Looking for Class

by Bruce Feiler

  “Nice tie,” cried John—Number Two—as he stirred the chili.

  “And look at this outfit, lads,” cried Max—the Stroke. “Spot on. Where did you get it?”

  “America,” I said, to his clear disappointment.

  “And these grey trousers, what are they made of?”

  “Denim.”

  “I like them, Brucie, but why didn’t you wear your whole DJ?”

  I glanced at the chili on the stove, the bread on the counter, the wine in Max’s hand. As I did, I recalled the story Ian had told me about the annual dinner of the Clare soccer team where half the members, after getting totally sloshed, climbed to the roof of Gonville and Caius College (usually called simply Caius) and tossed chunks of lamb kebab at the other half of the team, who had jumped across the ten-foot chasm to the roof of the Senate House.

  “Because,” I said, “I know what you’re like when you’re pissed.”

  “Clever lad,” Max said, vacuuming up the last contents of his glass and flashing a burgundy smile.

  The rules for the Crew Meal were quite simple: the boys do the cooking, the girls bring the liquor, and no one walks past the Porters’ Lodge dressed in his or her smart Sunday duds. The reason for this precaution is that with at least eighteen people in attendance, a Crew Meal would be classified as a “small party” and therefore would require written permission from the head tutor and disbandment before eleven o’clock. The gentlemen of the Clare Second Novice Boat had no intention of observing these rules.

  “Hey, Bruce,” said Oliver—Number Six—“do you mind whipping this cream? I have to stir the rice.”

  For the next half hour I stood in the gyp in my DJ and jeans whipping cream with a fork and a spoon. With the arrival of the Crew Meal, we had reached the halfway point of term and my life was settling into a rhythm. Our crew would practice four or five times a week, usually beginning before 6 A.M. After rowing I would bicycle back through the yawning town, hurriedly gulp down my bottle of milk, and pedal off to sleepy lectures on the Sidgwick Site: “Neo-Realism and the Second World War,” “U.N. Peacekeeping in a Bipolar World,” “International Relations in a Somnolent State.” After lectures, I would drop off for lunch in the Buttery, then head back to V Entryway and nap away most of the afternoon with an open book spine-up on my chest. Before dinner Simon would drop by my rooms on his way to Old Court; while afterward he and I, or I alone, would meet up with Ian for a game of darts, a round of pool, or a conversation on the virtues of Louise Rogers, a discussion that never proceeded past the theoretical but which invariably proceeded past “last call” at the pubs, at which point we would head down to the Clare Late Bar, since it was one of the few places in town open past 11 P.M.

  As the cream began to thicken in the bowl and my arm began to ache, the ladies began to arrive in the attic, toting their wine in brown paper bags and gripping their shawls around naked shoulder blades. One of the last guests to poke her nose in the kitchen was Susanna, the third-year coach of the ladies’ boat, who was draped half-naked herself on the arm of Peter of Clare.

  “Is that his girlfriend?” whispered Charlie Chaplin—the Bow—who was busy pouring low-grade vodka into a cherry gelatin mold.

  “Since last year,” responded Max. “Since she dyed her hair.”

  After spreading the whipped cream on a rum-soaked cake and arranging a can of mandarin oranges in a pattern around the top, I slid the intoxicated cake into the refrigerator and joined the others in the room, where a penciled looseleaf sign on the door read, PARTY HERE NOW.

  “Have a drink,” Oliver said as I entered the room, shoving into my hand a miniature blue brandy glass with two fingers of amber spirits inside.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “An aperitif,” he said. “A blend of wine and whisky. Sort of like sherry, but better.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “I don’t know, but don’t worry, it’s a real drink, we didn’t make it ourselves: it came from a bottle.”

  I took a sip of the sweet-and-sour drink, which reminded me of children’s candied cough syrup, then traded it for a glass of red wine. The rooms, which belonged to Number Seven, had the angular, somewhat cramped feel of an antique cedar chest, with exposed beams jutting out from overhead, dark paneling on the walls, and two windows carved into the roof to let the rain drip in. The thin metal shelves were overflowing with typical fresher fare: A-Level notes for chemistry, stained coffee mugs, and a bag of granulated sugar slightly torn at the top and dribbling onto the floor. The grumpy countenance of Winston Churchill stared down from the wall like a porter on patrol.

  Despite the abundance of alcohol, the party had not advanced past the sock hop stage by the time I arrived. Peter was working one side of the room teaching the lads how to drink. “Think of the glass as a woman’s body,” he said, “then plunge your face right in.” “Should my nose get wet?” asked Number Six. “Never your nose,” the prof professed. “The proof is in the lips.”

  Susanna, for her part, was goading the girls on the other side of the room.

  “And what do you do?” she said upon arriving at me, wiggling her purple miniskirted hips and twisting her obviously bleached-blond hair.

  “International relations,” I said.

  “Oooh!” she spewed with inebriated intensity. “That sounds serious, what does it mean?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m still trying to figure that out.”

  “Well,” she said, “when you find out, please let me know. We could sure use some of that around here right now.” She released her finger from her hair, spilling it loosely from her head and dribbling it down the front of my shirt. “But don’t wait too long. I might be too pissed to remember.”

  With sixteen rowers, two coxes, and two super-intoxicated coaches, the original nine bottles of wine were soon emptied and snogging one another on the ground. The boys in the boat had anticipated this problem, and on the morning of the meal it was decided to inform all the girls that they should each PB2B, assuring us a supply of eighteen bottles—at least one per person. But after a little more than an hour, and long before the boil-in-the-bag rice would be ready for the chili con carne, the expanded liquor stock had nearly run dry.

  “Ladies, ladies, could I have your attention, please.” Susanna stood atop one of the low white tables and smiled down at the party. “Ladies, it seems we have run out of wine, and it is our responsibility to provide it. So if I go out and buy some wine, I need your promise to pay me back.”

  There was some general discussion about how much wine (two cases), what color (red), and what grade (low), before Susanna went off with Peter to the nearby liquor store, called an off-licence.

  “Save us some of the food,” Peter shouted from the door. “And don’t take your clothes off without us.”

  In retrospect, I suppose I shouldn’t have been so surprised by the drinking I found at Cambridge. After all, in addition to attending college in America, I had also studied at several universities outside the United States: a semester in Osaka, a summer in Oslo. Each of those places, like each of those countries, had its own elaborate drinking rituals. Still, when I arrived in Britain, both the amount and the type of drinking I discovered overwhelmed me at every turn.

  To begin, students at Cambridge are virtually bombarded with occasions to drink and excuses to get pissed. Even before I arrived at Clare, I received a letter, by air, from Dr. A. B. Jones inviting me to have sherry with him before the matriculation dinner. After I arrived, I got more invitations from tutors (teachers), boaties (rowers), ruggers (rugby players), and even the rectors of the Christian Athletic Club, who served port alongside their orange juice. Liquor was everywhere in college. Clare, unlike King’s and Trinity, did not have its own winery, but it did have its own wine cellar for fellows, its own bar for students, and even its own staff of full-time bartenders. At the university level, myriad clubs exist for organized drinking, including the infamous True Blues Society, whose init
iates must dress up in breeches, waistcoat, bow tie, and tails and down an entire chalice of claret in under half a minute. Closer to home, Clare boasted an all-male drinking society called the CRABS (Clare Rugby and Boating Society), which required recruits to drink twelve pints of lager in under two hours. Clare ladies, not to be outpissed, formed a rival group called the Lobsters (no acronym, just crustacean fealty).

  To me this intemperance seemed wholly out of character. The British, after all, are supposed to be refined. Their language is thought to be mannered, their manners are said to be dignified, and their dignity is supposedly manifest in their stiff upper lips. “The English have all been trained in one severe school of manners,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. “They are never betrayed into any curiosity of unbecoming emotion.” As I soon discovered, however, behind this prim Victorian mask lives a thoroughly modern world of sin. If anything, the British approach to drinking and sex—on display in its rawest form at Cambridge—reminded me of the Japanese habit of dividing people’s lives into two separate realms: public and private spheres.

  In Britain, as in Japan, the public face is arid and pure, almost haughtily above such juvenile desires. This is the face of the highest icons of the royal family; this is page one of the Financial Times. The private face, on the other hand, is lush and lascivious, never outgrowing the adolescent urges even if temporarily storing them away under a three-piece suit. This is the image of politicians cavorting with low-grade prostitutes; this is page three of The Sun, where a busty, buxom, half-naked bombshell flashes her breasts to readers every day while fondling the handle of a tennis racket or the curve of a banana.

  This schism between public persona and private self is widespread in Britain, but nowhere is the split more apparent than at the country’s elite universities. Indeed, with their volatile mix of youth, wealth, and overeducated hormones, Oxford and Cambridge are probably the two most concentrated centers for decadence anywhere in the country. On the surface the university appears unflappable and dispassionate, but underneath the students find creative ways to skirt the authorities. “I think it is no exaggeration to say that, in my last year, I and most of my friends were drunk three or four times a week,” wrote Oxford alumnus Evelyn Waugh. “It took very little to inebriate at that age and high spirits made us behave more flamboyantly than our state of intoxication really warranted.”

  To be sure, most students do take their academics seriously. Yet because they are tested only at the end of every year (and sometimes only at the end of two), students are under little pressure to study every night. Also, because of limited social opportunities, they are under a great deal of pressure to drink. In fact, if one considers the number of students involved or the amount of time, money, or calories spent, drinking is probably a far more popular sport than rowing. It is also a far more decadent and desperate game at Cambridge than I ever witnessed in America. Since many Oxbridge students have come from straitlaced boarding schools or tight-lipped families, university is the first time in their lives when they can throw prudence to the wind and indulge in deadly sin.

  By the time Susanna and Peter returned to the rooms, the party had advanced most of the way through the chili and rice but was still one step shy of the coffee and mints. Most of the DJs had been long since discarded and barely a tie was still bowed like a shoelace. With plates scarcer than showers, the crews ate chili from bowls, platters, plastic bags, and even, in my case, an overturned Frisbee with a dog bite in the side. With utensils even scarcer than plates, the lads and ladies drank the “vodka jelly” out of stained coffee mugs and used their callused hands to pick off chunks of the mandarin orange rum-side-up cake.

  “Everybody…hello. I mean, good evening. May I have your attention, please?”

  Susanna stood atop one of the tables, staggered slightly from the effects of the wine, and flicked her hair back with sly seduction. “It’s time for the first dance of the night. In Boat Club tradition, I would like to ask Peter to deliver a toast.”

  Peter grabbed one of the few unopened bottles of wine and rose to embrace Susanna atop the table. His shirt tail was untucked around his waist and the sleeves rolled halfway up his forearms. His bright gold First Boat tie dangled like a neglected shoelace around his muscular neck.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he intoned, “please be upstanding.”

  The crews rose to their feet. Peter took a moment to lift the cork halfway out of the bottle, leaving it slightly engorged in the lip.

  “To the Queen,” he said with his arms outstretched and his voice quaking with inebriation. “To Lady Clare…”

  He retrieved a knife from the waistband of his trousers and flashed the blade to the crowd. The crews responded with hoots and howls. Susanna stepped off the table and hid her eyes in her hands.

  “What’s he doing?” I whispered.

  “It’s an old aristocratic ritual,” said Halcyon, who had stepped to my side. “The host must always open a bottle of champagne with a sword.”

  “But that isn’t champagne,” I said. “And that is hardly a sword.”

  “Boys will be boys,” she said.

  “To the Clare Boat Club!”

  With a dramatic slicing gesture that easily could have decapitated a lamb, Peter not only defenestrated the cork but decimated the glass neck as well, sending the bottle somersaulting toward the carpet and the wine fountaining through the air onto the outstretched arms of his white dress shirt. Susanna gasped. The room tenant cursed. But the rest of the crew burst into applause as Peter responded to the gurgitated wine by summarily ripping off his now blueberry shirt and tossing it into the air like a rock-and-roll star.

  “Gentlemen!” he cried. “Find your partners.”

  What followed was stage two of the Cambridge sock hop. Shoes flew everywhere and DJs were kicked even farther aside as the boys and girls paired off with one other, pretty much corresponding to seat. Halcyon grabbed me by the arm and gestured for the male cox of the ladies’ boat to seek out his Number Five instead. Someone turned up the music, a synthetic electric bop, and the crews began to dance.

  For the next several songs the dancing was oddly coordinated, with Peter on the table dancing with Susanna—his hands around her waist and hers around his neck—and all the lads gathered dutifully below, watching their coach with a studious eye. Welcome to Sharking 101, the only course in which these novice students dared not procrastinate. If Peter slid his hand up the curve of Susanna’s back, the boys all rushed to follow; when he stepped away and bucked his waist, soon half the room was gyrating like roosters. At one point he further roused the roost by flexing his hands, rubbing his body, and sliding his hands up Susanna’s legs.

  “Hands, body, slide!” he called.

  “Hands! Body! Slide!” the lads echoed.

  Feeling old, Halcyon and I began retreating from the dance floor. We had just arrived at the door when suddenly we heard a shout from the back of the room. We turned toward the central table underneath the window just in time to see Susanna’s arm moving at full-pressure speed, slapping against Peter’s face.

  “No!” she shouted. “I said enough!”

  Peter reeled from the weight of the blow and went tumbling off the table and onto the broken glass on the floor. Susanna, meanwhile, leapt from the table toward the tiny attic window, which was closed to keep in the sound. She thrust open the window, lurched her neck out, and vomited down the roofing tile, like a gargoyle come to life.

  Just at that moment the Clare Chapel chimed, a loud knock bellowed through the wall and Terry burst through the door. “What is going on?!” he shouted to the shocked faces strewn about the floor. “What have you horrible people done? Shut that window, turn off that music, and get your sorry asses back to your rooms. Wait till the tutor hears about this!”

  Halcyon and I moved toward the window to help Susanna back inside the room. As we turned to get some water from the sink, she lunged toward Peter on the floor, dropped her head into his lap, and as he rubbed hi
s cut-up hands across her bright red cheeks, they both began to weep.

  “You were good in there.”

  Walking home from the party that night, on slate pathways slicked down from the rain and alongside pine trees pruned by the college to look like overgrown bonsai, Halcyon eased close to my side and put her arm through mine.

  “So were you,” I responded. “I think we were the only ones sober enough to react.”

  “You like her, don’t you?”

  “Susanna?”

  “I could tell,” she said. “You’re strange, do you know that? On one hand, you’re friendly. You flirt with all the girls you meet, give them hugs and a kiss good night. But then you go home and close your door. I think you’re an introvert.”

  Halcyon was the first person I met at Clare. Indeed, in those early, unsure days she was a fellow spy: foreign, friendly, and eager to run joint reconnaisance missions on the alien world of Cambridge. But as I grew more accustomed to the place and less dependent on her, she grew more attached to me and less inclined to hold back.

  I laughed off her remark as we passed through Mem Court. For several minutes we walked in silence, until we started up our entryway stairs, when Halcyon again turned to me and said, “Why don’t you like me?”

  “What are you talking about?” I said. “I do like you. You’re the first person I see when I wake up in the morning, and the last person I see at night.”

  “But you don’t really like me,” she said. “You never touch me.” She stopped at the top of the stairs.

  “But I do much more than that,” I said, cringing at my knee-jerk sensitive male tone. “I tell you what’s on my mind.”

  “It’s not the same,” she said. “I’m a woman. Sometimes I want to be touched.”

  Somewhere in the course of those early months, Halcyon had become much less of my coconspirator at Cambridge and much more of a kind of male fantasy gone horribly wrong. Here was a woman—attractive, enticing, and all but undressing before my eyes—who was goading me for not coming on to her when the outcome of the come-on was all but certified. I thought of myself as a girl-shy teenager: how could I possibly turn down this offer? I remembered myself as an upstanding adult: how could I possibly take advantage of her when my designs were so short-term and base?