The Last Enchantments

by Finch, Charles

  The footage they had already shot consisted for the most part of Timmo working out. Evidently Anil had scored it, because the soundtrack was mostly Nas deep cuts. Once in a while Anil himself slipped into the footage to change the CD player in the corner of the room, offering a thumbs-up or a giddy wave to the camera before he left the frame.

  I told Timmo it wasn’t what Big Brother wanted, unless possibly they needed an education in the recent work of Talib Kweli.

  “But that’s me, that’s Timmo,” he said. “England will love that.”

  “Only if they get to see it,” said Anneliese. “Then they will, of course. But will a workout tape on its own get you onto the show?”

  “There’s a gym in the Big Brother house,” he said.

  Anneliese, always inclined toward generosity, said, “Perhaps you’re right.”

  “He’s not,” I said. “Anyway, are you sure you really want to go on a reality TV show where there’s a camera in the bathroom, Timmo?”

  “Of course,” he said stoically, like Sydney Carton.

  “Of course,” Anil echoed.

  I sighed. “Well, the first thing we need is a shot of the two of you.”

  “Why?”

  “Anil is hilarious.”

  “Thanks, Will!” said Anil.

  “No problem.”

  “I don’t know if he should be featured when it’s Timmo who wants to be on the show,” said Anneliese.

  “Haters gonna hate,” Anil said with unshakable conviction.

  I told Timmo his best chance to be on the show came from being an Oxford student, and suggested we film him around town.

  He looked doubtful. “I like the video of the workout.”

  “We’ll just get a little extra footage, then.”

  “Okay.”

  Someday, when anthropologists or Martians study our age, I hope they come across Timmo’s audition tape for Big Brother. I imagine them puzzling over it as if it were the Book of Kells, dismayed by its incomprehensibility, intrigued by its polysemous meanings. In the reshoots we took Timmo all over town, and he refused to do anything but mumble the word “Oxford” over and over—because, we later figured out in our review of the footage, he was devoting so much energy to flexing his muscles. Then there was Anil. Now that it was in his head that he should be in the video he tried to sneak into every shot “accidentally,” which rendered nearly all of our footage useless.

  “I don’t think I understand their friendship,” Anneliese whispered to me, looking troubled.

  “It’s simple, they’re both insane.” Timmo was doing push-ups in the center of Radcliffe Square. “I don’t know why he’s wearing a tank top, either. I wish we had a wardrobe consultant.”

  “He has more muscles than you.”

  “He has more muscles than a seafood restaurant.”

  This was the kind of joke that went straight to Anneliese’s heart, and she burst out laughing.

  Anneliese, Anil, and I spent hours cutting the footage together on her Mac. She had shot it all excellently—had grown up with a camera in her hand—and we edited it into quick and enjoyable moments: Timmo singing “Total Eclipse of the Heart” in falsetto when he thought nobody was listening, Anil crooning the mistaken lyric “Turn around, bright guys” moments later, Timmo flexing on the top of Fleet bell tower, Timmo and Anil in suits getting pennied at Hall.

  Anil was ecstatic, and once we put in enough workout shots even Timmo was satisfied. “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll mention your names on the show.”

  “I’m holding you to that,” I said.

  I still have a copy of the tape. I watch it when I’m feeling blue.

  “You won’t believe it when I show you,” I said to Ella afterward, drinking at the Fleet bar. “What an abortion.”

  “Don’t say that around a Catholic, Will,” she answered and hit me on the arm.

  * * *

  By early December I think we were finally unsurprised to be at Oxford. In the first two weeks of the month, Jack was in and out of town, annoyingly visible, and I couldn’t catch a glimpse of Sophie. The restlessness I felt at this started to spend itself toward Jess. I first texted her on Thanksgiving—unregarded in England, except for a few jokes about red Indians, but Fleet had thrown a small celebration for us—and invited her to come to the bar in college.

  She responded to my text with a call. “Do you always sleep with girls and then ignore them?” she asked.

  “Always. I run through two or three hundred a year.”

  “Hilarious.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  There was a moment of silence. “I’m just going to come to your flat,” she said.

  “It’s just a room, it’s not much of a flat.”

  “You’ve seen mine. How different could it be?”

  She arrived in an imperious mood, determined, unpacking four cans of Carling, lifting the window, and saying, “We need music. Let’s have some cheese.”

  “Cheese?”

  She looked over her shoulder at me from my computer, where she was already scrolling through my iTunes. Her face was aghast. “Do you not know cheese, Will Baker?”

  “What is it?”

  Now she turned the chair to face me and began to list songs. “It’s ‘Wonderwall,’ by Oasis.”

  “Well, I know that.”

  “No, it’s more—it’s when everyone knows all the words, like ‘Angels’ or ‘Love Is All Around’ by Wet Wet Wet.”

  “The Wets.”

  She rolled her eyes. “It’s all those Verve songs, ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’ and ‘The Drugs Don’t Work,’ it’s ‘Common People’ by Pulp, it’s ‘Alright’ by Supergrass, it’s ‘Back for Good’ by Take That—”

  “I know that one.”

  “Then we’ll start there,” she said.

  She put on the song and dimmed the lights in the room and came over and straddled me, searching in my eyes. “If we sleep together will you call me this time?”

  “Okay.”

  She looked beautiful in the half-light, with the opening chords of a terrible, wonderful song, a song that affected me, playing along to her smile. When the sex was over, though, my unspoken—unthought—logic, that even if I couldn’t have Alison or Sophie at least I could have something, collapsed: Lying in bed while she went to the bathroom and showered, I thought of all of them at once and separately, over and over.

  Yet there can be a greater intimacy to lying in bed with someone you don’t care about than there is with someone you do, because the lying in bed is the sum of your relationship, and because the conversation there, the little jokes and games, is flooded with meaninglessness and therefore with meaning. There has to be loss in life—lost connections, people you barely remember, nights that fade into matterlessness. Whatever Facebook thinks about it.

  When I woke up in the morning, groggy, she was awake already and looking at me. Her face was sad.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey.”

  “What is it?”

  In a singsongy voice, she said, “Oh, nothing. I wish I didn’t like you.”

  “It’s hard when I’m so irresistible.”

  “Ha, right.”

  We hooked up again and she showered again, emerging just in time to see Ella and Tom—Tom was abashed at Jess’s appearance in a towel, which annoyed Ella—and then she dressed in my room.

  “You don’t want anything serious, I guess?” she asked as she sorted through her purse.

  “I don’t know if I’m ready right now for—”

  She smiled. “No, I get it. Some girl who goes to,” and she put on a posh voice, “Oxford.”

  “It’s not like that, not at all,” though that’s uncannily what it was like.

  She stood up. “Okay. I’ve got to go to work.”

  In the empty spaces of the next months I saw her when I felt like it. She didn’t raise the idea of anything serious again—it was only dancing at the Turtle and movies in my room, and sex.

 
; That first morning I went and hugged her before she left. “Do you need money for a cab?”

  “No,” she said lightly, then let me go and raised a hand to wave good-bye without looking back.

  A beat passed before I realized I couldn’t withdraw the offer, that anyway her footsteps were going down the stairs already, and that she had taken it exactly as she should have. I think it was the worst thing I did all year.

  * * *

  None of this matters, I realize that. Not who loved who, not people’s disappointments, not Timmo’s audition tape. Directly before Christmas there was a severe corrective to our autumn self-indulgence. I’m tempted just to say what it was, not to try to make it a surprise. Maybe I’ll just tell it as it happened, beginning with the night before.

  All the students were packing to go home again for Christmas, the school year almost halfway gone. I had been working a lot at the Fleet Tavern by then, but one weekend Tom and I decided to take off to London. I had gone into the city alone twice that fall and had a look at the museums, but he and I had never gone together. Besides, he said, it was criminal that I hadn’t seen Gordon’s, his favorite bar. Also a fourth-year undergraduate named Lula, who had 477 friends on Facebook—that was a vast number in 2005—was going to have a party at her house. We didn’t know where we would stay, since neither of us was close with Lula, but figured that if worse came to worst one of Tom’s friends would put us up. He had invited them all to the party. (Invite everyone xxx:) see you there you darling lovelies! Lula had written.) The trip would mean cutting a class for me, but it was with a professor I didn’t like much, Dr. Drayton, who was obsessed with Faulkner and usually spent the last twenty minutes of every class, whatever subject it was meant to be on, from Marcuse to Aira, talking about The Bear.

  We got off the train and went to Notting Hill. Lula’s family lived on one of those mansion-lined squares there with a private garden behind it, to which only residents had the keys. The house that they inhabited, except Lula’s brother, who was away in Tanzania on his gap year, was a modern one, cantilevered up onto stilts and with ribbonlike horizontal windows. They must have gotten permission to knock down something old to build it, because the rest of the houses on the block were cream-colored Georgian ones. It was striking, but only because of the old houses on either side of it—the way the Guggenheim needs the plain brick town houses on Eighty-ninth Street to shock you.

  At the entrance were Lula and half a dozen giggling friends from Oriel. They had a computer, and to enter the party we had to prove we were friends with Lula on Facebook, or if we weren’t we had to add her. If someone wasn’t on Facebook at all, they had to drink a shot of vile tequila that Lula had acquired on her own gap year, with a worm on the bottom, but when we arrived the bottle was still full. “It’s all such a joke,” she said as we proved our friendship. “I’m really through with Facebook, it’s getting so tacky. I thought it deserved a send-off, though, don’t you? And secretly I adore it, of course. How do we know each other, by the way? You look familiar. Do you spend a lot of time at the Turtle? I stopped going in second year but now I’m back in love!!”

  It was a balkanized party, populated by small self-segregating groups. There were a bewildering number of staircases. One bedroom was full of pot, and potheads; another as full of coke, and cokeheads. We dropped our coats and backpacks in a closet along the front hall and went into a long dining room, then got two Coronas and headed up a random staircase to see what we would find.

  I won’t describe the long hours of the party much: seeing everyone Tom had ever met in public school or after; meeting up with his friends, who all treated me roughly as the Jackal’s friends had, despite Tom’s imprimatur (a Yank, eh?); the blurry hours of drinking and dancing with random undergraduate girls whose names we wrote on our palms so we could add them on Facebook the next day; everyone finally, drunk or high enough, beginning to pool in the main room downstairs just shy of midnight; Lula’s extended and smashed speech upon receiving a cake at one in the morning, followed by foam falling into the backyard and everyone rushing out to dance in it.

  It was at just after two o’clock, many hours into the party, that my line of vision cleared, and Sophie stepped into it.

  “Soph!” I shouted.

  “Oh my God, Wills!” she said, and with a surge of adrenaline I saw that she was delighted to find me there—that for the first time since the bop at Fleet, a month and a half before, she had no diffidence in her manner. “Is anyone else here?”

  “Just Tom!”

  We hugged and gave each other a kiss on the cheek, a kiss that brushed close to our mouths. She pulled farther back than she needed to, almost by way of recompense. “Let him stay there!” She shouted above the din.

  “Did you prove your friendship with Lula at the door?”

  She laughed. “I’ve known her for ages. We went to the same school. Half the people I ever knew are here, all of them bankers. It’s hideous.”

  I was drunk and energetic, and it felt so good to be together that without any hesitation I took her hand. “Is he here?” I asked.

  She looked down at the floor shyly and shook her head. “No.”

  “Come on.”

  I led her by the hand through the dancing swarms. It was impossibly loud. At last, walking away from the noise, we found an alcove along a hallway to the kitchen. In the dim light its daytime objects seemed touchingly foreign, as if they came from a world that had nothing to do with DJs or dancing—the phone with a long cord, the cheerful pink notepad next to it—and after being at the party it seemed also especially still. I sat back against a table scattered with bills and mail. She leaned in and kissed me.

  “I’ve missed you,” I said.

  “You, too.”

  “It doesn’t have to be weird.”

  “Don’t start that. Give me another kiss.”

  For ten minutes we stayed there, then another ten. She smiled as she pulled away from me at last and suggested we go outside and have a cigarette together. Lula’s station at the front door was abandoned, and the air was brisk, the streetlights shining a sallow gold over the massive row of white houses. They looked comfortable and immovable, those houses, built and kept with men’s money, with men’s salaries. Large, red, hale men with capacious laughs who voted Tory and drank decent wine and wore expensive watches. Members of Parliament, men from hedge funds. Sophie and I held hands and I pictured us, middle-aged, living here.

  “I have to go,” she said when we had stubbed our cigarettes out.

  “What?”

  “I’m late.”

  “Didn’t you just get here?”

  She shook her head. “I was up in Peregrine’s room, Lula’s brother, with all the girls. For ages.”

  “Are you going to see Jack?”

  She leaned into me and left her head on my shoulder. “Yes.”

  We stood like that for a few minutes, sometimes tilting our faces to kiss again. Then Lula stumbled out of the front door with a cigarette.

  “SOPHIE!” she screamed when she saw us. “My God, Billy Lownes has gotten tedious. I used to think he hung the moon. And those boys from Albion Hall are absolutely disgusting. How the scales fall from your eyes. Oh, Soph, I’m so glad you came!”

  Sophie grinned. “Lu, do you know Will Baker? He’s my favorite friend from Fleet.”

  “Hullo, Will.”

  “Would you two entertain each other while I find my coat?” Sophie said, and skipped back up the front steps of the house.

  “Are we friends, Will?” asked Lula when Sophie had gone.

  “We are. Before tonight, even.”

  “Oh, hurrah,” she said, putting her arm around my back and facing me, “then would you give me a birthday kiss? You look lovely under the streetlamp.”

  “What about Sophie?”

  “I won’t tell, darling.”

  I could have said no, maybe, but I knew Sophie would be a minute or two and so with one eye on the door I gave her a long kiss
. We disentangled just in time to see the girl I loved come out of the house again. The betrayal felt warm under my skin. At last I knew something she didn’t.

  The two girls hugged each other and said good-bye, and then Lula, her cigarette long cold by now, went back inside to find another wind.

  “Good-bye, Will,” said Sophie. She had a pink scarf wrapped tightly around her throat, her long hair tumbling over it, and that scarf pushed the two of us outside of the refuge of the party, placing her back in the real world.

  “Isn’t there anything I can say that would make you like me, Soph?”

  Again she softened; that dance. “You know I do.”

  “Can we meet?”

  “No,” she said and turned to the street.

  “No?”

  She was hailing a cab, which slowed for her, as everything did. Turning back, and relenting one last time under my gaze, she came back and kissed me on the cheek before running to the cab. “Oh, Will,” she said quietly. Then, through the window of the cab, as it rolled off, “I suppose you could text me. That would be nice.”

  * * *

  As the sun rose the last of us, a few dozen people, were draped over couches; there were little squadrons of boys and girls engaged in intense coked-up conversations, a group of guys trying to pool their resources to fill one last bong, a few individual dancers. Lula was asleep on a chaise. Her friends had written in Sharpie on her arms and legs.

  “What do you say, Bake?” Tom asked me. We were smoking amid the wreckage of the back terrace, which had small vanishing islands of foam left in it.

  “I can barely think.”

  He smiled. “I lost you for an hour or two there. And Sophie.”

  I sighed and looked up at the pale sun, its pink vale of light above that fine, pure white of morning. “I know,” I said.

  He looked at me. “It was fun.”

  “Really fun.”

  “Still, if we went back, we could make it to St. John’s bop tonight.”

  I laughed. “I was thinking the same thing.”

  “Back to Oggsford?”

  We kissed the slumbering Lula on the cheek and said good-bye to the one or two people we knew who remained at the party. We went to catch the bus at Hyde Park (the train didn’t run so early) and ended up falling asleep on the grass, waiting for it to come, until the driver honked at us. Cold, bruised, hungry, and at least half happy, we returned to our city; we stopped to pick up coffee and a packet of sandwiches and ate them on a bench in Anna’s Court, shivering. I talked about Sophie and Lula, and he talked about the memories of his schooldays that the night had conjured up. At eight we stood to leave, and he said, as he did so often in Anna’s, “Look at this castle we live in.”