The Last Enchantments (34 page)

I don’t need to describe the fight we had. It lasted for many hours and combined ten of the fights we should have had when I first broke up with her. She cried throughout it, and several times I nearly gave in. What was cruel was that during that fight I loved her more than I had in years. I think she could sense that, too; it deepened the mystery of the whole circumstance to her.

It was dark by the time we stopped arguing, a white panel of moonlight lying upon the floor. There were tears on her face. I told her again that I was sorry. Suddenly at the hundredth repetition of this apology her demeanor disintegrated into acceptance.

“Jesus,” she said. “I was so stupid to come here.”

“No,” I said. “You’re not stupid at all. I love you, you know.”

“I know that, you idiot.”

She looked up at me, and I became aware of how close our bodies were, our mouths, too. We started to kiss, and before long our faces were wet with her tears. She slipped my T-shirt off over my shoulders and took her pants off, then ran her hands lightly down my arms, kissing my neck, standing on tiptoes to reach up to me. The makeshift bed lay half-destroyed at our feet. She slid down my body and started to give me head, and then pulled me down so that we were both lying down together. I went down on her, tugging aside her black thong, and she took my hair in her hand, arched her back, and whimpered, pressing up against my mouth. “Let’s have sex,” she said after a minute or two. “Come on, stop that, fuck me. I don’t want to come yet.”

When you’ve had sex with someone a thousand times and it seems new again, it’s somehow better even than when it
was
new; there’s the same sense of exploration but not of anxiety. I remember observing her, her skin, her breasts, her hair. All of it had been mine for so long, but now it seemed initial again, with the sense of exaltation that you attach to another person when you sleep with them for the first time.

After we came we lay together for a long time, at first saying the inconsequential, happy things you say after sex. Then we were quiet. Her eyes became flat and unreadable, but she didn’t stop lying with me. The neglected punts clicked against each other on the river, a familiar sound, as the water they bobbed on sparkled dimly, distantly.

Her breath evened out and she fell asleep there, in my arms. I imagined seeing her at some random party thrown by a common friend in ten years, twenty years, not talking for long. She would have a husband and children I might never meet. The wide arcs of our lives, now estranged.

Exhilaration, happiness, desperation, dejection, and love—especially love, of Sophie; Jess; Alison; Tom; Ella; Oxford; Anil; Anneliese; myself; my father; an adult complexity of loves—swirled into me. Her head lay on my chest, her naked breasts along my naked ribs.
Good-bye,
I thought and gazed up at the very end of the daylight outside, the final midnight paleness at the edge of dark, until I fell asleep, too.

*   *   *

I took her to the train station the next morning, though I had asked her to stay as long as she wanted.

“You’ll call Doug Bryson?” was the last thing she said to me on the platform.

“I’ll call him.”

“You should keep him on your side, even though you’re fucking him over. He’s going places.”

“I know.”

“My dad’s going to flip out. He really pulled some strings.”

“Sorry.”

“No, you didn’t ask for it. I’m just surprised you can live with not knowing what’s next. It’s not like you.” She gave me a quick hug. “Bye, Will. I’ll miss you.”

“I love you.”

“Okay.”

“Will you call me when you get in?” I asked.

She laughed. I remember thinking that was stylish of her somehow. I don’t think anyone, even my mother, had ever understood the unhappiness of my childhood as Alison did, and how that unhappiness had ramified forward into my adult behavior. The generosity of her forgiveness of my flaws was mine to keep, even after we had separated. I realized when she laughed that I wanted to know her my whole life. “Okay,” she said.

“I love you,” I said again, and she smiled.

I saw her onto the train, then stood and, though I couldn’t see her from behind the ticket barrier, waved in the direction of the car she was sitting in. I stood there waving until the train strayed away and I knew there was no chance that she could see me anymore, if she ever had, and then I turned back and went home.

*   *   *

The next week for me was lonely. Tom was still in London, Anil and Anneliese were both working against deadlines, and Ella and Peter had gone on vacation together, a cheap bed-and-breakfast in the Cotswolds. I hadn’t tried getting in touch with Sophie. I worried that I had made a mistake.

Occasionally, though, if you make a gesture in neither hope nor despair, the world will send one back. Five days after Alison left for America, my phone buzzed in my pocket with a text from Sophie.

Is Alison still here?

She left a couple days ago.

There was a break of an hour or so. I kept glancing toward my phone over and over until at last she wrote again. Her text thrilled me.

I didn’t like watching the two of you together.

Not sure what to say to that.

I’m sorry. It’s stupid. What are you doing today?

Nothing. You?

Again time passed. I didn’t want to be the one to write her again. Just when I was going to anyway, she sent another text.

Do you want to walk into town?

Okay.

I pulled on some jeans and brushed my teeth, then walked three doors over to her house. She was sitting on the steps, hair back in a ponytail, a purple T-shirt and jeans on, drinking from an oversized plastic cup of iced tea.

“Do you want a sip?” she asked through the ice in her mouth and held the cup out.

“Sure.” I took it from her. “Where do you want to go?”

“Will’s choice.”

I tried to think of something that would take a long time. “Why don’t we walk down to Christ Church meadow and look at the cows? We could do the big loop.”

She smiled. “What a city boy.”

“Well, what do you want to do?”

“No, no, I’ll go look at some cows.” She stood up. “Should I grab my camera?”

“Shut up.”

She laughed. “Come on, let’s go.”

We walked slowly, her slender hands gesturing as she spoke. Our talk was what people talk about everywhere except in art: the people they know, gossip, old jokes. We theorized about Tom and Ella. We imagined Timmo’s daily life in the
Big Brother
house, where he was going to be sequestered the next day.

When we got to the cows we sat down on a bench. Christ Church and Merton were lined behind us, and a wild field in front of us.

“Was it weird having her here?” Sophie asked about Alison.

“It was.”

“Why?”

I looked away. “When I got here in the fall she was my life.”

“Not if you left New York.”

“No, I guess you’re right.”

“Did that sound mean?”

“No,” I said.

“Are you still going to America next week?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“I knew it.”

“Did Anneliese tell you?”

“No, but I knew.”

“You’re being weird.”

“I’m not! Why, tell me why aren’t you going?”

“It wasn’t any single thing. It won’t kill me not to work this cycle in politics, since it’s not presidential, and I’m curious about the job in London. It felt too fast to go.”

“I’ve been thinking, and it’s like you and Alison, it’s weird, about what I was holding on to with Jack. Just a feeling that it was the right thing for me.”

“Sometimes things don’t work out,” I said. “It doesn’t always have to be big and meaningful.”

“I still get his emails every day.”

“Do you miss him?”

“I miss the danger a little bit.”

“The danger?”

“Not of him being there, not that at all, just of him.”

I felt for a moment as if I had never understood her at all. I said, “So?”

It was a question that could have led anywhere. There were very few times that year when Sophie spoke to me directly about her feelings, but now she put a hand on my hand, along the bench, looking in my eyes, and said, without elaboration, “I woke up this morning and I thought,
I’m ready.
”

“What do you mean?”

She seemed in charge. “I know it’s been a long time.”

“What do you want to do?”

She scooted over so we were close and then put her arms around my neck and her face into my hair, leaning into me with her whole body. She kissed my cheek. “I don’t care,” she said.

*   *   *

From that afternoon forward, Sophie and I were together. I can’t remember if the two of us got dinner or if we returned to Fleet for Hall, but I know we spent the evening in the MCR, watching a movie with Anil and Peter. In retrospect that seems strange, but it made me happier than if we had just returned to my room.

The ten weeks that followed passed like ten minutes, and the days of that period seem identical as I recall them. We became inseparable quickly, and soon she had an encampment in the corner of my room (which was about four feet wider across than hers, and which, because Strickland expropriated the best furniture for the houses he looked after, was more comfortable). She kept her books and papers there, as well as a lap desk; at this time she was working hard in preparation for the start of her DPhil. She had accepted the money from the Swift Prize already. When we woke up in the morning she would go straight to her corner and begin to work. I rose more slowly, but after showering I would walk to Holywell Street, not far, and go to the dark green tuck shop opposite New College. There I would get us coffee and croissants, her coffee iced, mine hot and with milk. If I felt especially hungry I might get a sandwich for midmorning, too, usually the cheddar ploughman’s, and a packet of crisps. Back in the room we listened to music at a low volume as she annotated the margins of
Le grand meaulnes
or
L’immoraliste,
and I either read or worked on a halting campaign memoir I had started. I can’t even remember if I still have a copy of it, though it must be lurking like a ghost in my computer.

By lunch she would need a break, and we’d either eat at Hall with whoever happened to be there—we had a permanent station under the tall oil of Inigo Jones near the south windows—or at a restaurant in town. Then she and I would separate. She liked to sleep after lunch, and I would walk down to Iffley and swim in the university pool. The walk was just long enough that I would have digested whatever I ate by the time I got there and changed. Sometimes in the afternoons I would go to a museum or a movie while she was at the library, doing the archival parts of her work, and often I would begin at three or four or five to panic that I would never see her again. As a result, though we usually planned to meet up for the evening at seven, I would often arrive at her door at a quarter to the hour or even earlier, I imagine looking anxious. Whatever time it was, she would smile when I arrived and kiss me, and often we would sleep together for the second time of the day. I don’t think we had many arguments. When she was upset she became implacable instead of angry, and I was in love.

Our evenings during that June and July were more sluggish than they had been during term. Each evening a large group of people from Fleet, often with additions from outside of the college, gathered on the lawns. It was generally Anil who organized us. We would sit in a slack ring of chairs with gin and beer in the center, most people as they got drunk gradually shifting down into the grass, on their backs or up on their forearms. The sun didn’t fall until eleven. We had stopped punting for some reason, though it was the nicest weather to do it in. Occasionally after it was at last dark we would go into the city, but usually we would just retreat back to the Fleet bar for another drink, or if it was a weekend we might invite the people in our phones to come to our MCR, where we could stay up late. At whatever hour we went home, Sophie and I went together.

I wonder if I got to know her better in this time. I thought I would at first, but then, we had spent so much time together in the fall. I know that her power over me was very great. For instance, the political issue she cared most about—perhaps as a result of having grown up in the country—was the environment, and while I thought I had been conscientious about recycling and reusing she changed my habits quickly and completely. She was far more dogged than I was. She would take ten minutes to isolate the one bit of plastic from a parcel so that she could recycle it. She only ever put high-test gasoline in her car, and she drove it nearly down to empty before she would refill the tank, because it was meant to be more fuel-efficient. Soon enough I was lecturing people about these small matters and, as she did, forwarding them pirated downloads of
An Inconvenient Truth.
(It wasn’t that we didn’t want to buy it but that we didn’t want to add another plastic box to the world’s circulation of them. Anyhow, around then YouTube was invented, and most of the significant clips from the movie popped up on it before long.) As for the reverse—I don’t think I ever had such an influence on her, but there was a pleasure in seeing at her least guarded someone who had been such an enigma to me.

It didn’t seem like life. It seems very bright, lots of sunlight, in my memory—England is farther north than people realize, not too distant from the all-day sun of summer in Scandinavia. Our lively school-year friendships seemed to grow deeper and easier. It may be an unfair trick to describe this time in so few words, but it passed that way, wordlessly somehow, such that even now I annex it to the least intelligible and least articulate part of my memory.

*   *   *

I went that whole summer without seeing St. John Jarvis. In fact, I hadn’t seen him since March, or perhaps even February. In the first week of August, however, I noticed an article he had written for
The Guardian
and sent him a note complimenting it. He shot one straight back inviting me for coffee, and so on a wet day, with the sky gray and the radiantly green grass on the lawns combed down by the wind, I walked the half mile over the bridge and to his brown house among the fields.