by Bruce Feiler
Since the Crew Meal my relationship with Halcyon had rapidly deteriorated. Gone was the sense of shared exploration. Gone was the feeling of joint espionage. In their place was a new mood of tension. For my part, I went out of my way to avoid being too friendly, sneaking by her door when I came home at night, dashing by her room when I went to the bath. Halcyon, meanwhile, became even more friendly, bringing me gifts, baking me cookies, and sliding messages under my door just moments after I had gone tiptoeing past her room. With doors opening and closing, people coming and going, the atmosphere seemed like a British sex farce, except we weren’t British, we hadn’t had sex, and neither of us could act. At one point, as the farce began slipping toward drama, Halcyon even went to see Ian to get some direction from him. No subtle thespian himself, Ian managed to throw oil on a burning house by giving her a copy of Ovid’s Art of Love and drawing her attention to one line: “Love is a kind of warfare; every lover is a warrior.”
“That wasn’t Susanna’s umbrella,” I said to her. “It was Ian’s. I was in his room late that night and it started to rain.”
“Do you know what it’s like?” she said. “Do you know what you do to me, walking in and out of your room, running up and down the stairs?”
“Halcyon,” I said. “You have to believe me. I’m not trying to hurt you. It’s just…” What followed was one of those horrible impromptu speeches, the equivalent of a “Dear John” chain letter, which everyone hates when they receive, but which no one can resist passing on. Several months later, after I had inelegantly passed on that letter myself, Simon told me a story that Halcyon had told him. The previous year, following an incident in which her fiancé in Hong Kong broke off their engagement, Halcyon became extremely distraught. To recover she retreated to an aunt’s home in Birmingham where she stayed for a year before coming to Cambridge. When I heard that story, I felt I finally understood what had happened between us; that night I still did not.
She started to cry. She leaned her head against my chest and relaxed her fists into open palms. Then just as suddenly as before, she stood up and took a step back.
“Where are you going?” she demanded.
“When?” I asked.
“Over break.”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Okay,” I said. “Spain.”
“With whom?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“With whom?”
“Why does it matter?”
“Is there somebody else?”
I stood on the floor in my bare feet. Halcyon stood just inches away. I realized at that moment that I had been horribly wrong about college life. When I left the “real world” and returned to school, I looked at the university as an endless river of friends and encounters I would row, row, row myself through, gently as a stream. The beauty of Cambridge only heightened this expectation. “It’s so perfect,” I heard a tourist exclaim from the Clare Bridge. “The river, the grass, the trees, and the sky…” But once on that river, I found I couldn’t always maintain control. I could pull my weight and feel my way, but I couldn’t control the people around me so that we all pulled together, in the same way. I couldn’t control the river within us that flows in different directions. The real myth of Cambridge, I realized at that moment, is that life is but a dream.
“Yes,” I said. “There’s somebody else.”
She took a step back.
“I knew it,” she whispered. “I knew it all along. I can’t stand this. I have to get out of here.”
“Get out of here?” I said. “What are you saying?”
“Don’t stop me,” she said. “I know what to do. If you can go away without me, then I can go away without you.”
She lifted her chin and pulled open my door.
“When you come back from your trip,” she said, “I won’t be here to get in your way.”
“You’re not in my way,” I said.
“Not anymore.”
Halcyon walked across the hall and into her darkened room. I watched for a moment without saying a word and then lay back onto my bed, letting the wind cling to my body and leaving my door open onto the hall.
LENT TERM
IX
DATING
The Language of Love
Someone is always looking into the river near Waterloo Bridge; a couple will stand there talking for half an hour on a fine afternoon;…sometimes the river is opulent purple, sometimes mud-coloured, sometimes sparkling blue like the sea.
—Virginia Woolf
The Voyage Out, 1915
The road was a glacier, snowed by the sky. The glacier was slippery, swamped by the sludge. From the Thames to the fens, all along the M-11, cars were splayed in an awkward sprawl like fruit flies caught in a stream of glue. Shivering, I stood in the eye of the maelstrom at Knightsbridge, craning at occupied black taxicabs and looking forward to thawing out on the afternoon train from Liverpool Street Station. I had come to London by myself the weekend before term to meet a friend, see a show, and enjoy a last tasty dinner before the abstinence of spice that would return with the advent of Lent. All around me the city was tense. Terrorists from the North had set off a bomb, closing down the Underground for an anxious rush hour. The prime minister had stepped out of No. 10, calling the act a cowardly deed and adding that the Crisis in the East would not be cleared up without a fight. The climate was moving from bad to worse, and the worse it got the colder it seemed.
“Where’re you going?” said the driver of my black snowmobile as I waded through the knee-high drift and plunged into his cab.
“Liverpool Street Station.”
“Have you been there before?”
“I was there yesterday.”
“Sorry,” he said, turning back to look at me, “I thought for a moment you were a Yank.”
“Actually,” I said, “I am a Yank, except I was born in the South.”
He peered into his rearview mirror with an admiring snicker.
“Nicely done,” he remarked.
“Do you think so?” I said. “I’m trying to learn British wit.”
As the taxi eased through the maze of tiny streets, the driver, a young man with a stud earring, began asking me about England, about America, and even about what he should buy his wife for her birthday. In return, I asked him about London.
“I have this theory that Waterloo Bridge is the most romantic place in London,” I said. “What do you think?”
“Well,” he said. “There’re also bridges at Battersea and Chelsea. On the Albert Bridge they have a sign that was written way back for the troops. It says, PLEASE BREAK STEP WHEN CROSSING BRIDGE. Recently, however, someone crossed out STEP and wrote the word WIND.”
“That doesn’t sound very romantic,” I said.
“What’s all this stuff about romance? Are you writing a poem or something? If you ask me, a bridge is just one easy way of getting from here to there without getting wet.”
“I think they can be very romantic,” I said. “Perhaps you should take your wife.”
“I don’t think she’d go for it,” he said. “She prefers the beach.”
“Maybe you should bring her up to where I live.”
“Where’s that?” he asked.
“Cambridge.”
“Aha,” he said. “That explains it. You lot are meant to be poetic up there. Down where I come from, we’re much more humble. If you ask me, the most romantic places in London are not the bridges but the roads. We’ve got top-notch motorways in England, pal, always flat and smooth. They may not have many poems written about them, but they’re real nice on the tyres.”
Arriving at the station, I paid the driver my fare and sent greetings to his wife. Heading through the snow-drenched corridors, I sloshed down the stairs, stepped onto the platform, and slipped through the doors of the 5:58 to Cambridge. I took off my coat, settled into my place, and had just begun to stretch my feet toward the open seat in front w
hen the voice of the conductor burst into the air with a startling familiarity:
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard. I regret to inform you that due to weather conditions beyond our control I must ask you all to alight….”
Ours was indeed a poetic romance.
In the weeks since our first kiss on Waterloo Bridge, Rachel and I had begun the exhilarating, yet awkward process of peeling off our protective skins and offering them to each other. In an endless stream of storybook encounters, we walked through ever-green parks in London as she told me about her first boyfriend, who sent her notes in Latin class. We watched the guards at Buckingham Palace as I told her about my first kiss in eighth grade while on a date to the circus. We walked and talked, retelling stories oft told before and forever reliving our trip to “Wales” until we transformed it into myth.
Yet rarely did we walk at home. Oxford and Cambridge may be linked by tradition, but they are hardly connected by public transportation. Since all roads in England lead literally to London, the only effective way to travel the sixty miles between Oxford and Cambridge is to take a train to London, switch stations by Tube, and take another out again. The trip takes three hours. Barring that, the only alternative is to board a coach that crisscrosses many M-motorways on a series of smaller A-level roads that are neither flat nor smooth. That trip takes four hours. Fed up with this romantic cul-de-sac, we flew to Spain at the end of Michaelmas Term and celebrated the New Year with a champagne brunch of Seville oranges, prune yogurt, and elephant-ear danish all served in bed on a stolen road sign. It was, in a word, romantic, poetic, illicit, ecstatic. It was also extremely traumatic.
Despite the magnitude of love to most university students, romance and scholarship would seem to require conflicting faculties. The first—romance—demands fealty to the heart, while the second—scholarship—loyalty to the mind. The problem is that students learn how to train their minds but are left on their own with matters of the heart. I, for example, had spent much more of my life in school than in love and, as a result, was much better at doing homework than conducting romance. Not everyone I knew had the same problem. Simon, for his part, reacted to the freedom of college life by indulging in a myriad of sexual fantasies he imagined as romance. Ian, on the other hand, responded to the wealth of women on campus by “falling in love” several times a day and following nameless Valentines around town and dreaming of starry-eyed romances that would never see the light of day.
As far as I could tell, my feelings on the subject seemed to fall somewhere between my two public school friends, who despite their opposite approaches were equally obsessed with the same primal quest. I was too romantic to be satisfied with an endless stream of sexual adventures and too analytical to believe that love could happen twice a day in the glint of an eye or the curl of a hair that triggered feelings closer to lust than spiritual admiration. My beliefs, when uttered out loud, seemed strident at best, self-serving at worst, and riddled with enough inconsistencies to be morally indefensible. In my defense, they had led me through the laboratory of love with most of my values intact. Yet they also had left me alone, with no brothel fines to my name. Thus, when I met Rachel near the end of first term and felt in one evening the twin blows of admiration and desire, I shut my mind down to academic skepticism and gave myself up to the promise of romance.
We wrote letters.
Short of port, the love letter seems to be the ultimate English aphrodisiac: why muck up in person what you can say better, and with more muse, in the mail? The post is notorious in Britain, often reflecting in the range of passion it incites both the pride and shame of the nation. On one side nothing in the country, with the exception of the weather, is the butt of more jokes. On the night I met Rachel, for example, I told her about my experience sending a letter to the United States by a special, “express” service. After two months my letter had yet to arrive. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “Don’t you know that ‘express’ service only means they lose your letter faster?”
On the other side, the mail in Britain is a marvel of efficiency, on a par with what I witnessed in Japan. Post is delivered twice a day during the week and once on Saturday mornings. Letters posted late Tuesday in London, Oxford, or even Edinburgh, regularly arrive in Cambridge by Wednesday afternoon. This system enabled Rachel and me to maintain an almost daily correspondence that was better than that I shared with many of my friends in Cambridge, who, though they lived less than one mile away, had no telephones in their rooms, no free time, and no inclination to walk through the rain, climb up the stairs, and drop by my rooms for an unannounced chat, only to find me away. (The university’s internal mail network, like its internal telephone service, takes three times as long as the national system.) Finally, to someone who had dreamed about those passages in the great Russian novels where lovers could correspond furtively through the daily post and arrange a secret rendezvous on an hour’s notice, the postcards that came from Oxford every day only heightened my sense of romantic escape.
The cards, like my fantasies, were mostly plagiarized.
As foreign students, Rachel and I were both allowed to remain in our bed-sitting rooms after the British undergraduates went down in December until the time they would come up in January. In between our fleeting meetings I stayed home and read turgid textbooks on international law, while Rachel holed herself up in Oxford and read, underlined, reread, and notated the collected works of Virginia Woolf. Her daily notes to me were taken directly from English evenings past that still at century’s end had the ability to enliven the walls of my rooms.
From The Voyage Out:
Did love begin that way, with the wish to go on talking?
And the next day, from the same place:
She wished to kiss him. But all the time she went on spinning out words.
And the day after, the same:
During the two or three weeks which had passed since their walk, half a dozen notes from him had accumulated in her drawer. She would read them, and spend the whole morning in a daze of happiness.
The cards had paintings from Michelangelo, Leonardo, Toulouse-Lautrec, and one from Monet of a river in the morning, which prompted Rachel to write on the top, “Monet in Cambridge? Oxford? On Waterloo Bridge? Funny how landscapes in the fog all tend to look vaguely reminiscent of one another!”
From The Waves:
When we sit close together, we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an insubstantial territory.
From Jacob’s Room:
True, the words were inaudible. It was the intimacy, a sort of spiritual suppleness, when mind prints upon mind indelibly.
And occasionally from the inspiration of these cards, I might uncover an echo of Rachel in a passage from The Waves:
Now let me try, before we rise, to fix the moment in one effort of supreme endeavor. This shall endure. From discord, from hatred my shattered mind is pieced together by some sudden perception. I take the trees, the clouds, to be witnesses of my complete integration. Here on this ring of grass we have sat together, bound by the tremendous power of some inner compulsion…[All of this] hints at some other order, and better, which makes a reason everlasting. This I see for a second, and shall try to fix in words, to forge in a ring of steel: It is you I need; for it is you who inspires poetry.
Ours was indeed a poetic romance, it was words, and pictures, and, as she signed her name at the bottom of the cards, “Love, Love, Love.”
Simon, for his part, was more prosaic.
“Come in, old man, I’m in trouble. Serious trouble.”
I arrived at his door at close to midnight on Sunday night, after waiting for several hours in a crowded Liverpool Street Station and riding even longer on the only line out of London that British Rail had managed to clear. Simon had come from Tokyo the previous day before the snow had hit. His blue jeans, baggy sweaters, and green striped boxer shorts were already strewn about his room. Several new snapshots of his moth
er and father were pinned on the bulletin board the college hung from our ceilings to ensure we did not tape posters on the walls. A half-empty bottle of Bell’s whisky, an overflowing ashtray, and an open jar of crusty lemon curd (the citron equivalent of peanut butter) lay open on the squat table, where my wet Top-Siders and Simon’s suede brogues settled themselves, tête-à-tête.
“Well,” I said, “start at the top. Are we expecting a visitor?”
“The short answer is, no.”
“What’s the long answer?”
On his first day back in Tokyo, Simon met Emi. They went to a bar in Roppongi, had a few drinks, and he advised her that he thought a February visit would not be such a good idea. She should think about her future, he said. Cambridge was no place for a young girl who did not have a job or a place in school. She listened very carefully, he said, and then she started crying. Simon felt horribly guilty. “After a few more beers,” he said, “we went back to my parents’ flat and had what could only be described as a ‘bad fuck.’”
“What happened?”
“I wish I knew, but it was the first time I couldn’t…you know. I was really worried. Maybe I’m becoming old like you.”
With the relationship on the rocks, they went out two more times after that, and then on his final night in Tokyo she spent the night in his room and he redeemed himself. In the morning his father knocked on his door and found that it was locked. “Simon,” he said, “what’s going on in there? We’re going to be late.” Moving quickly, he snuck Emi out the door, bid her goodbye, then headed off to the airport with his father, who once again advised his son to have multitudinous affairs.
“So what are you going to do?” I said.
“A friend of mine told me that you spend your second term at Cambridge shedding the friends you made during the first. I don’t have a philosophy about these things. I came back to Kiet Khiem and basically told it like it wasn’t. We went out last night with a couple of other people in college and were laying around my room late at night playing spin the bottle. Triple K was lying between my legs, with her head on my crotch, and this girl I didn’t know, Lucy, was sticking her hand down my trousers—just far enough to get a response from me, but not far enough to get a reaction from Triple K.”