Looking for Class

by Bruce Feiler

  “So let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re telling me if I stop shaving, stop cutting my hair, start smoking, and start wearing an earring, that I can become somebody.”

  “With a little more practice,” said Lucy.

  “And if I do this,” I said, “being too aristo is bad.”

  “Horrid,” said Jo.

  “And wearing leather is good,” I repeated.

  “Divine,” said Hillary.

  “But that doesn’t sound like a somebody,” I said. “That sounds like a thug. If I leave this place and go out into the world, everybody will think I’m a truck driver.”

  “That won’t happen,” Lucy assured me. “Once you’re a somebody, everybody sticks together.”

  “I see. A somebody without everybody becomes nobody.”

  “That’s right.”

  Hillary got up to go to the bathroom, which she called a bog. The other two immediately rushed to accompany her. As soon as they had disappeared, the curious boys descended on me. “How do you do it?” they wanted to know. “Why are they talking to you?” The irony of the entire escapade quickly became apparent. In order to become somebody at Cambridge, I didn’t have to change my clothes and dress down. I didn’t have to affect an accent and speak up. All I had to do was be myself and be the object of somebody’s attention. All of which goes to prove that social standing in Cambridge is much more hollow than it first appears: not only does somebody separated from everybody quickly become nobody, but, even worse, nobody surrounded by everybody just as quickly becomes somebody.

  “Desperately seeking somebody,” I announced when the Posse had returned from the loo. “The package tour to Memorial Court will be leaving momentarily.”

  “Bruce, you can’t say that,” Ian muttered. “You can’t announce that you’re leaving alone and then take the chance that they’ll let you go.”

  A somebody, he said, never exits alone, but always waits for everybody else. For a somebody, the correct response to “I’m leaving” is “Me too.” “Are you going?” is best answered, “Are you?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said, turning toward the stairs. “This body is ready for bed.”

  “Wait,” one of the Posse shouted, or was it all three? “We’ll go with you.”

  They stood, linked their arms together, and marched toward me like a giant blond Pac-Man, sucking me into the bonus zone of somebody-land—a place where lights sparkle like wine and wits twinkle like stars, and where one tries to postpone the inevitable dimming before the fickle arbiters of class parcel out status to some other body in order to avoid flickering away themselves into the penumbra of nobody’s business.

  XX

  WALTZING

  A Ball

  PEYOTE: Wot is this place, anyway?

  ARTHUR: You are in what scientists now know

  to be a black hole. Floating free, an airless,

  lightless, dayless, nightless time-lock,

  a cosmic accident called a Cambridge

  College Ball.

  —David Hare

  Teeth ‘n’ Smiles, 1969

  I woke up at noon—a somebody with no date. I had trod many paths in the previous months in search of the perfect fit, but the other shoe always seemed to drop instead of slipping on. Hillary, my fickle first-year fling, was tending bar at the ball and didn’t need an escort; Susanna, my rowing pal, was going with a prince. As if my predicament was not bad enough, my mother had called the previous night to say I’d have more fun with a date. But at this late date, without a godmother, I feared I’d be dancing on no toes that night and feeling like a heel.

  “Remember the Alamo!” Terry said, although he didn’t seem to know what it meant. “Do it for the red, white, and blue!”

  So that afternoon, with my thesis asleep in my laptop computer and the Ball Committee scurrying around the gardens wielding walkie-talkies and rainproof tape, I crossed the Clare Bridge and went into town for one last blind search for a date.

  I headed for Magdalene.

  “Excuse me,” I said to the porter behind the counter. “I’m looking for a woman named Fuchsia.”

  “Fuchsia Dunlop?” said the man between the arms of his handlebar mustache.

  “Yes, that must be the one.”

  “Go across the road,” he said, “down to the river, up the stairs, and to the left.”

  Following his orders, I crossed the road, walked to the river, climbed up the stairs, and turned to the left, where I knocked on the oak nameplate: F. C. DUNLOP.

  “Won’t you come in. I’m sorry for the mess. Ignore the paté on the ceiling.”

  Fuchsia Dunlop opened the door of her top-floor rooms, pulled her robe around her shoulders, and, in a moment, invited me in. The previous Friday, at Ian’s insistence, I had gone with him to Louise’s for a party of the Belladonnas—Magdalene’s first women’s drinking society. While Ian tagged around after Louise, I sat on the floor drinking Indian beer and eating chicken curry with a group of charter “donnas.” The following day I met the same group at Emmanuel, the day after we met in Caius, and in the process we had achieved a curious kind of Cambridge intimacy: we had become “May Week friends.”

  May Week is the perfect microcosm for the anthropology of Cambridge. It brings outs and exaggerates many of the latent trends—interpersonal, international, and interclass—lurking just beneath the surface of the university. For some May Week symbolizes love and romance. For others it epitomizes freedom and debauchery. But for an outsider it also typifies the British love of euphemism and nostalgia, for in deference to the national penchant for obfuscation, May Week isn’t one week but two; and in accordance with the tradition of longing for things past, May Week doesn’t fall in May but in June.

  In the course of the first seven days of May Week, the party-goer has a veritable arklike menagerie of societies whose parties he can attend. There are reptiles (Gators) and amphibians (Tadpoles); marsupials (Roos) and arachnids (Scorpions); carnivores (Minks) and herbivores (Hippos); even an assortment of hypothetical beasts (Thunderbirds, Griffins, and Unicorns). Some of these groups require blazers for admittance, others require money, but most just require the guest to PBASomething, usually PBAB or PBABSpWW. I was even invited to one event that said PBA——, and the——had been filled with “Babe.”

  At each of the parties I attended, usually having brought or been brought by Ian, the talk was always the same: “I got so pissed at the last party…. I’m going to get pissed even worse at the next…. How many balls are you going to crash?” But in the end, when all was said and drunk, our purpose was not to get pissed or sharked, but to get a date. Ian, of course, had his classical quest and could only think of Belladonna Louise. (At the Wylies, an outdoor party where every guest brings a bottle of vodka that is then mixed with a hint of grapefruit juice and served from a watering can, the two of them were actually seen going toward a specially designated “snogging zone.”) I, however, was much freer, and by the end of the main weekend of May Week I had grown especially close to the leader of the Belladonnas, who was taller than the rest of the group, with reams of curly brown hair and large Olive Oyl eyes. By the morning of the Clare Ball, I had learned her “Christian” name (Fuchsia), her subject (English), and her future plans (becoming a chef); but I hadn’t learned the one piece of information that constitutes intimacy in collegiate terms—her surname. Once again I was saved by the porter.

  Stepping inside Fuchsia’s spacious rooms, I immediately noticed the clothes on the floor and the foie gras on the ceiling (from a party, she explained), but—more important—I also noticed no photographs of boyfriends on the walls. We started chatting—about the weekend, about exams, about Cambridge after classes. It was a real conversation—no NARGy pauses (“Oh…that’s strange”), no Yah-like gasps (“Really!? How brill”), and no references at any time in the ensuing hour about how drunk we had been on the previous day, how drunk we would be on the following night, or how many balls we would crash. Finally, when
the conversation did turn to balls, I took my mug by the handle, apologized in advance for my two left feet, and invited her to go with me that night to the Clare May Ball.

  She said yes.

  I smiled, and, avoiding the conspicuous male temptation to turn instantly and go away, I continued the conversation for a moment before mentioning the time, finishing my tea, and floating back to Clare. It was 4:30 P.M.

  “Well, Terry,” I said when I arrived back home. “If there is an award for the last person to get a date, I think I might have won it.”

  “Congratulations, ol’ boy. I knew you could do it. What’s the lucky girl’s name?”

  “Fuchsia,” I said. “I’ve known her for less than a week, but she really has the right attitude.”

  “I should say so,” he said. “Anybody who’d accept a date on the day of the ball must be what we call a free spirit. Anyway, as you Americans say, I hope you have a ball.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen, please step up to the registration table and hand your tickets to the hostess. Remember, there will be no readmittance to the ball.”

  May balls are the highlight of the Cambridge year and the climax of May Week. Since most colleges sponsor separate balls, a friendly rivalry has emerged among the committees to see who can come up with the most lavish food and the most outlandish entertainment. With tickets averaging 150 pounds a pair, the committees have close to a quarter of a million dollars to splurge on their conspicuous, all-night affairs. Some colleges, like St. John’s, opt for carnival fare, hiring merry-go-rounds and Ferris wheels to fill their Gothic quads. Others, like Trinity, choose Euro-chic, assembling casino tables and faux nightclubs beneath their medieval spires. But Clare, for its part, prefers fairy-tale romance—a preference that isn’t always realized.

  My evening started at six, when Simon (my wicked stepbrother) came to my rooms in undershorts and starched shirt to have me bow his tie. He was followed soon after by Ian, who was wearing not one but two DJs—the inner one black, the outer one white—and who also needed his one tie bowed. Lucy appeared not long after that looking for someone to hem her dress, but she wisely avoided asking me: sewing is nothing like tying a shoe.

  At seven we set off for the night: Simon and Lucy; Ian, still dateless; and I, in self-bowed black tie, who broke off briefly to pick up my date, who had managed to dress herself in a hand-sewn purple gown. The five of us reassembled at a French restaurant inexplicably called Michel’s of Oxford (marketing geniuses, those Brits), the kind of place where the boys order in French to impress their dates and the waitresses don’t understand. “Filet d’agneau avec sauce anglaise?” “Oh, brown meat with brown sauce.” After dinner we joined the soggy stream of students heading to one of the three balls being held that night.

  “I heard that in the old days people from the town used to come out during May Week to admire the gowns,” I said.

  “These days they just complain about the noise,” said Ian. “Last year some local residents objected that the colleges were shooting off fireworks in the middle of the night, so the county council passed a resolution saying no fireworks after eleven.”

  When we arrived at Clare, a short line of guests was gathered outside Old Court, where the normally somber entrance to college had been decorated like a florist’s fantasy. A pink and white tent stretched out from the gate, with branches of pine hanging from its brim and garlands of flowers entwined around its poles. A wooden swing hung from a nearby plum tree, and a giant corsage of pastel-colored carnations was pinned on the gate directly over the sign that said WELCOME TO CLARE COLLEGE: NO DOGS, STROLLERS, BICYCLES, OR PICNICS.

  Stepping into the entryway, we were met by a platoon of security officials. Two people took our tickets, checked them with a master list, asked us to sign our names on the back, compared them with our personal identification, stamped them with a rubber rose, then returned them with a warning not to misplace them as porters would be circulating throughout the evening and asking us for proof of entrance. Once through with the ticketing agents, we took two steps forward, where we were met by several more guards, who ordered us to raise our arms like surrendering soldiers. To the right, one guard forced into our hands a packet containing the program, meal plan, floor plan, and entertainment schedule, while to the left another person wrapped red plastic hospital identification bracelets around our wrists and clipped off the excess tails. The entire regimen took almost ten minutes and was far more rigorous than any airport security inspection to which I had ever been subjected. The only things missing from this totalitarian routine were a strip search and an X-ray machine: “I gotta dance. Know what I mean?” In Cambridge one need not PBAB to a ball, but one does need to PBA-Passport, -Visa, and -Immunization Card.

  “Matthew Sargaison, Gundula Azeez, John Breknell, and Damian Thantrey welcome you to the Clare May Ball,” said our six-page Program Guide, “by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Clare College.”

  Cambridge, at its worst, is dreary and grey—not the polished grey of marble columns, nor the stately grey of war monuments, but the gloomy grey of wizened buildings with splotches of age and wrinkles of time splattered across their once seamless façades. Cambridge, at its best, is lively and green—not the artificial green of Putt-Putt felt, nor the murky green of salted seawater, but the brilliant green of crew-cut lawns bedecked with an afternoon croquet game or the hand-holding naps of puppy lovers sprawled along the riverbank. But Cambridge on ball night is neither of these. It is red and blue splashed against college walls, bathing the stones with spots of color and reaching toward heaven with fingers of light. It is white marquees in every court, with yellow balloons and pink festoons arching and stretching from every hip joint. It is, in short, a rainbow of fantasies, spanning the void between rain and shine, night and day, final exams and unemployment.

  Once inside Old Court, Fuchsia and I quickly became separated from the rest of our crew. With so many choices among food and drink, magic shows and music acts, we felt like Hansel and Gretel let loose in a giant gingerbread house with no need to get written permission from the Witch to indulge in any illicit behavior or stay up past 2 A.M. We decided to start at the entrance and make our way through the venues. First, we needed a drink.

  Throughout the evening, you will find cocktails in Old Court, Bucks Fizz and Kir Royale on the Clare Bridge, Champagne in the Master’s Garden and free beer and lager in the Cellars’ Bar.

  Slightly intimidated by all this American-style choice, we stepped up to the first table we saw and grabbed two drinks that looked as if they could have been served at Nigel’s Yah Who’s Who. They were green and sweet, with a yellow parasol, and on first ingestion tasted like a mixture of tropical rum, clotted cream, and pureed lime jelly beans.

  With drinks in hand, we started walking. Each of the four plots of grass in Old Court was covered with a giant canopy: one for cocktails, another for snacks, a third for the eighteen-piece Umbrella Big Band, and the last for the waltzing guests. Further afield, each of the function rooms was set aside for a different program: comedians in the Latimer Room, a foot masseuse in the MCR, and even a “Beauty and Image Analyst” in the Thirkill Room. By the time we arrived in the Fellows’ Garden, close to half an hour later, we were ready to eat again.

  Strawberries and cream are available in the Master’s Garden. Cakes, croissants, filled bagels and candy floss [the local Freudian slip-up term for cotton candy] are served in Old Court whilst in the Fellows’ Garden, salads, crepes, barbecue, spring rolls and fruit are available. Hot soup will be served in Hall from midnight.

  We opted for salads, stepped up to a cart, and in an instant were given heaping plates with three different dishes—potato, pasta, and fruit salad, each one more bountiful and zestful than anything theretofore seen in Clare College that year. As we ate and chatted and waited in line to have our portrait taken (“Representative of the Coe Colour Centre will be in the Garden throughout the evening to photograph couples”), we suddenly noticed that dang
ling above our heads like manna from heaven were dozens upon dozens of chocolate-covered doughnuts. A May Ball, we calculated, costs not only 150 pounds but 15,000 calories as well.

  Once we had thoroughly digested the surroundings and viewed the fireworks at 11 P.M., the night began to lose its shape and dissolve into a seemingly endless stream of exotic drinks, candied snacks, trumpet blares, and vaudeville acts. Attending the ball was like stepping into the otherworldly paradise of one of those snowy plastic souvenirs—just when you get bored with one scene, move to another pavilion, give the toy a shake, and the party is instantly reborn in a musical flurry and sugary high. As if to emphasize this point, the next several hours were a blizzard of encounters.

  In the sunken garden, bobbing at doughnuts, we came upon Susanna, now a graduand—someone who has officially passed her finals but not yet graduated. After nearly two years with Peter de Clare—enduring his abuse, hiding her background, falling from his sink—Susanna had finally ended their affair and in his place had started dating Rana, the Indian prince from Nigel’s Yah-fest.

  “Nice speech at the Union,” Rana said to me as he took a sip of Kir Royale. He was dressed in a formal olive suit with a high Nehru collar. His mustache glistened with drops of champagne.