Looking for Class

by Bruce Feiler

  “It’s what everyone else calls the King’s cellars. Inside is a dungeon of grey concrete block, with tie-dyed paintings on the wall and big black letters that say P-E-R-E-S-T-R-O-I-K-A. Communism may be dead, but King’s students are still trying to reform it.”

  She paused for a moment, then said, “What’s it like?”

  “It’s radical chic. All the women wear leather jackets and most of the men wear punk black shoes with those one-inch rubber soles. It’s the only place I’ve been in Cambridge where the number of motorcycle helmets was higher than the number of pin-striped shirts.”

  “Sounds exciting,” she said, throwing her own towel into the kitchen sink. “I think I’ll go.”

  Hope sharks eternal.

  “Now remember,” I said as we arrived at the door, “you have to admire King’s chapel before we go underground. You’ll enjoy the cellars more if you know they’re just beneath ‘the climax of Western civilization.’”

  Call me Ishmael. Call me hooked. But as Rachel and I walked the fifteen minutes to King’s in search of Melinda’s party, our relationship shifted into a kind of one-to-one tuition of the most seductive variety. If, as Captain Ahab once said, whaling was his Harvard and Yale, then surely it’s possible for students in Britain to say that sharking can be their Oxford and Cambridge. As it was, my shark was shaping up to be an extended pop test in deciphering a text. As Rachel and I secretly surveyed each other, I tried to search for clues in her behavior as to her general interest in the subject of snogging. Unfortunately, during most of the walk she kept her hands deep in her pockets and focused her eyes directly ahead. She also dragged her feet. Every now and then, however, as she paused to consider whether to bite on a piece of raw bait I had tossed her way (“How long will you be in town?” “Would you like to meet my bedder?”), Rachel would tilt her head ever-so-slightly in my direction, a move that so filled me with desire that I would lurch my suddenly erect neck toward hers in the hopes that our heads might rub up against each other and that, from the static, a spark might fly.

  It didn’t happen. And when we finally arrived at King’s and paid our respects to the Chapel, we turned, still not touching, toward the cellars. The door was locked. We knocked on a window; no one answered. We tried a side door, it led to the library. We tried another, it led to the kitchen.

  “They must have gone fishin’,” I finally remarked.

  “But where?” she said.

  “The Cam?”

  “Don’t be silly. We have to find them. They couldn’t have got far. Cambridge, after all, is much smaller than Oxford.”

  “I’ll take that as a challenge.”

  We started back toward Grasshopper Lodge, and in the rush we picked up the chase. Whereas before, both of us had acted cautiously—circling, testing, and measuring each other only from afar, now we were both more aware of the game. Indeed, we started goading each other like nervous eight-year-olds in the door of an attic eager to prove we weren’t afraid to proceed but secretly terrified. With each step in the dark we drew closer together, but if, by accident, we happened to touch, we would both recoil in nervous laughter, while I, at least, would try to think of a way to make it happen again.

  After checking the river and beneath the bridge, we arrived at the giant iron gate of King’s, which—though still before two—was locked, trapping us in. Like any upstanding student not about to risk losing a potential shark to a college regulation, we scaled it. Actually, we skirted it, swinging around the side of the gate and landing, still apart, in a ditch. We brushed ourselves off and kept moving. The night was dark and growing wet. Up above, the mist had grown so dense we could no longer spot the library tower. Down below, we barely missed a pair of lovers entwined in an X underneath an orange streetlamp. No cars were out; no bicycles either. The only moving object we saw was a white pickup truck with an illuminated pink telephone receiver on its cabin that said FLYING PIZZA CORPS.

  Back at Grasshopper, no one answered buzzers 14, 15, or 18. But then, as before, the same woman appeared. The party, she said, had been closed down at King’s and was moved to the flat of a friend in a place called Owlstone Garden.

  “Which is where?” I asked,

  “Do you go here?” she said.

  “No,” Rachel answered. “We’re from Oxford.”

  “In that case, go down this road, cross the street, and head past the park. After a while…” She paused to scratch her head. “I’ve never gone from this direction, so I’m not sure I can tell you how to get there. But anyway, go up this road, past the garden, then take a left.”

  “Do we need to look both ways?” I said.

  Rachel hid her face. The woman shut the door. Our shark, like a catfish, had won a new life.

  While Cambridge is an undeniably romantic place, which naturally serves to promote love, it is also, at times, an overwhelmingly dreary place, which naturally conspires to hinder it. Some people are turned off by the scenery. “Hail, horrors, hail!” wrote Thomas Gray. “Ye ever gloomy bowers, ye gothic fanes, ye antiquated towers.” Others are dismayed by the people. “A mockery of the world,” complained William Cowper. “[Mere] gamesters, jockeys, spendthrifts, and brothellers impure.” If handled poorly, the occasional misery that comes with the place (like most places in England) can overwhelm even the most romantically inclined. But if handled wisely, the gloom and doom of Cambridge—the bad food and worse weather—can be put to good use. The secret, as ever, is wit. In Japan the seminal rule in making a good impression is not to talk too much. But in Britain, especially in Cambridge, the opposite is true: foreplay is in the tongue. Thus, rule number three when negotiating with a shark (or a sharkee) is to keep talking at all times.

  “Can you answer a question for me?” I said to Rachel after we had moved away from the Grasshopper and were back in unknown waters again. “How is it that the British could have colonized some of the greatest culinary countries of the world—India, China, Malaysia—lived there for generations, and not returned home with a single spice?” Rachel acted insulted. “Why, it’s because they have so much respect for their food that they don’t want to spice it,” she protested. “By boiling a potato for three days its ‘true’ nature is allowed to shine through.”

  “Well,” I agreed, “that could explain a lot. Maybe the fog in Britain comes from overboiling potatoes.”

  Rachel laughed out loud, stumbling on the curb and lunging in my direction, thus allowing me in the levity of the moment to steady her arm, set her upright, and quickly withdraw my hand. The pace seemed to quicken. Swelling up, I moved closer.

  “Take this word overboil,” I said. “Perfectly decent word, but I didn’t use it three times in my life before I came to Cambridge. Now I use it three days a week.”

  “I know what you mean,” she said. “Did you know that the word ‘bland’ was invented to describe English food?”

  I stopped in my tracks and started to say “Really?” when Rachel stopped, too, and told me it was a joke. To my chagrin, she had outwitted me; to my delight, she was now playing along.

  Several moments later we arrived at an intersection and stopped to review how far we had come. Like two hares with no tortoise tendencies, we had raced through the early stages—the first glance, the first touch, even the first caress of the arm. But now we were entering fresh territory, and Rachel still seemed somewhat hesitant.

  We rehearsed our directions. “Walk to first crossing, then past the park, and turn left at the next major road.” Assuming this to be the first crossing, we continued, winding our way through a block of flats, past a pub closed down for the night, and arriving several moments later on a clear stretch of grass.

  “This must be the park,” Rachel said. Renewed, we set off down the path, groping and giggling with occasional teenage giddiness, until the trees over our heads began to close with a growing menace, the muddy patches under our feet expanded to the size of small lochs, and the dainty patch of garden green seemed to extend for miles beyond ou
r path in an unending stretch of hillocks and valleys that slithered right up to the fog. With the wind howling across the plain and my mind quickly losing its way in the surging hormonal mist, I felt a bit like Heathcliff wandering the moors around Wuthering Heights.

  “We may have taken a wrong turn,” I suggested. “I think we’re in Wales.”

  “Wales?” she said, lifting her voice. “That sounds foreboding.”

  In the darkness the mood had shifted. The sky had grown more agitated. The wind mussed up our hair. It seemed as though a biblical storm were brewing on the horizon. Rachel dashed from my side into the open field and stared out over the heath. Desperately seeking an excuse to take her in my arms, bring up the violins, and put my shark to a test, I spotted a hut to the side of the field, and in it saw a chance.

  “I think I’m going to get out of the storm,” I called, shamelessly exaggerating the mist we were in. “Maybe we should rest for a while.”

  Until this point, as a novice shark, I had dutifully followed the rules—sampled the bait, struck my pose, cracked a wit or two—yet sooner or later I had to breach the ultimate frontier.

  “I like being out in the open,” she replied. “It keeps me on my toes.”

  Snaked. Far from a captain of the seas, I felt at this point more like a hack taxidermist: my shark, in short, had been stuffed.

  When I was in college, a friend and I used to have a theory about what time of the night things happened on dates. Our formula went roughly as follows: before twelve o’clock both sides are cautious and nothing ever happens. Between midnight and two a small window of opportunity prevails. But later, between two and four, both sides are so tired that neither has the energy for ignition. Then, after four, both parties become so desperate to stop talking they usually end up in each other’s arms. For me the last option seemed the only choice. Having failed as Ishmael, Heathcliff, and Romeo, I was left in the end playing Oliver Twist, hoping against hope for a little bit more.

  At close to three o’clock in the morning, we finally emerged at the far side of the field into a crowded neighborhood of prefab houses that seemed more than several centuries removed from the medieval grandeur of Cambridge. Defeated, downcast, and thoroughly drenched, we decided to abandon our quest for Melinda’s party and try and find our way back toward town. With all the pubs closed at eleven, however, and all the “convenience” stores closed at seven (the British imported the 7-Eleven from America, but somehow switched the numbers in transit and ended up with only 11-Sevens), we had no one to ask for directions.

  “Wait!” Rachel cried after several wrong turns and more than several dead ends. “I hear something.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Her.”

  “Who?”

  “Melinda.”

  “Be serious.”

  “I am.”

  “But where?”

  “Up there.”

  Rachel followed the lure of laughter, wandering up our road, down an alley, into a garden, and to the base of a wall, where two floors up a light shone from a window where a party was under way.

  “Hello!” we cried, but no one answered.

  “Help!” we tried, but no one came.

  Finally, we tossed stones at the window until a shadow appeared in the light.

  “It’s them!” someone shouted.

  “It’s us,” we agreed.

  Relieved, revived, yet somehow reluctant, Rachel and I made our way toward the door and waited for it to open. And in the hour of that final moment, with nothing left to lose, I lifted my arm to touch Rachel’s back and felt my finger, long since numbed by the cold, slide through the chill of her tightly wound scarf and brush the flint of her naked neck. At that instant the night must have struck four, for the door flew open with a brilliant spark, flashing night light into our owlish eyes and capturing Rachel as she glanced at my face and kissed it from afar.

  “And…”

  Ian was sitting on the edge of my bed, having come in from fencing practice as I was telling the story to Simon.

  “And nothing,” I said. “We went inside, had peppermint tea and chocolate cake, and when the sun came up, I came home.”

  “No shag?” Ian said.

  “No shag,” I confirmed.

  “No snog?” Simon asked.

  “No snog,” I conceded. “But I did get her telephone number.”

  “That’s not a shark,” Simon protested. “It’s more like a goldfish.”

  “No, wait,” Ian said, pounding his fist into his hand. He had thrown off his jumper when he arrived in the room and was sitting on my bed, guzzling my milk and eating his way toward the last crumb of a box of Cadbury Fingers. “This is good. It must be good. Why else would he get all teary-eyed over a conversation about potatoes? I knew you had it in you, Bruce. That’s it, you must be in love.” He reached to embrace me.

  “Wait,” I said when I had wiped his crumbs off my face. “I don’t know if it’s love. I don’t know if it’s a shark. In fact, I don’t even know how to tell the story because I don’t know the ending.”

  “You’re so old,” Simon said with more derision than respect. “You think too much. If this is what it’s like to get an M.Phil., I think I’ll politely decline.” He stood up and announced he was going to lunch. Ian got up to follow, remembering as he did that he had brought along my morning post.

  “Oh no,” I uttered reflexively, as I flipped through the meager pile. “There’s a letter.”

  “Who from?” Simon asked.

  “Don’t be naff,” snapped Ian.

  “Dear Bruce,” I read aloud from my seat on my bed. She mentioned she was tired, still a little bleary-eyed, and apologized for any English expressions that were not completely precise. And then she dropped in those man-eating words “about last night…”

  She had enjoyed meeting me, she said. Our conversation was stimulating. But perhaps, she realized, she should have thought to tell me she was involved with another man…

  In despair I fell back on my pillow, hearing only the echo of a silent splash. My story finally had its ending: Perhaps there was a chance we might be able to keep in touch.

  VIII

  RACING

  Head over Heels

  I met a solid rowing friend, and asked about the Race.

  “How fared it with your mind,” I said, “when stroke

  increased the pace?”

  But Five made answer solemnly, “I heard them fire a

  gun,

  “No other mortal thing I heard until the Race was

  done.”

  —R.C. Lehman

  “Trinity Boat Song,” 1901

  The river on race day was a road of dreams, roused by an unlikely shower of sun that spiced the bleak December sky like a splash of orange pekoe in a steady diet of Earl Grey. The road of dreams was filled with ghosts—skulls and swans and owls out of sight, as well as the vision of novice-shell crabs that danced like devils in the mind’s eye of every virgin crew. The ghosts of races past were alive and bright: red on the oars of the St. John’s boys, purple on the backs of all the King’s men, and pink on the necks of the Girton girls cheering from the bank. It was a rainbow of color when we arrived at the start, but the crew of gold was at the wrong end.

  “Hey, Clare, bloody hell! Where the bollocks have you been?”

  A crew-cut student with a megaphone and a giant clipboard was barking instructions from the bank.

  “Sorry,” Halcyon cried with a hint of desperation. “We’ve lost our coach. We don’t know where to go.”

  “If you don’t hurry up, I’ll tell you where to go.” He flipped his green scarf around his neck. “Now hurry down to the bicycle bridge and spin your boat around. Your number’s almost up.”

  At almost eleven o’clock in the morning three dozen novice boats were gathered in the narrowest part of the Cam for the start of the annual Fairbairns Race, the first of a series of competitions that marked Rowing Week of Michaelmas Term. The Fairbairns
was designed as an endurance test for novice rowers, with boats taking off one after the other and rowing the complete length of the practice stretch in a timed race that usually takes the winners about fifteen minutes. It would be followed several days later by the Clare Regatta, a head-to-head elimination tournament to crown a novice champion. The most famous competition of all, the bumps, in which boats line up in a single file several lengths apart and try to catch the crew ahead while eluding the one behind, would not take place until Lent and Easter terms. For the Fairbairns, starting times for each boat were determined by the finishing times of the same boat in the previous year. The Clare Gentlemen’s Second Novice Boat was starting ninth out of sixty-four.

  “Buckle down, lads,” said Max the Stroke. “This is our day.”

  “I have a question,” said Charlie Chaplin from the bow. “What do we do if we catch a crab?”

  “Don’t think about it,” said Goofy the Redhead. “If you don’t think about it, it won’t happen.”

  “But it might,” he insisted.

  “Peter would have told us if he were worried,” said Max.

  “But Peter’s not here.”

  “Okay, Clare, take the chain. Madame, raise your hand when you’re ready.”

  “Now, boys,” Halcyon scolded. “Settle down. You know what to do.”

  “Be stylish,” Max urged. “And mean!”

  Pushing off from the bank with our starboard oars, we wobbled bow-and-stroke toward the middle of the Cam. Halcyon grabbed the garden chain that was stretched across the river at the starting line and positioned the boat pointing toward the first curve where the river banked to the left.

  “All eight,” said Halcyon in her formal tone. “At front stops.”

  We eased forward on our slides, bringing our knees to touch our chins, stretching forward our arms, and arching our backs with near Gothic symmetry. In Clare tradition each of us was wearing skimpy black shorts, a black T-shirt, and a slinky gold tank top, or singlet.

  “Ready, boys,” she called again. “Square your blades.”