“I just don’t think of you wearing dresses. There are no tears in it or safety pins or anything.”
She bought it. The dress was made by BCBG and cost 140 pounds. I remember the price clearly; it scared me to see her putting herself at Tom’s mercy like that, though I didn’t say anything.
Perhaps I should have. I didn’t know about Tom—we hadn’t been friends long enough for me to judge his precariousness. Recently he had taken to spending hours and hours in his room researching, of all things, his family history. There was something wild-eyed in it. He had found forums on the Internet devoted to genealogy, and he followed every branch, his maternal grandmother’s maternal grandmother, as far as it would go. He found that his father’s great-grandfather had been a Crane—my middle name—and set out to see if we were cousins (which we were, a hundred times removed, like more or less all white people). I know he wasn’t doing his work. The night before, I had gone into his room and seen him swallowing a pill.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Acetaminophen,” he said. “My family—you wouldn’t believe—” and on he ran.
The pill had come out of a prescription bottle, I saw. What had Ella let herself in for? There was something immovable and titanic hooking him backward. She wasn’t likely to pull against it successfully. Love, though: Who can say.
I understood the position well enough myself. Yet I had hope. Sophie and I were still texting every day, even if we hadn’t seen each other since I returned, and both of us were looking forward to the James Bond bop that Saturday, our date.
What should I be? she texted me that Friday, and then, not fifteen seconds later, I’m going to be Moneypenny! I need a new dress!
HOBNOBS! I wrote back to her and felt a constriction of happiness and nerves in my chest. Part of me dared to wonder if the bop might be the night when she finally … what, became mine? Changed? Yielded? I didn’t know. It was more realistic to hope in blurry outlines than for anything specific.
* * *
Because of the bop I had had to tell St. John Jarvis that I couldn’t come to his annual Christmas party, which he held on the twentieth of January. When I wrote to say as much, he pidged back a note inviting me to have coffee or a cocktail that afternoon, so at three o’clock I headed out past the Fleet lawns, crossed the river, and walked through the fields on the other side to his house. It was gray and wet out, and the forecast was for a sharp drop in temperature that evening.
I arrived at his house soaked. He slapped me on the back, shepherded me through from the porch to his living room, and placed me in front of the huge fire burning in the hearth.
“Warm up here,” he said. “I’ll get you a drink.”
The decorations for the party were a marvel. In the living room there was what must have been a fifteen-foot tree, layered thickly with silver balls, fairy lights, ornaments, and Christmas crackers. On all the walls were ornate snowflakes made of green and red crepe paper. Except for two armchairs all the furniture had been cleared out of the room, and a huge sideboard was racked with thirty or forty bottles of liquor. Another sideboard, presumably for food, was still empty.
There is something sorrowful in an old man without children, and I wondered, as I sat alone, who the party was for—whether it was for himself, to surround himself with people and noise. When he came back into the room with two mugs, bearing a triumphant smile, and said, “Irish coffee—hope you like it,” I remembered that he was one of those humans who are sufficient unto themselves, a sovereign nation-state.
“Perfect, thank you,” I said, and he sat. “I’m sorry to miss this, by the way.”
“Oh, it’s my favorite holiday. Though I must say I loved Thanksgiving while I was over in your country, carousing with your uncle. There’s something deeply satisfying about watching American football on a full stomach, even if you don’t understand it. Christ knows I never did.”
“Do you do this every year?”
“Mm, a grand tradition, Christmas in January. They say the holiday should in fact be in August, or something like that—I can never remember exactly when. Apparently it’s only in December because of old pagan harvest rituals. I wonder what the pope thinks about that. Have you ever read Jessie Weston, or is she dated by now? I suspect she is. Even if you’re not fond of Eliot she’s well worth looking into, though, she holds up nicely. Although I forget, you’re a modernist. I imagine you’re devoted to Eliot.”
“Less than some. But why the twentieth of January?”
He grinned and took a gulp of the coffee. “Better to celebrate when people have returned. Oxford is such a tidal city, people in and out, and Christmas is a low tide. I’m sure you left, for instance. How was it? Christmas at home?”
“Yep.”
“Did you go back feeling like an Oxford man? Or do you wish you were still there?”
“It’s funny you ask that—”
“Ah, here we are. What’s the dilemma?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I was wondering if I should become an academic, actually. Something my—well, my once-upon-a-time father-in-law-to-be said to me, if that’s not too convoluted. It made me think that politics might not be right for me in the end.”
“What did he say?”
I told him. “I’ve been enjoying school, too. I didn’t think I would love the work this much.”
He looked at me appraisingly. “Remind me who your adviser is?”
“Harris.”
“Harris, Harris, that’s right. You’re Orwell. I once met a chap named Jack Common, Orwell’s chosen prole. He lived in one room with a wife and about fifty children and wrote terrible novels. Not that I blame him, mind you. Who could work in those circumstances? Can’t have been a real name, either. Anyhow, Harris. So you’re enjoying Orwell.”
“I am,” I said, my thoughts on the Swift Prize. “More than I expected I would. I’m thinking of a doctorate.” He smiled, eyes shrewd, and I rushed to add, “Though I’m not sure I want to write for an audience of the same twenty scholars my entire life.”
He shook his head. “Very foolish, that anxiety. Academics are the canaries in the coal mine. We shift an idea out into the world and it trickles from fifteen readers in a semiotics journal to a hundred listeners at a dinner party to ten thousand readers in a magazine to a million viewers on a television. I’ve seen it time and again. What were academics interested in the 1970s? Orientalism, in your field, our field. The perception of race and the other. And ever so slowly I watched as that debate flattened out and grew broad, and then, in the 1990s, finally, after a lifetime of waiting for it, I watched as people became, imagine it, ‘politically correct.’” He laughed. “What a triumph, to live to see the backlash against that.
“It’s not unlike modern art, which is a passion of yours as it is of mine, as I recall. In 1962 to walk into a gallery and see a painting by Barnett Newman, a few lines on a blank canvas…” He was lost in thought for a moment. Then he returned his eyes to me from the floor. “Now? You can buy a pale handed-down imitation of Ad Reinhardt at a hardware store for thirty pounds, comes with a gold frame, and all the throw pillows and rugs have those Rothko smears on them. Abstraction is decoration. These hedge fund managers buying Brice Mardens are buying decorations, DIY store decorations. They’re valuable the way the Ralph Lauren logo is valuable. Ideas have always descended from the high culture to the low culture, William. We open these gates and soon enough people walk through them. There’s nothing else I believe as fervently as that. Listen.”
“What if that’s not fast enough for me?”
He laughed. “I was once in that kind of rush,” he said.
“And?”
“There’s a balance. The key is to find a home outside of the academy, too—write for the papers, go on television, travel to foreign conferences and sleep with foreign women. That’s what I’ve done. There’s nothing drearier than a professor who stays at home all day and beavers away at his favorite Jacobin poet. I wrote for The Observer
for years, you know.”
“How did you get that job?”
“When I was in Japan in the sixties, actually. England was such a self-absorbed little islet back then that if you went to Marseille they considered you an explorer. I might as well have been on Jupiter. I called up an acquaintance who worked for the automobile review section of The Observer, of all things, and offered to write a series of letters from Tokyo.”
“It’s too bad everywhere’s so close these days.”
“Yes,” he said. “The death of the great journey. All of the leaps mankind makes now will be informational, I’m afraid. It’s a shame. For a thousand years or so we struggled and strove to see the corners of the planet, and now that’s done. It’s why I have a computer. But tell me something of yourself. Why are you skipping my party tonight?”
“I paid in advance to go to a bop at Exeter.”
“How much?”
“Twenty pounds.”
“I daresay you could get twenty pounds of drink here—though of course you want to be with your friends. Have you got a girlfriend?”
I was tempted to tell him about Sophie; even now I pictured her in the shower, getting her hair ready, putting on makeup. It wouldn’t be long. “No, just a couple of casual things.”
“That’s another reason to stay in Oxford. There are always new people, new girls. If the work here is satisfying you ought to stay. Washington will remain where it is, but being twenty-five and abroad—that won’t. What’s crucial is that you must love the material. You do, I hope? I could never get through Animal Farm, thought it was drivel, though people say the essays are terribly good.”
“I do.”
“Then stay.”
Again I stayed much longer than I had intended to stay. I loved his company, his friendliness, his oracular lack of reserve. We talked about what to wear at a job interview, how to fool a board of academic questioners, where I should publish my dissertation if I wrote it, whether Orwell’s widow was an angel or the devil, what exactly constituted a perfect Irish coffee. He put Guinness in his, and evidently a lot of whiskey, because when I finally staggered out of his house at five thirty. I was drunk. The Swift Prize never came up, but in his unblinking way he had seen it, and in my pidge later that week I would find the application form. There was no note attached.
I called Sophie as I walked back to the Cottages from his house. “Hey!”
“Hey,” she said. “I was just getting ready.”
“What are you going to wear?”
“Chanel Number—” She laughed and said, “No, it’s too silly, I can’t say it. I have a dress with sequins all over it. You’ll see.”
“I bet.”
“Are you going to get me drunk?” She seemed buoyant. “I haven’t been drunk in forever. I can’t believe how madly I worked on that stupid essay. Thank God it’s over.”
“You’re coming by at seven?”
“Yep. Two and a half hours. Shall we go over in a cab with Ella and Tom, or meet them there?”
“Maybe we should let them have some time to themselves,” I said hopefully.
“Cool. I’ll just come by yours.”
We hung up, and I smiled, thinking first of her, then of my conversation with St. John. Perhaps after all I could see myself at Oxford for good, away from America. Even the idea, unacted upon, was an emancipation.
* * *
As I came back to the Cottages Anil, Timmo, and Anneliese were leaving for the park—they wanted to test a kite they were building from a kit, whose maiden flight they would call us out to the lawns to witness next Tuesday, when they would with great ceremony crash it straight into a tree—and Tom was away, so the house was empty.
I showered, and when I had finished I stood in front of the mirror for some time, staring at myself. I shaved. Then I went back to my room to put on my dinner jacket. My windows were open, and the wind was whipping the curtains inward. I put loud music on and then walked to Tom’s room and stole a beer. (He always seemed to have a disconcerting quantity of them in his little refrigerator, these days, standing in well-ordered platoons along the three shelves, bearing the soldierly ribbons and regalia of beer-festival victory.) Life seemed peculiar, giddy. The imminence of things, how the wind and the beer and the music can seem to hold a future: That was how I felt.
At ten to seven the door rang, and I knew before I buzzed it open that it was Sophie, ten minutes early, and her earliness added to that sensation.
“Wills!” she called as she came up the stairs. “I’m early!”
“I’m naked!” I called out from my room. I could hear her footsteps on the stairs.
“You’d better be!”
I stepped out into the hallway, dressed, and she laughed. She looked radiant. Her hair was pinned up, wisps of it falling down her neck, and she wore a short black sheath and high heels. At her breastbone was a confusion of silver necklaces, which dipped between the tantalizing nearness of the tops of her breasts.
She put an arm around my neck and kissed me on the cheek. “Give me a drink, would you?”
“Beer?”
“No, wine, you cad.”
I grinned. “One minute—go sit down.”
“I’m changing the music!” she called out behind me as I sprinted into Tom’s room, digging through his things, searching for wine.
“Okay!” I said.
Tom had nothing. Lily Allen had just become popular and “Littlest Things” came on. In desperation I cracked Anil’s door and saw, to my delight, that he had four bottles in the rack on his desk. They looked perilously expensive, but I didn’t care. I took a bottle, fetched two glasses from the kitchen, and went back.
My bed was strewn with clothes, unmade, and my heart quickened when I saw that Sophie had chosen to sit next to my pillow, cross-legged. She was examining my high school yearbook.
“I found wine.”
“You look like a baby!” she said, tapping the page she was looking at.
I smiled. “No credit for the wine?”
“Who’d you steal it from?”
“Nobody,” I said indignantly.
“Anil,” she said.
“No!”
“Hey, have you called a cab yet, to come for seven?”
“Not yet.”
“Oh, good. Don’t, then. Let’s drink this bottle.”
“Perfect. Anil has three more, too.”
She laughed, and with a heave of courage I set myself right next to her, so that as we both leaned over my yearbook our heads nearly touched. I poured the wine and told her about the people she pointed out. My mind was only half there; it was happening, I could tell. I had a tension in my breath, and a hollow feeling in my solar plexus of the kind I get with any great emotion, happiness or sadness, and I was all nerves, filled with almost painful joy.
As I poured her second glass she closed the yearbook and pivoted so that we were facing each other Indian-style, knees touching. “What was the most romantic night of your life?”
“Honestly?” I asked.
“Of course.”
I wasn’t honest. “The first night my old girlfriend from college and I hooked up.”
She giggled. “Will.”
“What?”
She giggled some more. “I think I’m slurvy.”
There was what felt like a very long pause, the music confidential. The candles along my desk, which she had evidently lit, flickered and guttered at every draft of wind. “It’s cold in here,” she said and rubbed her arms.
“Lula’s party was kind of romantic,” I said.
“Oh, William,” she said in some dazed way and smiled sweetly, looking directly into my eyes. She leaned her whole body into mine and kissed me on the lips and then, after a minute, pushed me into a heap on the bed. We kissed more pressingly, not quite tearing each other’s clothes off but with our legs and arms knitted and her hair, she had unpinned it, falling into my face, our faces constantly close. We kissed each other’s lips and cheeks and
necks. I took her shirt off.
“Nice,” I said.
She laughed, straddling me. “Will, you muppet. Don’t say things like that.”
Then she lowered back down over me and we kissed. My dick was as hard as it had ever been—and may ever be, barring some unforeseen and strange pharmacological intervention—and she stroked it through my jeans. I don’t know. I was half in shock. I remember her kissing my neck as I looked out the window at the lights on in the dorms. The door opened, and Anil and Timmo came banging up the stairs, laughing and chattering about their kite and the bop, and Sophie and I laughed into each other’s mouths at our new secret, saying “Shh!” at the same time.
It’s tedious, I’m sure, to hear too much about how beautiful a girl is, but I think of it: her high cheekbones, the long, unruly hair down her back. She looked flushed and happy, and I remember feeling so relieved that what filled her face wasn’t guilt or diffidence but just happiness. I’m sure it filled mine, too.
Her thighs were wet, and as I touched her she didn’t moan but caught her breath in the back of her throat, then exhaled it in little bursts. She took off my shirt and as I started to put two fingers inside her she bit my chest and pushed back on my hand. She still had one hand on the outside of my jeans and started to rub it harder—painfully, one of the little irritants that make sex so ludicrous and personal.
“Ouch,” I said.
“I’m hurting you?” she asked.
“No, no.”
We shifted off of each other and she lay at my side, looking at me with a smile in her face.
“I’m so wet,” she said. She arched her back.
I kissed her. “Do you want me to go down—can I please—”
“Just, let’s have sex,” she said. She threw her thin arms around my neck.
At that moment I paused. She could tell. “Sophie,” I said. “You know how I feel.”
She looked serious, her hair falling down at me from above, and then she smiled. “Are you saying no?”
I rolled my eyes, smiling, too. “No, I’m not.”
She laughed and stood up. The song had ended a while before. “We need more music. Something with words. If we’re going to do this.”
The Last Enchantments Page 17
