by Jo Baker
I started hating those after-class drinks. We’d just be there together but not together, and everyone except me would get drunk, and I’d be alone sipping a soda and wondering what was so funny. Eventually I got up the nerve to say to him we should go for coffee sometime, just the two of us, so that we could talk, since it was impossible to really talk in the noise and crush of the college bar. Maybe we weren’t entirely on the same page at that point; maybe he thought of me more as a friend, but I could take that. Like I said: greedy and persistent.
“Study group,” I suggested. “Just you and me. Special study group for the gifted and talented.”
He laughed. We started going for coffee. The talk was always about work. He never opened up to me about any other aspect of his life, although I knew his writing was strongly autobiographical. I remember he told me that a work of art, in whatever form, should say something about the world and something about the form itself, whether it be the novel or sculpture or music or painting. And that anything that doesn’t do that wasn’t art. And that that, ultimately, was what he was trying to do. Make a work of art.
It wasn’t what I was trying to do. I was just trying to tell a story. And along the way, to process my own experience of growing up where I grew up, of high school bullies, of feeling like an outsider and a freak, that kind of thing. I wanted to make some sense of my own existence. I began to wonder if maybe I should have thought the whole thing through more, before I even started. If I should have aimed higher. Was good enough. I began to wonder if I was wasting my time.
After those coffee dates, I’d sit and chew a pen, or stare at my computer screen, the little cursor line flashing in and out of existence and the words not coming. Or I’d write a sentence, or a paragraph, reread it, and delete. In the face of his certainties, I lost all conviction.
I kept submitting work to class, though. Earlier work, stuff I’d written while I was still home. Stuff that I was now cutting away at with a scalpel every day, so that it got leaner and leaner. I’d cut away the fat, and the flesh, and was down to the bones. I hated it.
And she didn’t even notice that I wasn’t writing. She didn’t even care. What mattered was him, and his work, because she saw that he was special. Nobody else was ever going to get noticed.
I’d lie on my bed and stare up at that scrawled heart on the underside of the bottom shelf and daydream future-us. Maybe I should have started writing about that, the two of us living in Split, or Dubrovnik or Zagreb, or wherever Paris in the ’30s would be by then, writing side by side at separate bistro tables, me acquiring a taste for tiny bitter coffees, and becoming the new Simone de Beauvoir and he my Jean-Paul Sartre. I certainly spent more time in that imagined future than in the world of my supposed novel.
And if I didn’t get the novel written, then I wasn’t a writer at all, let alone Simone de Beauvoir.
I started to have fantasies about dying. I wasn’t actually suicidal, I’m pretty sure of that, but the way he grieved for that other girl for years, feeding the pain and feeding off the pain, made me jealous of her, of the way that she was perfect and dead, whereas I was imperfectly alive.
And then there was that day he ran out of class. The discussion had gotten out of hand, and he had had enough, and left. Frankly I didn’t blame him; sometimes the best thing you can do is take yourself out of a situation. I’d wanted to go after him, but she told me straight-out not to. I guess it was her responsibility to make sure he was okay. But then it was also her responsibility to manage classroom discussions in such a way that students didn’t feel they had to run out of the room. If she’d gotten that right, none of the rest of it would have happened.
As it was, she didn’t manage to persuade him back for the second half of class. We just went on without him, as if it wasn’t that big a deal. She was a little snippy with the troublemakers but that was it.
I went looking for him as soon as class was over. Maybe I could “just run into” him in the bar, or a coffee shop, or in the library, or in the student union shop. But I didn’t. Disheartened, I gave up and went back to my dorm room and made myself a cup of hot tea and lay down on my bed. I was pretty unhappy right then, but the walls are so thin here and my neighbors are not what you would call congenial, so I didn’t make a noise about it. After a while, there was a knock on my door. I got up and straightened myself out.
“Come in.”
He stood there, soaked to the bone, bruised-looking. He had come to me. When things were really bad, it was me he wanted.
“Come in,” I said, “come in.”
I handed him my towel and he held it, just stood there dripping. I took it from him and stood on tiptoe to rub his dark tousled hair.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
He shook his head to clear it. “No.” Then after a minute he asked me, “Are you?” noticing maybe the smudginess around my eyes.
“No.”
He touched my face. His hand was cold, and my cheek was hot. I leaned in to him, and then—well, let’s draw a veil over that. The detail isn’t relevant in this context. What matters is to state, for the record, what we were to each other. To have it acknowledged that we were together, that we mattered to each other. It was early days, but it was real.
That last week or ten days or so of the Michaelmas term, he’d find me in the library in the afternoon, and we’d head back to my dorm room. The rain dripping outside. We were discreet. No one realized, except for maybe those uncongenial neighbors; we didn’t have another class till January and I certainly didn’t tell anyone in the MA group; I didn’t need anyone’s validation. We sent texts back and forth, like little love notes. We spent hours in my dorm room. There was always the chance of running into him on campus. That brightened those rainy days.
And then this party.
As far as I was concerned it was him and me in our little bubble, and the rest of them were on a scale of irrelevance from “nice enough” through to “complete pain in the ass” and I could take them or leave them. I had gotten the impression that he felt much the same way. So I couldn’t fathom why he would drag the whole crowd out to his family home, and host a party there.
But like I said: greedy, determined, so I figured I’d take it in stride, because it would be an experience.
Karen said she’d give me a ride, which was sweet of her, but then she was late, and I’m always early for everything. I was jigging and fidgeting in the entrance hall of my building for fifteen whole minutes before she pulled up in her little soda can on wheels.
We swung out of campus the back way, heading into the countryside. We raced down narrow winding lanes, high hedges flickering past in the headlights. She kept wrenching the stick shift around; I had no idea how much trouble they were. The countryside was so empty; there seemed to be nothing for miles except the occasional home. The rain swept the windshield; we went grinding and dipping over the hills, weaving around curves, those big looming moors above us like something out of a Brontë novel. I tugged my good dress down. I don’t like wearing dresses; I look like a boy in a dress, all shoulders and knees. But it was a party, at his house, and that seemed like a special occasion. I wanted him to see I’d made an effort.
We reached a village—a scattering of homes, a pub, school, village store—Karen made the turn and we drove down the street and pulled onto a gravel drive. The car crawled up it, then stopped outside this house. Karen whistled.
“Is this it?” I asked.
“SatNav says yes.”
It was the kind of home you would expect the Bennet sisters to trip out of in an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. It was set back from the road; there were high laurel hedges, and the drive swept around an immaculate oval lawn. Karen pulled her little Matchbox car over and we got out and picked our way up to the door, the two of us huddled under my umbrella, Karen clutching a bottle of wine. I p
ressed the doorbell; I could hear it ringing inside. Dogs started to bark.
I’d had no idea Nicholas came from this kind of background. That he had money. But now the idea of it began to grow and sprout and bloom. Maybe I had been narrow-minded, thinking that European exile was the only way to live as a writer. This way of living—the steady, deep-rooted growth that came with old houses, lawns and gravel drives—could be creative too. There’s something inherently authentic about belonging, isn’t there?
“I didn’t know,” I said, “that it would be like this.”
“Like what?”
“Like, uh, well, all BBC.”
“You didn’t know that Nicholas was posh?”
“No.”
“Posh is written all through him, honey; like Blackpool in a stick of rock.”
The Englishness of England still had the capacity to charm even after all these months of rain. I rang the bell again. I was shivering in that dumb dress. Karen insisted that we shouldn’t wait any longer, and so we made our way along the side of the house. Climbing plants were twisted veins up the side wall; gravel crunched underfoot. We came through a side gate into a big paved yard, and the dogs, wherever they were, barked even louder. I couldn’t imagine that all of this went unheard. We knocked at the back door, but still no one answered.
“Do you really think we’re in the right place?” I asked.
“Yes, hon.”
“Then why isn’t anyone answering?”
“It’s a big house; could be they’ve got music on.”
“But he’s expecting us.”
“Maybe we’re not his top priority.”
I could have said something sharp at this, but I’m glad I didn’t. She tried the door and it opened.
“Here we go.”
British manners are sometimes baffling—at times excessively ornate, at others careless to the point of rudeness. I followed Karen into a huge kitchen, with a big blue stove and dark wooden fittings and a fizzing fluorescent light. The sound of voices and music took us through to a large living room. Chairs and sofas clustered by a fireplace. Nicholas was lounging with a tumbler full of ice and whiskey in his hand. He was wearing his blue sweater; it was my favorite; it brought out the color in his eyes. Tim was asking him about the Wi-Fi password, he had a specially made party playlist on his phone, wanted to get it synched up with the Sonos; but Nicholas ignored him. He’d seen me, and raised his glass and smiled, and that thrilled me. Then she leaned out from a winged armchair, and I faltered: Who invites their professor to a student party? I guess the short answer to that is Nicholas.
She said, “Hey there, Meryl; hi, Karen.”
She got up to greet us. She was wearing a shortish skirt and thick black tights, and for once was wearing makeup—I particularly remember her dark red lipstick. She seemed unlike herself. Her work uniform of buttoned-up shirt and pants was kind of asexual, I suppose. But to tell the truth I hadn’t really thought about her appearance until it changed. Until then it hadn’t seemed relevant.
There was a fire burning, but the room was chilly. There were drinks and cigarettes and cans and ashtrays and smoke in the air and loud talk and music and I could still hear those poor dogs barking out there. It felt chaotic, dismal; there was no sense that someone was in charge, was hosting. I felt so far away from home.
I looked to Nicholas, but he’d gotten Tim occupied with the tech, and then after that he wrapped himself up in conversation with her; they had their heads together like they were plotting something; he was clinking that ice around in his whiskey glass like he was paid to advertise the stuff.
Karen said, “Hey, posh boy?”
He glanced around him as if to say Whoever can you mean?
She raised the bottle of wine that she’d brought. “Corkscrew?”
“You bought wine with a cork?”
“I did, yeah. Special occasion, innit.”
He pushed himself up to his feet, and went off to the kitchen. Karen followed him. I heard her talking with him, teasingly, and his jokey replies. I wished I’d had her nerve; I would never have dared tease him; it all mattered far too much for that. Tim went after them, puppy-dogging for attention, still brandishing his iPhone.
Which left me alone with her. I perched on the arm of Nicholas’s now empty chair. She lifted her wine glass in salutation. I didn’t have a glass so I just smiled and nodded.
“Did Steven and Richard come?” I asked, for the sake of something to say.
“They’re out back. There’s a pool. I think they’re seriously considering a swim.” She widened her eyes. “Can you believe this place? Oh, but maybe everyone has a pool where you come from?”
“Not really, no. It gets kinda cold.”
She nodded exaggeratedly, “Of course, of course. Mustn’t generalize.”
“How is your son?” I tried. “Does he mind being left?”
“Oh, he’s fine; he was quite excited actually. The babysitter seems uber-competent. Teenage girls are just brilliant, aren’t they? We should let them run the country. They’d soon have it all sorted out.”
If I can’t give myself to something one hundred percent, then I don’t see the point of doing it at all. That’s why I don’t plan to have children; it wouldn’t be fair. I figure, if you have a career, a social life and a child, one of them is bound to suffer. If not all.
When Nicholas and Karen returned, he handed me a glass of wine that I hadn’t asked for. Richard and Steven came in from the back of the house clutching beer cans, and seemed positively jolly: alcohol’s not always so good at smoothing over differences; sometimes it emphasizes them. I took a sip of wine to be polite. It made me wince. I tried again. I was really trying. I was trying to fit in. Trying to belong. I looked to Nicholas, wanting his attention. In the end I had to put my hand on his arm.
“Are your folks not home?”
“Not tonight.”
“Where they at?”
“Just. Away.”
“You been by yourself awhile out here?”
“I suppose.”
“It’s just, I could have joined you.”
“I’ve been writing. Working flat out. So.”
“Of course, me too. Yeah.”
He shifted and my hand fell off his arm, and he lifted the wine bottle and refreshed people’s glasses, and returned to his conversation with our professor.
I guess this is a digression, but I wanted to show that I expected—and was due—something different from him. I didn’t ask for much. I didn’t want his heart and soul and hand in marriage; I only wanted a grain of kindness. But that night, he just kept shutting me down.
I wasn’t used to English drinking. I’m still surprised by it sometimes. The determined pouring of alcohol into the body, the deliberate achievement of drunkenness: I couldn’t see the appeal of it at all. That’s one thing I am not greedy for, maybe because it’s so limiting. Alcohol parks you in the constant present, makes you unsubtle, makes you repeat yourself. At least Karen was taking it easy. She sipped at one glass of white wine, rather than chugging it down like the others. She was driving, so I could rely on her.
I took myself out to the kitchen and helped myself to a soda from the refrigerator. It was a kind of Italian lemonade, and it turned out to be really sour. I stood at the kitchen island and heard the voices and the music from the living room, and the dogs barking outside, and I sipped the lemonade and choked on disappointment. Was just a little sweetness too much to ask of something that was, after all, supposed to be sweet?
I shook myself, then went back through. Karen spotted the soda can.
“Ooh, are you not drinking, hon?”
“I don’t really, no.”
“That lets me off the hook then,” she said, and rifled in her bag. She handed me he
r keys, a big jingling bundle, with a furry pompom and a Smurf dangling off them. “You don’t mind, do you?”
“Driving? Oh-kaaay,” I said, and weighed the keys in my hand. Those narrow winding roads, and everything on the wrong side. And that persnickety stick shift. Karen slugged her wine back, and refilled her glass eagerly.
Soon it was like everyone else was in on a joke that I didn’t get and they weren’t going to explain. Someone would say something and they would all just find it crazy funny, and I’d look from one reddened laughing face to another, and wonder what the big deal was. And then I remembered that they were drunk, and I was sober, and that was it. I wanted to go back to my dorm room. I wanted to actually be alone, rather than just feel it, because that would be less lonely. I elbowed Karen but she just gave me a sloppy grin and got right back into whatever earnest conversation she was having with Richard.
“We should play a game,” I suggested.
“What game?”
“Scrabble? That’s literary.”
“We don’t have a Scrabble set.”
“That’s disgraceful. How can you call yourself a civilized human being and not have a Scrabble set?” This was her, recrossing her legs.
“Who said I called myself a civilized human being?” Nicholas countered. Tim guffawed. I didn’t like the way Nicholas was looking at her. But she didn’t seem to mind. She smiled.
She said, “Good point.”
She seemed at once blurred and emphatic. Drunk as any of the rest of them. Drunker, even. It was disappointing, to be frank.
“Sardines,” Karen suggested.
“Too energetic.”
“Spin the Bottle?” Steven offered.
“Are you kidding me?”
“There’s a snooker table out back,” Tim said. “Anyone fancy a game?”
“Oh, I’ve never played,” I said, lighting on this. Tim nodded to me, insecure and grateful. I really felt for him. But I felt for me more.
“Billiards,” Nicholas said, just enjoying the word.
