The Last Enchantments (33 page)

Sometimes I hear from him. He has a stunning girlfriend, a glamour model (as the Brits call them) from Hull. Usually he sends me some video on YouTube that was popular three weeks before. I know he talks to Anil every day. There was even some word of them going out to India together, but I don’t know if that happened. I could find out. People drop out of touch more quickly than you expect.

*   *   *

The news was of surpassing significance to Timmo, but in those confused days I have to admit that for me it was only a footnote to my life, because of Alison.

When I saw her on my stoop, I said, stupidly, “Alison?”

“Hey.” She was smiling. “Are you surprised?”

“I’m shocked.”

“I had some business in London.”

“What business could you have had in London?” I asked.

“Terrorism stuff,” she said. “There was a conference with the London police and they sent me over.”

“Well—great. How long can you stay?”

She shrugged. “I didn’t book my flight back until Sunday night.”

I hugged her and kissed her, then sat down on the stoop beside her. We were covered from the rain there, looking out at the wet world, the yellow streetlights, the pavement glittering as if diamonds had been flung across it. I could smell her clean familiar saline scent, and I could see the white scar under her collarbone, from a bicycle accident when she was young. Her physical presence reached out and gave me, without warning, a yearning for things to go back to what they had been. In some universe we were still together. I felt the cruelty of living only once.

I grabbed her hand. “You’ll have to come out tomorrow night. We’re all going to the Turtle.”

“The famous Turtle,” she said dryly.

“Come on, let’s get your stuff upstairs.”

“I can get a hotel.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

When we were in my armchairs some time later, her presence in that bedroom slightly alien, as if two parallel lines had touched, she said, casually, “You know, I still haven’t hooked up with anyone.”

“No?”

“What about you?”

“No,” I said. “Not especially.”

*   *   *

The first night she was there Alison and I watched a movie; I slept on the floor. We caught up about old friends and sat around in our pajamas. There was a closer feeling between us than there had been in a long time, and the more I was with her, I found, the hungrier I was for her company.

The next day I showed her Oxford—the things you saw if you ever went there, the Radcliffe Camera, the Ashmolean, the grand stone stairwell at Christ Church, dipped in the center of each stair by generations of footsteps.

It was a Friday, and as I had told her it was supposed to be a big night. A ragged group of twenty or so Fleet MCR people was meeting up for dinner and dancing, in celebration of so many people finishing. Tom was absent—he texted me that he was with Jess—but over dinner Alison got to meet everyone else. Anil and Timmo (still a day shy of his earth-shattering news) strolled in a few minutes late, Anil in a Raiders hat and with his special gold chains around his neck

He lit up in a smile when I introduced him to Alison, his fancy glasses perched under the brim of his cap. “Will has told us much about you!” he said.

“Anil, why are you dressed like that?” I asked.

“To protest the Turtle’s racist policies. My black brothers are being discriminated against.”

“Your what?” asked Sophie.

“They won’t let you into the Turtle if you’re wearing necklaces or baseball hats, Sophia! It’s an outrage, really an outrage. On behalf of the black community—”

“Oh dear,” said Anneliese.

As things shook out, Sophie and Alison sat next to each other at Pierre Victoire, the French restaurant on Little Clarendon, and with their good breeding, like a shared property line, soon they were best friends. Sophie kept saying things like “You never told me Alison has so much responsibility at her job!” and “You never told me Alison went to Patagonia!”

“I can’t believe I didn’t mention that.”

Alison rolled her eyes. “Isn’t he too sarcastic to deal with?”

Sophie smiled. “Yep.”

As we walked toward the Turtle Alison and I put our arms around each other, both softened up by a great deal of wine. On every sidewalk were people our age, scattering in the twilight toward small aims, and I thought of youth, how youth is. We went into the dark cellar of the Turtle in a mood of festive exhilaration, ordering Orielgasms and J
ä
gerbombs at random, whether we already had drinks or not.

After a while I noticed Sophie was gone. I looked for her and saw that she had run into some of Jackal’s friends. I turned to Alison and said, “Do you want to get drunk?”

“That’s why I came to England.”

So we had two martinis, mango for her and vodka for me, and then we started dancing. The hours and the drinks passed, which is usually how it happens. Alison and I would occasionally find Anil or Ella and dance with them, Sophie once as well, but mostly we just danced together in between drinks. Then the song of the moment, “Mr. Brightside,” came on, and everything seemed to turn up a level, the adrenaline in the room, and it turned into that ecstatic kind of dancing, when you’re sweaty and happy, and everyone is screaming in unison. When at some point Alison fell into me, accidentally nudged by someone from behind, I slipped my hand under her dress to feel the crease where her ass hung over her thighs. She tilted her head up toward me and grinned, her dark hair falling messily around her face, then gave me a kiss. Her lips were salty.

“I took a job in Ohio,” I called out to her over the music.

“I know.”

“What?”

“I wanted you to take it on your own. You can’t be a banker, Will.”

I realized she was right, and I realized why she had come when she did, that neither the job nor her visit was an accident. I found I didn’t care. I looked around and couldn’t see anyone I knew. “I missed you,” I said.

“I missed you, too. This whole year.”

CHAPTER
TEN

In the next days we began to blend our lives back together. I booked a ticket to New York, where Alison said I could drop my things at her apartment while I was in Ohio, and then booked a second ticket to take me on to Columbus. I gave Doug Bryson my Social Security number, and he started a routine background check. I told Fleet I would be leaving my room earlier than I had anticipated.

At the same time Tom, too, was making a decision.

I had still only met Daisy once, but over the course of the year he had described their history to me. How they met at a London charity dance when they were both still in school, aged seventeen, an event with, as he recalled it (I think it can’t possibly be true) every stripe of crippled and contagious human article staggering around them in a lurid Buñuel waltz, how after school he went off to LSE while she went to its inferior neighbor, King’s, how while there she studied the Yves Saint-Laurent catalog, yoga, sexual guides she found online, and, in the margins of time these activities left spare, Spanish. It was sex that kept Tom enamored of her. I know for a fact that he believed he had never dated anybody as good-looking or as out of his league as Daisy. He was underestimating himself; she was a creature of upper-class dreams. She had money but he had real origins, Charles the Second stuff, whereas she was one or two generations removed from the working class. Her parents were the first rich members of her family, possibly her grandparents, but it went no further back. Her background was like Kate Middleton’s in that way, I suppose. She was very intelligent; I could tell from the e-mails she sent, from her face. Personally I never could have liked her. We were too different. She cared about things like fashion and food, those ruthless twin commerces mistaken by idiots for culture, and she distinguished herself from other people primarily by what she bought. (Here she was of her class. No spoiled Malibu teen could care more for
things,
cars, clothes, jewelry, than certain members of the British gentry. In every gesture they assert their status, commodifying even their children’s names, infant Rollos and Tristans and Leanders.) Tom was changeable; he could be led into or away from his snobbishness. For much of their relationship I think she led him into it.

The reason this is of more than academic interest is that on the day after I took Alison to see the Turtle I had a note from him on my desk, and it was about her.

Bake—

Daisy finishes working in Oxford today. She says good-bye. I’m driving her to London. I’ll be back in a few days, maybe a week, definitely in time for the LMH grad bop. Monitor Anil’s music for me—if he thinks he can start blitzing Nelly just because I’m gone he’s mistaken.

Raleigh

I called him. “Hey, Will,” he said, picking up. I could hear the highway.

“Are you on your way to London?”

“Yeah.”

“So wait, the past couple of nights you’ve been with—”

“With Daisy, yeah.”

You missed meeting Alison. “Did you tell Jess you were going?”

“I talked to her. Listen, I have to run. Daze says hello. See you soon.”

I tried to picture them together. I earnestly doubted that Daisy had said hello, or for that matter the good-bye Tom had relayed in his note. I went back into my room from the landing. “Who was it?” asked Alison. She was cross-legged on the floor, sorting through her dirty clothes. We were going over to the MCR to do laundry.

“Tom. It seems like he and Jess might be breaking up.”

She frowned. She was partially caught up on the story. “That’s too bad.”

“Yeah.”

“How did they meet?”

“Oh, just around,” I said. “She works in a teashop. Which is maybe the problem.”

“Not everyone can be happy like us,” she said and rolled her eyes, though she was smiling, too.

“Hilarious.”

I put Tom out of my mind then, until my phone rang several hours later. It was Jess.

“Hey,” I said cautiously. Alison was in the room.

“Hey, Will.”

I walked out into the hallway. “How’s everything?”

“Fine,” she said. “Listen, is Tom next door by any chance? I can’t get him on the phone. I wouldn’t ask, but I haven’t even had a text from him since yesterday.”

“No, he’s not around.”

She paused. “He’s with that girl, right?”

I didn’t know what to say. “Who?”

“Okay,” she said. “Well, thanks for nothing.”

“I’m sorry.”

I thought she was going to hang up, but she didn’t. “Will?”

“Yes?”

“When you saw me naked did you ever think I looked fat?”

“Oh my God, Jess, no. Don’t be a psycho.”

“You promise?”

“Yes. God.”

She was quiet for a minute. “Really, I just hope he’s happy. I know it sounds stupid.”

“I think you’ve made him happy. Almost as happy as he was before Katie died.”

“Do you think so?”

“You shouldn’t jump to any conclusions about them, either. I don’t think they’ve hooked up. And I can see why he would find her comforting. For the same reason. Just, she knew his sister, she’s from before.”

“Is she pretty?”

“No,” I lied, loyal in a way to both Tom and Jess.

“That’s good.”

“He loves you.”

“He said that?”

“He hasn’t said it to you? I can tell it’s how he feels.”

“He said it once—once when we were hooking up.”

I could hear her happiness as she considered the memory of it. “Let’s keep this family-friendly, okay?”

“Oh, grow up.”

*   *   *

On the night before Alison had to leave, a day or two after Tom and Daisy went to London, she and I began to pack my room.

“It’s weird to be somewhere that you live and I don’t,” she said, boxing up books. “Everywhere since I lived on Lynwood, senior year, you’ve lived, too. Basically. Even when you had your own place you never slept there.”

“I did too.”

“Yeah, like once a month.”

I paused and then said, “It’s harder to sleep alone.”

She looked out through the window and shook her head, as if there were too much to say. It was one of those late summer evenings when it all seems heartbreaking, the world, when the soft light, the trees, and the warmth of the air still your restlessness.

“Are you glad you’re coming home?” she asked.

“I guess probably I am.” I kissed her cheek. “I am.”

“Let’s sleep together then.”

I smiled. We hadn’t done that yet for some reason. “Okay.”

She went to my bed, and I went to the door and closed it. Instead of lying on the bed, though, she pulled off my sheets and my pillows, bringing them over near the open windows. There she laid them out. She slipped off her shirt and then lay down between the sheets. When I came over she reached up for my hand, and as I knelt she put it to her cheek.

Then something happened to me; nearby, on the pile of books she had been packing, was a dark blue pennant, triangular and small, only about the size of my hand. Though it was upside down I knew that on the other side it said
BOAT RACE 2006
in white letters and had the two seals of Oxford and Cambridge underneath.

The difficulty of life for me is in its individuation: how every stray minute of the day passes at the same pace as a minute during the last ice age, in the same space-time, or the minute you were born. One day on this earth it was thirty million years ago and the next a person as real as you was dying in Theresienstadt and the next you were sitting in a restaurant in New Haven laughing with your new girlfriend. I have so much trouble with those gaps. Where it all goes.

I looked at Alison and then back at the pennant, stricken. I loved her very much, but I had been wrong.

“Is everything okay?” Alison asked.

I knew then that I was going to stay in Oxford for the summer. The only thing I didn’t know was how to tell her.

“Will? What is it?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“What is it?” she asked again.

I took my hands away from her. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I think—”

She looked at me sharply. “No, no, Will.”