The girls exchanged a look. Grace, with her whiskey, had not allowed herself more than the last six inches of the sofa’s seat and so sat somewhat hunched over her knees, more curved than she needed to be. She touched her glasses, of course, as she said, popping up a bit like a good student, “Neither of us.” She touched her sweater. “I’m from Buffalo,” she said. “Annie’s from Long Island.”
“Well, good,” he said. He had picked up another piece of loo paper and was holding another glass up to the golden lamplight. “We’ve had two Americans from Binghamton here in the past two weeks and I think I’ve learned all there is to know about the place. State University,” he said. “Three hours to New York.”
“That would be Lydia,” said Grace, the good student. She touched her index finger to her cheek, tapped it, raised her eyes to the shadowy ceiling, pantomiming thought. Then Grace pointed the index finger at Mr. Wallace. “And Kevin Larkin,” she said.
He raised his eyebrows. “Right you are,” he said. “Kevin. Rugby player, all taken up with Rupert Brooke.”
Grace popped again. “That’s right,” she said.
“And Lydia,” he went on. “Pretty girl. Mad for Wordsworth.”
“Yes,” Grace said, warming to the conversation. He was, after all, more or less sitting at her feet. Annie thought only of what a thing it would be to hear Mr. Wallace say of her, “Pretty girl.” Lucky Lydia. She sipped her Chianti. She supposed it was the way it was meant to taste.
“But Buffalo,” he said. “I’m not sure we’ve had anyone from Buffalo yet. What’s it like?”
Grace was now clutching the stubby glass in both hands, leaning toward him. “Boring,” she said and barked a short laugh, the ends of her blunt-cut hair swinging forward along her chin and then swinging back. She touched her glasses, returning to the more successful serious student guise. “No,” she said. “It’s nice, I guess. My parents like it. I have a lot of family there.” She hunched a little more. Her head snapped to the right for just a second. It was a curious little tic Annie had seen in their tutorials; it meant that she felt her point was not yet made, that she knew her intelligence had not yet burned through the obscuring fog of her plain, chubby face. “It’s where Dick Diver ends up in Tender Is the Night,” she added. “It has that going for it.”
Examining the row of glasses before him, Mr. Wallace raised his eyebrows when she said Dick Diver, and then placed his hands on his brown corduroy knees. It was likely that he was somewhat younger than his wife. He leaned toward her, rolling on his haunches. “And is it Fitzgerald you’re mad for?” he asked. “You wouldn’t be the first American to come to England to study Fitzgerald, or Hemingway. You’re all mad for Hemingway as far as I can tell.”
But Grace sat up a little straighter. It might have been in imitation of Professor Wallace—as much as a girl like Grace could aspire to imitate Professor Wallace. “I’m not, really,” she said. And then added, “I love Spenser.” She touched her glasses again and took another nip at her whiskey.
What a smile he had. While his wife’s had been thin-lipped and wry, forgiving, insightful, his was warmly amused, reservedly delighted. He had, Annie was convinced, the best teeth in all of England. A boon, she thought, for the entire nation’s dental gene pool. “Well, you’ll be teacher’s pet then,” he said. “At least for Elizabeth,” his smile grew a bit wider, a sparkle, at his wife’s name. “Spenser’s her man.” Annie thought the smile more charming still if its source was not Grace’s declaration but his pleasure at hearing his wife’s man championed, or perhaps, more simply, the pleasure it gave him to say his wife’s name.
Suddenly she found herself both fully enchanted and heartsick. To live, as these two did, in a comfortable, warmly lit room full of velvet chairs and old books, with cats and, yes—she was only just hearing it, or perhaps Professor Wallace had just put it on in another room—classical music playing softly somewhere, low enough for conversation, loud enough to add romance to the air. To reach over your knees at the end of a day, the book falling from your lap, to take such a man’s handsome face into your hands. It was a life from a novel. It was a still life, beautifully arranged. It was a life she’d never attain. When he turned to her and said, “And who’s your man?” she said, “Edith Wharton,” without thinking and without an inkling of truth in it, her only impulse being that she should name a woman, since the life she wanted—their life—was all unattainable and she must begin to prepare herself to be a woman alone.
She glanced quickly at Grace to see if she would contradict her, but Grace had the glass to her lips again, her eyes on David Wallace. Annie imagined Grace felt it, too: the enchantment and the despair.
Professor Wallace swept into the room with a large, tufted footstool held high in her hands, like a farcical English maid with a tea tray. “Edith Wharton?” she said and then spun a little, her long skirt flaring, her little leather boots. “How interesting,” and then, “David, my love,” in that way she had of speaking in soft asides, “you’ll have to move your glasses and your loo paper so I can put this down.”
With a kind of salute, he stuck the roll of toilet paper under his arm. Leaning forward, he moved a few of the glasses, one at a time, as if they were chess pieces, to the side of the couch, and then gathered up the rest in his hands, the crystal clinking, and placed them and the paper on a side table. “Careful,” she said. “Always,” he told her. And then, so smoothly, he was on his feet again, taking the stool from her hands.
He lowered it to the ground. It was a maroon upholstered footstool with four wooden, turnip-shaped legs and on it were half a dozen small plates, black cloth napkins, a silver bowl of olives and celery, and a small black crock containing what Professor Wallace announced was pâté. She handed a napkin to each of the girls, smeared a tablespoon of pâté onto each little plate, added some olives and some thin crackers, all the while saying, “Although she married fairly young I think it’s well accepted that she was a virgin until she was somewhere around forty-five.” She gave Annie a little plate, and started putting together another. “She’d divorced her husband at last and fallen madly in love and taken up residence with her lover in Paris. Forty-five or so.” She handed the plate to her husband, who was now in a small chair at Grace’s side.
“It appears she wrote Ethan Frome while in the midst of a girlish middle-aged passion. Which has always struck me as curious, given the short shrift she gives poor Mrs. Frome, with all her middle-aged ailments.”
Professor Wallace spun around again in her soft little boots and then took the other corner of the couch. Grace was smiling at her, ogling, Annie would have said. There was a lightness about Professor Wallace at home, a physical buoyancy she didn’t have in the lecture hall. It made it seem possible that she was not older than her husband after all. “A lesson for you girls,” she said, looking up, “in matters of the heart.” She raised her long nose and trilled the word. “Patience,” she said.
But David laughed. “Surely, Elizabeth,” he told her, “you’re not making a case for forty-five years of virginity.” He smiled at both girls, full knowing, it seemed, that if there were sides to be on, they were on his. With his handsome face before them, forty-five years of virginity seemed worse than cruel. “I’d call that corrupting the morals of a minor,” he said and his eyes flashed. They sparkled.
There was the sound of Grace’s whiskey glass colliding with the bridge of her glasses.
Professor Wallace smiled her wry smile at her husband and then seemed to sip the air the way a bird sips water, her throat all exposed. “Surely I’m not,” she said. And then she turned her head, regally. “But Annie must tell us,” she whispered, “what it is about Wharton that she loves.”
She felt all their eyes on her. Felt suddenly like a bird herself, a baby bird, helpless, wordless, her mouth opened. The truth was that she had read very little of Edith Wharton. Had thought, until a few minutes ago, that Edith Wharton was a spinster, homely and professional (she recalled a mannish
jaw, a heavy pile of dark hair), with no exquisite husband waiting for her at home. It was the sole reason she had said her name. She had a vague memory of Ethan Frome, of laughing at it. Suicidal sled rides. Sex and death. She couldn’t recall finishing The Age of Innocence.
“Oh, Ethan Frome,” she said, shrugging a little. “The Age of Innocence.”
Mr. Wallace said, “No doubt you’re a James fan as well.”
And his wife said, “Being a James fan is de rigueur for Americans in England, I should think.”
“Portrait of a Lady,” Grace chirped, not to be outdone. She held her stubby glass and her little plate to her clasped knees, hunching over them. “I read it again this summer,” she said. “Before I came.”
“He was a big poof, you know,” David said and his wife cried, “Really, darling,” and Grace ducked and giggled, and drank more whiskey, touching her fingertips to the edge of her glasses as she did. Gently, Professor Wallace leaned over and took the small plate from her lap and placed it on the cushion between them. And then, as if she were caring for a child, with her shoulder pressed languidly to the back of the couch, she lifted a cracker and spread it with pâté.
“Well, if we’re going to bring up Edith Wharton’s moldy virginity,” he cried, charmingly, “then we might as well get it all out. Henry was a poof and William a religious fanatic and Alice was a sexual deviant, flummoxed by shyness, who figured the only way she could get professional men to come see her in her nightgown was by taking to her bed.” He turned his attention to Grace, who was beet red behind the Waterford crystal, hunched and laughing into her ice cubes. “Varieties of Religious Experience, indeed,” he said. “Have you read it?”
Professor Wallace gave her one of the spread crackers. “Never mind,” she said gently, although Annie couldn’t say if she was addressing her husband or the girl.
“A prototype for the modern American family,” David said, smiling. The light from the lamp at his elbow only burnished his glow. “Hedonism plus Puritanism yields both deviant sex and deviant religion. What could be more American?” His eyes met his wife’s. Annie thought that there was a complex intelligence even in their unspoken conversation. Only more to envy. To despair of. “But we were talking about Buffalo,” he said, more gently. He turned again to Grace, who had just, obediently, bitten into the cracker, which had, in turn, broken apart in her hands. There was a tiny shower of crumbs falling from her lips to her palm to her sweater.
Graciously, he diverted his attention across the room. “And what of Long Island?” he asked Annie. “We seem to get as many from Long Island as from Binghamton.”
She smiled. She did not want to appear flummoxed by shyness. “There’s a lot of us,” she said. She was aware of the fact that it was as close as she had come since she’d arrived to speaking a full sentence.
“And your parents are there?” he asked, more gentle still, luring her into a conversation. “Brothers? Sisters?” Implying that he recognized her shyness but knew it was his duty as her host to relieve her of it, as if it were only a heavy coat. “Big family? Small?”
“Small,” she said. She would not make herself more interesting to him, more American, by mentioning Jacob. “A brother and a sister,” she said. “An aunt who lives with us.” She would not say “a moldering virgin,” to prove herself clever. She took another sip of her wine. She saw that Professor Wallace was smiling at her, as if—it was all unaccountable—admiring her restraint. Then the buzzer rang downstairs and Professor Wallace stood, her skirt sweeping. “I’ll get that,” she said. They were in a play again. “If you’ll refresh the girls’ drinks.”
Behind her when she returned were three more American students, two boys and a girl. Entering, they looked at Grace and Annie with some resentment, as if the ratio of Americans to English in the room suddenly made the occasion less interesting. Mr. Wallace stood, there was the bustle of introductions and new drinks. For a moment, the music disappeared. Monica and Nate were a couple—a bond they had formed at the same time Annie and Grace had formed theirs, in the five hours of pillow talk that was the transatlantic flight. Ben was, perhaps, Nate’s version of Grace. A friend from their New York campus who held on to Nate perhaps a little too tightly now that they were abroad together, comfort in a strange land. He was a big guy, a little thick around the jaw, with dark curly hair. At his side he held a bottle in a brown paper bag, grasped by the neck as if he had just taken a swig of it and planned to take another. He greeted Mr. Wallace and said, “Beer would be great,” before he seemed to remember it was there. Awkwardly, he handed it to Professor Wallace and she said, “Thank you,” and “Lovely,” as she slipped it out of the bag. “Drambuie,” she said to her husband as she placed it on the server. “How nice,” he said. Together, Ben and Nate made Professor Wallace’s cozy living room seem smaller. They looked so starkly American, so comically American male that it seemed the room should have filled with the odor of gunsmoke and horse manure.
Beside them, David Wallace seemed not only the member of some more advanced, more refined civilization but a creature who must also be ranked a good deal higher on the phylogenetic scale.
“Sit, sit,” David was saying once again. He had poured Chianti for Monica and opened bottles of beer for both boys. Grace caught Annie’s eye and patted the empty cushion beside her, tilting her head, pleading, and against her better judgment, Annie stood and crossed over to sit with her friend. Monica took the velvet chair, Nate at her feet, his elbow in her lap. Ben went to another chair, a gold ladderback with a dark turquoise seat. It looked somewhat fragile under his thick thighs in their new jeans, although he declined, smiling, when David offered him his own chair beside the couch. “This is good,” he said, the brown bottle held between his legs. Annie could see him regretting his decision to come along with Monica and Nate, and thought of her mother’s injunction never to be a third wheel.
“Yes, well,” David Wallace said as his wife distributed pâté and crackers, olives and celery to the new guests. Annie prayed that he wouldn’t again mention Binghamton because she knew if he did she would think less of him. “Will there be more of you?” he asked the assemblage. “Tonight? Any more of you coming? That you know?”
The Americans looked at each other, frowning, shaking their heads. Grace offered, eagerly, that she didn’t know.
“You don’t consult?” Mr. Wallace said, smiling. “All you American students? It’s rather remarkable to have five of you here all at once. I thought perhaps it was part of a plan.”
They continued to look at one another, shaking their heads. “No,” they said. It was clear the two boys were wary of Mr. Wallace; they suspected he was making fun of them.
“No, of course not, David,” Professor Wallace said. “They hardly travel en masse. They’re an independent bunch, our American students. Aren’t you?” she said, looking around the room. “You’re made to come together, what is it, once a month, to see how you’re getting on, but that’s it, isn’t it?”
“Actually,” Grace said, “it’s every fortnight.”
“Is it?” Professor Wallace asked.
“It’s ridiculous,” Nate said from Monica’s knees. “I quit going.” Monica put her hand in his curly hair. She was loose-limbed, slim, and large-breasted. Her face was plain but there was a luster about her skin and her hair, a luster of sex and of good health. She shook his head a little, playfully gripping his scalp. “You were at the last one,” she said in a tone that seemed to imply that the last one had ended in some mad sexual transaction.
Grace had turned to Mr. Wallace, explaining. “Only a few of us live in the same halls,” she said, piling on the Britishisms (Annie, stubbornly, still said dorms). “We’re scattered about campus precisely so we don’t stay to ourselves. It’s sort of the point of the whole program.”
“And yet, here you all are,” David Wallace said. “All on the same evening.”
Quietly, Professor Wallace slipped out of the room, through the door to what Ann
ie guessed was the kitchen. She wished for the courage to join her, but felt the anchor of Grace, sitting beside her, who was now saying, “Yes, isn’t it funny?” and once more raising her glass.
“Great minds think alike,” Ben said, leaning over his lap on the small chair. Whether he intended to or not, he sounded bitter.
Mr. Wallace then questioned the three about their hometowns. Monica was from Long Island, too, and Nate from outside Albany. Ben was from Staten Island. “A city boy,” Mr. Wallace said, to which Ben replied, with a tilt of his beer bottle, “I hate New York City.”
David Wallace nodded, touched his silk cravat. They could now smell their dinner in the kitchen. “Unfortunate,” he said, as if resisting his own disappointment in the boy. “Yet understandable. No doubt you’re a Wordsworth fellow as well,” he added.
But Ben seemed to miss the connection. He glanced at Monica and Nate before he spoke. “What’s a Wordsworth fellow?” he asked.
Now David Wallace looked puzzled. “A fan,” he said, as if the word were a colloquialism he wasn’t quite sure of. “Of Wordsworth. Since you don’t like the city, I assumed you’d be a devotee of someone like Wordsworth. The romantics. The pastoral poets.”
Ben was looking at Mr. Wallace with what Annie had come to recognize as a particularly American look. He suspected Mr. Wallace was putting him on the spot and even before he’d demonstrated his own lack of knowledge, he was preparing his case for how useless what he didn’t know really was. “Wordsworth’s okay,” he said, with some caution. “I guess. I don’t know a lot about him.” So fuck you, was only implied.
Mr. Wallace asked, pleasantly, “Well, what inspired you to study in England then?” and Ben laughed once, through his nose, and raised the bottle in his hand. “The beer,” he said.
Nate dropped his head, amused at his friend. Monica leaned down over her lap to whisper something in his ear, her thick hair falling to shield them both.
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