by Bruce Feiler
“Yeah,” said Susanna. “I was really impressed. You could’ve almost been English.” She brushed back her hair and straightened her glasses. For the first time since I had known her, I detected a slight northern accent.
“But you forgot the most important point,” added Rana. “Do you remember that part where you said Americans have choices—about ice cream, or weather, or toast? You missed the best thing about America: you have a choice about class.” He put his arm around Susanna. “In India we don’t have that choice. Our lives—even our families—are all arranged.”
“So what are you going to do?” I turned toward Susanna.
“Well, the prince will go home and rejoin his family, and I—” She kissed him on the cheek. “I’m going to join the army.”
“The army!?” I gasped.
“Why not?” she retorted. “I think it sounds rather exciting. And besides, at least one of us has to find out the true meaning of international relations.”
In the cellars, dancing to Wolly and the New Cranes (“A heady mix of jazz, folk, and pop”), we bumped into Cyprian and his date, Isadora. After several songs Isadora split a seam, and she and Fuchsia excused themselves to seek out the seamstress in A Entryway. We sat down to wait.
“So how did you meet her?” I asked Cyprian. His ponytail was tucked inside his DJ. His red tie was store-tied.
“Well, you know, ever since Sophie left me in March, my blood’s been boiling. I met Isadora at a classics party. I knew right away she was the right girl. She was Greek, and she had brown hair, brown eyes, and a big nose. I have a history of women with big noses. And besides, she was a Pisces.”
“You could tell?”
“I guessed. I told her she was a four-one.”
“What’s that?”
He let out a sigh. “If you take out the X and divide the remaining letters of the alphabet into a five-by-five grid, the first column of the fourth row is a P. When she told me she was a Pisces, I told her I had guessed.”
“She must be the right one for you,” I said. “Anybody who would fall for that line must be pretty desperate.”
“Very funny. Anyway, just listen to me. I’ve only known this girl for two weeks and already I’m saying I’m prepared to spend the rest of my life with her. It’s a bit hubristic.”
“It doesn’t have to take long,” I suggested.
“I knew after the first hour. Of course, this is the time when I’m supposed to be meeting the love of my life.”
“According to whom?”
“My clairvoyant.”
“Your what?”
“I went to see a clairvoyant several years ago after I broke up with my girlfriend. She knew many things about my life, like the fact that I love music. She made me write ‘I will have more confidence’ on a piece of paper five hundred times. She told me my life would undergo a dramatic change around this time.”
“I can leave Cambridge now,” I said. “I’ve heard it all.”
Isadora and Fuchsia appeared on the stairs and started toward our table. Cyprian stared at them.
“So this is the one,” I said.
“This is the one.”
“I’m happy for you. It has a certain classical air.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“And will she follow you if you go somewhere else to teach?”
“I’ll follow her,” he said.
“To Greece?” I asked.
He looked at me. “To heaven.”
Several minutes later, on the makeshift ballroom floor in Old Court, we finally met up with Terry.
“Don’t tell me,” he said, as I went over to introduce him to Fuchsia and allow him to fulfill the last of his famous three rules, “‘Dunlop.’”
“How did you know?” I said.
“I spoke with this fine young lady this afternoon.”
“When was that?”
Fuchsia stepped in. “I called about six to see if you were going to pick me up or if I should meet you at the restaurant.”
Terry perked up. “I told her I had taught you how to be an English gentleman and that of course you would pick her up.”
I dipped my head and accepted the sword tap on my shoulder.
“Yes, Mr. Feiler”—Terry glanced at my tasseled loafers—“you don’t have the right shoes yet, but at least you’re learning the manners. Now, Miss Dunlop”—he turned toward her and bowed—“shall we show our friend how to dance?” He stripped off his jacket, gave her his hand, and led her to waltz on the grass.
If the ball had ended there, in the wee hours of the morning, I—and many others—would have gone home refreshed, rejuvenated, and reawakened to the magical possibilities of Cambridge. The setting was magnificent. The music inspiring. The food anything but brown. “The ball is the highlight of the year,” Terry had gushed. “It’s Disneyland on the Cam.”
But the Ball didn’t end in the wee hours of the morning. It lasted until dawn, when all those left standing would gather in the garden for the “Survivors’ Photograph.” In the interim between midnight and morning, between “well enough” and “alone,” the party slowly came undone.
It began with a punt. Somewhere between the dance floor and the champagne bar we once again bumped into Simon. “Meet at the dock in half an hour,” he said. “We have a reservation.” After securing our last bowl of strawberries, we wandered down to the makeshift pier and waited with Simon and Lucy for our tour in a chauffered punt—the May Ball equivalent of a gondola ride.
When our time arrived, Simon and Lucy sat in the stern, while Fuchsia and I moved to the bow. A uniformed chauffeur with straw hat and silk sash climbed onto the steering platform and skillfully used the pole to propel us toward King’s. “At the top of the Gibbs building you will see a round window,” he said. “That’s a bathroom where E. M. Forster used to entertain young boys.” We headed for Queens’. “Next to that cloister is a room where Erasmus wrote love poetry for Henry VIII.” Fuchsia and I were following the tour, but Simon and Lucy were not: they were quarreling. In recent weeks they had been doing that more and more. Simon craved attention and demanded more time. Lucy needed space and started retreating. Their clashing needs finally came to a head on the night before Simon’s final exam, when Lucy walked into his rooms, shut the door, and announced that she was pregnant.
Simon froze. When he came into my rooms later that night, his face was as white as the fog in his eyes and his body was as still as a cartoon character who had just run over the edge of a cliff but had not yet succumbed to the inevitable fall. His whole year had been a struggle to stay unattached—first with his girlfriend in Tokyo, then his neighbor Triple K. But late in the year he had lost control—tripping first by falling in love, then falling even further by tripping up in bed. He took his exam the following morning but stayed indoors for most of May Week. And when, on the day before the ball, Lucy discovered she wasn’t pregnant, it didn’t seem to matter anymore. The relationship had caught its crab. The veil of youth was rent asunder.
“I want to punt,” Simon declared, after we had turned around and were heading back toward Clare.
“But you’re pissed,” Lucy protested.
“You’re right,” he agreed.
After persuading the chauffer to take a rest, Simon left his seat in the trough of the punt and assumed a position on the platform in the back. He rested his pint glass on the slick wooden surface and began to push us home. His course was wobbly, his legs unsteady, and Lucy only worsened the effect by continuing her verbal abuse.
“Be quiet,” he said. “I’m concentrating.”
“Grow up,” she said. “You’re like a child.”
Lucy turned abruptly with her last remark, pivoting from her seat in the belly of the punt and in the process knocking over his glass, thus spilling its contents all over the platform and propelling Simon, staring at Lucy, into a time-lapsed, back-first free fall directly into the arms of the Cam. Students come, students go, but the river never stops
telling time.
Next came the climb. Ian had been absent for most of the night. In our backings and forthings across the Bridge, we had not run into him even once. Simon’s descent into the river, however, finally brought us together at river’s edge and since the sun was just appearing over the trees, I suggested we climb onto the roof of Old Court for the sunrise. Ian declined, but gave us his key.
Fuchsia and I climbed the stairs of D Entryway, stepped across Ian’s overturned books, and crawled out his window onto the catwalk five stories above the ground. From that angle, King’s Chapel looked like a giant bread box with a lace bonnet on top. The river meandering through the Backs seemed even more calm than usual. As we admired the scene and drank a toast, we heard someone shouting at us.
“Bruce, Fuchsia…down here!”
It was Ian, who at that moment was using a rope to pull himself up the outside of the Grand Marquee in the Fellows’ Garden. The tent was at least twenty-five feet high and seventy-five feet long. When Ian reached the top, he balanced himself like a tightrope walker and brought his hands to his mouth.
“Louise!” he cried in the direction of Magdalene. “Louise, I worshiped you, I really did. You were all I ever wanted.”
The presence of a screaming suitor on top of the Grand Marquee was more than enough to attract the attention of the goons at Security Central. Several porters came rushing to the scene, several dozen students came pouring from the tent, and for all we know several hundred townspeople could at that moment have been telephoning the police to complain of fireworks past 11 P.M. Ian, meanwhile, seemed unconcerned. Like Simon, he had reached the end of a year-long struggle, in his case the battle between mind and body. In the Bacchae, the hardheaded king of Thebes succumbs to the lure of Dionysus and passion triumphs over reason. In real life, or at least at the Wylies, Ian and Louise had ventured off into the snogging zone. For a moment—arm in arm, face-to-face—he was in bliss. Caution had been tossed to the wind, passion appeared to triumph. But when the sun came up an hour later and she invited him back to her rooms, he declined. When she invited him to go to the Magdalene Ball, he said no. At the end of the year, the end of the pursuit, the kiss was all he wanted. Ian could not succumb to the cult of pleasure: the bodily act might corrupt his ideal. The pursuit itself proved to be more important than the pursued.
As the guards started shaking the rope of the tent, Ian turned toward us for a final bow. He peeled off his outer dinner jacket, tossed it onto the canvas, and slid like a child to the lip of the marquee and landed, like a cat, on his feet. Tragedy had been averted. The hero was restored.
Last came the dance. Fuchsia and I climbed down from the roof and walked toward the Fellows’ Garden. The ball was coming to an end; the Survivors’ Photograph was drawing nigh; but first we wanted one last waltz. All through the night the music had been diverse: from Anita Chakraborty (“The mistress of mellow music”) to the Brand New Heavies (“Giants of acid jazz”); from SPAM! (“The coolest a cappella crooning in town”) to Root Jackson’s Unfinished Business (“Talented purveyors of punk”); from Masquerade (“Hip-swinging African music”) to my favorite, Wolodomyr Dyszkant (“Laid-back Ukrainian entertainment”). The last band of the night on the Main Stage of the Ball was Haji Ahkba and the Funk Ambassadors (“We raise the curtain—they bring down the house!”).
Inside the marquee close to two hundred ball boys and girls were gathered in front of the illuminated stage. Some of the boys had discarded their DJs, many of the girls had ditched their high heels. But for the most part the guests bumping and grinding on the portable parquet floor were in remarkably natty condition. The members of the band, meanwhile—a short, fat, balding man with a mustache (alias Haji Ahkba?), three backup singers with flowing brunette hair, and an eight-piece eclectic electric rhythm section—could not have been less concerned with dignified appearances. With each song the main singer, Chubby Ahkba, would discard another article of clothing—first his lemon blazer, then his blueberry vest, next his flowery tie—until he reached a one-piece lycra suit. “Purge me of my sex!” he chanted. “Purge me of my love.”
After several more thrusts, when a student came to the stage and announced that the next song would be the last, Haji the Great disappeared behind a bank of amplifiers and emerged seconds later to a synthesized trumpet blare wearing nothing at all from head to toe except for a black leather G-string that clung for its life around his sizable waist and sprouted from its scanty frontal piece a five-foot, flexible green plastic tube with a smiling yellow foam-rubber head attached to its outer end. The crowd burst into a frenzy of hooliganic hoots and howls as Chubby (and Hairy) Haji Ahkba the Great grabbed hold of his squirming penile projection and began shaking it back and forth, singing:
“I like coffee;
I like tea;
I don’t like fucking
Pricks like me.”
The crowd could hardly contain itself, as the three backup singers in white unitards prostrated themselves on the ground as if genuflecting to a king. Haji Ahkba himself, clearly moved by this spontaneous display of reverence, started lifting his prop erect into the air and screaming, “Fuck Me! Love Me! Fuck Me! Love Me!” and urging the students to follow his lead and purge him of his sex. And so they did: at six o’clock on a misty mid-June morning, on the ninth day of May Week, several hundred of the brightest young minds of Great Britain, dressed in dinner jackets and wearing ball gowns, strutting necks tied like shoes or trussed with fake pearls, gathered alongside the banks of the Cam, underneath a giant white tent, and shouted at the tops of their potato-fed, lager-sogged, smoke-filled lungs, “Fuck Me! Love me! Fuck Me! Love Me! Purge me of my sex!” while stamping their feet, shaking their bums, and waving their arms high in the air in order to show any guard on patrol that they were still wearing their red hospital tags. Roll over, Christopher Robin; make way for the modern Cambridge rain dance.
“Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention? Please stop talking. Cross your arms in front of you, look directly at the camera, and, whatever you do, don’t move.”
Minutes later, as we gathered beneath the wide-angle lens in the last remaining patch of grass in the garden, I reflected for a moment on the evening’s activities. Like so much else at Cambridge, the ball had started out all elegance and smiles but over the course of the evening had degenerated into dissipation and debauchery. It was as if all the guests were Cinderellas who reverted to their darker selves when they stayed up past 11 P.M. Part of the debauchery, I’m sure, came from too much liquor; part from too little sleep. But most, I suspect, came from the character of the students themselves. At the end of my year in the Empire of the Mind, I was left with the overwhelming impression that Cambridge, for all its aged buildings and storied past, for all its rigorous exams and strict regulations, is still a world where the personalities of the students emerge through the tradition and exert themselves on the place.
In many ways, the personalities gathered before the camera that morning were a remarkably isolated lot. All through the ball, those inside were not allowed out (at least if they wanted to get back in), and those outside were not allowed in (at least if they wanted to stay). In that sense the ball was a telling metaphor for Cambridge, with the students locked in, the town locked out, and the two worlds connected only by the fireworks that were shot from inside the college but landed in the middle of town. Not long after the ball I learned a revealing story about that gap. Two centuries ago Cambridge students invented a special term to describe the townspeople—“snobs.” The swells, in those days, were kept in, the snobs were kept out. It was not until Cambridge graduate William Thackeray wrote the Book of Snobs in 1829 that the term snob came to mean a person of any social rank who displays vanity or vulgarity. Within a generation the term had been completely turned on its head and snob became an insult that people outside the university hurled at those within.
To my surprise, however, the true face of Cambridge is much less snobbish and much less uniform than
its exclusive image might suggest. Far from an exclusive upper-class resort, Cambridge, with its open admission, has become a sort of social melting pot for brainy postpubescents. In this sense the university is the worst kind of club: it is a club anybody can join. And because the members realize how fragile their status is, they spend a lot of money to uphold it. SHOW BALLS SELL OUT TO CREEPING CLASSLESSNESS, wrote The Guardian several days after the end of May Week. “The guests are all just snobbish automatons living out a pose.” The trouble, said one old boy in the article, “is that balls are just so bourgeois. Not enough nobs; too much riff-raff. The people that really matter are all having parties at the Little Chef [the English equivalent of Howard Johnson’s].”
Perhaps the greatest irony of all is that while Cambridge traditionalists complain that their beloved institution drifts into classlessness (read: bourgeois hell), those outside still complain that the institution embodies class-based exclusion (read: aristocratic heaven). While those inside know the party is over, the rest of the world still looks at Cambridge and sees the privileges of the past. To these people Cambridge students will always be “the elite,” “the snobs,” or simply “them.” “They are rich, complacent, self-loving, self-regarding, self-righteous, phoney, half-baked, politically immature, neurotic, evil-minded little shits,” says the main character in David Hare’s Teeth ’n’ Smiles, a musical about an eccentric band (not unlike Haji Ahkba and the Funk Ambassadors) that is invited to play at a Cambridge May Ball. “Expect nothing and you will not be disappointed.”
“Are you ready?” called the photographer, and the students all posed, teeth and smiles. “Three, two, one…”
“Cheers!”
After the Survivors’ Photograph, I walked arm-in-arm with Fuchsia back to Magdalene and said good night, with a hug, at the door. Amid all the decadence and depravity, ours had been a fairy-tale romance—three days, two nights, one ball; no snogging, no shagging, no fairy godmother; just rapturous compatibility. I didn’t even know her sign. With my DJ smelling equally of Cam water and strawberry juice, I headed back through town. Bicycle bells and traffic whistles filled the early morning air. I wandered past St. John’s, erecting last-minute tents, and strolled past Trinity, pulling down its marquees. As I walked into Clare and across the Bridge, I noticed an object in the champagne-soaked grass behind the sign NO MOORING ON THE BANKS. Curious, I stepped into the garden, reached under a napkin, and discovered a memento that somebody had left as they hastily fled the ball and returned to earth: a single black velvet high-heeled shoe.