Looking for Class

by Bruce Feiler

  “I told you,” he said, “it’s my business to know what goes on in this college.” He moved from behind his swivel chair and handed me a message. “Anyway, maybe this will help you. A young lady from King’s telephoned today and invited you to her birthday party.”

  I looked at the memo. “This is no help. She doesn’t even like me. I’m more worried about the situation closer to home. I’ve tried to be indirect with her, Terry. I don’t want to ruin our friendship. But she doesn’t seem to get the message.”

  “I’ve seen this kind of thing before around here,” he said. “But whatever happens, just remember this: always be a gentleman—be honest and direct—and you’ll never have anything to be ashamed of. That’s what we try to teach you at Clare.”

  “Is that the college motto?”

  “Why, it’s the British motto,” he said. “The Dunkirk spirit. Never sacrifice your principles. Never drop your chin. In the end, it’ll all work out. We learned that during the Second War.”

  “I guess what they say is true,” I said. “You Brits don’t easily forget.”

  He tugged smugly at his lapels. When he had finished, I asked him if he liked the job of turning teenagers into ladies and gentlemen.

  “Are you asking me a serious question?” he said.

  “I’m trying.”

  He took out his pocket watch and checked the time. “I’m going to Old Court exactly at eight to have my tea with Richard,” he said. “But let me try to answer your question.”

  He sat down on his swivel chair and began telling me the story of how he became a porter at Clare. Originally enlisted into the Royal Air Force, Terry quit his post in the early 1950s and went to work for the Royal Mail. Several years into his job, however, he was knocked unconscious one afternoon by a football, “what you Americans call a soccer ball”; and six months later, after recurring bouts of vertigo, he was asked to leave. Frustrated, he took up retail, went back to school, and became a manager in a friend’s sporting goods’ store. Again, however, his luck ran out and the store went bust. “At the ripe old age of thirty-two,” he recalled. “I was finished…washed up.” A friend asked him to join Clare. All his family had been around the university—his great-grandfather and grandfather had been porters; his mother had been a bedder—so he decided to give it a try.

  “I find the job is quite challenging,” he said. “There’s a side of me that I like—the friendly side—and I use that as much as I can. But sometime I have to use that other side. I don’t like giving people a wiggle in the ear, but I do it if I have to. Take the other night at that party in the attic. Every year the kids in the novice boats think they have to lose it all in one night. They’ve heard the stories about drunkenness in the previous year and think they have to top them. Somebody invariably gets hurt. Last year we had a boy running around the Bridge and barking like a dog. We had to take him to hospital.”

  “So you never lose control, do you?”

  “If we didn’t have certain rules around here, it would turn into a jungle. In the past, people used to go into the army. That taught them discipline. But now they have to get it in school. Every year about a hundred and twenty freshers drop through that gate, plus another dozen graduate students. Out of that hundred and twenty, about five or so usually think that being friendly and outgoing is a sign of weakness. They have to break the rules to show off. So I try to show them what it means to be members of this college. Freedom is one of the scariest words, Bruce. Many of these students don’t know what it means. We have to keep them in line and let them know that they have a certain responsibility to uphold the tradition of the college.”

  I looked around the office—the portable stove, the walkie-talkie, the black-and-white television with the sound turned down. “So do you like it?”

  “Well, I enjoy the architecture, the life-style, and of course I enjoy being deputy head porter of Clare College.” He nodded his head in deference to the title and straightened up in his chair, as he might have done to the first deputy head porter he ever met and, no doubt, as I was supposed to be doing to him. “But I think what I enjoy most is the kids….

  “The students come in and talk to me when they have a problem. I remember a young girl from Edinburgh who was around here when they were building the library in the middle of Memorial Court, you know the one that Prince Philip came to dedicate. She was pretty to look at. Not attractive, you might say, but not unattractive. Well, the boys who were working on the library were whistling at her one day, so I put them straight with a chat. Several weeks later a young boy from Trinity was pestering her. One night I was on patrol when I heard him being a bit too familiar for my tastes. They were having a row in the middle of the court and, well, I put him out of the college. Several days later she wrote me a letter thanking me for my assistance. What I had done anyone would do. A little kindness goes a long way—”

  The telephone rang abruptly. Terry straightened his glasses and moved to the edge of his seat.

  “Now go on,” he said. “Get out of here. That’s Richard giving me a call. Nothing waits for tea, my friend. Nothing waits for tea.”

  VII

  SHARKING

  How to Pick Up a Rhodes Scholar

  Half-past one,

  The street-lamp sputtered,

  The street-lamp muttered,

  The street-lamp said, “Regard that woman

  Who hesitates toward you in the light of the door…”

  —T. S. Eliot

  “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” 1917

  Simon knocked on my door at ten minutes to noon, rapping against the Guardian headline I had taped beneath my name: MIND OF A SCHOLAR, BODY OF A LIBERTINE.

  “Wake up, Mr. Feiler,” he shouted in his high-mocking tone of public school English. “Get your libertine body out of bed.”

  I pulled the covers from around my head and crawled to the end of the bed.

  “Turn the knob,” I grunted. “It takes three hands.”

  “Good morning,” he chirped as he bounded through the door. “I just came to bring back your gown.”

  “How was the dinner?” I asked, falling back on my pillow and straining through chalky eyes.

  “Halcyon and I sat across from Dr. Jones. I don’t think he liked me very much. I was told I could be ‘sent down’ for wearing an M.A. gown.” He hung my gown on the hook behind the door and flopped down in my chair. “Then I went home and indulged in some stimulation.”

  “With Halcyon?”

  “Not with Halcyon, fool. Her heart is set on you. With my neighbor, Kiet Khiem Koh. I call her Triple K. She came into my room around midnight and caught me in bed with no clothes on. She sat down on the end of the bed and started talking, and it was only a matter of time before—Why, Bruce,” he said when he had settled in and caught a good look at me, “did you consume vast quantities of alcohol last night?”

  “Don’t bother me,” I said. “Finish your story.”

  “I don’t need to,” he said. “You know the end. Now tell me, how were your parties?”

  “I only made it to one.”

  “What time did you get home?”

  “Quarter to seven.”

  “Good God,” he said, “you’re worse than me. Did you have a stimulating conversation?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Was it debauched?”

  “Worse,” I said.

  “What do you mean? What could be worse than debauchery?”

  “Genuine attraction.”

  It was eight-thirty on the previous night when I emerged from the bath and stood dripping wet on my orange floor mat wondering what to wear. At the Crew Meal I had kept my tie laced all night and felt donnishly overdressed. The following week I had worn sweats to a party in Cauis and felt sophomorically underdressed. Cambridge parties, I realized, bring out the extremes—a student population that all week conforms to a standard fare of dark pants, called trousers, and baggy sweaters, called jumpers, rushes to the edges of its cupboa
rds on weekends to make dramatic statements. I, on the other hand, had few extreme clothes and was forced to choose middle-of-the road gray striped trousers and a maroon button-down shirt. Mind of a libertine, wardrobe of a scholar.

  After dressing down I grabbed my requisite bottle of red wine and walked out of Mem Court past the University Library—a one-block mud-brick monstrosity topped by a twelve-story tower that some member of the Royal Family is reputed to have labeled “the largest erection in Britain”—and headed toward the Grasshopper Lodge, which houses students from King’s.

  PARTY UPSTAIRS, said an envelope attached to the door. PLEASE RING 14, 15, OR 18.

  I rang 14. Nothing happened.

  I rang 15. Nothing happened.

  Then a woman using the building’s pay telephone opened the door and let me in. The party, she said, was in room 18.

  “Oh, Bruce, thank you for coming,” gushed the hostess, Melinda, as I arrived at the door and tendered my wine. “Come in and have a drink. Let me introduce you to my friend Serge.”

  I knew no one at the party other than Melinda, who had invited me to her birthday bash despite having decided during our previous meeting that my knowledge of philosophy was sufficiently tertiary to disqualify me from stimulating conversation. Despite my murky intellectual status and the usual difficulty of mingling in Britain, however, I managed to meet three people in the course of the evening.

  The first was Serge.

  “I’m a socialist,” he said. “I don’t believe in parties.”

  Serge was wearing a mustard blazer and a green silk tie.

  “Cambridge must be difficult for you,” I said. “How do you manage to be a socialist with all these public school boys running around in their Brideshead clothes?”

  “They’re an anachronism,” he said, “just like the Royals. And besides, they’re always drunk.”

  The second was J.B.

  “I’m a Buddhist,” he said. “I don’t believe in God.”

  J.B. was dressed in ripped black jeans and a leather jacket.

  “I guess that means you never go to Chapel.”

  “I go every week. It’s a great place to meditate. I just sit in a comfortable spot, cross my legs, and concentrate on my breathing.”

  “Sounds like going to lectures.”

  “Except you come out relaxed.”

  The third was her.

  “I’m Rachel,” she said. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

  During my time as a single man in Japan, I was given clear, albeit tongue-in-cheek, advice on how to pick up a Japanese girl. Befitting the formulaic culture of Japan, the rules were very explicit, from the pickup line (“Would you like to drink some tea?”) to the check-in desk (an illuminated bank of photographs at a rent-by-the-hour “love hotel”). In Britain the native culture is hardly less formulaic, but the rules for a single student at Cambridge are considerably more complex. To begin with, unlike the ski slopes and department stores where I was told to go scoping in Japan, there are almost no locations outside of college for single students to meet. Except for the library, with its bookish limitations, and the pub, with its inebriatic illusions, few places in town receive anything resembling a cross section of students. As a result, the first rule of sharking in the fishbowl of Cambridge is to nibble at every bait.

  “I’m Bruce,” I said. “I believe you’re right.”

  I stuck out my hand, which she took in hers with a commanding grip that rippled up her uncovered arm to the arc of her upturned smile. Her hair rained black in well-combed streaks, her neck was as tall as the library tower, her shoulders were covered with a black leotard that scalloped at her breastline toward her leather-belted pants and the pointed boots on her feet. With dark green eyes and ivory skin, she had all the regal aura of Princess Diana, except for a notably pronounced English nose that was more reminiscent of Prince Charles. She was not my type; she was probably not my sign. I couldn’t let go of her hand.

  “Would you like a drink?” she said.

  “Sure. I mean—I have one. Well, yes.” I smiled, putting down my half-empty glass and picking up a full-empty one from the table. “What do you have to offer?”

  “Just wine.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Why don’t I take your glass.”

  She took my glass and filled it with standard PBAB vintage—Bulgarian table wine—as I plucked a piece of pecan cake from a pan and leaned against the fake fireplace to steady my hand. Rachel, she told me, was not at Cambridge but at Oxford. She was not from Britain but from Canada. She was a Rhodes Scholar.

  “I’m reading English,” she said. “It’s extremely exciting. Language here is so clear.”

  “But the English are so understated,” I said. “American English is much more direct.”

  “Americans,” she said, “are much more direct. The English are more precise.”

  Among students, tourists, even professors, there is one indisputable manner in which Cambridge promotes love: it is an incredibly, at times overwhelmingly, romantic place. For some, the charm is in the setting. Cambridge, wrote Henry James, boasts “the loveliest confusion of Gothic windows and ancient trees, of grassy banks and mossy balustrades…of single-arched bridges spanning the little stream, which is small and shallow and looks as if it had been turned on for ornamental purposes.” For others the appeal is in the students. “So many happy youths,” wrote Wordsworth. “So many divers samples from the growth of life’s sweet season.” But for many the spell is in the stunning number of poets who lived and wrote in Cambridge. For as long as the university has existed, its legacy has been passed down in verse from one generation to the next: Milton swam in Spenser’s river. Wordsworth sat under Milton’s tree. Tennyson walked over Wordsworth’s bridge.

  Women, of course, were long kept away from this sacred core. Virginia Stephen, daughter of eminent don Sir Leslie Stephen and future wife of Leonard Woolf, complained that she was forced to eat plain soup and prunes at a nearby “women’s college,” while her male friends enjoyed partridges, pudding, and, most importantly, stimulating conversation around the tables at King’s. “I have to delve from books painfully all alone,” she wrote to a friend, “what you get every evening sitting over your fire and smoking your pipe with friends.” Over time, she, more than anyone, helped eliminate this state of affairs with a memorable portrait of Cambridge men in Jacob’s Room and a powerful manifesto for Cambridge women in A Room of One’s Own.

  As a result, women at Cambridge these days have not only joined the conversations but also joined the hunt. In Japan, the process of nanpa, or picking up dates, is mostly a one-way affair, with the men making most of the moves. In Britain, however, especially at its elite universities, the game of sharking is much more of a two-way street. Thus, if rule number one is to nibble at every bite, then rule number two when sharking in Cambridge is to strike a pose of mutual respect.

  As Rachel and I slipped into conversation, I slowly leaned my elbow on the hearth to my left. Without seeming to notice, I watched as she pressed her shoulder slowly against the same fake fireplace. After several more minutes, when it became apparent she did not plan to flee, I extended my hand in Sistine Chapel fashion along the top of the mantelpiece in an outrageous gesture that anyone watching would have taken for a move to touch her arm. Finally, after Melinda announced that everyone was going dancing in the King’s cellars and Rachel responded that she was staying at Melinda’s to continue her conversation with me, I took the final plunge into deep-sea sharking by lifting my left arm à la John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, leaning it against the wall, and cocking my body in a mock disco pose by crossing my left leg over my right. Rachel reacted by taking one step forward into the empty room and tilting her head into the flagrant void left by my upturned arm.

  The telephone rang.

  “Should we answer it?” I said, secretly cursing my fortune and thinking to myself, “I can’t believe King’s has phones.”

  “Sure,” s
he replied. “I’ll answer it.”

  To my chagrin, she walked to the other side of the room to pick up the receiver, and to my horror, she knew the person on the other end of the line. It was a he. He was calling from Oxford. They joked about a previous conversation. She invited him to her place for dinner the following night. She stood on her feet and arched her back. Her voice took on the rising tone of someone being tickled.

  My heart sank. I sat down on the floor. I looked for something to occupy my mind and settled on a poster of a Sumo wrestler and tried to practice my Japanese.

  “That was a friend from Oxford,” Rachel said after she returned to the room and plopped down on the floor directly in front of me. “He called to wish Melinda happy birthday.”

  I stayed silent and waited for a hint.

  “He’s actually something of a playboy,” she said. “He likes to have a lot of girlfriends and avoid commitment. Recently, someone fell in love with him, but he lost interest. I told him he should try having a serious relationship, and he called to tell me he was trying.”

  “That was fast,” I said. “When did you tell him that?”

  “Yesterday.”

  Although the news from Oxford was not that bad, the call still had a shrinking effect, like an incident of sharkus interruptus. After several more minutes of rather tepid conversation, Rachel stood up, announced she was going to bed, and began to clean the room. I helped carry some paper plates into the gyp, then ducked into the W.C. for some reevaluation. Here I was, the last person at a party where I hadn’t known a soul, engrossed in a conversation that had moved from get-to-know-you to know-you-and-like-you-too, and the person whom I was actively sharking and who moments earlier seemed to be sharking me too had declared she was ready for bed and begun to tidy the room of someone who wasn’t even there. Not my idea of debauchery. I decided to throw in the towel.

  “I think I might go over to the Perestroika Bar after all,” I said when I returned to the gyp.

  “What’s the Perestroika Bar?”