Vivian  by J. Boyer                                                                                     

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            Tom fetched their drinks from the bar while Vivian claimed their table, a pair of G and Ts, his choice clearly not hers, spending longer than was called for, she thought, with a pair of sloe-eyed barmaids, sisters, Viv supposed, one who seemed to be under the influence of a great narcotic and the other, judging from the vacancy in her eyes, steadfastly determined to avoid any serious thought, in need of a guardian, no doubt, not that Tom noticed, for she was wearing a low slung peasant blouse and clearly her vacant gaze was of more concern from Viv’s vantage than it could possibly be from his.
            
           “Is this where you come normally?” asked Tom.

           “It’s just in the neighborhood where I come to see the milliner. Well, yes, sometimes, sometimes I suppose I do, yes.”

           “Ah.”

            
            “Just Ah? Well? What do you think?”

           “So you didn’t just wander in here and make a scene the other day—I must say it has its allure.”

           “From how you were peering down that girl’s blouse, I’d say it has more than one.”

           “Thank God at least it’s not crowded. Cheers.”

           “To actually having an income. Do you mind if I take off my shoes, Tom? My feet, I swear, are killing me.”

           “Tell me how you found this fabulous den of iniquity, Viv. Then we can go on to the part where they called the authorities.”

           “What?”

           “The Cox and Comb here.”

           “Blind luck. It found me, actually. I was looking through—Tom, are you listening?”

           Tom’s attention had fled. His cheeks looked suddenly sunken, his flesh pale, his eyes like two dark orbits, looking away from the door. She followed his eyes with her own. “Oh God,” said Tom. “Don’t turn. Pretend you don’t see him. There’s Pound. And Joyce both.” 

           Viv noticed at the door an atrabilious looking man who having had too much to drink had acquired the judicious walk of someone whose legs are soon to turn to corkscrews. She said, “Isn’t that—

           “Old Forster as well. Oh God, Viv, I told you not to look. Now they’ll join us for sure. Dear Lord, take me now, Pound’s come with friends.  And some of them were at the Savoy this evening. That awful to-do for Forster, to which neither of us were invited.”

           “To which I was not invited you mean. Would you prefer I just slipped away?”

           “It’s too late, Viv. They see us. Just wave.”

           “What are we going to do now?”

           “What can we do!"

            Tom impressed everyone he met with his varied ambitions, his boundless energy, his mischievous Anglophile charm, yet Viv knew he spent much of his emotional life along the shoals of depression and dissatisfaction, for he showed a side of himself to Viv he kept carefully concealed from anyone else. A coldness. A kind of Polar winter.  He had no close friends, and while he liked to claim he could charm a tea kettle into dancing a jig, and for that matter probably could, Viv thought, Tom had charm instead of warmth, had none of Viv’s sun about him, nothing warm, not even his smile.  Like so many others who learn early in their lives that they are good at all they care to try, he secreted the belief there was really nothing worth being good at, and while this could manifest itself as dry wit or even ironic detachment, depending upon the situation it could also come across as being peevish and superior, even contemptuous, as if Tom felt wholly justified in shutting off his charm at a moment’s notice and becoming remote from others and disdainful of the world.

            At least there’d be Pound, she thought, Pound who had brought them together. She’d known Pound forever, it seemed. She would sit, much as she was sitting here in the Cox and Comb, listening to Ezra Pound go on about America as if he were an emissary from a grand and distant continent, a traveler from a foreign land, pleased by how lucid was Pound and open in his judgments to anything she proposed, thinking he was the one male creature she’d ever met who saw her in the same light in which she secretly saw herself, as a truly—if indefinitely—special being, possessed of an idiosyncratic beauty, charming, of course, very charming, with a keen, even fierce wit and unspoken power to fascinate,  an estimation  of  Pound’s all the more convincing for  how long and how lightly he’d worn his good opinion of her—and then again, to her eye at least,  how visibly. 

           Such was the pattern this evening in the Cox and Comb. It began with Pound speaking about the Savoy as the first round of drinks was served by the barmaid, then saying how Tom and Viv had been missed, but Viv most of all, going on to say that Viv’s capacity for charming a room full of strangers was as natural as it was rare, then continued in this vein until his voice dissolved into the sound of pub crawl laughter and music from the street. Tom was saying at the moment that the world is divided into only two classes that make any real difference, the good and the bad, and while he supposed Viv, as a woman, could not help but desire to be one of the former, for himself he preferred the alternative, since good people were inevitably afraid of bad ones while the reverse was almost never true, a situation leaving the bad among us with a distinctly upper hand, he thought.

           Viv protested, “That’s not what I meant, and you know it, Tom.”

            “Well that’s certainly what it sounded like to me.” 

           “Do you listen to anything I say, anything at all? Is there anything else I’ve done wrong?”

            “Yes.  Now that you bring it up. Your view of the world.”

           “My view of the world, is that all.”

           “Yes, Vivian. Your view of the world.”

            
           To hear Tom tell it, she had opinions about nearly everything, some of them to be greatly improved had she by accident been given a brain, and, in any case, most of them what he called “fashionably out of step,” for instance explaining away Lady Ottoline Morrell as being misunderstood by the public, when it was clear to anyone with even the hint of a pulse that the woman was pigeon-toed, ugly, and fat.

           So clearly excluded was she now that Viv turned to Tom’s friend Pound and said, “Well? Save me.”

            They struck up a flirty conversation, as they were wont to do, with Viv hoping Pound might take up her part straightaway, which he did, calling to Tom at the other end of the table, first saying to Tom that he hadn’t noticed Lady Ottoline Morrell being pigeon-toed but had thought to himself as Tom was making his case that were he Tom he would never be seen in public with someone as attractive as Vivian, since considered in tandem they were very much like a flower pulled up with a handful of weeds, leaving it to Tom’s imagination whether or not Tom was the flower, and adding that while a flower might be its own excuse for being, weeds were generally snatched from the earth by their roots and then chucked in a bin with the detritus and slops—or hadn’t Tom noticed? To which others joined in like a chorus: