The Last Enchantments (20 page)

That was how they first slept together. Tom carried a low temperature for a few days after that, nothing serious.

They were inseparable then. I remember one morning as I was leaving for class seeing him lurch home, like a bear newly awoken out of hibernation, from her room. He grinned privately at me. The smile meant nothing; all the merriness was still emptied from his face. He looked like a bare tree in winter: disconsolate, cold-minded, but somewhere within it still the sun abiding.

CHAPTER
SIX

At unexpected moments, not very often, I glance up from whatever I’m doing and realize that I have a longing to be inside an airport, on my way somewhere else.

When I returned to Oxford it was about the second of January, and there were still six days until school started again. Not everyone was back. The people who
were
back didn’t have much time, it seemed; Sophie was working hard on her long essay, and I was trying not to stake too much hope to our date for the James Bond bop, Anil was still in Mumbai, Anneliese and her family were visiting the Azores, and after that MCR meeting Ella and Tom were in and out of each other’s rooms at all hours. I had assumed the three of us would spend our time together, but Tom, with a fervor unusual for him, seemed to want only Ella’s company. It didn’t bother me. The first two or three weeks are always that way.

So I slipped away like a Bedouin one morning and boarded the early train to Paris. I had a friend there, a girl named Kristen Johnson, and I had e-mailed her the night before, asking if I could still visit.

“I’m dying of boredom, you have to come,” she wrote, and it was she who came to meet me in the open air of the Gare du Nord, which was windy and cold, a few snowflakes hanging in the gray air. I hadn’t been there since I spent three months interning at the
International Herald Tribune
one summer during college.

“Will Baker,” she said, a big smile on her face. She gave me a hug. “I haven’t seen you in forever.”

We knew each other from the brief, endless, intense final month of the campaign. She had been my best friend there other than Alison. “Since Ohio, right?”

“Jesus, that was shitty, wasn’t it?”

“It still sucks.”

“And you don’t even remember that terrible Gore campaign.”

“Aren’t you younger than I am?”

“Right, but I took a semester off of college to work for him. You remember the election—come on, this way—but I mean being inside that campaign when the recount was going on, watching him concede to Bush. It was fucked up.”

“Did you see about—”

“Lieberman?”

“Yeah, Lieberman. What a dickhead. Murtha, that wasn’t bad, though.”

“Fucking Murtha.” She sighed. “No, it’s a big deal. I’m just a pessimist these days.”

Kristen was blond and slight, with light freckles around her nose and quick cheekbones; a live, thin, endearing person, full of energy, with a hoarse laugh. She would make an endlessly entertaining wife and mother to some suburban family one day. That’s not to say she was destined to be a housewife—in Paris she was a consultant, having grown up bilingual because her mother was from the St. Lawrence River Valley, near Montreal—only that she had the sort of open, good nature upon which a whole family can come to rely without entirely realizing it.

We were out in the seedy area around the train station, with a big McDonald’s and a bunch of cheap hotels opposite, the gray and white buildings ridged with black wrought-iron balconies that for all the soot and cell phone shops made them still beautiful, in the way that Paris alone is capable of permitting every area of life, whatever its wealth, the dignity of aesthetic faultlessness.

“You must want a coffee, right?” she asked. “Or do you just want to go back to my apartment and hang out? I’m on call, but realistically I probably don’t have to do anything until the start of the week. Everyone takes about six months for Christmas here.”

“How far is it?”

“Pretty far. I live in the seventh.”

“What, by the Musée d’Orsay?”

“Yeah, how did you know that? Rue de Verneuil, my street is called. Number fifty. In case you get lost.”

“Let’s get coffee. I was up early to get the train into London.”

We went into one of the cafés and ordered two coffees, standing at the brass-railed bar because they would be cheaper there than if we sat a table. It was a policy I loved. People think of cafés in Paris as romantic, but I appreciated them more for their comity, the loud workmen in neon vests downing
noisettes
over
Le Parisien,
friends to everyone, shoulder-edged with businessmen filling out lottery tickets and old men who at half past nine in the morning sipped sherry and deposited trembling pieces of doughnut between their noses and their chins. Everyone got a shot glass of water, there were the hard-boiled eggs in their small rack, a euro each, the Café Richard sugar tucked into your saucer … then, too, this was a time, 2005, before the smoking ban, when the floor beneath the bar was an enormous clutter of cigarette ends, flaked bread, and torn sugar packets, all of which you were meant, as policy, to drop at your feet. Every half hour or so a small man would come out with a vast broom and sweep the detritus cleanly away, almost archaeologically, like a dream of how life should be: fixable, clearable, there should be fresh starts. Seeing Kristen had reminded me of Alison.

“So how is everything here?” I asked her.

“It’s good.”

“You’re the only other person I know who kept their promise about leaving the country if Bush got reelected,” I said.

“It was partly that. I was sick of New York.”

“I can’t believe we never managed to get together when we were both there.”

She shrugged. “Campaign friendships are always the same.”

“Don’t say that.”

“No, it’s fantastic to see you! It’s great to see you.”

“You, too.”

I remembered trudging through an early snowfall in Ohio with her and thinking how beautiful she was, on our way to yet another rally. Through the whole six weeks we were together in Columbus we had just been friends, in part because she had been sleeping with the campaign’s star, a strategist from D.C. who was rumored to be making fifty grand a month, and of course because I was with Alison.

“So you and Alison…”

“It didn’t work out.”

“Dead and buried?”

I shrugged. “Can you ever be positive?”

She laughed. “Yes,” she said, and her voice was emphatic.

I shook my head. “It was jarring how abruptly the campaign ended.”

“They always do when you lose, no victory lap. Then some poor asshole has to spend three days breaking down headquarters and sending out the last checks. No more volunteers to lord over, just an empty building full of depressed staffers.”

“Yeah, that was me. I stayed. Kerry never showed his face again.”

“You stayed? I couldn’t face it. I just went home and collapsed.”

“Who do you like in 2008?”

“Two years out it’s tough to say. I guess Hillary’s the presumptive. Edwards will run. He seems like a guy with integrity. What about Mark Warner?”

“From Virginia?”

“Uh-huh. He’ll be in there. For me, for us to win, we don’t need southern votes as much as we need the West. Like if we can get Colorado, maybe Nevada, Montana.”

“That’s not many electorals.”

“But if he could pick those up and bring Virginia, that would almost cover us losing Ohio again. Of course, Florida would be grand. However we can do it. I just don’t want to lose again.”

“I don’t think we lost it last time.”

She sighed. “No, I know, the voting machines.” She shook her head. “We should change the subject, before we get too engaged. Really. Tell me about Oxford, distract me.”

I noticed she had on mascara and eyeliner and wondered whether it meant anything. “It’s fun.”

“Are you in looove?” she asked, jokingly.

“I don’t know. No. You?”

She nodded. “I think maybe. I have a boyfriend.”

“Is it serious?”

“Not yet. I work with him. I’m worried he’s back in California, hooking up with everyone he ever went to high school with.” She looked at me, suddenly remote, her cup at her cold red lips. “Are you sad you came?”

“Kristen, are you serious?” I took a sip of
café crème.
“Do you remember when I told you that I only wanted to keep one friend from the campaign?”

“I was so nervous when you said you were coming over, you have no idea.”

“You shouldn’t have been. You’re one of my best friends.”

“It’s shitty being a girl, because you always have to wonder. And we used to have some chemistry.”

I smiled. “We did?”

“Oh, fuck off.”

We spent that day at her house, both of us in T-shirts and pajama pants, playing video games (she had a PlayStation), recounting stories from the campaign, watching TV, catching up. It was perfect to be with an American person—I didn’t need to explain anything, or translate from American English to British English, and all of our stupid references made sense to each other.

After a nap we went out to eat at a café with glass jugs of red wine, still bleary-eyed but in a good mood, and then met up with her friend Amanda at the Café Charbon for drinks and dancing. Amanda hooked up with some French guy.

Eventually Kristen and I went home, and naturally enough, for it was only a studio apartment, fell into bed together. It was just sleeping, though, intertwined, hugging and disentangling and pushing back together, warm and comfortable. It meant the same thing to both of us, I believe, companionship. I felt in a state of vacancy.

“I really do love Cliff,” she murmured to me once in the middle of the night, pushing her head under my arm after I came back from the bathroom.

“I know,” I said.

When her breath was regular again I got up once more and went to her high windows, opened one, and leaned over the railing, having a cigarette. I could see up the boulevard that led to the river, the greenish Seine I knew so well, which at night runs black and blurred-streetlamp yellow. There’s nowhere that life feels more eternal, your dimwit youth more important, than Paris.

Then for some reason my mind turned with a pang to Katie, and as I gazed up at the implacable black of the sky, my body warm from the bed but my face chilled, I thought of the terrible truth we all know, somewhere in our souls: that there has never been a shred of evidence that life goes beyond life. Nobody has sent back word. There is nothing. That does not mean there is nothing. But there is nothing.

*   *   *

There are rarely two kinds of anything, but here are the two kinds of Paris: first, the graveyard, Les Deux Magots, 68, Saint-Sulpice, Montmartre; second, the carnival, Arabs, Brazilian bars in Oberkampf, students lurking in the
shops aux bandes dessinées
behind Greektown. They are meant to be countervailing—every third day
Le Monde
publishes an article about how young people are leaving—but as I saw it each licensed the other to exist.

In the three days I spent in Paris, mostly alone during the daytime to give Kristen space, I visited both. I went to the Louvre and also to BHV, where I bought a flash card for my digital camera, down to Shakespeare and Company, where I once slept a night, over to Bastille, even to the far-flung Butte-aux-Cailles, which is like a French village with a city accidentally sprouted up around it. I sat in the park outside Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre church, gazing up at Notre Dame. I drank a lot of coffee, ate omelettes, spoke French. I sat in cafés and wrote long, improbably stupid poems about Sophie or Alison. I think sleeping in the same bed with Kristen every night made me miss them.

On my last night Kristen and I put on nice clothes and went out to Bofinger, one of the few traditional and grand restaurants in town that hadn’t been completely rousted out of obscurity by the Internet, and had a huge three-tiered fuck-you of clams, mussels, lobster, and crab, and three bottles of cold, sharp white wine, as Hemingway would have said, all followed by cigarettes, dessert, more wine. We sat not far from the 1939 bullet hole in the mirror above a booth.

Afterward we walked to the Caveau des Oubliettes to see some jazz. Our arms were linked, the city busy around us and then quiet, changing block by block. “Do you remember Dylan?” she asked as we crossed onto Ile St. Louis.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“He was from the campaign.”

“Well, obviously.”

“He was from Toledo. He had his car there?”

“Oohhh—yeah, I do. Not on staff.”

She shook her head. “No, no, he was an intern. He put in a fuckton of hours, though.”

“He used to bring in bagels.”

She laughed. “That’s right, and like the assholes we were everyone was willing to be his best friend because of it.”

I laughed. “What makes you think of him?”

She sighed. “I don’t know. Do you think you’ll work for someone in 2008?”

She meant one of the campaigns. “It depends,” I said. “What about you?”

“That’s what I was thinking about. I guess if the opportunity came up I would.”

“Who?”

“That’s what I mean—I don’t think it matters. A Dem, of course, but beyond that…” She waved a hand.

I looked at her doubtfully. “What do you mean?”

She cocked her head. “I don’t know, really. I have a theory that whatever you really love, if it’s a person or a thing or a job, you’ll go back for more, no matter how much bullshit and misery it means. I miss politics. I miss all the hotel rooms and inside jokes and … and everything. The Dylans.”

“But it’s been so disheartening.”

“That’s what’s amazing! All of this horrible fucked-up bullshit hasn’t, hasn’t dampened my enthusiasm. I mean, it has—but not
really,
not deep down.”

“A person or a thing or a job?” I asked.

“Whatever you love.”

*   *   *

I got back into Oxford in the early evening of January 9, just a little daylight left. I wanted company. Tom’s room was dark; Ella’s, too. I learned later that they had gone into London, thinking that I wouldn’t be back until the next day—or at least that’s what they told me. It’s likely that they didn’t care. I dumped my bags in my room and checked the MCR, but it was empty, and then I started idly through Fleet’s front quad, empty and austere, its white stone cold to the touch, feeling sorry for myself, the aleatory sorrow of passing winter loneliness.