“Okay.”
She put on this random mix I sometimes listened to back then. The first song was “Underneath Your Clothes” by Shakira. We laughed. When she got back to the bed the mood was altered—instead of that passionate, back-scratching foreplay, it was smoother and calmer. She lay back on the bed, smiling up at me beatifically. I half-stood above her and she raised her head to wet my dick with her mouth. Then we lay down and as I sank on top she guided me inside her.
“God,” she said, a quarter of the way in.
Nobody has ever described sex accurately. I can’t either. There’s something near-impossible to record about the sensation of your stretches of skin, something internal, the comprehensive accuracy and correctness of the junction, the corresponding interior sensations, all of it. Don’t tell us about hot breath, don’t tell us about hair in each other’s faces, we know all that—but there’s nothing else to say either.
After it was done she fell straight to sleep on top of me, which I adored, and I dozed, too, waking up every few minutes to check that it was all still happening: a curse, always to be looking backward and forward from the moment. She was asleep when I said, “Look,” and pointed out at the pale black January sky.
She turned her head, and a drowsy smile came onto her face. “Snow,” she murmured and pressed her face again into my bare chest, kissing it with her lips.
As she slept I watched the flurries falling onto the evergreen trees outside my window, scatterbrained, windblown, and wild at first, gusting past the curtains into the room and landing suicidally on my floor, then steady and heavy and plodding, accumulating: the two things, love and snow, that make the world look fresh again, angelic. I thought of when we had gone punting and she said she could stay in Oxford forever, that it was like home already.
Soon everything outside was an unbroken white. The heart, my heart, always understands before I do when happiness is possible.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Foucault theorized that as religious faith began to decline, physicians assumed the role that for centuries had belonged to priests. A doctor and a cleric were equally oracular, passing down decrees the common man didn’t have the expertise or language to question. Both could claim admission to the penetralia of a body unintelligible to most men. It was never faith that disappeared—it only turned inward rather than upward, and the bearer of its news changed uniforms.
At Oxford we had scouts. With the next two cottages, Tom, Anil, and I shared a windburnt man with a white mustache named Strickland. He would vacuum our rooms and empty our bins, but he had no real interest in the constant service of the antique world, nor any real warmth. Yet he knew everything: how to cheat an extra mug’s use out of a tea bag, when we were supposed to run down to Merton and walk around the quad backward, how to slide a fourth into Hall without a reservation. Battels, John Evelyn, loons, mods, prelims, hacks, rustication, bumps, vivas, the Other Place. Most of the day he would sit on the banister reading the Daily Sport (a tabloid dedicated almost exclusively to soft pornography) and smoke Woodbines. We treated him with intense respect.
When I slipped out to the bathroom in the hallway, with Sophie still asleep, he was on the banister. On our hall table were two white drinks in handled glasses.
“Take her them,” he said.
“What is it?”
“Rum, egg, nutmeg, and cream, hotted up.”
“Strick, I can’t give her that, it sounds disgusting.”
He looked at me levelly, trying to assess the true depths of my ignorance. “It’s an Oxford Dairy. Tradition when a young lady stays by. I brung ’em to Lord Threepwood by the dozen.”
So I took the drinks to Sophie. She laughed. “We always heard about these in school. What a tart I’ve become.” We drank them in silence—they were stronger than I would have expected—and watched the snow fall outside, as the brilliant hard light of morning slowly suffused the pine trees, shagged with ice.
The night before, after sleeping together, we had roused ourselves into our clothes and gone to the bop with Anil—whose black James Bond costume met with universal censure—and Anneliese, meeting Tom and Ella there. Tom had been dangerously drunk. Sophie had warned me not to kiss her in public, but in the end we had nevertheless siphoned ourselves off behind a column with a bronze bust of an old don and clung to each other, and at eleven we decided the hell with it and flagged a taxi home. We slept interleaved on my narrow bed, the windows still cracked, our heat under my heavy down blanket balanced by the chill of the room.
At eight or just after she had stirred.
“Hey, Will,” she murmured. I ran my fingers over one of her breasts and then the rib beneath it. “Mm,” she said and stretched like a cat.
“Are you sober now?” I smiled as I asked this, but she detected the seriousness of the question and turned her head away, human on my faithless arm.
“I feel…” There was a break as she searched her feelings, then decided, “Hungover and happy.”
We were silent for a minute. I tried not to, but at last I said, “What changed?”
“Oh, Will.”
“You can understand why I’m curious.”
To my surprise it was something specific that had brought her to me, not impulse. “I found out on Wednesday, my friend Clementine called me—one of Lula’s best friends, actually. She’s a horrible spiteful girl. She told me that I had to know, that Jack’s been sleeping with a girl we all went to school with. Minka, not that it means anything to you. She was a nightmare back then, too.”
“Did you like anyone at school?”
She smiled sadly. “She was pretty, though.”
“I’m sorry.”
She turned over and got up on her elbows. I was still on my back, so she was looking into my face. “Do you know what happened when Clem called me? I was in seventh heaven. I knew I could finish my essay and then come over and be with you.”
“Be with me?” I repeated carefully.
“Sleep with you,” she said.
“Just that?”
She studied me, her light brown eyes hunting in mine. “I think just that,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
I looked at her for a long time. I didn’t say anything.
“What, Will?”
“Nothing.”
“He’s apologized.”
“And that’s it?”
“I’m not going to turn everything upside down. I know him too well by now for that.” There was a silence. “People are flawed.”
This was a boilerplate evasion, fatalistic, but I thought I perceived a pleasure she took in it. It’s hard to describe. It was tied up in her Englishness, in her youth, in her parents. Perhaps it was that in the end she and Jack were the same. Having no home for so long, they had each had made a home of their manners. There was something sent-away and patrician about it: prejudiced, cold, insular, correct. Would she rather have felt loved or secure? Sometimes they’re shaded into each other.
“You have lots of choices,” I said.
She was silent for a while. “I like you,” she said at last, her voice very quiet.
The sun grew brighter in the room, and after a while she sat up and started to gather her clothes, sitting on the edge of the bed. I reached out and touched her arm, and then it took no effort to pull her back to me. We kissed and it all started again.
* * *
Everyone in college was a wreck because of the bop, but at sundown word went around the cottages about a moonlight snowball fight on the lawns, graduate students against undergraduate students, with Giorgio and Jem as team captains. (The referee was Anil, deemed appropriately judicious because he liked all the graduates but was irrationally terrified of the bartender.) Sophie and I went out and took turns playing and then going into the bar, where there was hot chocolate. When we got tired of playing we sat in the snow together, my back against a tree, her back against my chest, my arms over her shoulders.
By far our best player was Anneliese, who not once but
twice ran across the median and freed our prisoners. Both times she was rewarded with ten pounds of snow in the face, but entered jail holding one hand up in a fist of solidarity to the overwhelming cheers of our team. Because of her we won.
Our faces stinging, we gathered in the MCR for drinks afterward.
“I’m going to miss this next year,” Sophie said fondly, gesturing out toward the loud room. We were alone in the kitchen because we had said we’d fetch more wine.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Now she looked at me. “The AHRC wouldn’t give me money to stay.”
“Shit. What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. Travel, perhaps. Jack will be somewhere.”
“But you love it here.”
She smiled faintly. “Yes,” she said. “I love it here.”
I took her hand. “Shall we slip away?”
She looked at me. “I think I’m going to turn into a pumpkin anytime, now.”
“What?”
“I should go back to my room.” She gave me a soft kiss on the mouth. “Thank you, though.”
“We don’t have to stop.”
“I told you before.” She crossed her arms in front of her chest, bumping her necklace. “I’m sorry, Will.”
She was true to her word. For the rest of January and into February I saw her only occasionally, in town or biking past Fleet, her long legs down on her pedals. Her manner at these times was easier than ever, friendly, I thought perhaps even full of love.
My heart sank when I thought of the time we lived in the same city diminishing. We had that night, though, it was mine to keep; because of that there was some reservoir of hope still inside me. Indeed, every evening when I returned from the library I half-expected to find her waiting in my room.
I never did. Once in Paris I was with a French girl I knew, and I asked her why she had never managed to go back to school, why she had stayed at the investment bank where she worked. She laughed and said, “Anything can happen in life, you know. Especially nothing.”
* * *
It was unoriginal of him, but Tom started to drink too much: not just on weekends but each afternoon, each evening, on weekdays. Ella tagged after him fairly often, but she had commitments in the lab, and I sometimes dodged over from the Bodleian, but in the end it came to him drinking alone four, perhaps five times a week.
He chose a noble venue for his decline: the King’s Arms, Oxford’s most famous and visible pub, situated at the end of Broad Street, the town’s busiest thoroughfare, a stone’s throw from the Bod.
It was a cheerful place with a big room in front and three smaller ones in the back, one of which had a high fireplace in it. There was more light at the KA than in other pubs, with windows along every wall because it was at the corner of two streets. There were oars commemorating ancient Boat Race victories hanging among the rafters, college photographs dotting the walls, and above the bar 1950s advertisements for beer. Its walls were honey-colored, its couches soft and comfortable. All of the fixtures at the bar were brass, which gleamed brilliantly, their light reflected off of the rows of glasses that hung above them. Oxford students will tell you that it’s a tourists’ pub, but every one of them seems to be there after exams, or on the first day of spring when they put tables outside.
The KA served as a hitching post in town, and gradually people from the MCR other than Ella, Anneliese, and I realized that Tom was always there, always at the same small table stacked with papers and books about genealogy, doing who knows what, tracing out family trees, I suppose, utterly absorbed. I had to have the same stupid conversation with a dozen different people, all concerned about him drinking alone, the empty pint glasses stacked in front of him. They knew about his sister, of course. In a way I’m afraid that at first I didn’t mind, even liked, that feeling of being at the center of intrigue, the hushed conversations, rich with false degrees of anxiety to justify their gossiping tone. But I reached the limit of my patience when Giorgio said something.
Giorgio’s daemon at Oxford was his electronic organizer, a bulky piece of hardware he managed with an officious little stylus. He caught me in the MCR one day (I was probably hanging around to see if Sophie would come along, like an idiot) and whipped this contraption out.
“Will, Will, good,” he said. “I know I meant to speak to you about something … what was it? Hmmm … ah, yes, here it is.” He looked up. “Tom. I hear Tom’s been spending too much time at the pub.”
“What?”
“Drinking too much, Will. Of course, his poor sister died recently.”
I frowned at him. “You put that in your PalmPilot?”
“It’s not a PalmPilot, actually, it’s—”
“Tom’s not MCR business, Giorgio.”
Here he felt on firmer ground. “I understand your feelings as a friend, Will, but I consider that the welfare of my students here at Fleet is primary among my responsibilities. I have a duty to make sure each and every one of you is healthy and happy. Now, a few questions.” He read from his PalmPilot. “How often does Tom have more than six drinks at one sitting?”
“What?”
“How often during the past year has he failed to do what was normally expected of him because of drinking?”
“What is this?”
“Has his drinking affected his sexual performance?”
I burst out laughing. “Giorgio, this is ridiculous.”
“Has he or anyone else been injured because of his drinking? These are medical questions, Will.”
The next afternoon—at the King’s Arms—I told Tom about the questionnaire. I presented it as a joke to see how he’d react.
“Fucking hell, is that what people are saying?”
“Kind of,” I said.
“You used to love drinking.”
“I still have that passion, never fear.”
He was quiet for a minute. “I guess I could try to cut down.” Then he smiled and stood up. “I wish Giorgio would ask Ella about my sexual performance. She would smack him. I’m getting another pint of Young’s, do you want one?”
I nodded. “Yeah, why not. Let’s grab those seats by the fireplace, though. It’s freezing by the window.”
“No, let’s stay. I like to look out.”
* * *
In class that early February we read Pnin, Nabokov’s comedy about a Russian professor in America and his many befuddlements. On the day we came to class to discuss it, our teacher—whose mood we had advanced far enough into the year to judge—looked dangerous, brusque, and bored. Then Larry made the mistake of declaring he thought the book a postmodernist trifle.
There was a long moment of tense silence before she said, “Larry, why would a person choose to write a novel?”
“Ego,” he answered immediately.
“Anyone else?”
Money, someone said, and then a third added perhaps just aptitude.
“Then why not write a television show? More money in that. More sex, too.”
“It’s hard to get a television show made,” Helena offered.
“That’s a pathetic reason to write a novel.”
“A good novel makes you love life more,” said Sullivan.
“Don’t quote at me. Give me a reason.”
“Diegesis,” I said.
She shook her head. “Regurgitation from Michaelmas. Wayne Booth.” Then it had been one of her favorite subjects: how the novel alone could present interior states, whereas plays and movies had to present the action without authorial comment. “What I want to know is why you’re all here—why we care about Pnin, all of us other than Larry.”
“I care.”
“Anyone else?”
There was silence. I’m sure we all had our answers, but our teacher, a wispy, caffeinated woman, was, though usually amiable, in her rare moments of unfriendliness, such as this one, intimidating.
When none of us spoke she did, and what she said troubled me, forced me into thought, and, i
n the end, altered my plans.
She began by saying that our class was starting out at the end of time. No, she wasn’t speaking about belatedness—she meant it seriously. The past century had been an arms race of postmodernism, from Joyce to Borges to The Interrogation to Satantango. The outright self-eradicating absurdism of Barth and Barthelme, the purposive nonsense of Tel Quel, had taken the long saga to its logical extremity. Romance novelists now used the same tricks that had dazzled the avant-garde of the thirties and forties; what had seemed daring in Hopscotch was the favored structure of a series of children’s books. There might still be incidental curlicues of invention to come, but effectively the possibilities of formal innovation in fiction had been finalized.
For a postmodernist trifle, she said, try David Foster Wallace—a sterile sense of play, at bottom sentimental, but ironized to a degree of coolness. Franzen and McEwan wrote big Victorian triple-deckers, excellently plotted, conservative at heart. The incorporation of minor postmodern tricks made it possible for them to retain character and story, the pleasures that made the novel, while retaining the snob appeal of postmodernism. It was a runaround.
Here we returned to Pnin. If you wanted to study postmodernism, technique, the formalities of fiction, it was a fair pursuit, she said. But what came first for her was something older, what the novel could achieve, she felt, that no other form of art could: The novel was where our deepest correspondences called out to each other. It was how we moved each other into recognition of ourselves.
There was a silence in the room.
Take her example, she said, television. Its consumption was passive—there had been neurological studies about that—and then by the time a show reached the air, most shows, it had been so diluted of its intent, by notes, by commerce, by the choices of actors, that it was streamlined and glamorized into dangerous serial purity.
What about music, someone asked, or painting.
She smiled. She loved music, she said, but it’s an emotion. A very deep emotion, but one that bears little analysis. The opposite of visual art, in a sense: visual art one could absorb in five seconds, but beyond that it was hard to see it freshly, it gave way to analytical reification. There was no duration to visual art. She loved both, and neither was in competition with the novel—but if they had been, their inarticulacy was their doom, pushing them briefly ahead of fiction, striking quickly and then falling off, the hare and the tortoise. No, it was the novel that offered the most sustained, honest interrogation of the human experience. It was interesting to consider Pnin’s formal syntax, but it moved her only as a tool that came to express Pnin’s solitude, his helplessness. In the end, for that least academically fashionable reason, too: because it was autobiographical. Nabokov left Russia at the revolution and lived out his life in a country where the train timetables looked wrong, the butterflies were named differently. She looked at Larry gently and said that she would like him to read the book’s last pages again, just the final two or three. Then, smiling to soften the intensity of her long monologue, she said not to forget, after all, that Nabokov wrote a novel in footnotes before Wallace was born. Though she had enjoyed the cruise ship essay.
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