with themselves for being in London.’” He laughs, then blows his nose.

“That’s why the plumber didn’t come when our kitchen sink clogged up. He refused to say when he could get here, or if he would ever even come at all.”

“Or like today, that woman at the dry cleaners. She looked at my pants as if they had a smell. ‘No, sir, we couldn’t do anything with those oily spots, one pound ten please.’” Joe’s imitation of a phony-refined British accent is marred by a natural tin ear and a bad cold.

“It’s so ugly, that’s what I think I mind the most,” Debby says. “Everything’s so gray and damp, and of course all the modern buildings are absolutely hideous. And they put up public housing and hamburger restaurants and billboards right in the middle of the most beautiful old streets. What’s happened to their aesthetic sense?”

“Frozen out of them,” her husband says. Joe, a native of California, is thin, narrow-chested, and easily chilled; he has been ill ever since he arrived in London and sometimes sick as well. At first he tried to ignore the whole thing, he tells Fred while Debby is below in the dark, damp kitchen making coffee. Then he went to bed and waited for four days to feel better; finally, despairing of recovery, he got up again. At present he has a fever, a headache, a sore throat, a cough, and blocked sinuses. What he wants most is to go upstairs, lie down, and pass out; but he is a student and professor of philosophy and a natural stoic. Debby and their baby Jakie also have colds.

“The real downer is the climate,” says Joe, hauling on the ropes of the dumbwaiter in response to his wife’s shout. “They probably fix that too.”

“When I think what the weather’s like right now in Claremont!” Debby exclaims a moment later, pouring coffee. “It makes me feel really stupid and cheated. Well, hell, we were cheated. You know, maybe I told you before”—she has—“we rented this house by mail; the agent sent us a photograph and description. The morning we got here, off the plane, Flask Walk was so pretty: the sun was shining for once, and when the taxi stopped it looked just like the picture, only better because it was in color, a perfect Georgian cottage. And I thought well, damn it, it’s really worth all that rent and plane fare and those eight hellish hours with Jakie on the plane. And then we went inside, and the back of the house wasn’t there, like it had been sliced off. Of course the real estate agent hadn’t said anything about that.” The Vogeler’s house is on a sharp-angled corner; it consists of a basement kitchen, a sitting room, and two bedrooms, one above the other. Each room is narrowly triangular, the shape of a piece of pie cut far less generously than those Debby has just served.

“‘Drawing room eighteen by twelve feet at best,’ the description said,” she goes on. “I thought that meant not counting the baseboards or the closets or something. And this awful plastic furniture, squeezed into the corners. And of course there wasn’t any garden. It made me feel kind of dizzy and kind of crazy, all at the same time. I just burst out crying, and then of course Jakie started bawling too, the way babies do when you’re upset.”

“We were totally disoriented, no kidding,” Joe admits. “Partly jet lag, I guess. Only it’s been nearly six weeks, and we’re not recovered.”

“I know what you mean.” Fred holds out his cup for more coffee. “I get the weird idea sometimes that I’m not really in London; that this place isn’t London, it’s some kind of imitation.”

“That’s just how we felt when we first got here.” Debby leans forward, her square-cut brown hair swinging. “Especially every time we went to look at something, say Westminster Abbey or the Houses of Parliament or whatever. They were always smaller than we expected, and overrun with busloads of American and French and German and Japanese tourists. So we decided, the hell with it.”

“Of course that’s inevitable anywhere,” her husband explains. “Tourism is a self-degrading process, kind of like oxidation of iron.” Joe has a fondness for scientific metaphor, the precipitate of undergraduate years as a biochemistry major. “Some place is designated a sight because it’s typical or symbolic—it stands for the ideal Britain. So hundreds of tourists go there, and then of course all they see is other tourists.”

“And when you get to a sight it probably doesn’t look right anyhow,” Debby adds, “because you’ve already seen a prettied-up picture of it, taken on some bright summer day with all the tour buses and candy-wrappers and cigarette butts swept away. So the real place seems kind of dirty and shabby in comparison. We’ve just about given up sightseeing. Well, at least it prevents distractions.”

“Right,” Joe says. “And if you don’t go looking at things, in a climate like this, you’re bound to write a lot. Nothing else to do but play with the baby or watch TV—Hey, what time is it?”

“Nearly eight,” Debby says Joe unfolds his long legs and goes to turn on the rented television set that has been installed in the pointed end of the pie-shaped sitting room.

As they move their chairs round and wait with the sound off for this week’s episode of a BBC serial based on a James novel, Fred considers putting forth his own ideas about tourism, but decides against it, realizing that his most important point doesn’t apply to the Vogelers, neither of whom—as their juxtaposition on the ugly sofa demonstrates—is deprived of the sense of touch.

Joe turns up the sound, and a minor-key theme announces the start of the program. Fred, who has missed the earlier episodes, watches with less than his whole attention. Gloomily, he compares the Vogelers’ situation with his own. They have each other and their baby, and apparently they are getting some writing done, whereas his work on John Gay in the British Museum (now referred to by Roo as the BM or Bowel Movement) is going very badly.

Fred is active, energetic, impatient of confinement. When he’s in a library he likes to range through the stacks finding the books he wants, and coming across others he hadn’t known about. In the BM he is forbidden to enter the stacks; he can’t always get what he wants, and he can never get what he doesn’t know he needs. Often he has to wait up to four hours for the constipated digestive system of the ancient library to disgorge a pathetic few of the volumes whose numbers he has copied from the complex, unwieldy catalogue. And even when they arrive all is far from well. Fred is used to working in a study of his own, away from noise and distraction. Now he is surrounded by other readers, many of them eccentric or even possibly insane, to judge by their appearance and mannerisms—filling dusty volumes with multicolored paper slips, tapping with their fingers or feet, mumbling to themselves, conversing in nervous whispers, coughing and blowing their noses in a contagious way.

He also likes to spread out at work, and to move around; at home his notes covered two tables and a bed in the spare room, and books lay open on the carpet. In the BM his tall, muscular frame is cramped into a chair at a narrow section of desk between two other scholars or lunatics and their encroaching heaps of volumes, in an ill-ventilated hall full of identical radiating seats constructed on the same plan as the model prisons designed by Victorian moral philosophers.

Fred is convinced that the BM is having a baleful effect on his work. In order to write decently about John Gay he must (to quote his subject) “take the road.” He must be able to “rove like the bee,” to bring together not only literary criticism and dramatic history but folklore, musicology, and the annals of eighteenth-century crime. Crouched over whatever books he has managed to get that day, in this huge stuffy scholarly prison, it is no wonder the sentences he strains to produce are cramped and heavy. Again and again he rises to consult the catalogue unnecessarily, or to pace about the room. Glimpses of those habitual readers he now knows by sight, or in a few cases is acquainted with, depress him further. Often either Joe or Debby Vogeler is there, steadily grinding away; they went through graduate school together and have a scrupulously egalitarian partnership, sharing the care of little Jakie. The Vogelers are untroubled by working conditions in the Bowel Movement. As he passes, whichever one of them is present is apt to glance up and smile rather patronizingly. Too bad Fred never learnt to concentrate, he can sense them thinking.

The closing theme of the program comes on; the faces of its hero and heroine are frozen between a background of lush Edwardian architecture and a foreground of television credits.

“Well,” Fred says, rising. “I guess I’d better—”

“Hey, don’t go yet,” Joe snuffles.

“Stay and tell us some news. Uh, how is Ruth?” Debby or her husband ask this question at weekly intervals, alternating as if by prearrangement.

“I don’t know. I haven’t heard from her,” he replies for the fourth time.

“Still haven’t heard, huh.” Behind this seemingly neutral comment and Debby’s neutral question Fred senses hostility. His friends do not know Roo very well or like her very much. On both occasions when they met they had made evident efforts to know and like her, but—as with London—these efforts had not succeeded.

“She was never really right for you,” Debby says, breaking a three-year silence. “We always saw that.”

“Yeh,” Joe agrees. “I mean, she was obviously a decent person. But she was always in overdrive.”

“Those photographs of hers. They were so kind of frantic and weird. And she seemed awful immature compared to you.” Roo, admittedly, is four years younger than Debby and three years younger than Joe and Fred.

“She just wasn’t on the same wavelength.”

“Evidently not.” Fred picks up that morning’s Guardian from the plastic imitation-oak coffee table.

“Listen. Don’t let it get you down,” Joe instructs him.

“Yeh, that’s easy to say,” he replies, turning the pages of the newspaper without seeing them.

“You made a mistake, that’s all,” Debby says. “Anybody can do that; even you.”

“Right,” Joe agrees.

“You know, I’m still really sorry it didn’t work out for you and Carissa,” his wife murmurs. “I’ve always liked her so much. And you know she’s really brilliant.”

“She has a fine mind,” Joe says.

“Mmf,” Fred utters, noticing that Carissa is described in the present tense, whereas Roo by implication not only has a mediocre or coarse mind but has ceased to exist.

“She’s a unique person,” Debby goes on.

A unique person is exactly what Carissa is not, Fred thinks. She is a conventional, frightened academic: intelligent, granted; but forever anxious to seem even more intelligent. Whereas Roo—

“Let’s not talk about it, all right?” he says abruptly.

“Oh, God. I’m sorry—”

“Hey, we didn’t mean—”

It takes Fred nearly ten minutes to convince his friends that he is not really offended, understands their concern, enjoyed dinner, and is looking forward to seeing them again.

He doesn’t condemn the Vogelers for their opinion, since when he himself met Roo he also would have said they weren’t on the same wavelength, though in fact the signals she broadcast made him hum like a stereo amplifier. Everything about her seemed to send out an electrical pulse: not only the full round breasts under the orange SOLAR ENERGY T-shirt, but the wide liquid eyes, the flushed tanned skin, and the long braided cable of copper-brown hair from which wiry filaments escaped in every direction.

Their meeting took place during Fred’s second month at Corinth University, at a reception for a visiting lecturer. Roo attended because she had been assigned to take a photograph for the local paper, and Fred because of his admiration for the views of the speaker—which she emphatically did not share, and said so. Their initial impressions of each other were unfavorable, even scornful. Complete polarization was avoided by the discovery of a mutual interest: Roo had been out horseback riding earlier that afternoon, and hadn’t bothered to change; and when Fred learnt that her jodphurs and high waxed boots were functional rather than—or as well as—theatrical, his hostility relaxed. When Roo, with what he would soon come to recognize as her characteristic impulsiveness masked by a deadpan manner, said that if he wanted to go riding with her that weekend he could, he accepted enthusiastically. Roo, as she told him later, was slower to come around. “I was like blown away, I wanted to make it with you so much; but all the time my superego was saying Hey, whoa, wait a minute, this is an uptight woolly liberal professor type, probably a real pig in disguise; all you’ll get from him is grief, baby.”

Turning off the High Street, Fred plunges into Hampstead Tube Station, buys a ticket to Notting Hill Gate, and enters an ancient iron lift decorated with advertising posters of half-naked young women. As it descends into the cold, damp shaft, so he descends, against his will, into naked memories.

“You know something?” Roo said, turning on her side so that sunlight and shadow flowed over her warm tanned skin as they do over ripe hayfields on a partly cloudy day. “It’s a lie that when your childhood fantasies come true it’s always a letdown.”

“Did you use to imagine a scene like this?” Fred did not move, but lay on his back looking past the interlaced limbs of the trees into a sky the burning blue of a gas flame.

“Oh yeh. Some day my prince will come, all that sappy stuff. From about age seven.”

“That young?”

“Sure. I never heard of the latency period till I got to college. I was always trying to get the little boys I knew to play doctor, but mostly they weren’t all that interested. Of course my ideas about what would happen after the prince came were pretty out of focus. I could visualize the scenery all right, and the way the guy would look riding out of the woods, just about exactly like you, only of course at first he was seven years old.”

“Was that when you learnt to ride, when you were seven?”

“No. Not seriously anyhow.” Roo sat up. Her thick dark-russet braid (the same hue, he had realized earlier, as her horse Shara’s coat) had come undone during their recent struggles. Now it spread down her back, uncoiling as if with an inner volition. “I was wild to, but I didn’t get much chance, except for a couple weeks in the summer at day camp. I didn’t really learn till I was thirteen, after Ma met Bernie. What about you?”

“I don’t know exactly. One of the first things I remember is being put up on a pony at my grandfather’s: it seemed miles high, and broad as a sofa. I was two or three, I guess.”

“Lucky bastard.” Roo made a fist and hit him playfully, but not lightly. “I would’ve given anything—I was crazy for horses when I was a kid, and so were most of my friends. We were a little nuts about it really.”

“Yeh, I knew girls like that. Funny social phenomenon. I always thought it must be a reaction against this mechanized world—women maybe mind that more than men do, even as kids.”

“Some women.” Roo shrugged. “Then there’s also the Freudian explanation, but personally I think that’s all crap. I never imagined I was making it with a horse; I thought I was a horse. It was the same for the rest of us, I’m positive. Y’know there were two kinds of little girls in my elementary school: the goody-two-shoes types who liked pretty clothes and baking cookies and playing with dolls; and then me and my friends who wanted to run around outside in old jeans and sneakers and get dirty and were crazy about horses. The way I figure it, it was sort of identification with energy and strength and freedom. Wanting to be a different kind of female than everybody wanted us to be.”

“I remember those good little girls,” Fred said. “They were no use for anything.” He pulled Roo down toward him. “Ahh.”

“Hey,” he said a little later. “You really mean you never went out riding with anyone before and ended up like this?”

“Oh, well.” Roo’s breath was warm against his face. “Sure, a couple of times.” She rolled back so that she could look at him. “But it wasn’t the same. A lot of guys I’ve known can’t ride, not worth a damn anyhow—it’s worse when they pretend they can. And the ones who could, they were mostly nice sexless dopes like my stepbrothers . . . I never brought anyone up here before; not to this place.” Her voice thickened, and their glances locked.

“Thank you.”

“Don’t think you’re so fucking special,” Roo said presently. “I mean, you can’t keep waiting forever for some goddamn prince. I was getting old, you know, and I just figured it was about time.”

“Yeh. Twenty-two.” Fred stroked her face; but Roo turned away from him, propping her chin on one hand and gazing downhill through the trees toward the horses.

“Besides, there was Shara. You know, like I told you, I wanted to get the fuck out of the Boston area last spring because my boss on the paper was such a chauvinist shit, and the relationship I was in turned into a real bummer. I didn’t have to come home, though. I could’ve gone to New York or the West Coast—I had some decent leads on jobs. But I wanted to be with Shara. I figure this might be her last good year—she’s nearly as old as I am, and after twenty you never know with a horse. She can still work up a fair speed, but she gets winded. Of course, I could ride one of the other horses, but it wouldn’t be the same. In my fantasies I was always on Shara, and that’s how I wanted it to be, you know? And it’s October already. In a couple of weeks, maybe sooner, it’ll be too cold to fuck outdoors. So in a way it was now or never.” Roo gave an uneven laugh. “So don’t think you’re so special,” she repeated.

But Fred did think so, and rejoiced in it.

In other quarters the rejoicing was less. As he paces the bare, freezing, nearly empty London Underground platform Fred hears again in his mind the recent remarks of Joe and Debby, and of other friends and relatives, some of whom hadn’t hesitated to congratulate him on the breakup of his marriage. Most of these people had never been very enthusiastic about Roo from the start. She was not the sort of girl/woman they had expected Fred to become serious about, and their congratulations had been manifested in the conventional form of faint and damning praise.

By Fred’s father, for instance: “Well, she’s certainly good-looking. And she seems like a very warm-hearted kind of girl. Those photographs she took in the Mexican slums show a lot of feeling for her subject; you know what she thinks, all right.” The photographs were of Mexicans in an upstate New York farmworker’s camp, but Fred had given up trying to correct this error, typical of his father, who prefers to locate all social disagreeableness at the greatest possible mental distance.

Or as Joe and Debby had put it: “Pretty far out, those disco pictures of Ruth’s. You can see she really knows her stuff technically.” “She’s obviously a high-energy kind of person.” “That was a really unusual dress she was wearing, with the red embroidery and all those mirrors, Albanian or whatever it was.” “She reminds me of some of my students from New York. We were suprised she grew up in a place like Corinth.”

Translation: Roo is too emotional, too political, too arty, too noisy, and too Jewish. As it happens, Joe himself is Jewish, but from a very different tradition: Princeton-trained, scholarly, retiring.

Many of Fred’s graduate school friends, and most of his relatives, are obviously relieved that Roo is, as one of them put it, “out of the picture.” They assume or at least hope that she won’t reenter it, but will remain in the more far-out and slummy world of her own photographs. Fred’s mother, on the other hand, very much wants them to get back together. Maybe for sentimental and conventional reasons: he can remember her saying in another context, with a placid pride, “You know, darling, there’s never been a divorce in my family.” But it is not only that she wishes to preserve this record; his mother had taken to Roo from the start, though they could hardly be less alike: Roo so arty, noisy, etc., and Emily Turner such a lady, her tastes so elegant, her voice so well modulated.

Roo, though more grudgingly, also took to his mother. “I don’t care if it’s raining, I want to go for a walk,” she said as soon as they were alone on the first afternoon of her first visit to his family. “It really gets to me after a while, this whole uptight place. . . . Well, your mother’s okay. She had to put us in separate rooms, so it’d look respectable, but I notice she gave us ones with a connecting bath. And she sure is great-looking; almost as great-looking as you.” Roo leant warmly against Fred. “I bet she’s had a lot of adventures.”

“How do you mean, adventures?” Fred stopped caressing Roo’s left breast.

“Like, you know: love affairs and stuff. Well, maybe not a lot,” Roo qualified, registering his expression. “But enough to make her life interesting. I mean, hell, you’d have to do something to stay awake in a place like this.”

“You’ve got her all wrong,” Fred said. For the first time he considered his mother as a possible adulteress, and recognized that her qualifications for this role were excellent. His memory, without any prompting, even suggested possible partners. There was a visiting professor in History she used to dance with at parties; his father always made sour cracks about him. And of course the old guy that ran the riding stable—it was a family joke how he had a crush on her. And once when he was little (four? five?) he suddenly remembers, there was a man sitting in their dining-room fixing a toaster, and Freddy hates him, and his mother, in a red sweater, is standing too near the man, and Freddy hates her too—what was all that about? No, certainly not; his parents are very happy together. “Not that I don’t think she could have, if she’s ever wanted to, but—”

“Okay, okay. Forget I said it. She’s your mother, so you want her to be like one of those Virgin Mary statues in your church. Maybe she is, how should I know?”

“And you’ve got the wrong set of stereotypes,” he said, hugging her. “There are no Virgin Mary statues in our church; it’s all very abstract, very Reformation. Come on, get your coat, I’ll show you.”

Though he had known Roo for nearly three months at this point, Fred was still intoxicated with her—and not only sexually. As if she had been some mind-expanding drug, he was in a constant state of heightened awareness: what he saw seemed both strange and amazingly familiar. The transformation had begun with her photographs, but did not depend on them. In Roo’s presence at first, and then even when he was alone, Fred saw that farm workers had the expressions and gestures of Gothic carvings—elongated, creased, hollowed; and disco dancers, those of a Francis Bacon painting—all pale, screaming, metamorphosing mouths and limbs. He saw that the gate of the college was a frozen iron flower, and that the university officials resembled a convocation of barnyard fowl. Moreover, he knew that these visions were real—that he now saw the world as it was and always had been: like Roo herself, naked, beautiful, full of meaning.

Soon he no longer cared if Roo’s pictures and Roo’s conversation shocked his kith or kin. Indeed he privately enjoyed it, as she pointed out later: “You know something: you use me to say things you’re too polite to say yourself. It’s like that ventriloquist I used to watch on TV when I was a little kid. He wore this big crazy puppet on his arm, sort of a woolly yellow bear with goggle eyes and a big pumpkin mouth, that was always making smartass cracks and insulting everybody else on the show. And the guy always pretended to be suprised, like he had nothing to do with it: ‘Ow, that’s awful! I can’t control him, he’s so naughty!’ . . . Hell no, I don’t mind. It’s a good act.”

“Besides, it’s reciprocal,” Fred told her. “You use me to say all the conventional things you don’t want to say. For instance, last week you got me to tell your mother we were getting married and take the blame for being a square.” The reaction of Roo’s mother was: “Really? How come? I thought nobody your age got married anymore unless—Oh, hey! Are you two having a baby? . . . Well then, I don’t get it, but it’s fine by me if you want to.” (Needless to say, on the one occasion when Roo and Fred had stayed overnight with her mother and stepfather, due to blizzard conditions following a party, they were put in the same room.)

It had in fact been Fred’s suggestion that they might get married, ostensibly to simplify his relations with his students and hers with his colleagues (“This is Fred’s er-friend.”). But it was also a way of proving to everyone that he took Roo seriously—that she wasn’t just, as one of his cousins had suggested, the kind of girl you can have a lot of fun with for a while. And Roo, he thought, had wanted to marry him because in spite of appearances (her radical views and getups, her tough manner) she was deeply romantic.

As their plans progressed it became clear that he had been cast in another of her youthful fantasies: the Perfect Wedding. Sunlight on the lawn, massed bouquets of flowers, Mozart and Bartók, strawberries, homemade wedding cake and elderflower champagne. Romantic, but still a radical feminist. Roo had, for instance, refused to take his name; nor would she remain Ruth Zimmern. Her relations with her father, L. D. Zimmern, an English professor and critic of some reputation in New York, were friendly; but still, why should any feminist go through life with a patronymic, particularly that of a pater who had walked out on his familias when Roo was a small child? Instead, she used the occasion of her marriage to become legally Ruth March. The new surname was chosen because it was the month of her birth; and also in tribute to the favorite book of her childhood, Little Women, with whose heroine Jo March she had deeply identified. (She was determined that if they had children, the boys would take his ancestral surname and the girls her new one, establishing a matrilineal line of descent.)

Just as Fred is beginning to wonder if the Northern—or as the London papers call it, the Misery—Line has stopped running, a train arrives. He gets into it, is carried by slow stages to Tottenham Court Road station, and makes his way through a series of cold tiled sewerlike tunnels plastered with posters advertising cultural attractions available in London in February. He pays them no heed. Because of the desperate condition of his finances he cannot afford to go to any of these concerts, plays, films, exhibitions, or sporting events; nor can he afford to travel anywhere outside of London. Last fall when he and Roo were planning their trip together, counting on his study leave, both their savings, and the sublet of their apartment, it seemed as if time were the only barrier to their plans for exploring London, and beyond: Oxford, Cambridge; Cornwall, Wales, Scotland; Ireland; the Continent. He wanted to see everything then, to travel forever; he felt that forever was hardly long enough for him and Roo. Now, even if he had the funds, he lacks the spirit to explore Notting Hill Gate.

Roo, for instance, wanted to go to Lapland in June to photograph the midnight sun, the glaciers, the Northern Lights, the reindeer—the whole landscape, she explained, of Andersen’s “Snow Queen.” But there is no point in thinking about Roo, Fred tells himself as he waits on the platform for a westbound train. She cares nothing for him and never did; she has insulted him and probably betrayed him and said she never wants to see him again. And he doesn’t want to see her again; how could he, after what has happened?

But in spite of this he can see her now: her dark eyes wide, her hair electrically springy, talking about the green ice of the glaciers, the mountain flowers—and then, even then, Roo was destroying him, photographing and possibly, probably, fucking—you couldn’t use a more polite word—both of those— And what made it worse, at the exact same time she was photographing and fucking him. She was even more full of energy those last, unseasonably warm November weeks, even more beautiful, alight with joy because she was about to have her first one-woman exhibition in Corinth and because (she thought) she was going with him to London.

Her show, Roo had decided, would be called “Natural Forms” and would include mostly pictures taken in Hopkins County, some of them for her newspaper. She claimed afterward that she had offered to let him see the prints before they were framed, and that he hadn’t taken her up on it. As Fred recalled it, Roo had suggested it would be better if he saw the show as a whole.

Roo also claimed she had warned him to expect surprises, and had said she was worried about whether he would like them; but Fred has no recollection of this. He did remember her saying at one point: “I’m going to use some of the shots I took of you last summer, okay? Your face won’t show much.” To which he must, unfortunately—probably he was working at the time—have replied “Okay.” Certainly she had said more than once that her exhibition was going to bother some people; but there are ways of telling the truth that are worse than an outright lie. Fred knew that Roo’s photographs had always bothered some people, people who didn’t like sharp-focus views of poverty or of the hysterical underside of the American dream.

On a cold bright afternoon in November, then, an hour before Roo’s show was to open, Fred walked into the gallery. As he stood with her in the first and larger of the two rooms beside a bowl of blood-red punch and symmetrical plates of cheese cubes, each pierced by a toothpick, they exchanged their last warm, untroubled embrace. Around them, Roo’s photographs were hung in groups of two. What she had done was to pair views of natural and manmade objects in such a way as to emphasize their similarity. A few of the combinations he had already seen. Others were new to him: insects waving antennae and TV roof aerials; Shara’s rump and a peach. Some of the juxtapositions were personal and humorous, some strongly political: two overweight politicians and a pair of beef cattle. But the overall tone, in contrast to that of earlier exhibitions, was sympathetic and even lyrical. Three years of happiness, he had thought stupidly as he stood with his arms round his gifted wife, have made her see the comedy and beauty of the world as well as its ugliness and tragedy.

“Roo, it’s so damn good,” he said. “Really fine.” Then he released her and entered the other room of the gallery.

What he saw first were photographs of himself, or rather of bits of himself: his left eye, its long lashes magnified, placed next to a magnified spider; his mouth with its slight pout, its infolded curve, likened to a spray of bougainvillea; his reddened knees compared to a basket of reddening apples. He admired the wit, but was somewhat embarrassed. As Roo had promised, his face didn’t really show; nobody could be sure that it was him, though many might guess. He glanced at Roo, whose own face expressed—there was no doubt about it—anxiety and suspense; then at the next two photographs. There, paired with a beautiful color shot of woodland mushrooms, dew-dappled, springing strongly from moss and mold, was an unmistakable portrait of his own erect cock, also holding aloft a drop of dew. Fred recognized the picture—or rather, the photograph from which this detail had been grossly enlarged—but had never thought to see it on public view.

“Roo. For God’s sake.”

“I told you.” Her large soft mouth quivered. “I had to put it in, it’s just so beautiful. And anyhow”—her voice modulated, as it did sometimes, into a strained toughness—“who’s going to know it’s yours?”

“Well, for Christ’s sake, who else’s would it be?”

Roo didn’t answer. But the question, he soon saw, was not a rhetorical one. On the walls beyond his own partial portraits were others not his own. Including other penises—two others, to be exact. Neither was as fully enlarged (in either sense) as his, but both displayed some interest. One tended to length at the expense of breadth and rose from sparse blond tendrils; it was compared by juxtaposition to a stalk of asparagus. The other, stubbier and mottled a darker red, was displayed next to a high-focus photograph of the heavy, rusted bolt of an ancient barn door.

The battles that followed this private view were fierce, painful, and prolonged. Roo refused to take down a single one of her photographs before the show opened or at any time thereafter—a decision in which she was upheld by the owners of the gallery, two small, deceptively quiet and pretty radical feminists whom Fred had once liked very much. She also refused to identify her other models, whose feelings she was evidently more considerate of than her own husband’s. (“Honestly, I can’t, I like swore I wouldn’t say.”)

When he protested, using phrases like “good taste,” Roo started screaming at him. “Yeh, well you know what that is, baby, that’s a pile of chauvinist shit. What about all the male painters and sculptors that’ve been exploiting women’s bodies for thousands of years—and photographers too, posing women to look like fruit or sand-dunes or teacups? A room full of breasts and asses, oh yes, that’s really nice, that’s Art. But don’t let the cunts think they can try the same thing on us. Well, too bad. Goose sauce, sauce for the gander!”

Okay, all right, Fred conceded for the sake of argument. If she wanted to take photographs of good-looking men, their physiques, he guessed he could see the point of that, their chests and shoulders and arms and legs. Or even their asses—“great buns,” he had heard that was the term— But Roo, still fuming, interrupted him. “That’s not where it’s at, pal. Women aren’t interested in men’s behinds, that’s a fag thing.” What they are interested in, she didn’t say, didn’t have to say, was cocks.

At the same time, Roo insisted and kept on insisting that neither of her unknown models had been physically intimate with her. “I don’t know how they got aroused like that. Being photographed turns a lot of people on. You really think if I’d fucked some other guy I’d put a picture of his cock in my show, you think I’m that kind of bitch?”

“I don’t know,” Fred said, angry and weary. “Hell, I don’t know what you might do any more. I mean, what’s the difference?”

Roo looked at him with rage. “Kate and Harriet were right,” she said. “You really are a pig.”

Fred’s choice of Roo had felt to him like a bold and expansive act, a defiance of conventions—and also of his own conventional self. For years he had been aware that in spite of all his abilities and advantages his life was a little unexciting. From babyhood on he had been what he once heard his father describe as “a very satisfactory child”—bright, good-looking, successful in everything, above all well behaved. His adolescent rebellion was of the most ordinary variety, and gave his parents no serious anxiety. Fred would have liked to worry them a little more—but not at the cost of failing school, scrambling his brains permanently with acid, or wrecking the battered tail-finned Buick he had delivered papers in zero weather and mowed lawns for five years to earn.

Roo was his red flag, his declaration of independence—and in the beginning, the less comfortable his family and more conventional friends were with her, the better pleased he was. Now he feels shamed and enraged to realize that they had judged her more accurately than he. His father, for instance, held the unspoken but clearly evident opinion that Roo was not a lady. Once Fred would have indignantly denied this, or rather condemned the concept as outmoded and meaningless. Now he has to recognize its validity. Even if you suppose, just for the sake of argument, that Roo never slept with either of the two guys whose semi-erect cocks were featured in her show, those photos were pretty vulgar. And worse, she didn’t even know it. As Joe had put it, she wasn’t on the same wavelength; they weren’t, as Debby had said, “coming from the same place”—though in fact they had both grown up in university towns with fathers who were professors.

Possibly it was this similarity of background that had helped mislead him into assuming that Roo and he were, whatever her language and manners, essentially in cahoots. It wasn’t his fault; Debby had said so: “Anyone can make a mistake—even you.”

As Fred hears her remark again in his head, however, it begins to deconstruct, becoming condescending, chilly, and spiteful. It occurs to him for the first time that Debby does not like him, possibly has never liked him, that she is glad to see him depressed and discomfited. Why this should be so, however, he has no idea. He has known Debby even longer than he has known Joe, since their first year in graduate school, and has always thought of her as a friend, though not an intimate one.

As a matter of fact, though he doesn’t know it, Debby had originally liked Fred very much—too much for her peace of mind. When they met—almost daily, in class or at some lecture or party—or when they had lunch together, usually in a group but now and then alone, Fred remained unaware of her feelings. With the good-natured vanity of the extremely good-looking, it didn’t occur to him that dumpy, dish-faced Debby might hope he was developing a romantic interest in her, or that as time passed she regarded herself as a woman scorned. At present Debby would tell anyone who asked that she “likes” Fred, but privately she thinks of him as rather immature and thoroughly spoilt. She resents him professionally too, both on her own account and on her husband’s. Why should Fred, who did no better in graduate school than they, and has published no more, have a job in an Ivy League university, while they are at California colleges nobody ever heard of? It is only because he dresses well and has a smooth manner at interviews, and because of his connections: because his father is a dean at another Ivy League school. Fred, according to an article Debby once read, is an example of Entitlement Psychology: he has been brought up to get, and think he deserves, all the good things of this world. So why should she mind seeing him stumble, even fall? It will do him good to get a few bruises and a little mud in his eye. The fact that Joe doesn’t resent Fred the way she does, though he is in her opinion basically much more brilliant and has a more original mind, is for Debby just another proof of her husband’s inner superiority.

Fred, however, has never been agile at discovering unpleasant motives for his friends’ behavior. What he thinks now is that he must somehow have offended Debby, maybe by coming to dinner too often. Maybe she thinks he is sponging on them; maybe he is sponging on them. (Actually, this idea has never occurred to either Joe or Debby.) He has to ease up, Fred thinks as the train jolts toward Notting Hill Gate; he has got to meet some other people in London.

He decides that he will go to Professor Miner’s party after all. Probably there will be nobody there but other elderly, touchy academics; but you never know. And at least there will be drinks, and more important, maybe food—enough hors d’oeuvres so that for once he won’t have to buy supper.