The Last Enchantments

by Finch, Charles

  That’s the guy we were trying to get on the phone. He always published the morning of the caucuses, and before he filed we wanted to get a last word in—he loved Alison, liked me—or even, if he wanted, get him on the phone with Kerry one last time.

  For hours now he hadn’t picked up his phone.

  “He’s going with Dean,” said Alison.

  “It can’t be Edwards, right?”

  She snorted. “Come on.”

  We were in a closet with two phones and a desk, which because of the scarcity of space in any campaign headquarters was a grand fiefdom. Some junior organizer peeked around the door. “The Davenport turf is—”

  “Get the fuck out of here and bother someone else,” I said, in a tone that I can’t imagine I ever used at Oxford but was second nature to me during the campaign.

  The organizer apologized and left. Alison sighed and tore a chunk of crust off of a piece of cooling pizza. “What the hell are we going to do?”

  Just then someone altogether more respectable, Rix, came in. He was the candidate’s point person in Iowa, erratic but politically a savant. “Polsky?” he asked.

  “Nothing yet.”

  “Jesus Christ, get your thumbs out of your pussies.”

  “We’re on it,” said Alison.

  When Rix was gone, I said, “We’re on it,” in an eager voice.

  She laughed and threw the crust at me. “What are we going to do?”

  Around the campaign office we were a kind of golden couple. The candidate himself knew us by name and joked with us about our relationship. We were certain our first kid’s godfather would be a president. Embarrassing to admit it.

  “Maybe we should just go find him. We know he’s not at the Star-Herald offices, right? I’ve bugged Myers about it like six times, Jennifer Fabianski, too. Neither of them has seen him over there.”

  Those were Polsky’s bosses. “So he’s at home. We can’t go see him at home.”

  I smiled. “Why not? That’s what Carville and Stephenopolus would have done.” The War Room was our favorite movie. “Those guys didn’t wait for things to come to them.”

  She sighed. “But if we rub him the wrong way—”

  “Do you honestly think he’ll endorse John fucking Edwards because two Kerry staffers bothered him at home?”

  “I think that’s exactly the kind of thing he would do, yeah.”

  I grabbed her hand. “Come on, Al. Let’s do it.”

  So we walked out through the bullpen, where droves of volunteers were making calls, and through the staffroom, where Rix was screaming on the phone, and got in our rental car to drive out to the Des Moines suburbs.

  It was, and had been, about five degrees outside. With the wind chill, five below. Even within the heat of the car nobody ever felt quite warm.

  When we got to Polsky’s house the lights were off. “Shit,” said Alison.

  “Polsky, you asshole, where are you?” I said.

  Suddenly Alison gasped. “Jesus, is that him?”

  I followed her eyes and saw a brown lump in the snow on his lawn. “No way.”

  We both got out of the car and into the freezing air—it was so cold that after thirty seconds you couldn’t feel your face, the kind of cold that doesn’t feel cold as much as painful, like an Indian burn—and ran to the brown lump.

  “Polsky?” she said.

  The lump groaned.

  “Mr. Polsky?” I said.

  “Help me, for fuck’s sake,” he said. His voice was sluggish.

  We lifted him onto our shoulders. “What happened?”

  He didn’t answer. His knee was at a weird angle to the rest of his body, and I think he had been passed out. “We’ve got to get you to the hospital,” I said, which is a sentence that sounds like a hospital-TV-show joke until you have to say it.

  That roused him. “Gotta file.”

  “It can wait,” said Alison.

  We wedged him into the car and took him to the hospital. Once we got him there the nurses put him on a stretcher, and he disappeared for two hours, while we sat and waited.

  “We should stay here, right?” I asked.

  “Obviously.”

  “Rix has called me twice.”

  “Ignore it. Or text him.”

  Finally the nurse came out to find us. “You can see your friend.”

  “C’mon,” I said.

  “No, wait,” said Alison, “let’s get him something hot.”

  The soup we got him, honestly, I think, won John Kerry the caucuses in Iowa. Actually that’s absurd—he likely would have won anyhow—but it seems to me now there’s at least a chance that the last few thousand votes we needed to get to a plurality came out of that odd and fortuitous night.

  Polsky was in a hospital bed in a curtained-off area, his face crimson red. As we knew him he was so solid, unusually midwestern, but he now looked different, ebbed down into nothing. “Frostbite,” he said, “and a fucking broken leg. It just gave way right underneath me. I passed out.”

  “Here you go,” said Alison and gave him the soup and a cup of hot tea we had bought him, too.

  To our surprise, he started to cry. “You have no idea,” he said.

  “No idea about what?”

  “You have no idea” was all he would say. I wondered if he had a wife.

  “Is there anything else we can do?”

  “Anything else?” he asked. “Besides saving my life?”

  “Someone would have found you,” I said.

  “Maybe not,” Alison said. She was more ruthless than I was. “Anyway, it was lucky.”

  Polsky shook his head. “Lucky. I was going home to file, I was gonna go play the big guy at O’Leary’s, tease people about the pick, have everyone buy me drinks, not tell shit to anyone.” O’Leary’s was the bar where the staffers and the press met up every night and drank, a clearinghouse of sorts. He started to cry again. “I mean, Christ in a fucking Chevy, right?”

  “Who’d you pick?”

  He looked at us. “I hadn’t decided. Kerry or Dean, one of ’em. I was still up in the air. Probably Dean.”

  “Well, shit,” I said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Alison. “As long as you’re safe, obviously.”

  “Do you think Dean can beat Bush?” he asked.

  “No,” we said simultaneously.

  “Do you have a laptop?” he asked. “I can get my Kerry piece off my e-mail. I write up all the endorsements, see how they feel.”

  “You don’t have to change—”

  “I’m endorsing John Kerry,” he said, shortly.

  I texted Rix. Al and I got him. Long story. Back late.

  Nobody at the headquarters slept that night, we were so elated. A bunch of us, the senior staff, sat around on the couches, talking about the campaign, about who would get what job in the White House when we won. We played Scrabble and got through huge urns of coffee and refreshed the news Web sites to see what was getting play.

  Polsky’s endorsement loaded onto the Star-Herald’s Web site at seven in the morning, and twelve hours after that we won.

  The ecstasy of it was overpowering. Everyone thought we’d come in third, maybe second. It was certainly the end of Dean, and effectively the end of Edwards.

  It also marked a turn in my relationship with Alison. Throughout the party that night we kept grinning at each other, and right after Kerry spoke—stopping on his way to the podium to say, “Nice work on Polsky, lovebirds”—we went to an empty conference room and fucked. When O’Leary’s closed at four in the morning we picked up burgers at the all-night diner, in a group of ten or so, all of us full of the future, since when you win it seems impossible that you’ll ever lose, and then she and I went back to our little studio apartment, the one the campaign rented for us.

  Before that night our relationship had been loving, but we had never promised each other too much, in all those years. Now it was something else. “I hope we’re always together,” she said as we fel
l asleep.

  “We will be,” I told her. “This is just the beginning.”

  Of all the hours I’ve spent on earth, rising and falling away like waves, I think that I was happiest during that one.

  I thought of that night when Sophie kissed me, nearly eighteen months after Iowa; I thought about Alison and realized where we had come from that night, realized that I was in trouble. It was too much of a change, too fast. Jess I could ascribe to madness or unsettledness, but now twice in two weeks I had kissed other people—and Sophie was a different kind of trespass. Or maybe I was just spiraling, or at rock bottom, whatever language of crisis people use—and I understood then why that language exists, it’s a comfort to have it there, as if elsewhere, in other places, it’s happening to them, too, so often that they need phrases to describe it, it’s not just you.

  “Do it one more time,” I said to Sophie.

  She laughed and turned away, and I thought she was going to leave, but she only flicked her cigarette onto the wet cobblestones, then came back to me and put her mouth against mine, cool and soft—tasting faintly of cigarettes and red wine—tasting of silence.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I don’t know what I thought would happen the day after that. Certainly something dramatic. I woke up—the guilt fainter, perhaps because I was growing accustomed to a sense of such terrible transgression—and half-expected Alison and Sophie to walk through the door together. It shows, the world is always less about you than you think it is.

  In fact, it played out differently. When the group went to hear the bell ringers, Sophie had slipped away, and when I saw her two days later she was merely friendly, not unlike Anneliese or Tom. I wondered if she had chalked it up in her mind to free wine and start-of-the-year mischief, or to the end of her relationship, or perhaps even forgotten it.

  So it went for that whole first month at Fleet, seeing each other here and there, friendly, unromantic. In those weeks I began to talk to Alison as often as I could, and at the same time I thought about Sophie obsessively. Whenever I went to Hall for a meal I scanned the room for her, and when I passed the laundry room I would hope to see her big blue bag lying on the dryer, because if it was there it meant she would be killing time in the MCR, watching TV or reading. Coming home from class I always looked to see if her white Vauxhall was on the street—she called it “Little Car,” and loved it—because twice I had been in the right spot and she had picked me up to drive around on errands, killing the afternoon together. For the first time since high school I experienced that thrilling boredom beneath an unspoken crush, which makes going to McDonald’s for fries a stomach-fluttering experience. I remembered for days afterward every accidental physical touch between us, some of them sneaky—letting my leg fall in next to hers as we slouched down on the couch, collapsing into her with laughter when Anil freestyled for us in the MCR one day. Of course, that was all inside of me and nowhere else.

  Besides, there was a whole new life to get used to. The first days passed gradually away, and before I realized it I had already been in Oxford for five weeks. The city’s wide, intimidating thoroughfares became intimate to us, as we moved outward from Fleet to the bars and the bookshops. During the week after the first Hall, we started our studies in earnest—or rather, with varying degrees of earnestness. Tom did next to nothing, for example, while on the other hand Anneliese began to work long shifts in the history library on Holywell Street.

  I have always had the habit of solitude, and I spent a great deal of time on my own, at lunch counters each afternoon, and two or three times a week at the Ashmolean, where I liked to sit by the Night Hunt and read. I used to escape at Andover the same way, a respite from the fetor and dirty imaginations and long-running jokes of the dorm, which we loved and loathed at once. It had probably been then that I last spent so many aimless hours with new friends.

  These weeks were happy and full, passing in soundless avalanches of contentment. My classes I found deeply absorbing. I had friends—Tom and Anneliese especially—and seeing Sophie gave life a gloss of excitement, without, in the end, changing anything. By the Thursday of Fourth Week, in fact, when Alison came to visit for three nights, I was myself again, removed from the recklessness of those first days. I had only needed time to settle.

  Her visit was unremarkable, which was the best thing I could have wished for. Tom and Anil both happened to be out of town that weekend, and so she didn’t meet any of my Oxford friends, which seemed strange but apposite. We spent a lot of time in my room, did a little bit of sightseeing. There was a twinge of unreality about having her there. When I dropped her at Heathrow she shed a few quiet tears and walked her solitary way, looking back once or twice, past security, but there was nothing histrionic in it. We had developed a routine by now—a quick call when she woke up at six o’clock, eleven in the morning for me, a longer one when I was done for the day and she was in the doldrums of the afternoon, eight o’clock in England, three at home, cards and letters when we thought of it, and e-mails buzzing back and forth between us all the time—and I knew that would be enough to see us through to the safe harbor of Christmas vacation.

  * * *

  The longer I stayed in Oxford the more confounding the university came to seem. It was very beautiful, home to first-rate researchers and teachers; it was also a scam.

  One day I walked into the Fleet MCR and found a group of nine Chinese students, arguing furiously. I knew one of them, Fu-Han, and when he came to the kitchen for a glass of water—I was making coffee—I asked him what it was about.

  He waved a frustrated hand at me. “Google.”

  “What?”

  “Our government, it doesn’t want us to use this Web site, Google,” he said.

  I told him I’d heard of it. Fu-Han was a statistician, but he was also more distinctive than the other Chinese students, who tended to be well dressed, polite, and superficially unexceptional. He wore a silver necklace, for example, and he played guitar (appallingly). He sighed and said in rudimentary English—all he spoke—“Most of us, first day we get here, we look up, right, on Internet, Tiananmen Square, Mao Zedong, Hundred Flowers Movement. Like, we can read the truth? But still some of us don’t want to know, good behavior, yeah?”

  “What is the Hundred Flowers Movement?”

  He couldn’t be bothered to explain. “Communist event, yeah? So, but now, our government doesn’t want us to use it, Google. But we need it, right, for work! For translation! And some of us want to but some of us want to do greater obedience?”

  “Okay.”

  “So, we argue.” He shrugged. “Stupid.”

  “What did you think of Mao, on Google?”

  “Ha. Real asshole.”

  I laughed.

  These Chinese students were emblematic of Oxford’s flaws. Compared to the great American universities, Oxford is poor, and these students were admitted for financial reasons, nothing else. I liked them, and to make it to Oxford from China meant they were very likely enterprising or brilliant or both—but of the group, six or seven spoke no English whatsoever when they arrived in England. Every college had a similar-sized contingent. They stuck together, working at one table in the library, sitting in the same corner of Hall. To pass their courses they would translate all of their work through Google into Chinese, then translate it back through Google into English. They would pass, just barely, through hard work, and primarily because they studied math or statistics, subjects that didn’t demand language skills.

  It affected the university. At its core it was still ridden with luxury—each college had a wine cellar worth millions of pounds—but on the peripheries it was a miserly and mean-spirited little place. Nobody remembered you; in the lesser departments files were lost, the copiers were from the 1980s, the public computers were laughable—like the KGB after the money ran out. Everything was badly run, especially in comparison to Yale, which seemed to me, in retrospect, like one of those exquisitely managed golden-age ocean liners.

&nb
sp; Still, I never really think about all that now.

  George Orwell once wrote, “There is a widespread idea that nostalgic feelings about the past are inherently vicious. One ought, apparently, to live in a continuous present, a minute-to-minute cancellation of memory.” When I think of that fall, and settling in at Oxford, I feel stirred somewhere within to remember how happy I was. Is that the same as sentimentality? If so, is it vicious? I don’t know. I’m in the unhappy position of thinking sentimentality is insidious, but of feeling it at the same time so strongly, so deeply. I don’t think I idealize Oxford. That’s where memory can go wrong, it’s true, when you use it as a weapon against the future, or when you bind it up too tightly with regret. I don’t regret that I’m not at Oxford. I did love it there, though.

  For me remembrance is mostly taken up with acknowledgment of death. When my life fulfills its only precondition—its own ending—my memory will vanish. Nothing is being recorded, nobody is keeping score. Your childhood bedroom, your first kiss. They go with you. Better to think of memory as like food, or sex, or books: a reason to believe in the perishable days. A way to manage being alive.

  * * *

  In the fourth week of term Tom’s sister, Katie, came up from London to take us to lunch. She was back from the Middle East for ten days on vacation.

  I heard her before I saw her. As I was bouncing up the stairs of our house after a morning at the Bodleian, I could hear a woman’s voice singing “On the Street Where You Live” on our floor. I reached the top step and saw Katie, standing in our bathroom with the door open, putting makeup on. She had a quiet, pretty, unstrained voice.

  It was surprising after hearing her voice to see that she was ugly, with horsey teeth and intelligent green eyes couched in big, red, laughing cheeks, no makeup. A silver cross on a necklace was the only flair she had of individual style. She looked sunburned a dozen times over.