The Last Enchantments (22 page)

I was tempted to tell him about Sophie; even now I pictured her in the shower, getting her hair ready, putting on makeup. It wouldn’t be long. “No, just a couple of casual things.”

“That’s another reason to stay in Oxford. There are always new people, new girls. If the work here is satisfying you ought to stay. Washington will remain where it is, but being twenty-five and abroad—that won’t. What’s crucial is that you must love the material. You do, I hope? I could never get through
Animal Farm,
thought it was drivel, though people say the essays are terribly good.”

“I do.”

“Then stay.”

Again I stayed much longer than I had intended to stay. I loved his company, his friendliness, his oracular lack of reserve. We talked about what to wear at a job interview, how to fool a board of academic questioners, where I should publish my dissertation if I wrote it, whether Orwell’s widow was an angel or the devil, what exactly constituted a perfect Irish coffee. He put Guinness in his, and evidently a lot of whiskey, because when I finally staggered out of his house at five thirty. I was drunk. The Swift Prize never came up, but in his unblinking way he had seen it, and in my pidge later that week I would find the application form. There was no note attached.

I called Sophie as I walked back to the Cottages from his house. “Hey!”

“Hey,” she said. “I was just getting ready.”

“What are you going to wear?”

“Chanel Number—” She laughed and said, “No, it’s too silly, I can’t say it. I have a dress with sequins all over it. You’ll see.”

“I bet.”

“Are you going to get me drunk?” She seemed buoyant. “I haven’t been drunk in forever. I can’t believe how madly I worked on that stupid essay. Thank God it’s over.”

“You’re coming by at seven?”

“Yep. Two and a half hours. Shall we go over in a cab with Ella and Tom, or meet them there?”

“Maybe we should let them have some time to themselves,” I said hopefully.

“Cool. I’ll just come by yours.”

We hung up, and I smiled, thinking first of her, then of my conversation with St. John. Perhaps after all I could see myself at Oxford for good, away from America. Even the idea, unacted upon, was an emancipation.

*   *   *

As I came back to the Cottages Anil, Timmo, and Anneliese were leaving for the park—they wanted to test a kite they were building from a kit, whose maiden flight they would call us out to the lawns to witness next Tuesday, when they would with great ceremony crash it straight into a tree—and Tom was away, so the house was empty.

I showered, and when I had finished I stood in front of the mirror for some time, staring at myself. I shaved. Then I went back to my room to put on my dinner jacket. My windows were open, and the wind was whipping the curtains inward. I put loud music on and then walked to Tom’s room and stole a beer. (He always seemed to have a disconcerting quantity of them in his little refrigerator, these days, standing in well-ordered platoons along the three shelves, bearing the soldierly ribbons and regalia of beer-festival victory.) Life seemed peculiar, giddy. The imminence of things, how the wind and the beer and the music can seem to hold a future: That was how I felt.

At ten to seven the door rang, and I knew before I buzzed it open that it was Sophie, ten minutes early, and her earliness added to that sensation.

“Wills!” she called as she came up the stairs. “I’m early!”

“I’m naked!” I called out from my room. I could hear her footsteps on the stairs.

“You’d better be!”

I stepped out into the hallway, dressed, and she laughed. She looked radiant. Her hair was pinned up, wisps of it falling down her neck, and she wore a short black sheath and high heels. At her breastbone was a confusion of silver necklaces, which dipped between the tantalizing nearness of the tops of her breasts.

She put an arm around my neck and kissed me on the cheek. “Give me a drink, would you?”

“Beer?”

“No, wine, you cad.”

I grinned. “One minute—go sit down.”

“I’m changing the music!” she called out behind me as I sprinted into Tom’s room, digging through his things, searching for wine.

“Okay!” I said.

Tom had nothing. Lily Allen had just become popular and “Littlest Things” came on. In desperation I cracked Anil’s door and saw, to my delight, that he had four bottles in the rack on his desk. They looked perilously expensive, but I didn’t care. I took a bottle, fetched two glasses from the kitchen, and went back.

My bed was strewn with clothes, unmade, and my heart quickened when I saw that Sophie had chosen to sit next to my pillow, cross-legged. She was examining my high school yearbook.

“I found wine.”

“You look like a baby!” she said, tapping the page she was looking at.

I smiled. “No credit for the wine?”

“Who’d you steal it from?”

“Nobody,” I said indignantly.

“Anil,” she said.

“No!”

“Hey, have you called a cab yet, to come for seven?”

“Not yet.”

“Oh, good. Don’t, then. Let’s drink this bottle.”

“Perfect. Anil has three more, too.”

She laughed, and with a heave of courage I set myself right next to her, so that as we both leaned over my yearbook our heads nearly touched. I poured the wine and told her about the people she pointed out. My mind was only half there; it was happening, I could tell. I had a tension in my breath, and a hollow feeling in my solar plexus of the kind I get with any great emotion, happiness or sadness, and I was all nerves, filled with almost painful joy.

As I poured her second glass she closed the yearbook and pivoted so that we were facing each other Indian-style, knees touching. “What was the most romantic night of your life?”

“Honestly?” I asked.

“Of course.”

I wasn’t honest. “The first night my old girlfriend from college and I hooked up.”

She giggled. “Will.”

“What?”

She giggled some more. “I think I’m slurvy.”

There was what felt like a very long pause, the music confidential. The candles along my desk, which she had evidently lit, flickered and guttered at every draft of wind. “It’s cold in here,” she said and rubbed her arms.

“Lula’s party was kind of romantic,” I said.

“Oh, William,” she said in some dazed way and smiled sweetly, looking directly into my eyes. She leaned her whole body into mine and kissed me on the lips and then, after a minute, pushed me into a heap on the bed. We kissed more pressingly, not quite tearing each other’s clothes off but with our legs and arms knitted and her hair, she had unpinned it, falling into my face, our faces constantly close. We kissed each other’s lips and cheeks and necks. I took her shirt off.

“Nice,” I said.

She laughed, straddling me. “Will, you muppet. Don’t say things like that.”

Then she lowered back down over me and we kissed. My dick was as hard as it had ever been—and may ever be, barring some unforeseen and strange pharmacological intervention—and she stroked it through my jeans. I don’t know. I was half in shock. I remember her kissing my neck as I looked out the window at the lights on in the dorms. The door opened, and Anil and Timmo came banging up the stairs, laughing and chattering about their kite and the bop, and Sophie and I laughed into each other’s mouths at our new secret, saying “Shh!” at the same time.

It’s tedious, I’m sure, to hear too much about how beautiful a girl is, but I think of it: her high cheekbones, the long, unruly hair down her back. She looked flushed and happy, and I remember feeling so relieved that what filled her face wasn’t guilt or diffidence but just happiness. I’m sure it filled mine, too.

Her thighs were wet, and as I touched her she didn’t moan but caught her breath in the back of her throat, then exhaled it in little bursts. She took off my shirt and as I started to put two fingers inside her she bit my chest and pushed back on my hand. She still had one hand on the outside of my jeans and started to rub it harder—painfully, one of the little irritants that make sex so ludicrous and personal.

“Ouch,” I said.

“I’m hurting you?” she asked.

“No, no.”

We shifted off of each other and she lay at my side, looking at me with a smile in her face.

“I’m so wet,” she said. She arched her back.

I kissed her. “Do you want me to go down—can I please—”

“Just, let’s have sex,” she said. She threw her thin arms around my neck.

At that moment I paused. She could tell. “Sophie,” I said. “You know how I feel.”

She looked serious, her hair falling down at me from above, and then she smiled. “Are you saying no?”

I rolled my eyes, smiling, too. “No, I’m not.”

She laughed and stood up. The song had ended a while before. “We need more music. Something with words. If we’re going to do this.”

“Okay.”

She put on this random mix I sometimes listened to back then. The first song was “Underneath Your Clothes” by Shakira. We laughed. When she got back to the bed the mood was altered—instead of that passionate, back-scratching foreplay, it was smoother and calmer. She lay back on the bed, smiling up at me beatifically. I half-stood above her and she raised her head to wet my dick with her mouth. Then we lay down and as I sank on top she guided me inside her.

“God,” she said, a quarter of the way in.

Nobody has ever described sex accurately. I can’t either. There’s something near-impossible to record about the sensation of your stretches of skin, something internal, the comprehensive accuracy and correctness of the junction, the corresponding interior sensations, all of it. Don’t tell us about hot breath, don’t tell us about hair in each other’s faces, we know all that—but there’s nothing else to say either.

After it was done she fell straight to sleep on top of me, which I adored, and I dozed, too, waking up every few minutes to check that it was all still happening: a curse, always to be looking backward and forward from the moment. She was asleep when I said, “Look,” and pointed out at the pale black January sky.

She turned her head, and a drowsy smile came onto her face. “Snow,” she murmured and pressed her face again into my bare chest, kissing it with her lips.

As she slept I watched the flurries falling onto the evergreen trees outside my window, scatterbrained, windblown, and wild at first, gusting past the curtains into the room and landing suicidally on my floor, then steady and heavy and plodding, accumulating: the two things, love and snow, that make the world look fresh again, angelic. I thought of when we had gone punting and she said she could stay in Oxford forever, that it was like home already.

Soon everything outside was an unbroken white. The heart, my heart, always understands before I do when happiness is possible.

CHAPTER
SEVEN

Foucault theorized that as religious faith began to decline, physicians assumed the role that for centuries had belonged to priests. A doctor and a cleric were equally oracular, passing down decrees the common man didn’t have the expertise or language to question. Both could claim admission to the penetralia of a body unintelligible to most men. It was never faith that disappeared—it only turned inward rather than upward, and the bearer of its news changed uniforms.

At Oxford we had scouts. With the next two cottages, Tom, Anil, and I shared a windburnt man with a white mustache named Strickland. He would vacuum our rooms and empty our bins, but he had no real interest in the constant service of the antique world, nor any real warmth. Yet he knew everything: how to cheat an extra mug’s use out of a tea bag, when we were supposed to run down to Merton and walk around the quad backward, how to slide a fourth into Hall without a reservation. Battels, John Evelyn, loons, mods, prelims, hacks, rustication, bumps, vivas, the Other Place. Most of the day he would sit on the banister reading the
Daily Sport
(a tabloid dedicated almost exclusively to soft pornography) and smoke Woodbines. We treated him with intense respect.

When I slipped out to the bathroom in the hallway, with Sophie still asleep, he was on the banister. On our hall table were two white drinks in handled glasses.

“Take her them,” he said.

“What is it?”

“Rum, egg, nutmeg, and cream, hotted up.”

“Strick, I can’t give her that, it sounds disgusting.”

He looked at me levelly, trying to assess the true depths of my ignorance. “It’s an Oxford Dairy. Tradition when a young lady stays by. I brung ’em to Lord Threepwood by the dozen.”

So I took the drinks to Sophie. She laughed. “We always heard about these in school. What a tart I’ve become.” We drank them in silence—they were stronger than I would have expected—and watched the snow fall outside, as the brilliant hard light of morning slowly suffused the pine trees, shagged with ice.

The night before, after sleeping together, we had roused ourselves into our clothes and gone to the bop with Anil—whose black James Bond costume met with universal censure—and Anneliese, meeting Tom and Ella there. Tom had been dangerously drunk. Sophie had warned me not to kiss her in public, but in the end we had nevertheless siphoned ourselves off behind a column with a bronze bust of an old don and clung to each other, and at eleven we decided the hell with it and flagged a taxi home. We slept interleaved on my narrow bed, the windows still cracked, our heat under my heavy down blanket balanced by the chill of the room.

At eight or just after she had stirred.

“Hey, Will,” she murmured. I ran my fingers over one of her breasts and then the rib beneath it. “Mm,” she said and stretched like a cat.

“Are you sober now?” I smiled as I asked this, but she detected the seriousness of the question and turned her head away, human on my faithless arm.

“I feel…” There was a break as she searched her feelings, then decided, “Hungover and happy.”

We were silent for a minute. I tried not to, but at last I said, “What changed?”

“Oh, Will.”

“You can understand why I’m curious.”

To my surprise it was something specific that had brought her to me, not impulse. “I found out on Wednesday, my friend Clementine called me—one of Lula’s best friends, actually. She’s a horrible spiteful girl. She told me that I had to know, that Jack’s been sleeping with a girl we all went to school with. Minka, not that it means anything to you. She was a nightmare back then, too.”