The Last Enchantments

by Finch, Charles

  “Will Baker,” she said, a big smile on her face. She gave me a hug. “I haven’t seen you in forever.”

  We knew each other from the brief, endless, intense final month of the campaign. She had been my best friend there other than Alison. “Since Ohio, right?”

  “Jesus, that was shitty, wasn’t it?”

  “It still sucks.”

  “And you don’t even remember that terrible Gore campaign.”

  “Aren’t you younger than I am?”

  “Right, but I took a semester off of college to work for him. You remember the election—come on, this way—but I mean being inside that campaign when the recount was going on, watching him concede to Bush. It was fucked up.”

  “Did you see about—”

  “Lieberman?”

  “Yeah, Lieberman. What a dickhead. Murtha, that wasn’t bad, though.”

  “Fucking Murtha.” She sighed. “No, it’s a big deal. I’m just a pessimist these days.”

  Kristen was blond and slight, with light freckles around her nose and quick cheekbones; a live, thin, endearing person, full of energy, with a hoarse laugh. She would make an endlessly entertaining wife and mother to some suburban family one day. That’s not to say she was destined to be a housewife—in Paris she was a consultant, having grown up bilingual because her mother was from the St. Lawrence River Valley, near Montreal—only that she had the sort of open, good nature upon which a whole family can come to rely without entirely realizing it.

  We were out in the seedy area around the train station, with a big McDonald’s and a bunch of cheap hotels opposite, the gray and white buildings ridged with black wrought-iron balconies that for all the soot and cell phone shops made them still beautiful, in the way that Paris alone is capable of permitting every area of life, whatever its wealth, the dignity of aesthetic faultlessness.

  “You must want a coffee, right?” she asked. “Or do you just want to go back to my apartment and hang out? I’m on call, but realistically I probably don’t have to do anything until the start of the week. Everyone takes about six months for Christmas here.”

  “How far is it?”

  “Pretty far. I live in the seventh.”

  “What, by the Musée d’Orsay?”

  “Yeah, how did you know that? Rue de Verneuil, my street is called. Number fifty. In case you get lost.”

  “Let’s get coffee. I was up early to get the train into London.”

  We went into one of the cafés and ordered two coffees, standing at the brass-railed bar because they would be cheaper there than if we sat a table. It was a policy I loved. People think of cafés in Paris as romantic, but I appreciated them more for their comity, the loud workmen in neon vests downing noisettes over Le Parisien, friends to everyone, shoulder-edged with businessmen filling out lottery tickets and old men who at half past nine in the morning sipped sherry and deposited trembling pieces of doughnut between their noses and their chins. Everyone got a shot glass of water, there were the hard-boiled eggs in their small rack, a euro each, the Café Richard sugar tucked into your saucer … then, too, this was a time, 2005, before the smoking ban, when the floor beneath the bar was an enormous clutter of cigarette ends, flaked bread, and torn sugar packets, all of which you were meant, as policy, to drop at your feet. Every half hour or so a small man would come out with a vast broom and sweep the detritus cleanly away, almost archaeologically, like a dream of how life should be: fixable, clearable, there should be fresh starts. Seeing Kristen had reminded me of Alison.

  “So how is everything here?” I asked her.

  “It’s good.”

  “You’re the only other person I know who kept their promise about leaving the country if Bush got reelected,” I said.

  “It was partly that. I was sick of New York.”

  “I can’t believe we never managed to get together when we were both there.”

  She shrugged. “Campaign friendships are always the same.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “No, it’s fantastic to see you! It’s great to see you.”

  “You, too.”

  I remembered trudging through an early snowfall in Ohio with her and thinking how beautiful she was, on our way to yet another rally. Through the whole six weeks we were together in Columbus we had just been friends, in part because she had been sleeping with the campaign’s star, a strategist from D.C. who was rumored to be making fifty grand a month, and of course because I was with Alison.

  “So you and Alison…”

  “It didn’t work out.”

  “Dead and buried?”

  I shrugged. “Can you ever be positive?”

  She laughed. “Yes,” she said, and her voice was emphatic.

  I shook my head. “It was jarring how abruptly the campaign ended.”

  “They always do when you lose, no victory lap. Then some poor asshole has to spend three days breaking down headquarters and sending out the last checks. No more volunteers to lord over, just an empty building full of depressed staffers.”

  “Yeah, that was me. I stayed. Kerry never showed his face again.”

  “You stayed? I couldn’t face it. I just went home and collapsed.”

  “Who do you like in 2008?”

  “Two years out it’s tough to say. I guess Hillary’s the presumptive. Edwards will run. He seems like a guy with integrity. What about Mark Warner?”

  “From Virginia?”

  “Uh-huh. He’ll be in there. For me, for us to win, we don’t need southern votes as much as we need the West. Like if we can get Colorado, maybe Nevada, Montana.”

  “That’s not many electorals.”

  “But if he could pick those up and bring Virginia, that would almost cover us losing Ohio again. Of course, Florida would be grand. However we can do it. I just don’t want to lose again.”

  “I don’t think we lost it last time.”

  She sighed. “No, I know, the voting machines.” She shook her head. “We should change the subject, before we get too engaged. Really. Tell me about Oxford, distract me.”

  I noticed she had on mascara and eyeliner and wondered whether it meant anything. “It’s fun.”

  “Are you in looove?” she asked, jokingly.

  “I don’t know. No. You?”

  She nodded. “I think maybe. I have a boyfriend.”

  “Is it serious?”

  “Not yet. I work with him. I’m worried he’s back in California, hooking up with everyone he ever went to high school with.” She looked at me, suddenly remote, her cup at her cold red lips. “Are you sad you came?”

  “Kristen, are you serious?” I took a sip of café crème. “Do you remember when I told you that I only wanted to keep one friend from the campaign?”

  “I was so nervous when you said you were coming over, you have no idea.”

  “You shouldn’t have been. You’re one of my best friends.”

  “It’s shitty being a girl, because you always have to wonder. And we used to have some chemistry.”

  I smiled. “We did?”

  “Oh, fuck off.”

  We spent that day at her house, both of us in T-shirts and pajama pants, playing video games (she had a PlayStation), recounting stories from the campaign, watching TV, catching up. It was perfect to be with an American person—I didn’t need to explain anything, or translate from American English to British English, and all of our stupid references made sense to each other.

  After a nap we went out to eat at a café with glass jugs of red wine, still bleary-eyed but in a good mood, and then met up with her friend Amanda at the Café Charbon for drinks and dancing. Amanda hooked up with some French guy.

  Eventually Kristen and I went home, and naturally enough, for it was only a studio apartment, fell into bed together. It was just sleeping, though, intertwined, hugging and disentangling and pushing back together, warm and comfortable. It meant the same thing to both of us, I believe, companionship. I felt in a state of vacancy.

 
; “I really do love Cliff,” she murmured to me once in the middle of the night, pushing her head under my arm after I came back from the bathroom.

  “I know,” I said.

  When her breath was regular again I got up once more and went to her high windows, opened one, and leaned over the railing, having a cigarette. I could see up the boulevard that led to the river, the greenish Seine I knew so well, which at night runs black and blurred-streetlamp yellow. There’s nowhere that life feels more eternal, your dimwit youth more important, than Paris.

  Then for some reason my mind turned with a pang to Katie, and as I gazed up at the implacable black of the sky, my body warm from the bed but my face chilled, I thought of the terrible truth we all know, somewhere in our souls: that there has never been a shred of evidence that life goes beyond life. Nobody has sent back word. There is nothing. That does not mean there is nothing. But there is nothing.

  * * *

  There are rarely two kinds of anything, but here are the two kinds of Paris: first, the graveyard, Les Deux Magots, 68, Saint-Sulpice, Montmartre; second, the carnival, Arabs, Brazilian bars in Oberkampf, students lurking in the shops aux bandes dessinées behind Greektown. They are meant to be countervailing—every third day Le Monde publishes an article about how young people are leaving—but as I saw it each licensed the other to exist.

  In the three days I spent in Paris, mostly alone during the daytime to give Kristen space, I visited both. I went to the Louvre and also to BHV, where I bought a flash card for my digital camera, down to Shakespeare and Company, where I once slept a night, over to Bastille, even to the far-flung Butte-aux-Cailles, which is like a French village with a city accidentally sprouted up around it. I sat in the park outside Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre church, gazing up at Notre Dame. I drank a lot of coffee, ate omelettes, spoke French. I sat in cafés and wrote long, improbably stupid poems about Sophie or Alison. I think sleeping in the same bed with Kristen every night made me miss them.

  On my last night Kristen and I put on nice clothes and went out to Bofinger, one of the few traditional and grand restaurants in town that hadn’t been completely rousted out of obscurity by the Internet, and had a huge three-tiered fuck-you of clams, mussels, lobster, and crab, and three bottles of cold, sharp white wine, as Hemingway would have said, all followed by cigarettes, dessert, more wine. We sat not far from the 1939 bullet hole in the mirror above a booth.

  Afterward we walked to the Caveau des Oubliettes to see some jazz. Our arms were linked, the city busy around us and then quiet, changing block by block. “Do you remember Dylan?” she asked as we crossed onto Ile St. Louis.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “He was from the campaign.”

  “Well, obviously.”

  “He was from Toledo. He had his car there?”

  “Oohhh—yeah, I do. Not on staff.”

  She shook her head. “No, no, he was an intern. He put in a fuckton of hours, though.”

  “He used to bring in bagels.”

  She laughed. “That’s right, and like the assholes we were everyone was willing to be his best friend because of it.”

  I laughed. “What makes you think of him?”

  She sighed. “I don’t know. Do you think you’ll work for someone in 2008?”

  She meant one of the campaigns. “It depends,” I said. “What about you?”

  “That’s what I was thinking about. I guess if the opportunity came up I would.”

  “Who?”

  “That’s what I mean—I don’t think it matters. A Dem, of course, but beyond that…” She waved a hand.

  I looked at her doubtfully. “What do you mean?”

  She cocked her head. “I don’t know, really. I have a theory that whatever you really love, if it’s a person or a thing or a job, you’ll go back for more, no matter how much bullshit and misery it means. I miss politics. I miss all the hotel rooms and inside jokes and … and everything. The Dylans.”

  “But it’s been so disheartening.”

  “That’s what’s amazing! All of this horrible fucked-up bullshit hasn’t, hasn’t dampened my enthusiasm. I mean, it has—but not really, not deep down.”

  “A person or a thing or a job?” I asked.

  “Whatever you love.”

  * * *

  I got back into Oxford in the early evening of January 9, just a little daylight left. I wanted company. Tom’s room was dark; Ella’s, too. I learned later that they had gone into London, thinking that I wouldn’t be back until the next day—or at least that’s what they told me. It’s likely that they didn’t care. I dumped my bags in my room and checked the MCR, but it was empty, and then I started idly through Fleet’s front quad, empty and austere, its white stone cold to the touch, feeling sorry for myself, the aleatory sorrow of passing winter loneliness.

  On an impulse I took out my cell phone and texted Jess. She wrote back to me right away.

  Hey, it’s Will.

  So you ARE alive.

  Sorry I didn’t write back on Facebook, I was abroad. Do you want to hang out?

  Nothing else going on?

  Would be fun to see you! Watch a movie and order food?

  Then there was a long pause, until she wrote:

  Too much of a palaver here with roommates. Can I come there?

  Sure.

  She appeared at my door an hour and a half later, her face decorated with the exaggerated but strangely beautiful makeup of the English working-class twenty-something, her arms bare and cold when she leaned in to give me a kiss on the cheek.

  “I can’t believe you never wrote me back, to my message,” she said. I was always surrounded with BBC accents and always forgot her voice.

  “It’s been a weird couple of weeks.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, okay.”

  “No, it has. Tom—actually, it’s funny, Tom is the one who always tells me to call you because you’re so hot—”

  “That snot?”

  “Yeah. Anyway, his sister—”

  “No, it’s okay,” she said. “Get me inside, I’m freezing. How was your Christmas?”

  “Lonely.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I felt a swelling of affection for her, and now I think of what Michael Caine said in Hannah and Her Sisters, “I loved her more than I realized.” Just perhaps not enough.

  * * *

  Term started in earnest that Monday. Anneliese returned with a tan, and Peter, Giorgio, and Richard resumed their parliamentary wrangling. Anil came back full of plans to dress up for the imminent James Bond bop as James Bond, “but with a twist!” as he told me one day in the kitchen of our house. We were making tea.

  “What’s the twist?”

  “You know what?” He was full of sudden resolve. “I’m going to show you my costume. If you swear yourself to secrecy.”

  “Why me?” I asked. “I’d have thought you’d show Timmo.”

  “I know you’ve been to the 40/40 Club.”

  I would never achieve anything greater in Anil’s eyes. “I have.”

  “I need your opinion. You see, I’m going to the bop as James Bond—but black.”

  “It seems like there’s the potential for that to be racist.”

  “No, no, you’ll see. Wait here.”

  I sat in the kitchen and read for fifteen minutes, waiting for his return.

  It didn’t disappoint. He was dressed in a plain tux, but his body was baroque with accessories: a heavy gold chain, a huge watch, Adidas sneakers, and a flat-brimmed Yankees hat, from beneath which his chubby Indian face beamed.

  There was a loaded silence, until I said, “It’s the best costume I’ve ever seen.”

  He beamed at me. “Game recognizes game!”

  If Anil was unchanged, Tom, in his own way, was the same. To me he seemed mostly like himself. As people returned they all wanted to see him with their own eyes, but other than that first MCR meeting, he had behaved as he always did. Perhaps it was Ella—though
after their first flush of romance he did retreat from her slightly, even then he couldn’t bear to be apart from her for the night.

  For her part Ella was ecstatic. Nothing in her speech or her manner showed it—if anything she was more diffident with him, and her noli me tangere air of the start of the year seemed to return, like a bulwark against possible hurt—but if you knew her as I did, it was obvious how tremulously and deeply affected she was. I think she had expected them to be a couple right away, but some final new distance in Tom prevented that. Still, as long as she got to see him every day it didn’t seem to bother her. She even canceled a trip to a conference in Leeds and had the money, paid for by her scholarship, refunded to her.

  I remember exactly how she spent it. We were walking down the High Street together one morning, on our way to get lunch together, and she stopped at the window of a boutique.

  “Remind me what Tom’s favorite color is, Will?”

  “I have no clue.”

  “Try and remember.”

  “Is it important? I’m freezing.”

  “Come on, you know. We were playing that drinking game you taught us? Favorites?”

  Then I did remember. It was a game from college; whoever started off had to name a favorite, whether it was a color or a kind of beer, and anyone who shared that preference had to drink. The better you knew each other the more esoteric the categories became: favorite character on The Simpsons, favorite pub in Oxford proper, favorite philosopher. (Any Wiggum, the King’s Arms, and Hume were my answers to those.)

  “I do remember, that’s right. It was yellow, wasn’t it?”

  “Yellow,” she said, and I saw she had known the answer all along. “Will you come into the shop with me?”

  “What do you have your eye on?”

  “That dress in the window.”

  “The yellow one? Because of Tom?”

  “No! It just reminded me of that game. That’s why I thought of it. Because I drank at yellow, too. I love yellow, too.”

  “Will your boobs fit in there?”

  She smacked my arm. “Do you like it?”