After This

by Alice McDermott

  Mr. Wallace turned to the two girls. “Well, that’s honest at least,” he said, although his face, Annie thought, also said he was sorry the conversation had taken such a boorish turn. He looked at both of their glasses. “Let me refresh those for you,” he said, gently, and took the glasses out of their hands, out of their laps. Grace said, “Thank you,” looking up at him, her throat and chin growing flushed. “It won’t be long,” he said, kindly. Annie knew he meant until dinner, but felt he might just as well have said, Till we’re alone again, the way Grace’s breath seemed to catch on the words. The way her fingers, reaching up to touch her frames, were trembling.

  Just as he returned with their fresh drinks (over his shoulder, “Can I get you gentlemen another? Young lady?”) Professor Wallace came through the door again with a tray stacked with dinner plates and silverware and a huge pot that filled the room with the woodsy odor of meat and mushrooms. In what struck the girls as marvelous choreography, one neither had ever seen in her own home, Mr. Wallace swung back into the kitchen and emerged with another large pot and then, without a single word of instruction between them, the two began to fill plates with pasta, to ladle sauce, to distribute plush throw pillows in silky Indian prints that seemed to appear miraculously from behind the couch. “You’ll want these on your laps,” Professor Wallace told the students. “To shorten the distance from plate to lips,” she said. She shook out huge napkins to place over each pillow; she might have tucked another just under their chins, the way they all, suddenly, with pillows and napkins and plates of steaming food on their laps, felt swaddled, childish and also cared for.

  Mr. Wallace took his place beside Grace again, with only a napkin, no pillow on his knee. Professor Wallace made the rounds with a small glass dish and a tiny silver spoon, sprinkling parmigiana like fairy dust over each plate.

  Then she sat with her own next to Annie.

  “This is delicious,” Monica said. Nate had abandoned her knee and her lap and was hunched now over his plate. He may even have moved away from her a bit. “Oh God,” he said, looking up. There was a fleck of sauce on his chin. “So good.” It was a kind of moan. “The food in hall is so freaking bad.”

  Professor Wallace smiled. “Poor dears,” she said. “I’m sure it takes some getting used to.”

  Beside Annie, Grace was struggling with plate and pillow and fork and the stubby glass she still held in her hand and just as Annie was about to suggest she put it down, Mr. Wallace leaned over and took it from her and put it gently on the small table at her elbow. “There,” he said softly. “Easier to manage.” And Grace touched her glasses and nodded and said, “Thank you.” Now her skin flushed up over her chin and down, Annie noticed, the length of her plump, pale arms.

  David Wallace was questioning them again. “Where are you going and where have you been?” he asked. Monica and Nate had been to Stratford and Bath and London. Annie and Grace to London and Stonehenge. Ben would be joining his parents in Dublin over Christmas. The girls wanted to get to Brontë country, of course. Ben’s father wanted him to visit the village near Dover where he had been stationed during the war. Nate was hoping to get to Pamplona in the spring. (Mr. Wallace turned to Grace and said, “Hemingway, you see,” as if it were an old joke they had long shared. He lifted her plate, and then her glass from the small table. Took both away and then returned with her glass once again full.)

  When all the plates had been cleared, Professor Wallace brought a tray of fruit and cheese and placed it on the footstool, serving them again, this time using small plates painted with branches and birds. She recommended the Rambling Club at the university to all the American students. A lovely and inexpensive way to see the countryside. She would suggest, she said, kneeling among them, slicing a ripe pear, finding a focus for your travels. Historical, literary. Lawrence walked through the Pyrenees looking for roadside crucifixes. Read his essay. An American student once followed the route of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Another made a trip to the Hebrides, for Virginia Woolf’s sake.

  “Something like that,” Professor Wallace said. She proffered the slices of ripe pear, the Americans reached for them, childish, Annie thought, grateful. Nate had scooted farther away from Monica, across the Turkish rug to the footstool. Closer to the food, but also to Professor Wallace’s feet.

  “It’s nice to have a focus,” Professor Wallace said, taking the couch next to Annie once again. “It’s nice to see a pattern emerge out of travels that might, otherwise, seem random.” She turned to Annie, looked at her down her long nose, kindly, fondly perhaps. “You might follow in Wharton’s footsteps, for instance,” she said. “Find that hotel in Paris where she was so thoroughly happy.”

  “So thoroughly shagged,” David said, and only Grace laughed with him, her blush having settled in permanently now. He looked at the other men in the room. “We were discussing it earlier,” he said. “She’d been a married virgin, Edith Wharton.” He turned to his wife. “Until what age, Elizabeth? Forty-five?”

  Annie saw Professor Wallace put her fingertips, forefinger and thumb, to a crescent of pear on her plate and hold them there, as if, briefly, measuring something. “That’s right,” she said without raising her head. Then she leaned a little into Annie, there was a hint of perfume on her velvet shawl. “Poor David,” she whispered and then, looking up, she said across the two girls, “My dear, I’m afraid your mind has been in that hotel room all evening.”

  He threw back his head and shouted a laugh. “It has!” he said. “Isn’t it odd?” Now Professor Wallace was laughing, softly. If Annie hadn’t been sitting beside her, feeling the laughter through the velvet shawl, she would not have known that was what she was doing. On her face, there was only that wry smile. David made a gesture that encompassed the room. “Three young beauties here for dinner and I’m a voyeur in some Parisian hotel room, wondering what it was like. I mean, at forty-five, Elizabeth. Think of it.”

  “It was just as it would have been at twenty-five,” Professor Wallace said warmly, and now another kind of mad, sexual transaction was implied. The Americans suddenly felt they had vanished from the room. Monica had Runty in her lap and she paused with both her hands in the cat’s fur. Nate on the floor, an elbow on his raised knee, held a forgotten piece of cheddar in his hand. Ben bowed his head, as if in deference to some sweet intimacy, and Grace—Annie was sure of it—raised a knuckle to her glasses to hide a tear. “She was in love, darling,” Professor Wallace said softly. “I can tell you without hesitation what it was like. It was marvelous.”

  David Wallace smiled at his wife. It wasn’t an imaginary hotel room he was thinking of now. “I’m sure,” he said. “I’m sure you’re right.”

  After the fruit and the cheese, there was a chocolate gâteau and the box of candy the girls had brought, and Ben’s Drambuie. Professor Wallace ran the small glass of it under her nose and closed her eyes and then told them that when she was a child her grandmother had kept a decanter of Drambuie on the table in the front hall. During the war, she said, after they’d been down in the cellar for an air raid, she and her cousins, who had also been sent to the safer distance of their grandparents’ little farm, would come up the stairs and into the hall, where their grandmother would give them each a teaspoonful of the liqueur, to reward them, or to prepare them for sleep, or only, perhaps, to steady her own nerves. Professor Wallace closed her eyes and put her lips to the glass. “It comes back,” she said after she had drunk. “That time.” She opened her eyes. “We would wrap ourselves in blankets and dressing gowns. In anticipation, I suppose, of shattered glass. My grandmother would divide us into groups of three, two children and an adult, my grandfather, my mother, herself, my aunt. Each adult with a child under each arm, scattered to different corners of the cellar, in case.” She sighed. “In case, I suppose, some part of the ceiling came down, not, one would hope, on us all.” She paused again. Annie recalled her own family, huddled in the basement, long ago. Milk that tasted like candles in their mouths. A tree had
fallen. Forever after, Jacob had kept a flashlight by his bed.

  “You must have been scared to death,” Monica said.

  Professor Wallace shrugged. “I was very young,” she said, as if to acknowledge that the memory might be flawed. “I don’t recall being frightened at all, only thrilled. By the adventure. Even when we could hear the bombs, the whistle and the long silence—the worst part of it, people have said, that terrible silence before the impact—I don’t know that I ever cried.”

  “Brave girl,” David said. But Professor Wallace shook her head.

  “It wasn’t real, to a child,” she said. “The danger wasn’t real. You’re all sensations at that age, aren’t you? The smell of the cellar and my grandfather’s pipe smoke on his clothes. Oh,” she said and touched her jaw, “and the satin collar of my dressing gown. That’s what I remember. My cousins and I would look across the darkness at one another as if to say, Isn’t this something, what do you think will happen next? The way we might have glanced at each other in the middle of a film or a play.” She ran the small glass under her nose again. “And then the teaspoon of Drambuie. Like a little jewel. I’d hold it in my mouth for as long as I could.” She took another sip, pursing her lips and drawing down her long nose. “It comes back,” she said again.

  They were all watching her, even her husband. Enchanted by her, her voice and gesture, and as if she suddenly noticed this, noticed how they were all watching her, even her husband, she raised the little glass and grimaced, freeing them from the spell she herself had cast. “What can be more tedious,” she said with a laugh, “than someone else’s childhood?”

  “It’s kind of disgusting,” Nate said from the floor, and for a moment they all believed he was agreeing with her. He looked up. “How long it took the United States to notice you guys were getting the shit bombed out of you by Hitler.”

  “Really,” Monica said, agreeing, shaking her hair. “We knocked ourselves out to save bloody Vietnam but we sat back while London got blitzed.”

  Beside Annie, Grace raised her own little glass, gulping the Drambuie as if she had to catch a train. She had, Annie knew, no interest in politics or current events. In their tutorials she had announced more than once that history had meaning for her only as far as it pertained to Henry V or A Tale of Two Cities. On its own, she had said, it was all circumstance and repetition, temporal, not eternal. No more significant than the weather.

  “Nixon sucks,” Ben was saying.

  “LBJ sucked, too,” Monica added.

  From across the room, Ben said, “Spiro Agnew.”

  Both Professor Wallace and her husband were nodding, tolerantly, as if the Americans were merely complaining about their parents.

  “At least in World War II we knew what we were fighting for,” Monica went on, as if, Annie thought, she and General Eisenhower were contemporaries. “At least there was Hitler.”

  “At least,” Ben said, “we won.”

  Grace touched her glasses and then dug her elbow into Annie’s side. She put a hand to her mouth and whispered from behind it. “Come with me.” Annie stared straight ahead for a second. What an effect it would have on the assembly, she thought, were she to say, “My brother.” But she felt David Wallace’s eyes on them as Grace poked her again. “Please,” she said and stood quickly, swaying a little as she did, in the narrow space between the couch and the big footstool. Against her will, Annie stood, too. They both sidestepped past the couch and between the small table with the lamp and Mr. Wallace’s knees. Gallantly, he held a hand out to Grace as she made her way around him. She touched it briefly. Before either girl thought to ask, Professor Wallace told them, “It’s just through that door there, first on the right.”

  Annie followed Grace into the small bathroom. She shut the door behind them both and leaned back against it. “Are you going to get sick?” she asked. Grace nodded. She was already heaving a bit, hyperventilating, her glasses fallen down her nose and her pale skin greenish behind the spilled red of her flush. Annie leaned forward to lift the toilet seat. She stepped back again. “I’m here,” Annie said, imitating her mother. Grace leaned down, heaved a bit, then knelt and vomited her dinner into the toilet. Annie turned her head away, and then, reluctantly, stepped closer to the girl to hold back her hair. Grace’s neck at the nape was thick, her hair thin and almost weightless in Annie’s hands. “You’re okay,” Annie said. This, too, was what her mother said to her sick children. “You’re okay.”

  When she had finished, Grace flopped back onto the tile floor, and Annie could tell by the way her body fell that she was ready to give up all pretense of sobriety or control, that it was not merely drunken spinning that made her collapse, but a long-awaited giving in to despair. She pulled off her glasses, dumped them in her lap, gulped some air, and then, unabashedly, her legs folded in front of her, her arms limp at her sides, she began to cry.

  Annie flushed the toilet and turned the water on in the sink. The guest towels were starched linen, old-fashioned and neat. There was a ceramic clamshell with a small cake of fragrant soap. She wet some loo paper, making a compress of it, and handed it to Grace. “Put this to your lips,” she said. “It will make you feel better.”

  But Grace merely held it in her hand, the hand still in her lap. She let her head fall back against the wall, the tears falling freely. “Oh, God,” she said. “Oh, God.” Her shoulders were shaking with her sobs. Her face was terrible, the pale, myopic eyes and the torn mouth, the short forehead and the bloated cheeks. “I love him,” she said. “I’m so in love with him.”

  Annie smiled a little. “Oh, come on,” she said, gently, the way you do, the way she’d done before, to a drunken girl crying. “You don’t love him.”

  But Grace put her fist to her soft stomach, and then to the space between her breasts, as if the love were lodged there and so there was no denying it. “You don’t understand,” she said, sobbing. “I’ve never had a boyfriend, nothing, no one. I’m ugly and stupid and fat.”

  “You’re not,” Annie said. She crouched down beside her. “You’re pretty, you’re brilliant.”

  But Grace pressed her fist into her breast as if it were a dagger, leaning over it to bring her face to Annie’s face. There were wet flecks of her dinner at the corners of her lips. “You don’t understand,” she said, ferociously, her eyes both furious and oddly unfocused—or focused, perhaps, on something other than what she saw. She was grimacing, showing her teeth. Annie would not have been surprised if she had punched her. “I’m lonely,” she said; she seemed to extract the words from the place her fist had pierced. “I’m completely lonely.” She slowly tilted her head in that gesture of hers: she wasn’t making herself clear. Her eyes were a blur of tears. “I’m lonely,” she said a third time, and then collapsed back again, into her tears.

  After some minutes, Professor Wallace rapped at the door and asked, through it, “Is everything all right?” Annie said, “Yes, thank you,” and Professor Wallace asked, gently, “May I come in?”

  Annie began to stand, but Grace grabbed her wrist, looked at her through her red eyes, and then let her go. Annie opened the door and began to say, “Grace isn’t feeling too well,” when Professor Wallace looked beyond her to Grace on the floor and said, “My dear girl.”

  She was in the room, touching Grace’s forehead, then helping her to stand. Grace was still crying but more gently now, as Professor Wallace said, “Silly girl,” and led her out. The other Americans had left and all signs of dinner had been cleared away and the couch she and Grace had been sitting on was now made up into a bed, fresh floral sheets and a comforter and a blanket and a crisp-looking pillow.

  “Well, you’re not the first,” Professor Wallace was saying, getting Grace to kick off her shoes. “My husband is known to be a bit liberal when he pours. Poor girl.”

  Annie stood by the velvet chair as Professor Wallace pulled back the sheet and fluffed the pillow for Grace, who was still crying but seemed weak with it now, not ferocious. �
��He’s so beautiful,” Grace said, a cartoon drunk. “You’re both so beautiful.”

  “Yes, well,” Professor Wallace said. “Drink will do that.” She glanced at Annie, perhaps to assess how sober she was. “If I don’t keep an eye on him, my husband will get everyone who enters blind drunk. He believes he alleviates suffering.”

  There was a satin bathrobe thrown over the back of the velvet chair, but Professor Wallace didn’t mention it as she guided Grace onto the couch, between the sheets in her clothes. Grace crawling in like a weary child. “I’m so in love with him,” she said as her head touched the pillow, but now she said it as if he were merely a character in a novel, as if the love were merely a source of comfort and delight. Merely a part of the delight she felt at the moment, with Professor Wallace shushing her like a child and touching her face. “Silly girl,” she said again. “Is the room still spinning?” Grace, the good student once again, shook her head. “Only a little.”

  “There’s a basin here,” she said, and indicated the ceramic bowl at her feet. “If you’re sick to your stomach.”

  Grace smiled a little, her cheek to the pillow. “Thank you,” she said.

  Professor Wallace looked down at her, almost fondly, and said again, “Silly girl.” She turned to Annie. “I can set up a cot for you if you’d like to stay as well. You’re more than welcome.”

  But Annie shook her head. It wasn’t that late, she said. She’d get the bus.

  “David will walk you down,” Professor Wallace said and as if on cue, David appeared in the far doorway, creeping softly into the room. “Everything all right?” he asked. He looked over the back of the couch to Grace, who Annie knew was only pretending to sleep. “Poor child,” he said, and Annie was certain Grace smiled.

  David Wallace walked her to the bus stop, offering her a cigarette as he did. They stood smoking together as they waited. In the wet lamplight, with his collar turned up, he was even more handsome. He chided himself for pouring Grace too many whiskeys, and then praised Annie for handling her wine. “She leans on you a bit, does Grace,” he said gently. “You’re kind to be good to her.” Annie shrugged. At the end of the street there was a large crescent moon, rolled over on its back. She was thousands of miles from home, across a vast ocean, out on a wet night in a strange country, and standing next to a beautiful man whom, in another life, she would have loved. He threw the cigarette into the street as the bus approached. “Or good to be kind,” he said softly, “whichever you prefer.” He smiled at her and she smiled back. He waited until she had taken her seat inside before he turned to walk away, back to the house and the room with the books and the cats and the music and the rugs, pâté and Chianti, and a woman whose name alone lights up his handsome face. And Grace, tonight and tomorrow morning when she woke, snug in the middle of it all. No matter who leans on whom, Annie thought, it was Grace who, tonight, had gotten what she wanted.