I couldn’t tell what I thought about her, as she walked a half step ahead of my pace. Was it love? No, I was too cynical to agree to that, and too jarred.
She intimidated me. I had reached the point in life when the ignominies of middle school were long gone, but still as I watched her walking that night, her cool, pale shoulder blades jutting above the back of her dress, the gazes of pimpled undergraduates following her, I understood that like all beautiful women she reflected back to me a simultaneously heightened and attenuated sense of what I was worth.
The black night was crisp, full of stars and moonlight, and as we crossed the wide lawns the trees by the river listed in the wind. We went and leaned up against the boathouse. I took a pack of Dunhills out of my jacket pocket and gave her one, which I lit.
“Cheers,” she said.
“Are you cold?”
“It’s warm enough.”
Probably it sounds as if we were alone, but in fact it was quietly chaotic by the river. There was a newly minted couple discreetly making out against a tree, and two drunk freshmen who were shouting at them from a safe distance, and someone trying to unlock the punts to steal them, and someone else trying to climb into the tennis court, which was surrounded by a high fence.
Our hands found each other, and she looked over at me quickly, smiling.
“Can I kiss you again?” I asked.
She put her arms around my neck. “I wish you would.”
We stood there for twenty minutes then, our hands underneath each other’s clothes and in each other’s hair, our breath quick, our skin a strange mixture of hot and cold. I felt overwhelmed by a longing for her body—not a sexual one exactly, but as I kissed her I wished I were kissing her, as I touched her breasts I wished that I were touching her breasts. My desire overran reality. I couldn’t understand it.
Finally we stopped, only because the undergrads had at last loosed one of the punts from its chains and were making down the river in it without a pole or paddles, laughing wildly, drinking from bottles of beer, unsure of what they were doing.
“Tossers,” she said affectionately. We watched them until they were around a bend in the river; then she turned to me and took the lapels of my jacket in her hands, pulling me close and grinning. “Alison’s a lucky girl.”
The one thing I knew I wasn’t going to do was tell her that Alison and I had broken up. It was too soon. I didn’t even know my own mind yet—and though I wouldn’t have admitted it, there was also part of my brain that was worried about losing Alison’s father. I kept thinking about that job.
I looked at Sophie and my mind changed.
“I broke up with Alison tonight,” I said. “After we went punting.”
She let go of my jacket and looked at me. “You did?”
“Yeah.”
“Shit, Will.”
“It doesn’t mean anything about us—not at all. It was just the right thing to do, regardless of … of whatever.”
“Shit,” she said again.
“What?”
“There’s something you should know. You remember my boyfriend, right?”
“Your ex?”
She never talked about him, though once she’d mentioned that he had just left Sandhurst. She looked up at me without speaking, and after a second I understood it.
“Oh,” I said.
“That day—”
“Right, right.” I paused. “You said you liked me.”
“I do.”
“But…”
“No.” She took her arms away and turned toward the river. “I made a mistake. I thought you had a girlfriend.”
Faintly I could hear the noise of the bop. I felt sick with unhappiness; I could still taste her mouth on my lips, but it already seemed to have happened, our kissing and touching, a long time ago, somewhere else.
“Maybe you should break up with him,” I said.
“I can’t do that.”
“Why?”
She stepped back. “I’ve been wrong,” she said. “I’m sorry, Will. Really I am, I swear.”
As I was going to say something, a cry came up from the lawns, a hundred feet away, and we both turned to look. It was Anil, tearing toward us and laughing helplessly. On his heels was Tom, his dress drenched, shouting, “Anil, you fucker, get back here!”
Anil flew by us with a huge, winning grin, and then Tom, now laughing, too, smacked my arm as he careened by, and as I turned to watch them go Sophie squeezed my hand and said, “You stay here,” and took off back for the large bright din of Fleet.
CHAPTER FOUR
Michaelmas ended not much later, twelve days. There was a weeklong break; very few people from the Cottages planned to remain in Oxford for it. Anil had flaunted his first-class ticket to Mumbai, Tom was going to meet Katie in Dubai for four nights, and even Ella, chronically short of money, was traveling to Budapest with the Fleet Chamber Orchestra. My original intention had been to return to New York. When I knew that I didn’t have to see Alison, however, I called Delta and pushed my flight to Christmas.
The fallout at home from our breakup was severe but distant from me, the way a thunderstorm sounds when you’re swimming in the ocean and dive down. Friends called me to express their disbelief; my mother cried; in Oxford, of course, no one had met her, though Tom, Ella, and Anneliese were all sympathetic. Really the only part of it that affected me at all was Alison’s voice—for we still spoke nearly every day. Our conversations were mild, unimportant. I think we were trying to make our separation gentle. There’s that horrible moment after a breakup where you realize you’ve gone from knowing everything about a person to knowing nothing about them, when you go from getting worried if they’re twenty minutes late to dinner to learning months after the fact that they went who knows where, on safari, to Antarctica, to the moon …
“You could still come back,” she said when I told her I was going to be alone for a week.
“I should work,” I said.
I wouldn’t be alone, either: The other person who stayed behind was Anneliese, and we spent the week together.
Everyone departed on a Friday, and she and I had a bleak night at the Turtle, emptied now of all but its hardiest patrons. Even half of them seemed to be asleep. The leather twins, scowling, simply waved us by without checking our IDs.
As we left, one drink later, we vowed not to repeat that dejected experience, and by Sunday we had developed a routine. Each morning we went to get coffee and eggs at a restaurant in town called Porter’s, and then we would retreat to the warmth of the MCR to spend the rest of the morning watching a movie. After that we separated for a couple of hours to work at our libraries, and then at five o’clock we would bike into town—I had acquired a clumsy black single-speed bike by then, a necessity in Oxford—and find somewhere to hang out.
I remember one day in particular, either Tuesday or Wednesday of that week, when we stopped into Blackwell’s, a bookstore on Broad Street, opposite the Bodleian. We spent hours reading in two armchairs, with big stacks of books between us, occasionally talking. At seven we wandered down to the Turf for our evening beer.
The Turf was a low-ceilinged place, blackened by time and smoke, and had one of its original menus posted over the bar: a wood panel that read DUCK OR GROUSE. In the summer they opened a stone terrace in front, but in the cold the best seat was a plush curvetted bank in the bow window of the front bar, with pint glasses hanging above you in a brass rack. She drank cider (much cloudier in England), and I had a Guinness.
One of the last books she had been reading at Blackwell’s was about youth culture and Germany, and jokingly I said, “So, did that neo-Nazi book convert you? Are you a Nazi now?”
Very seriously, she answered, “You can’t say such things to a German, Will.”
“No?” I asked, surprised. “I’m sorry, Liese. You’re the only German person I know.”
“Then you only know half of one anyhow, because I only grew up there a little,” she said.
> “I thought you were from Berlin.”
“I am.” She had a curious German music to her voice, one of those rare German voices, always female, that sound beautiful. “Or my family is now, you see. I grew up in Japan until I was nine, then in Cologne, and just before I went to university my parents and my little sister returned to Berlin. They live there now.”
“Japan!” I said.
She nodded and laughed. “In Tokyo.”
“Do you speak Japanese?”
“Badly. I went to the American school there.”
“That’s crazy.”
She laughed. “Crazy. That’s the only word you and Tom ever say. I don’t think I even learned it in English class—that way, I mean.”
“You probably didn’t learn any slang.”
“We did, too!”
“Like what?”
“We would say ‘cool’ or that something ‘rocked.’”
“Yeah,” I said, trying not to laugh, because Anneliese was famous at Fleet for misusing colloquialisms—saying she didn’t give any shits about something, using the word “jester” instead of “clown.” (“You are honestly being two jesters!”)
“Anyway, what German slang do you know?” she asked irritably. She knew why I was grinning.
“You have me there.”
“Then I came here, and you all say different things, like ‘crazy’ or ‘peace out’ or calling somebody a gangster.”
“That’s just Anil.”
She furrowed her brow. “Hm.”
I took a sip of Guinness. “So did you feel like you weren’t at home in either place? Like, German in Japan and Japanese in Germany?”
She nodded. “Mm—yes. Like that third-culture book.”
“What’s that?”
She looked at me with surprise. “I suppose it might have been more popular in Germany than here? It describes children who grow up abroad, how their families have one culture, their environment has another, and out of confusion they become, what’s the word, hybrid. A third culture.”
“A feathered fish.” She smiled. “I think everyone feels like that, not just people who grew up in Germany and Japan.”
“No, no. You have the same framework of references as the people who were born in America in 1981, you know. I don’t. My references are all mixed up. In fact, they’ve proven that someone like me would be more compatible with a person from … with a Swedish-Mexican, say, than with Hans.”
She giggled. Hans was an angry Bavarian who studied linear geometry at Fleet. “Poor Hans.”
“Oh, Hans isn’t so bad. But yes.”
“Well, then I’m glad to be a third-culture kid.”
“What do you mean?”
“I grew up in America and now I’m here.”
She laughed, that inimitable pitchy laugh anyone who knows her would recognize even on the end of a transatlantic phone line, or across a crowded room, and said, “That must be why we’re friends!” She held up her beer. “Cheer to that.”
I raised my glass. “Cheer.”
We walked back to Fleet, Oxford’s ramparts and battlements white and cool to the touch, never gold any longer as they had been in the long evening hours of our first arrival, when it was still just summer. Our destination was the bar, which amid all the dimmed windows of the college was bright and at least a little lively, since—I should have said—Jem was there over the break, too. He had stayed because his parents didn’t know he smoked, and he couldn’t face a week of sneaking cigarettes and spraying himself with Febreze.
He kept the bar open for a few haphazard hours every night, and gradually the three of us got into the habit of meeting up to play the video quiz machine. Jem could answer questions about science and British sports, I did movies, books, and art, and Anneliese knew everything about history and music.
We won eight pounds each, and at a little after ten o’clock Anneliese and I said good-bye to Jem and left. We thought we would watch a movie in the MCR. As we left she seemed quiet. I wondered what was on her mind. Soon we were passing through Anna’s, and she put a hand on my forearm, stopping me.
“You mustn’t think about it all the time,” she said softly, looking into my eyes. Her own eyes were gray and beautiful, comprehending. “Truly.”
“Okay,” I said.
“We can speak if you like.”
“No, no.” She was probably Sophie’s closest friend in Fleet. “Maybe later. I’ve been talking about it with you too much.”
“I know. I worry because you stopped.”
There was a huge blue couch in the MCR’s TV room, and we gathered up all the blankets and put on one of the Harry Potter movies. Both of us fell asleep during the movie and slept through straight till daybreak, when the sun woke us up. Then we made coffee and finished the last half hour of the movie, laughing together, before we separated to go work at our departments’ libraries. Again before we parted she gave my forearm a squeeze, and as I cycled toward Manor Road, I remember thinking: friendship. The highest pleasure.
* * *
In the two weeks before this, between the bop and the term break, I had gradually fallen into a terrible agitated state of anguish, the kind I had forgotten existed, in which I could think of nothing but Sophie. It hadn’t been quite so bad at the start of that period of time, when I assumed I would continue to see her in the MCR or at Hall—but she stopped coming. When I realized her absence I felt first glad that I could have a clean break from her, but then slowly it began to make me uneasy, and at last, after four or five days, I became obsessed. I would wake in the morning and immediately wonder what she was doing, and though in those first moments of consciousness I would tell myself that today would be different, that for instance I wouldn’t check outside of her house to see if her car was there, after a few minutes I would find myself walking outside to the street to check nevertheless. Certainly I wouldn’t text her; but then every morning I texted her, something innocuous, asking if she meant to be at lunch for instance, and it would be agony until my phone pinged, which usually it didn’t, but if it did I would feel such delight—except that it was always Tom or Anil, someone, until I hated the sight of all names but hers. Other than classes I spent my days on my bed, watching TV shows on my computer, trying to distract myself. There was no way I could concentrate enough to read. I began to push for an earlier and earlier start to our evenings in the Fleet bar, until eventually I began to go over alone at six o’clock and wait for everyone. On the way I would check the MCR to see if she was there, and then the laundry room. Then I would check the Junior Common Room’s laundry, which was out of the way, to see if she was using it instead to avoid me, since I had once seen her blue laundry bag there, though I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just an identical bag, and anyhow she was never there. If nobody had come to the bar by seven I would walk back to the Cottages to see if her car was still on the street. If it was gone I would sit on the brick wall outside of my house, looking at my phone intently, as if I were contemplating a very important message, and then usually I would text Anneliese and ask if she knew where Sophie had gone. She sometimes did. At moments it seemed possible to me that I literally wouldn’t be able to live any longer. Even physically: There was a kind of persistent low-grade nausea and a pain in the nerve endings of my skin, which made it horrible when my clothes shifted or I was lightly touched. Throughout the day I looked at the pictures on my phone—my fixation, like a wood fire, nourished by ravaging itself—because three or four of them were of us, until I reached the point when even the pictures on either side, of Anil or Timmo or whoever, had become familiar to the point of abstraction.
I saw Sophie in person twice during those twelve days. The first time was by accident, and in fact when I least expected it. I had a meeting at the English Department, and for once my mind was away from her. As I left the building I saw her striding down St. Cross with a tall dark-haired guy in a blazer and checkered pants, and worst of all a Blues tie. I watched them until they disappeared, an
d then stood there a while longer. It hadn’t been Jack.
The next time I saw her was outside of the Cottages. It was the Thursday before vacation, a day before most people were planning to leave. She was loading her car. I was in love, I thought when I saw her. I thought of Alison. “Sophie!” I called, heartsick. She had taken up so much of my mental life that I had partially forgotten she was real.
She turned. “Oh, hey, Will.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m off home. Well, I’m going to see Jack for two or three days, then home for break.”
Her bags were stacked on the curb. “Here, let me help.”
She was wearing a down vest, puffy enough to make her look small and fragile. “Thanks.”
“How’ve you been?” I asked.
She was going through her things in the car, avoiding my eyes. “Really busy.”
“Hey, did you hear about those kids?”
“What kids?”
“The ones who stole the punt?”
She looked up. “What happened?”
“They got rusticated.”
“What, expelled? For what?”
I shrugged. “For stealing a college punt. I think they get to come back in Trinity term maybe, but they won’t graduate with their matriculation.”
“That’s crazy.”
“I know.”
She glanced at her watch. “I do have to go,” she said and opened the car door. “I’m already running late. Have a good vake?”
“You, too. Give Chessie a hug for me.”
For the first time she looked at me with warmth and, leaning toward me on one foot, gave me a fast hug. “I will. Bye.”
That was the worst afternoon. At first I thought I had handled the whole thing well, but then I wasn’t sure. There was a great deal I could have said. It was colder by then and grayer, and when the sun appeared it was sharp and white, not soft and yellow. For a few days the geese had passed southward overhead. Two or three days, I kept thinking, and though I imagined them having sex, the image that had more force to make me unhappy was of them walking hand in hand. For some reason as I envisioned it she was looking up at him and smiling, her face full of unwonted animation, and he was looking off into the distance—she was working for his affection—and the setting, though I had no idea where he lived, was a country lane, except it looked almost like the bird sanctuary at my high school. Two or three days. That night I got horribly drunk and fell asleep early, and when I woke just after midnight I was drenched in sweat, with a metallic taste in my mouth, as if I needed salt. I turned on all my lights and ate something. Then for a long time I stood at the window and stared out at our backyard, at the river. She had seemed so final by the car, somehow. At last I went back to sleep. When I woke up the next morning, the hour-to-hour pain of missing her had diminished, but the feeling of loss was stronger. Perhaps it was because she was gone. Everyone left that day, and then in the next week Anneliese’s company taught me to turn my mind away from the whole thing.
The Last Enchantments Page 10
