“Oh, well,” she said, her breasts softening into my ribs. “This is nice, at least.” Soon, though, there were voices in the hall, her roommates returning, and she gave me a last kiss and pushed me out through a side door, saying good-bye.
So I left. I hadn’t noticed it as we came in, but in the courtyard of her building there had been a party. Half-deflated balloons had blown into piles; there were overflowing garbage cans. There were also six or seven abandoned beers, standing on a ledge, chilled by the night air. I took two. I put one in my pocket and opened the other. I held on to the last moments that I could ignore what I had done.
Out on the street it felt suddenly not cool but cold, and the first violet paleness of dawn was emerging imperceptibly from the black of the middle night. It must have been four.
Suddenly, after just a few steps, I had a terrible sense of what I would find at home—that there would be e-mails from Alison, apologizing that she hadn’t been able to write back sooner, she had been away from her computer, the congressman had been in Staten Island all day and she had been with him, she was sorry, too, the fight was stupid and ridiculous, we were fine, it was only one year. What had I done? Two days away from America, and this had happened. It seemed so shamefully short a time. It told its own story. I thought of Motherwell, when asked how long it took him to paint one of the Elegies, saying, “Thirty seconds and a lifetime.”
As I walked down Jess’s street I saw a pretty blue mailbox that said MARK AND JUNE LENOX on it, the names curlicued with small white painted lilies, faded now, a woman’s touch, ten years old, from when they had moved in, and I felt a foreshadowing of the violent regret I knew was coming. I felt triumph, too, and physical pleasure, and horror with myself. It was a muddle. It’s rare to surprise yourself. The dim streetlamps still shone at intervals before me, and by their light I could see the austere and enduring spires of Oxford, rising in the middle distance, untroubled by human grief.
When I came to the end of the street I knew roughly where I was in relation to Fleet and started back toward home. As I went I pulled on the T-shirt I was carrying and realized that it was the wrong one. I turned it inside out and saw that it was pink and bore an inscription, in Union Jack–colored glitter: BRITISH GIRL.
I laughed. Then I took a sip of the beer and within a few seconds of swallowing it I lurched toward a potted plant beside another blue mailbox and threw up into it. When I was finished I wiped my mouth, swished it out with beer, then stood, looking up at Oxford, feeling that I was finally there, and drank the rest of it.
I had only just started walking again when the peal of the different colleges’ bells startled me out of my still reverie, each with its own melody, all out of kilter with one another. So it was five in the morning. The walk was another fifteen minutes, and as I drew closer to the Cottages and Fleet I kept thinking to myself, Shit, shit, but also, somewhere else, early days, early days.
CHAPTER TWO
I come from that vague northeastern gentry inside which families dip and rise, but from which perhaps they never depart entirely. My first paternal ancestor in America was a man named Abraham Backer—described as “surly and ill-tempered” by John Winthrop, who was so surly and ill-tempered himself that the description has an inflection of admiration in my reading of it. Abraham’s great claim to glory in life, other than venturing across the ocean to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1623, was the inadvertent submission of his family to wholesale slaughter by a group of Pequot Indians, who, again in the words of Winthrop, “burned them in their wigwams.” Great.
All families are equally old, whether or not there are records of their age, but Abraham is mine, and I feel a half-serious pride in him. Nobody in history is more real to me. He left seven books to his son William—who survived the Pequots—in a time of almost unexceptioned illiteracy. Before his death he was a magistrate in the colony. These cinders from the fire of life, those seven books: I feel his human presence down the years. I can imagine that he breathed as I do, stretched his stomach too full with food, loved his dog, annoyed his wife.
My mother’s family has its own tales of Mayflower glory, and on both sides there are the leavings of long centuries, the painted sea chest that traveled from Boston Harbor to China aboard my great-great-great-grandfather’s clipper ship, the set of silver hairbrushes descended from Age of Innocence New York. There is the large, privately printed, grammatically dubious family genealogy, assembled in the fifties and annotated in its margins with ferocious corrective irritation by my grandfather. There’s the Social Register, the anecdote of Colonel Simon Baker and George Washington sharing a carriage from Boston to Virginia. The Cherry Orchard tales of lost houses and subdivided lands that could have been ours, ought to have been ours. I went to the same boarding school that my father and his father and his father did. The same college, too.
Then there were the manners. To say “beverage,” or “pardon,” or “patio,” or any of a few dozen other words was within my family to commit a grave solecism. Cheerfulness in social situations was considered perhaps the greatest virtue a human being could possess, and its cousin, stoicism during adversity, was second. To have a complete matching set of silver flatware—no, hopeless, your silver had to have gotten mixed up over the generations.
Indeed, anything that matched at all was considered to be in poor taste. “They have matching sofas and chairs,” my mother reported to her sister when we visited Alison’s parents for lunch in the city once, not thinking that I could overhear her from the next room. Years before that she had told the same sister that a friend from college had left his knife and fork akimbo on his plate, and that another had seemed to brag (imagine!) about going to Southampton.
In this way I grew up conflating stylistic and moral choices. Drapes, home, gift. Purchase. Anything that savored of upsell. The code was self-effacement—my people were Yankees, and when I see the popular representations of WASPs I cringe at the vulgarity, the Greenwich and Nantucket imprint in the public consciousness, lobster reds, sneering ski-slope kids. My male relatives wore unbranded khakis, windbreakers, and digital watches. They carried combs. Their shoes were as cheap as possible and ordered in bulk from catalogs printed in black-and-white; the only articles of clothing upon which it was acceptable to spend a great deal of money were a suit, a shirt, and possibly a hat. My grandparents, all four of them, would rather have walked through Times Square naked than utter the word “summering.” Society has shifted toward money now, and money is what makes you a socialite. There was an older way.
In one way this was a small part of my life, and in another all of it. It had the poverty of imagination that wraps like an involucre around any dead world—meeting on the platform at New Haven, all those Fitzgerald second-order signifiers—but it would have taken a greater strength of character than I had to reject their accretion of meaning as false.
This has something to do with Oxford. Not long before I moved to England I turned twenty-five, and like everyone I slipped into adulthood like a delinquent through the back door, never quite sure I hadn’t been seen. The future was decided: Alison and I were settled together; we would work in politics; we would live in New York.
It was not an unhappy thought to me, but there was a titration of loss in those certainties, and perhaps for that reason, Oxford in those first days seemed to me like the last of something in my life. Once more I could look out upon the coming years, as I had for so long, and see a future full of nothing, full of everything, before all the choices I made started to become irreversible. It was only a year—and I very probably wouldn’t even have taken that year if it hadn’t been for the terrible and disorienting things that happened around the time I put in my application.
I don’t know. I do remember that on the afternoon in my second week at Fleet when Tom and I first went out and visited the lawns, I felt a difference in myself. Space could induce what I had once imagined only time could: forgetting. I thought, Oh, so this is why people leave places. This is what a new start f
eels like.
* * *
As I said before, Fleet’s lawns were considered unusually fine. The college had a lot of land, and from the stone terrace outside of the bar, just behind Third Quad, the long stretch of grass looked almost limitless because you still couldn’t quite see the natural boundary of the river. The lawns were divided in two by a slim stone path, and just at the river there were loose groups of interchangeable teak chairs and tables, one of them usually overturned, none of them very tidily arranged.
Tom and I went out there at the end of the afternoon. He had a rugby ball and tossed it underhand to me. I caught it—“See, you’ll have it in no time”—and we started jogging farther and farther apart, so that we had to give the ball long heaves.
After ten or fifteen minutes an older man with a tennis racket started walking toward us from the courts nearby, waving. “Hello,” he called when he was still twenty feet off, looking at Tom and not me. “I’m Gobbs, statistics. Have you played before?”
We stood up and shook hands. “He hasn’t,” said Tom, and they shared a cutting little laugh. “I played in school. Not at uni. I’m a graduate student. We both are, in fact.”
“I reckoned you might be. Listen, how would you feel about trying out for Fleet? We have a good deal of fun. Last year we came in seventh, which isn’t shabby considering that there are forty teams. If you want we could have a throw now, I could tell you about it.”
Tom nodded, looking curious. “D’you mind?” he asked me.
“No, no. I want to check out the boathouse anyway.”
The two of them started walking away down the lawns, talking and hurling the ball at each other with the teeth-baring aggression that passes for friendliness among upper-class Brits.
The river was glossy, narrow, and quick, a beautiful green color, with the white and maroon striped college punts strung along the near bank. (The punts are riverboats, low flat things you pole along the river in, notionally with champagne and strawberries, in real life more often with beer and crisps.) The sun, westering, heavy, and hazy, was in those great final throes of energy before the sky whitens and clears, and evening comes. I stood and watched it. That immense body, dying trillions of feet away from me, still warming my face with its steady insensate chemistries.
Sometimes we’re available to change. The grass was high by the river, and when I was five or six feet from the water, half-stumbling in it, I saw Sophie for the first time. She was tall and thin, with long auburn hair down her back, wreathed in the gold light of a late summer five o’clock. I thought I had never seen anyone so beautiful in all my life.
* * *
I felt a terrible longing for Alison.
In the ten days since the Turtle, my guilt had become constant. There was no residual joy—or very little—in thinking of Jess, except occasionally when I remembered what her body felt like. Certainly if I could have erased what I had done I would have.
It had also made me clingy, and when Alison and I spoke on the phone I spent the time reassuring myself that she still loved me. Of course, for her nothing had changed, and so I could never elicit quite the tone I wanted.
“I wish I could see you,” I would say as soon as we started talking on the phone.
“You, too!” she would answer, too lightly for my taste. “So much has been going on at work, Martinez, you know, in the fifth—”
Then, feeling actually close to tears, “I would seriously pay a hundred bucks to just lie down with you for ten minutes.” (Oh God, the cringing when I think of this.)
“You’re so sweet.”
“I mean it.”
“And a little bit of a girl.”
“Ha.”
She laughed. “Don’t sound so miserable, I’m only teasing.”
I’m sure it gratified her to know that we had reversed roles—that I was handling the change badly, not her. “I don’t know if I can wait a month to see you. When’s the last time we spent that long apart, the summer after college?”
“I’m doing okay with it, I really am.”
“Thanks.”
“I just meant that I can live with it. It’s only a year.”
“I was wrong, a year is fucking forever.”
“Oh, shit. That’s my dad on the other line. He might have some good news about the governor’s bullshit seaport thing for me. I’ll call you back in like four minutes.”
“I’m supposed to go to the pub, but I can wait if—”
“No, go, make friends, we’ll talk tomorrow—I love you—bye—shit, there it is again—bye—”
I would picture her familiar face, her slender hands, and feel a wave of anguish. What was I doing here? That was my frame of mind in Oxford, that afternoon.
I was walking along when I saw Sophie, but I had accidentally come too close not to say hello. “Hey,” I called out.
She turned with her arms still crossed. “Oh, hi,” she said. She had been looking down the river and turned back to it, leaning over the water and staring. “You can’t see a scull coming up toward us, can you? You’re taller than I am.”
I looked. “No, nothing. Are you waiting for someone?”
She turned back to me. My first impression of her was that she was distracted and faintly bad-tempered, as pretty girls can be if they are not emptily sweet, but then I realized something else was going on. There were tears in her eyes. “Yeah.”
I had been walking toward her but stopped now, leaving a tithe of space between us. “Is everything okay?”
“Oh, I’m fine,” she said, tucking a dejected strand of hair behind her ear. Almost immediately she was crying. She wiped her tears away more quickly than they came with the heel of her hand.
“Is there anything I can do?”
“I’m sorry, I’m not ever like this—”
“No, don’t apologize. Do you want to sit?”
She sniffled. “Why not.”
When we were on the chairs I was silent for a minute or two. She had been throwing bread to a family of black birds with red bills, and she started again, smiling weakly when they took it. Finally I asked, “So are you in Fleet? Are you in the Cottages?”
“Yeah, I just got here. Number five. What about you?”
She had a lovely, lilting accent, posh but with sweetness at its edges and a faint heaviness in its vowels that I learned later was from Yorkshire. Even in her vulnerable state there was something imperious to her.
“I’m in three.”
“You must think I’m nuts.”
“No. Everyone gets this way sometimes.”
“But not me.” She studied me for a second. “I’m breaking up with my boyfriend today.”
I smiled and said, mildly, “On a boat?”
“He was supposed to pick me up.” She sighed with her whole body. “But he’s always fucking late, or he ditches me, even for things like this. God, I hate him.”
“Then congratulations. Right?”
“Listen to me.” She gave her head a quick, sharp shake, took a deep breath, and smiled a smile set with the determination not to be foolish. “So what do you study? What’s your name? I’m Sophie.”
We shook hands. “I’m Will. I do English. What about you?”
“French.”
“A master’s, too?”
She shook her head ruefully. “Probably for the long haul, actually, the DPhil. Are you American?”
“Yeah, I’m from New York.”
Unlike most people, she didn’t rush to prove that she knew the city. “Oh, lovely,” she said and looked down the river again.
“Have you met anyone yet?”
She looked back at me. “Not a soul. I only just got here on Tuesday.”
“I think a bunch of fun people are going out tonight, if you want to drown your sorrows.” I was referring to myself, Tom, and Anil, so “a bunch of fun people” might have been misleading, but who cared. “To the Royal Oak.”
“I wish I could, but my department has these introductory seminars
every evening this week. Refreshers, they’re supposed to be, vousvoyering. It’s an insult, but they’re mandatory.”
“What about next week? There’s the opening Formal Hall in First Week.” There were three terms at Oxford, Michaelmas, Hilary, and Trinity, each with nine numbered weeks. Just then we were in Noughth Week, as it was called, when the students arrived and settled in. First Week would be the formal commencement of the fall term, Michaelmas.
“Oh, I’d love to go to that,” she said and looked genuinely pleased.
In a formal tone, I said, “If you come you may tutoyer me.”
She laughed. “Seems hasty.”
“I feel as if I’d known you for decades. I’ve known you in a relationship and single, and I have to say I prefer—”
She laughed and was about to speak when from not far off a voice barked out her name. “Soph.”
It was her boyfriend, I guessed; he was sitting in the stern of a scull for two, handsome and very tan, shaggy-haired, an instinctive smirk in his expression. After he had called for her he set about the work of turning the boat, so we had a moment before she went to him.
She stuck out her hand again. “It was nice to meet you,” she said. Then, in a lower voice, she added, “Wish me luck.”
“Good luck.”
She went. “Who was that?” I heard her boyfriend ask her.
I didn’t watch them go, turning back toward Fleet and finding Tom after a short while. He said good-bye to Gobbs and apologized for running off, and we started to walk back to the college, again tossing the ball back and forth. It was an hour full of meetings; I told him about Sophie, and on the way back to the bar we met a girl who would be one of our closest friends at Fleet, Anneliese.
* * *
Then again, in those young hours of the school year there were always chances to meet new people. There were movie nights, cocktails with the Master on the lawns, unskilled games of croquet that devolved into a kind of loose, horseless polo. All of these activities originated with the MCR, or Middle Common Room, which was the graduate students’ chief social center. It was located in three rooms on the ground floor of First Quad, with a view of the gates and porters’ lodge, and had couches, a kitchen, and a television. At a cheese-tasting there in Noughth Week Anil became friends with Tim, or Timmo, as we all eventually called him, a short, silent, very strong personage—not overburdened with charisma—who Anil assured us belonged to the very elites of Liverpool.
The Last Enchantments Page 4