Free Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie Page A

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