Looking for Class

by Bruce Feiler

  “Then, just as he landed in the water…”

  A little over an hour later I was telling a story on the bed in Ian’s rooms with a plate of Chinese noodles on my lap and a glass of Irish stout in my hand. Ian was busy fiddling in the gyp and fussing like a nagging host: Are the noodles warm enough? Is the broccoli cut too large? That left me alone in the spotlight, building as I usually do toward the climax of the story, waving my arms as I also do when blessed with a responsive audience. “It spread its wings, opened its beak, and…”

  It cannot be said that Dr. Cyprian Kramer would strike the casual observer as responsive. He was tall, almost gangly, his face was thin, ascending from the curb of his rounded chin to a pair of spectacles affixed to his nose like academic training wheels. When I finished my story, Dr. Kramer did respond.

  “That was pretty funny,” he said without so much as a grin. “Let me guess: Scorpio?”

  “Close. Swan.”

  “Even funnier. You must be a Scorpio.”

  “What, my sign?”

  He nodded, jiggling his blond shoulder-length ponytail that hung from the rear of his balding head.

  “Well, yes, I am a Scorpio.”

  “I thought so. Of course, you won’t believe me, that’s why I never guess anyone’s sign in public, but I knew that.”

  I stared at him. “How?”

  “From the way you told that story. It’s the same way I would have told it—the pauses, the gestures, the climax. Indeed, you’re a typical Scorpio, as am I.”

  Dr. C. P. Kramer (“Call me Cyprian: it’s Greek for ‘prostitute’”) was a classicist and a former don of Ian’s in ancient philosophy. Like Ian, his junior by ten years, Cyprian was born in London, had attended the prestigious St. Paul’s School, and had been an undergraduate at Clare. Unlike Ian, Cyprian came from a middle-class family, attended St. Paul’s on scholarship, and stayed on at Cambridge not merely for his master’s but also for a Ph.D. After receiving his doctorate, Cyprian was invited to become a fellow at Clare, a position which entitled him to free rooms in Memorial Court, free meals at High Table in Hall, and free reign to walk on the grass, unaccompanied. His area of expertise was an unsung Roman writer named Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, or Lucan, who wrote an epic poem two thousand years ago that has been mostly ignored by scholars. Cyprian, on the other hand, adored its twisted humor and exotic style. The reason, he said, was that he and Lucan shared one vital sign: both were Scorpios.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said.

  “Why?” he replied.

  “You mean to tell me your academic career is based on what day of the year you were born?”

  “Your love life is based on that,” he said. “Why not your professional life as well?”

  Eventually, inevitably, when the serving was complete, the conversation settled onto the semiotics of love. The laboratory was in session.

  “So tell me,” I said. “I’m engaged in a kind of quest. Is Cambridge a good place to fall in love?”

  “Yes,” Cyprian quickly answered.

  “Of course,” Ian agreed.

  “Well…” they began to reconsider. “Maybe it’s not so simple.”

  Ian had come to Cambridge yearning to fall in love. If Simon was the type of student who left public school consumed with sex, Ian was the type who left petrified. During Ian’s first term at Clare, a beautiful girl from his entryway came to his door at two in the morning, dressed only in a nightgown, and asked for a cup of coffee. “She was the most beautiful girl in our year,” he remembered (Cambridge students, like the porters, still use the term girl). “All my friends wanted to snog with her—I slammed the door in her face.” After that trauma he moved slowly, sitting across from girls in Buttery—the cafeteria underneath the Hall—and starting conversations with them in the JCR, the Junior Common Room underneath the Chapel. Halfway through his second year, Ian’s preparations finally paid off: she was blond, a historian, a horseback rider, and a tender influence on Ian’s rapacious soul. Her name was Miranda.

  “I fell in love with her eyes,” he recalled. “She had the most vulnerable look in the world. Also, she was good. The ideal of good. She could walk into a storm and calm it with her grace. I made her laugh; she made me weak. I never let her out of my sight.” He shut his eyes and swooned.

  “You should have seen them together,” Cyprian said. “They would yell and scream and curse the day they met, then melt into each other’s arms and kiss away the tears. She was definitely an Aries.”

  “And a whore,” Ian snapped.

  The previous summer, after two years of tumultuous romance, Ian and Miranda traveled to Sardinia to celebrate their graduation. For two weeks they frolicked in the sand, went skinny-dipping in the surf, and then three days before the end of the trip, while Ian was upstairs taking a shower, Miranda danced with another man, who kissed her goodbye on the lips.

  “I was destroyed,” Ian remembered. “I had given her my heart, I had shared my soul, I had even showed her my foreskin, the most sacred possession I have, and she abandoned me.” Ian flew back to London the next day and decided to postpone a legal training course for another year of philosophy at Cambridge.

  “She says she wants you back,” Cyprian reminded Ian, who had stopped eating altogether and picked up his guitar again. “It was only a kiss.”

  “It was a violation,” he declared. “We had a pact. Love is much more than sex: it’s an understanding. Call it sappy, but I have this extraordinarily traditional opinion that the highest form of love requires exclusivity. It is special because it’s particular. I don’t accept this idea of human frailty. If you say, ‘I’m only human,’ you can never achieve greatness. Kant said if you believe in love you can achieve it. The act of following a certain moral code can transform it into law.”

  As philosophical as Ian was about love, Cyprian was providential.

  “I don’t believe you can make laws out of words,” Cyprian said after Ian had drifted off into a self-pitying silence. “There is a certain amount of fate involved. I haven’t had many relationships, but when I find a match that fits my chart I’m not going to let some philosopher tell me what to do. What you don’t understand, Ian, is that the stars are wiser than all the sages put together, the planets are more powerful than Plato.”

  He reached over and lit a Marlboro cigarette and unsuccessfully offered one to me. Ian waved at the smoke in the air and rolled over on his bed. Then Cyprian told a story with Scorpion finesse about a woman he recently met in line at the buttery of the History Faculty. She was drinking coffee by herself, she was French, and she was looking for someone to teach her Italian. Buoyed beyond his sheepishness by the remarkable chance, Cyprian, doctor of Latin, offered to help. But first he asked her a question.

  “I couldn’t believe it,” he sighed. “She was a Gemini. If only she had been born twenty minutes later, she would have had some water in her.”

  “Water?” I said. “What’s that?”

  “Bruce,” he said, “you disappoint. It means she would crave love and protection—”

  “Which only Scorpios can provide.”

  “We are passionate and deep, you know.”

  “I’m learning,” I said. “And what do we match?”

  “Water. Cancer, Capricorn, Pisces.”

  “But not Gemini.”

  “That’s air.”

  “That’s bollocks,” Ian shouted from the bed.

  “That’s not the only problem,” Cyprian retorted. “There’s the matter of her name, Sophie. Oh, Sophie, my least-favourite name, after, of course, the obvious choices of Sharon and Lisa. And she likes clothes. I mean really likes clothes. She wears a different outfit every time I meet her. Usually, I don’t recognize her, or it takes me several minutes to find her. It’s rather embarrassing.”

  “And she wants you to like clothes as well.”

  “Me?” he glanced down at his standard-issue Cambridge uniform—baggy grey trousers and black turtleneck. “I can’t,
it would ruin my image as a slouch. Last week I said, ‘Okay, I trust your taste. Let’s buy a pair of shoes for me.’ We couldn’t. All she wanted me to buy was a pair of Italian patent leather loafers. I wanted a pair of sandals. ‘You can’t wear those,’ she said. So I bought nothing.”

  Ian could no longer contain himself. “Cyprian,” he blurted, “you’re a loser.”

  Cyprian was unfazed. “Then there’s the problem of food. This is one of Sophie’s favourite subjects. She hates English food. I kind of like it. She’s a vegetarian. She keeps offering to cook dinner to show me how wonderful a cook she is. She wants to cook me fish. I hate fish.”

  “So let me get this straight,” I said. “She likes Italian clothes, and you don’t. You like English food, and she doesn’t.”

  “It’s worse.”

  “How?”

  “She likes France, and I don’t.”

  “You wanker!” Ian cried.

  “She wants to teach me French. I hate French; I even hate the French. It was my first foreign language, but I don’t like it anymore. It’s probably because of the French officials who were rude to me in Paris. I prefer Italian.”

  “That’s perfect,” I said. “That’s what she wanted all along.”

  “It’s not perfect,” he insisted. “In Cambridge, English is the language of love.”

  With that remark Ian popped up and slammed his befisted arms on his knees. “Then why do you see her?” he demanded.

  “Because it’s rare,” Cyprian said without lifting a finger. “It’s rare to meet someone with whom it is possible to have a conversation. I don’t believe in all your philosophical constructions, all your educated guesses. There’s something terribly English about it. Education is such a controlling thing, and I believe love is much more basic. I remember when I was young, very young—about six or seven. I used to take a bus to school, and there was a woman who took the same bus. I became infatuated with her. Later, five or six years later, when I knew what a film star looked like and had seen porn mags and the like, I happened to take that bus and the same woman got on. I realized then that she was ugly—amazingly ugly, in fact. And I have been questioning ever since. Perhaps I fell in love because it was my naïve self before I had learnt what beauty, or sex, or love actually is. I think education corrupts the heart.”

  “You’re a traitor,” Ian said when Cyprian was done. “You’re a traitor to everything you taught me. What about the classical notion of love—that there is a higher ideal out there that we must strive to achieve. Education is not a burden, it liberates us from the tyranny of our bodies and opens up new worlds…. Bruce, don’t you agree?”

  With this last question Ian turned in my direction, and he and Cyprian paused in their spat to hear my mediation. I was fully prepared to equivocate. On the one hand, I could see Ian’s point about the virtues of high ideals. On the other hand, I could sympathize with Cyprian’s fear of losing a love to some philosophy. Faced with these conflicting urges, I was going to say instead that maybe a university was a bad place to look for love, since all we seemed to do was talk about it.

  But they didn’t want to hear me at all.

  “I don’t agree with you,” Cyprian insisted.

  “Then you’re wrong,” Ian shouted back.

  “No,” Cyprian responded, relishing the exchange though never raising his voice. “You’re wrong, and I’m right. You should appreciate what you had with Dominique and grab it before it disappears.”

  “I can’t. I won’t.” Ian stood up and started pacing the room. He plucked a dart from his circular board and spun it in his fingers. “Don’t you see? I’m young, and if I don’t experiment now, I’ll never know if it was right. Miranda is dead. Louise is my pursuit, my agon.” He paused for a minute over his Greek mandate and lifted the dart to his eye. “I’ll push myself harder. I’ll test her devotion. Love must be the strongest emotion. I have to know: Would she die for me? Would I die for her? Would I die for love?” He aimed the dart at the heart of the board and propelled it toward the target. The dart bounced off the thin metal ridge around the center and landed on the floor.

  “Bull’s-eye!” Ian shouted with Pyrrhic glee.

  “Sorry,” Cyprian retorted with Roman acumen. “If it doesn’t stick, it doesn’t count. Those are the rules of the game.”

  V

  DRINKING

  Bottoms Up and Trousers Down

  This place [Cambridge] is the Devil, or at least his principal residence, they call it a University, but any other appellation would have suited it much better, for Study is the last pursuit of the Society…. I have only supped at home 3 times since my arrival, and my table is constantly covered with invitations.

  —Byron

  Letter, 1805

  I bought my first bow tie the day before the dinner. The invitation made me do it:

  The gentlemen’s 2nd novice eight with cox

  cordially invite

  the ladies’ 2nd novice eight plus cox

  for a

  CREW MEAL

  of chili, rice, and casual sex

  followed by coffee and mints

  at 8 P.M. Thursday

  Memorial Court

  Smart Dress

  RSVP PBAB

  I knew that PBAB, the four most important letters to any Cambridge student, meant “Please bring a bottle,” but I didn’t know the meaning of “Smart Dress”; so I asked.

  “It means a DJ,” said Max, the toniest member of the boat and also the most out of shape.

  “A DJ?” I repeated, unenlightened.

  “You know, a dinner jacket.”

  “A tuxedo, you mean.”

  “That’s right. A black jacket, a white shirt, and a bow tie. You have one, of course.”

  “Of course,” I said with exaggerated aplomb, being suddenly thankful for having been invited to my cousin’s wedding on Long Island the previous year. At that time, after receiving some sartorial advice from my father, whose fashion tastes were freeze-dried in 1947 at the apogee of the British Empire, I purchased my first tuxedo. I had made it through four years of Yale University without once trying on a tuxedo, but I would not finish my first month at Cambridge without donning my DJ. At Cambridge, it seems, a curious dress code applies: the more dressed up the guests must get, the more debauched a party becomes.

  So that afternoon I trekked off to the shop called A. E. Clothiers, across the street from King’s, and asked for a Clare bow tie.

  “What kind of Clare tie would you like?” asked the man behind the counter as he lifted his nose from a stack of scarves, smiled, and gingerly laid one hand atop the other, like a pastor before a corpse.

  “You mean I have a choice?”

  “Why, yes,” he intoned, “you can have the Regular tie, or the Rugby tie, or the Boat Club tie.”

  “I’ll take the Boat Club tie.”

  “Which one?”

  “There’s more than one?”

  “Well, you have the yellow ones for the first boat, but I don’t imagine you’ve got that far.” He smiled; I coughed. He continued. “Or the yellow ones with the black stripes, or the white ones with the—”

  “That’s all right,” I interrupted. “I’ll just take the Regular tie. The black one, with the yellow stripes.”

  “Very well,” he agreed. “Will there be anything else? You have the hooded sweatshirt, of course.”

  “Of course.” I reached for my checkbook, in England a chequebook.

  “How about cufflinks, a tiepin, a money clip…”

  “That will be all, thank you.”

  “Very well. Come back anytime.”

  Now that I had my tie, I needed someone to teach me to knot it. On the night before I left for England, in the hopes of averting embarrassment, I had asked my mother to give me a lesson. I had stood dripping wet in the late summer heat staring into a mirror as my mother, the Anglophile, stood on a stool behind me and tried to show me how to fasten a tie around my shirtless neck.

 
“It’s just like tying a shoe,” she kept saying.

  Not only is it not like tying a shoe, I concluded after two hours of lopsided, floppy-eared knots, but it is also not like riding a bicycle, because in the interim between shirtless summer and wing-tipped fall, I had forgotten how.

  At first I sought out Simon. He was a prep school boy, I figured, so surely he had learned how to dress smartly for tea.

  “I don’t know how to do that,” he smirked. “My grandmother always did it for me.”

  Then I asked Cheryl from Canada, K.K. from Malaysia, and Halcyon from Hong Kong—all people from places that were at one time under the British Empire—but none of them could tell me either.

  “It’s just like tying a shoe,” Halcyon said, though she couldn’t seem to demonstrate on me.

  Finally, I asked Bill, from Northern Ireland. We were sitting in the Buttery the day of the dinner and he assured me he could explain. He took a napkin, rolled it from corner to corner, and started to knot it around an egg-shaped salt shaker—empty, like most, from overuse.

  “That’s it!” I shouted.

  “That’s what?” he said.

  “You’ve got to make the loop before the knot.”

  “That’s right,” he said, “but where do you put it?”

  “That’s easy,” I said. “You put it through the hole.”

  And so it came to pass that I locked myself in my rooms that evening just hours before the crew meal, stood cursing before my closet mirror—this time in shirt and no shorts—and sold my soul to the fading Empire by rendering my neck like a shoe.

  “Hey look,” Max called as I arrived with Halcyon at the attic rooms on the far side of Memorial Court. “Brucie’s got a Clare bow tie.”