Tom sat up further and seemed entirely awake for the first time since he had come out of the bathroom, though he was slurring his words. “I’m an asshole?” he said to me.
“Forget it.”
“I’m an asshole?” he said again. Then he leaned back. “Yeah, okay. Sometimes I am. But at least I didn’t fuck a girl while her fucking boyfriend was in Iraq.”
There was a long stop in conversation. “Jesus,” said Percy at last. “Heavy.”
“He’s not even overseas, he’s like two hours away at training,” I told Percy.
“He’ll be going over soon enough to get shot up,” said Tom. “Then we’ll see how you feel.”
“Let’s take a breath here, ladies,” said Alex. He opened a window and cold air rushed into the room. “Tom, that was some heavy shit.”
I felt a wave of nausea. I had drunk too much over the course of the day.
“I’m fine,” said Tom. “I’m fine, fine, fine. Let’s just go to this party.” He stood up and stumbled and then looked around at the rest of us, still sitting. “Will, come on. I’m sorry, mate. Are we cool?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Ella?”
“Of course, Tom,” she said, as if we would always forgive him. Anything.
We all stood and put on our coats while Ella waited at the door. By eleven thirty we had walked the short distance to the bar.
* * *
King’s did have an extraordinary view of London. I tend to judge cities by their rivers, and by that standard Paris beats New York and London alike, but the Thames was beautiful, dark, and swift beneath the billion yellow and white lights of the city, its bridges strangely unpersuasive, toylike. We found our way into the party without any trouble, and on the big primary dance floor there were already strobe-lit multitudes, moving in syncopated time.
Tom, Percy, and Alex went straight to the dance floor. Now that I think it over they must have been on heroin: the modulating energy, the irritability, the mix of focus and dreaminess. Who knows what else Tom had taken. Soon they had integrated themselves into a group of dancing girls, as Ella and I stood at the bar, drinking. Her eyes were fastened to Tom. He was out of it, gliding slowly but surely away from Alex and Percy and their group of girls, not dancing even, really, swaying back and forth. His eyes were closed again.
“Should we get him?” Ella asked.
“He’ll pep up. Let’s get another drink.”
She looked unsure. “Okay.”
Her concern was correct. At some point between ordering our next round of drinks and paying for them, Tom disappeared.
For a while we couldn’t even be sure that he had gone. We walked around the dance floor looking for him. Alex and Percy had lost track of him, but neither seemed to think he had gone far. Ella called him; we checked the bathroom. At last we asked the guy at the door, Alex’s friend, if he had seen Tom leaving, and he had.
The elevator had just gone, so we ran down the stairs. Ella was frantic, out of control herself. We looked up and down the street, but there was no sign of him.
“You go right,” I said. “I’ll go left, and we’ll meet on the other side of the block if one of us doesn’t find him first.”
She nodded and clattered off, wearing just her high heels and her yellow dress. I started to walk around the corner, but after only an instant I heard her shout my name, and I ran back.
Tom was slumped against the trashcan by the traffic light, with vomit all over his shirt. Ella was leaning over him.
“What should we do?” she asked again. He murmured something. “He’s talking at least. He’s awake.”
“Let’s get him home.”
She didn’t move. She was shivering, so I put my jacket around her shoulders. Still she crouched by him, watching silently, and I saw that there were tears standing in her eyes, about to slip away one by one. The full force of her love for him, its hopelessness, its delusions, its infiniteness, was apparent, and for a split second I was more worried for her than for him.
I noticed she was clutching something. “What’s that?” I asked.
She looked down at her hand before she remembered. “His wallet.”
“Why do you have it?”
She showed me her other hand, which was full of plastic shards. “He snapped every card he had. His Oxford ID, his Fleet ID, his credit cards, his driver’s license. His fucking NHS card. He tore up the cash.”
“Anything else?”
“No.”
“I wish I knew what he took.”
She looked at me. Her mascara was running with her tears. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.”
We had been almost ignoring Tom, though all our attention was supposed to be on him, but then he started to convulse and bile burst in a bubble from his mouth. Almost simultaneously I saw that there was a ragged line of blood on the side of his neck. I turned his head; there was an open wound there. When he had fallen he had broken open his scalp.
“Fuck,” I said. “I’m calling 999.”
She knelt down on the ground next to him and took him in her arms, even though it meant blood and spit and vomit on her bare chest, on the top of her dress. She was sobbing. The ambulance was there three minutes later, and eight minutes after that he was in the emergency room.
* * *
It was Ella who sat with Tom at the hospital while I went back to King’s, found Alex, and retrieved our light bags, it was Ella who watched as they pumped his stomach, and it was Ella who decided to rent a car the next morning and drive back to Oxford to save Tom from the train or the bus. It was Ella who sat in Tom’s room, running out occasionally to the kitchen or Sainsbury’s, for the drag of the next three days, until he was better.
On the fourth day, he broke things off with her.
For three days he had been passive, until finally his agitation erupted. It happened in his room, and when their voices rose I could hear what they said. (I wish I could pretend that I didn’t eavesdrop. It reminds me of a story my grandfather used to tell. He was a journalist for Life in the sixties, interviewing Truman Capote at a roadside diner in Kansas. At some point Truman went silent, and my grandfather started to repeat his question. Truman shot him a look, scrawled something on his notepad, and pushed it across the table, Shut the fuck up, I’m trying to eavesdrop. The scrap of paper is in a frame in the front hall of my uncle’s house.)
“Just leave me alone!” Tom shouted. “I’m an adult!”
“You need someone to take care of you,” Ella said.
“I didn’t slash my fucking wrists!”
“You might as well have.”
“Oh, Jesus, the melodrama.”
“Me? What about you?”
“What does that mean?” he asked, his voice softer.
“You know what it means.”
“No, what does it mean, Ella? If you’re talking about my sister—”
“I’m talking about you, and how you wallow.”
“Please just go, leave me alone.”
There was a silence. “I love you.”
“Ella.”
Now there was a long silence, a minute or two. At last, she said, “Are you drinking your fluids?”
“There’s not much else to do with them.”
“Tom.”
I heard that symphony-chord sound of his Mac powering on. After that there was another passage of silence, and then Ella left. As she was going I opened my door, but she brushed past me without looking and went down the stairs.
I went into Tom’s room. “What is wrong with you?” I asked.
He still had a bandage on his head. “Jesus, not you, too.”
Nevertheless, that evening he went over to Ella’s house to talk to her again, more gently this time. When I saw her the next afternoon she was puffy-eyed and impassive.
“Well, it’s over,” she said.
We were standing in the MCR together making coffee. It was a cold day. “What happened?”
“I never
know what to believe with these things.” She tucked a strand of pink and black hair behind her ear. “He told me … he said that he could have loved me, but for him I’ll always remind him of … of this time.”
“Anyway, you helped him after Katie died.”
She shrugged. “If that’s true, I would do it all again. It’s not much of a sacrifice.”
I could see in her eyes that this was untrue. “Maybe you two will—”
Before I could finish speaking she cut me off, however. “No. Never.”
Amid all of this drama, the worst thing of all happened: Big Brother turned down Timmo. He was distraught and started speculating about whether they took Brits on Survivor.
“It puts my own ordeal into perspective,” said Tom. “Thank God he’s strong.”
* * *
Not much later, I had a call from Sophie. It was a Tuesday night in the third week of March, and I was walking home, through Radcliffe Square, from a seminar at Balliol about neutrality in fiction. Its subject was the novelists of the 1930s and 1940s—Henry Green, Evelyn Waugh, Ivy Compton-Burnett—who had chosen to write almost exclusively in dialogue. Was it a reaction to the war—a silence? A reaction to the discursive self-regard of the previous generation, Proust, Conrad, Joyce, Woolf? There was something of Pontius Pilate in the inert disinterest of these writers, refusing to speak in their own voices, but something great, too. Their ambiguities invited the reader’s participation, the reader’s choices, in a sense even the reader’s coauthorship. Still, I thought that Orwell’s way took more courage. He took the burden of judgment upon himself. Perhaps as a result he didn’t write with such terrible coldness.
It was an hour of conversation that won me another few paragraphs for my thesis. It was times like that when I was gladdest I had come to Oxford.
My phone buzzed in my pocket, and I pulled it out and answered. “Sophie?”
“Hey,” she said. “Can I come over there?”
“I’m on my way home now. I won’t be back for ten minutes or so.”
“Pick up beer, would you?”
“We have some.”
“What kind?”
“1664.”
“If you pass a shop, get some Guinness.” There was a beat after this command, and then, as if she were answering to some deeper reflex of politeness, something I understood so well, like the older magic in Narnia, she added, “If you don’t mind, of course.”
“No problem. See you in twenty?”
“Thanks.”
When I arrived at the Cottages, she was on our steps. There was still some last white light lofted high over the still city, the air colder than ten minutes before.
“Hey,” I said.
She stood up and smiled. “Hey.”
In my room—which Strick had tidied just that morning, thank God—she went over to my computer and put on Room on Fire. Then she took one of the beers and drank half of it without speaking.
“Are you okay?” I said.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do when I have to leave Oxford. Who knows where Jack will be. It all seems like a mess. Everyone has someplace to be, except me. I wish they wanted me here.”
“You could stay.”
She laughed. “I wish.”
“Why don’t you? Did you apply for the Swift?”
“I told you, they wouldn’t give it to someone studying French language. Not academic enough. Maybe if I did literature.” She finished the beer and looked at me. “Anyway, I didn’t come over to talk. Let’s sleep together.”
“What?”
She came to the bed, pushed my things onto the floor, and lay down. “You do the work,” she said.
So I did: I unbuttoned her jeans, ran my fingers over her hipbones and her thighs, kissed her from her neck to her breasts, brushed her hair away from her face and put my mouth on hers, felt the slight pressure she returned, and then the involuntary rise of her hips against my hand, and after only a little while she had turned me on my back and started to do the work herself.
When it was over she held me tightly. “This was the last time,” she said.
“Okay.”
“Sorry.”
We lay there in silence for a very long time, perhaps half an hour, until, not wholly to my surprise, she started to cry. “What is it?”
“Nothing, nothing.”
“Okay. You don’t want to talk about it?”
“No.” There was a pause. “Are you ready to go again?”
“Not quite.”
She rested her fingers in the declivity between my stomach and my right hipbone. “One more time, that will be the last.”
“Okay.”
* * *
I was going back to America for two weeks, the term break. My flight was a late one from Heathrow to Logan, and I spent the day before I left doing laundry in the MCR. Timmo, Anil, and Anneliese hung out with me for most of it, playing table football and watching the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. Nobody seemed to have any work.
I was leaving for the airport at six, and at half past five I walked over to Sophie’s house, hoping to say good-bye. We hadn’t exchanged fifteen words since we slept together.
Her room was directly at the top of the stairs on the second floor, so that she had less privacy than most of the rooms. When I was near it I realized she was talking to someone.
I hesitated long enough to hear a male voice, cracking with emotion, say, “I just can’t believe it.”
“Baby,” said Sophie, as soft as motherhood.
“One stupid week.” With a shock I realized that it was Jack’s voice, vacated of its customary command. What were they talking about? “I need the loo.”
I was poised on the top step, one foot lifted to its toes, listening, and the door opened too quickly for me to start back down the stairs. The bathroom was just adjacent to Sophie’s room, and Jack must have thought he could slip into it without anyone seeing him. He hadn’t bothered to wipe his cheeks dry.
“Will?” he said, confused.
“Hey.”
His stare hardened. He went into the bathroom and slammed the door. Sophie then came to her door to discover what had happened and saw me.
“Jesus, Will,” she said, “what are you doing here?”
“I was seeing if—if Marta was in,” I said. Marta was a sixty-year-old Brazilian woman, headmistress of a school in Pernambuco on leave to study education, who spent the majority of her waking hours on the phone, talking to her husband. I can say with incontestable certainty that she didn’t know my name. “I’m going stateside for a while.” I gestured toward the bathroom. “Is everything okay?”
“Jack’s going to Afghanistan next Tuesday.”
“Shit.”
“No, no, it’s good. It’s good for his career.”
“Oh. Good, then. When did he find out?”
Her face was unreadable, but her eyes flicked to the door, to check if he could hear perhaps. Her arms were folded across her chest. “About a week ago.”
I thought of her visit to my room, of course. “Wish him luck for me.”
“I will.”
“Good-bye.”
For the rest of the day and all through my flight home, I thought about Jack. I couldn’t stop imagining the ways he might die in the war. There were helicopter crashes, stray bullets, improvised roadside bombs, ground-to-air shoulder launchers, there were plain old car accidents, and of course the fighting, which I understood only somewhere between the abstraction of terror and the overrealism of movies and TV.
Those were black years, during those two wars; every day I brooded over America’s politics, and brooded then on top of that because I had removed myself from them, and therefore, in a sense, relinquished my right to object. The fantasia of Oxford, its self-regard, its late nights—how pointless it seemed when I considered the state of the world elsewhere.
The worst part for me was thinking about him and Ella. A month before, we had all been together at the Fleet bar
and he and Ella, previously just civil, out of nowhere became intensely absorbed in a conversation about classical music. Both of them listened to it, it turned out, and as Jack picked up on her answers, offering names I didn’t know (“Albinoni’s cello suites!”) his face softened out of itself into something like warmth. After that the two of them could always chat together. They even traded music sometimes, I believe, though I can’t remember for sure. I kept thinking about it on the plane.
We landed at around midnight American time. The first thing my eyes lit on was a metal garbage can, and its familiar American shape. It had suffused me all at once with the prestige of my own memories, located in the dull objects of life as much as in people. The garbage and the whole terminal of restaurants it implied and spawned by its existence. I realized I was home. It felt strange. At the exit I saw my mother, and her presence was almost difficult to register, since all of my feelings were already so quick to arise at the slightest pressure, at the garbage can. How was I supposed to handle anything as full of meaning as my mother’s cheerful face, her halo of dark hair? I started to cry, which I don’t imagine I had done in her presence since I was nine or ten.
“Sweetheart!” she said. “My goodness, what is it?”
“Hey.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. Seeing you is hard.” It all seemed like too much to handle. “My friend is going to Afghanistan.”
“Oh, Will.”
I let her hug me. “And I miss Dad, obviously.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
I was an unhappy child: intelligent, anxious, solitary. My parents divorced seven violent years into my life, and when in college I read Tender Is the Night I noted with special interest that the Divers’ son and daughter had “that wistful charm, almost sadness, peculiar to children who have learned early not to cry or laugh with abandon.” My father and the stepfather who followed him were angry men. At the footsteps of either I would slip into an empty room if I could and wait. I did my schoolwork perfectly and my chores as well as I could, hoping to escape notice. I read a lot of books.
Until I was twelve or so my life was full of deep terrors. I used to be convinced beyond persuasion, for example, that one day I would be kidnapped. In one of the lunatic misunderstandings of early childhood, I would have guessed then that around ten percent of children were stolen at some stage. Especially at the age of seven or eight I would lie in bed envisioning how it might happen. I never wanted to bother my father—later, my stepfather—so I would remain in bed, paralyzed with fear, clenched all along my body, until my terror reached its highest pitch and I would sprint, sobbing, to my mother. It was a transgression my stepfather in particular hated, but that I could never manage to stop myself from committing. How bizarre that I should have been reprimanded! What was I back then? A little particle of being. Why would it have angered them to see me afraid?
The Last Enchantments Page 20
