“Five years of French, though,” I said.
“I like French.”
“Have you heard of the Swift?” I asked.
She laughed. “Of course. Who would I have to sleep with?”
“Maybe you should apply.”
“I wouldn’t get it. French isn’t very academic, unless you do theory or literature. I’d like to be a historian somewhere pretty, who gets to visit Paris twice a year.”
This, too, was odd about her: Her friends from Cheltenham and Durham were in the usual garrulous professions, marketing, fashion, the BBC. Another sign of interiority, perhaps. Or ascesis. Or liability even.
Soon we reached the pub. It was the usual docking station, but we didn’t have time to go in because the punts were due back an hour later. Tom said he would run inside to get us beers for the trip back downriver.
The wind gusted up after he left, loud and blustery. Each of us looked away. Ammons said it—how strange we humans are here, raw, new, how ephemeral our lives and cultures, how unrelated to the honing out of caves and canyons. We looked up at the trees and down at the river, the difficult majesty of the world. We were silent.
Her hand found mine then and took it, until our fingers were twined like those high branches over the river. She had been looking over her shoulder at the fields across from the pub, scattered with cows and hedges, incidents of life, but she turned back to me and in her gaze acknowledged for the first time in five weeks, since that first Hall, that there was more than friendship between us. I felt my heart quicken.
“You know I like you,” she said quietly.
“What do you mean?”
She sat up and crossed her legs Indian-style, so that our faces were close together. “What do you think?”
“Like that?”
“Like that. But you have a girlfriend.”
We were still for a moment, staring into each other’s eyes. Then I kissed her. It was only a touch of lips, but I felt dizzy with happiness; I could smell her hair, feel the cold of her cheeks, I could feel her body moving closer into mine; it seemed all imminence, all future. Our hands were still together.
“Mm,” she said, eyes closed, a sound of satisfaction, the sound she made sometimes when she smiled.
I saw Tom opening the door with an armful of beers. “He’s coming,” I told her.
“Don’t say anything.”
“No, of course not.”
* * *
I don’t remember punting home. When I got back to my room I was hollow with nerves. I called Alison.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey. What’s up?”
“I was asleep.” I heard her moan, shifting under the covers. “Shit, it’s late. I went out last night with Christian and Margaret, down to a new place on Jane Street. I can’t remember what it was called, but there were tons of people you know there, for one that asshole Patrick—”
“Alison, I have to say something.”
Her guard went up right away. “What is it?”
Are there are any words you can say, during a conversation like that, that don’t sound as if they came from television? In a way, as well, she was the one person I most wanted to tell about Sophie, the person who knew me best, who could have comforted me. She would have understood the faint anguish of wondering for every minute of the last six weeks what Sophie was doing. There was nobody who understood more than Alison, and as I considered this I loved her especially.
“I can’t believe I’m doing this on the phone, but I think we need to take a break.”
There was a long silence. “You’re joking, right?”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Oh my God, Will. Oh my God, don’t say that, you can’t—”
You know what she said, all of the usual things, specific to us this time around but part of every conversation two people have who have loved each other and are breaking up. I searched for relief in her voice, or anything that would pardon me, registration, even ambivalence. None of it was there. Only disbelief and anger.
After we had been speaking for more than an hour, she asked, sniffling, “Do you love me?”
“I love you as much as anything.”
“Then what the fuck, Will.”
“I’m not ready. It could be that in a couple of years I’ll be ready.”
“I wish you knew how shitty that sounded.”
“I do.”
She laughed somberly. “No, you don’t. What’s funny is that I knew the second you applied that this shit was going to happen. Do you remember me telling you that? On the stoop that day? You’re so fucking restless all the time. Listen to me: You’re going to hate this. You’re going to be so unhappy. Because now I’ll be what you don’t have.”
“I know it’s true.”
“But still?” When I didn’t say anything she started to cry again. “Oh my God, you asshole.”
I was hurting someone I loved, and as the words came out of me I think I almost would have taken them back. Her voice made me want to cry, too. She had experienced none of the emotions I had since I had come to Oxford, neither the sense of alienation nor the subsequent fear of that feeling, the clinging love it induced.
“Is there someone else?” she asked.
“Of course not. I can’t imagine loving someone other than you, or wanting to be with someone more than I want to be with you. And maybe we will end up together! But right now—”
“Just don’t do this till Christmas, Will. Wait until then and we can actually see each other and touch each other and—”
“I’m sorry.”
“What about my dad? What about—”
“What?”
“What about our stocks?”
“What, that Apple stock?” Her father had given this to us once, as an early wedding present, he said—we had laughed that off but had both, I believe, felt bound by it, just as perhaps he had intended. “I don’t know. That’s not a reason … I don’t know.”
“So you just want to split it?”
“I don’t care about it, no, or I mean—listen to me, it’s not that I can’t see us still having a life together, Alison, but right now I feel like I’m twenty-five and I…”
There was another pause. “What? You feel like what?”
“I’m sorry.”
She was silent for a while. “I was just thinking, yesterday, I was thinking about that night senior year? At Miya’s. Your surprise birthday.”
When she said that my eyes started to sting, and a lump came into my throat. “Al.”
“Do you remember how happy we were? I was thinking about it because I saw Patrick, he was there, and I can still picture exactly where everyone was sitting, and how much we all loved each other.”
“Maybe down the road—”
“This is the road, stupid.” She started to cry again.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You’re not, you’re not,” she said helplessly.
“I do love you.”
“Will you call me tomorrow?” she asked. “Just call me, so this isn’t it. This specific conversation can’t be it, this conversation.”
“Of course I’ll call you tomorrow. Tomorrow morning.”
“We had Christmas at your house last year.”
“I know.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“Don’t do anything. Just give it a day.”
She blew her nose. Her crying had subsided. “Okay.”
“Alison, I never want to hurt you.”
“It’s fine, it’s fine,” she said at last, her voice distant now, as if she were calling from a faraway world, where people kept their promises. “I’ll let you go.”
She didn’t, though; we were on the phone another forty minutes, until at last we hung up. I didn’t feel any of the sense of liberation I had expected. I tried to remember Sophie, but it didn’t give me any joy, away from the spell of the trees and the water, not just at that minute, and I went over to my
desk and looked at the picture of Alison and me that I had there, from Halloween, her dressed up as a cowgirl, me as a cowboy, and I was still buzzed but in an unhappy way now, and it all felt like too much, I felt alone, and I wanted to take it all back, I wanted none of it to be true.
* * *
Tom was in town, picking up his costume for the bop, and I couldn’t get Anneliese on the phone, so I called Ella.
“Hey, it’s Will,” I said.
We had hung out nearly every day, meeting up to watch movies or have lunch, in the three weeks since evensong at Merton. “How was punting?”
“Can I come hang out?”
“Your voice sounds funny.”
When she said that I decided not to tell her. I cleared my throat. “Better?”
“Yeah. Come over! I’m getting ready for the bop. Can you bring drinks?”
“I have wine.”
“Perfect. If I’m in the shower, just let yourself in.”
Before I left I put on my costume for the bop—a bunch of us were going as the Rat Pack—and took a shot from a bottle of Patrón that Timmo had left in my room. I fucking hate tequila, and the bile of the taste, my theatrical shuddering, improved my mood.
Ella lived two doors down from us in the Cottages, in the kind of room that anyone who has been to college has seen a hundred times, with a corkboard full of photos of her and her friends, scarves dimming the lamps, a prettily made bed, and a live, unplaceable scent, a girl’s room, candles and laundry, drifting in the air. If you met her you would never have guessed she had that kind of room. Except for the posters. They were all for bands I didn’t know.
She only listened to two kinds of music: punk and (the one that had taken her to Merton that day) classical. Her parents had made her practice the clarinet for hours every afternoon as a child, and instead of making her hate the music it had made her love it. She listened to it constantly, and after she put a CD on she had the vexing habit of asking, “Do you know what this is?” when she knew nobody had any idea.
“What do you think this is, William?” she asked. She had come to the door to hug me, and now she was rifling through her clothes.
It was some symphony. I looked very serious, narrowed my eyes as if I were thinking hard, and said, “This is Cats, right?”
She looked back at me disbelievingly, a blue top in one hand, and said, “No, you idiot, it’s Finlandia.”
“No, no, this is from Cats. I saw it on Broadway with my grandmother.”
“It’s not fucking Cats!” She grinned and shook her head. “I’m getting in the shower.”
I drank more than half of the wine from the bottle I had brought while she was showering, and e-mailed some friends about Alison. I felt shivery, manic. It had been a long time since the future was a secret. I turned off Finlandia and put on loud music.
When she came back she called out over the noise, “Turn it down! Let’s talk!”
She was in a white towel, smooth-skinned, still damp. For half a second I thought about trying to kiss her.
“I have vodka,” she said, walking over to her desk. “Let’s do a shot.”
“To what?” I asked.
“To evensongs. Prost.”
I took a shot glass from her. “To evensong.”
We drank that one, then another. “Can I tell you a secret?” she asked a few minutes later, as she put her makeup on in the mirror.
“What?”
She turned and grinned at me. “I might let Tom kiss me tonight. If he’s lucky.”
“What!”
“I feel frisky. Dressing up. Drinking. You know.”
“You punk rock chicks.”
She laughed. “We love to kiss dudes, it’s true.”
“How about second base?”
She gave her boobs a heft over her towel. “He should be so lucky.”
The drinks hit me all at once, or something else did, and I said. “Let me see.”
She looked at me, in the mirror. There was a soft smile on her face. “My tits?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re drunk.”
“Before you’re Tom’s.”
“Are you crazy?”
“You don’t have to. I was joking.”
She squinted at me in the mirror, smiling but suspicious. Then, after a beat, she turned and let her towel drop, and I felt a huge pulse somewhere down in the root of my body. Her nipples were hard, small, and pink; a strand of wet hair stuck to her left breast.
“Wow.”
She giggled and lifted up her towel. “That’s the only time that will ever happen.”
You would think it might be awkward after that, but it wasn’t; the drinks had done their work. I felt ready to see Sophie; ready to start the whole folly, love and fucking and fighting, over again. I texted Alison something comforting and indeterminate then turned my phone off for the night.
* * *
Jem had been working all day with a committee of five first-year girls to turn the college bar into the Moulin Rouge. The night before he had sent out a Facebook message inviting two dozen people to come early, including Ella, Tom, and me, nightly stalwarts of the bar. We stopped by my house and shouted up the stairs for Tom, but he wasn’t there.
Anil answered instead. “Hey, gangsters!”
“Anil, come down!” Ella said.
“It takes a great deal of time to become the brown Frank Sinatra!” he shouted.
“Well, fucking hurry!”
“I’ll be there in good time, my friends!” he shouted back at us. “Go without me!”
At the bar Jem’s exhausted harem was putting the final touches to the decorations, then staggering upstairs to put on their sluttiest dresses. (The reward for their labor was free drinking till eleven, by which time they wouldn’t need any more.) Jem waved us to the bar, where a line of undergrads stood. He addressed us.
“All right,” he said. “This is a lockdown situation. The bop starts in twenty minutes and before then nobody will get into this room, and I mean not the fucking Master himself. Not the fucking chancellor of Oxford.” Everyone nodded, awed. “Let’s do some shots.”
With some ceremony he depressed a button on the jukebox, and a whoop went up at the opening chords of the college anthem, “Back for Good,” by Take That. When it came on everyone in the bar would wait until the chorus and then sing along: Whatever I did, whatever I said, I didn’t mean it: I just want you back for good.
Jem poured fifteen shots of lime vodka and at the chorus we downed them and then sang in unison as he poured another round. On the second chorus he had two shots ready. Fifteen minutes later we were already drunk. Jem opened the doors.
The first people in were Anil, wearing a fedora and a pinstriped suit, with a cigarette holder between two fingers—I felt a wave of affection for him—and Tom, who, true to his public school breeding, had dressed up as a woman: Shirley MacLaine.
“You look ludicrous,” I said.
“I feel marvelous.”
The bop started at nine o’clock, and by nine fifteen it was a melee. At nine thirty Jem, looking harassed, beckoned me up to the bar and shouted over the dance music, “You wanted a job, right? Come work for forty-five minutes, just while the first rush is on, and it’s yours.”
“I should warn you I’m drunk.”
“That’s ideal.”
So I poured drinks for the dense press of people, sweating in my suit, mixing up orders, accepting five-pound notes from high-spirited girls whose outfits would have shamed their teachers at Marlborough, until at last there was a break in the crowd—just in time for me to see Sophie come in.
I waved at her. “Come get a drink!” I called.
She looked beautiful. Do I say it too much? Certainly I thought it all the time. She wore a white, summery dress that just showed the push of her breasts, and a white headband pulled her hair back. She leaned in and kissed me on the cheek, then instead of retreating held her face close to mine so that we could understand each other.<
br />
“Who are you supposed to be?” I asked over the noise, still having to shout.
“Lauren Bacall! You know she named the Rat Pack, right?”
“Shit, I should’ve been Bogie. He went to my high school.”
“What are you doing back there?”
“Bartending.”
“Are you going to work all night?”
“Only until ten o’clock.”
“Come have a cigarette with me when you’re done.”
I smiled. “Okay. Do you want a drink? On me.”
“D’you know, I still feel tipsy from that gin in the punt.”
“One more won’t hurt.”
She smiled at me, her cheeks dimpling, and in her mellifluous English accent said, “Just a Red Bull and vodka, then.”
I made it and handed it to her, promising I’d be outside at ten.
As it happened I couldn’t get away from the bar until ten thirty—I texted her to change the time to then—and when I waded out among the revelers Ella caught up with me from behind, wasted.
“Are you off to kiss her?” she shouted, hips swaying, the red straw in her glass crimped under her finger as she took a sip.
“Who?” I asked.
She grinned at me. “Just do it. Don’t even think about it.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Where the hell is Tom?” she asked.
“Are you off to kiss him?”
“Fuck you, Baker,” she said and laughed.
By then the feverish dancing was at its crest, and when I went outside to the flagstone terrace it was mostly empty. Sophie was on the phone, the ice cubes in her empty drink crowding each other as she tipped her cup up to get one last sip from it. When she saw me I got an apologetic eye roll, and she mouthed, “Just a second,” and walked away.
I sat down on a bench, cooling off in the night air.
“Sorry,” she said when she was done.
“It’s fine. Cigarette?”
She looked behind her toward the bar, where we could see Anneliese and Timmo. “Yeah, but let’s hide from Anneliese. She’ll get cross with me.”
“Shall we go out by the river?”
“Oh, let’s,” she said and smiled.
The Last Enchantments Page 9