The Last Enchantments (7 page)

He whistled. “Money?”

“Yeah. He was in real estate when he was younger.” Then, with a feeling of guilt, I added, “He bought his way into politics, actually. No talent of his own for it, but money, and strong convictions.”

“You should get married. It’ll be good for you. Then you should cheat.” He took a gulp of coffee. “I had a girl at Columbia—Kitty, a student, which means I shouldn’t tell you, but there it is. If I had ever married it would have been her.”

“Do you have any children?”

“I hope not. Just nephews that I know of, three,” he said. “Big boys. They play cricket, like I did.”

“How did you decide what to do?” I asked. “To go into academia.”

“How did I decide? Well, I was passionate about it.” He shrugged. “Couldn’t imagine anything else.”

“I don’t think I feel that way. About Orwell.”

He nodded and then gave me an odd look, half fond, half shrewd. There was a sheaf of papers on the table between us, and he picked it up. “I’m glad. If you seemed right I was going to suggest—I’m the chair of the committee for a fellowship Balliol disburses.”

I realized I had been tricked. Or that was too ungenerous a word—appraised. I think I blushed. “What fellowship?”

“Doesn’t matter. Take the papers, if you like, there’s a chance you’ll want to stay here for another four years, but don’t, don’t do it for a fellowship or out of lassitude. Stay here for a year, see Europe, get an honorable second. God, but I envy you.”

I took the papers. It was funny; I envied him. I had looked at his CV online, nine books, two of which were still widely taught, and he wrote now for
The Observer
and
The Times Literary Supplement.
He had been a visiting professor in New York, Tokyo, Stockholm, and Cape Town. He had obviously fucked about ten thousand women. His achievements were behind him. When you’re young, people keep telling you how lucky you are to have all of your choices in front of you. I don’t doubt I’ll feel that way one day, too, but it’s an old person’s dream.

In truth, I arrived at Oxford feeling half like a failure. It was 2005 already. I had been out of college for more than three years, and time seemed to be running out the way it only can when you’re twenty-five, and armed to the teeth with it. I woke up in the middle of the night with a hollow feeling in my chest, panicked about what I would become. I had a friend making three million dollars a year at a hedge fund and another friend who had just been elected to the Rhode Island Senate. All I had was the Kerry campaign—and Alison, I would tell myself in the middle of the night, at least I had Alison.

There were times when I wished I could be done with all of what I was good at, books, reading, writing, speaking, thinking. Too much analysis, too quick a brain. Too many words. It was a kind of fever. Sometimes I thought I had the temperament of a scientist, just not the intelligence. I wanted to be a scientist in the age when good birth, a knack for organization, and a pleasure in careful labeling were enough—when you could simply record the time of the sunset and the sunrise, measure how long it took different types of flowers to bud, dig up bones, and make wildly inadequate conjectures about their origin: the whole time of civilization when the imponderables of life were broader and softer, before polymers, before relativity. It’s the wish of a stupid mind.

Jarvis and I talked about all of this. I stayed for three hours, two hours longer than I should have, two and a half longer than I intended. I kept thinking about the fellowship.

“We’ll have to do this again,” he said when at last I was going. “I mean it.”

“Thank you for inviting me. It’s easy enough to feel lost here.”

He shook his head. “No, within a week you’ll be at home. When does Fleet have its first bop?”

“Third Week, I think.”

“I went to one, you know. Anything but clothes was the theme, meaning you had to dress up in anything but clothes. There was a young woman in a tinfoil bikini, and there were a great deal of poorly fastened socks. About ten years ago, this would have been.”

I laughed. “Did you have fun?”

He thought for a moment. “At my age the beauty of these young people, the women, is a personal affront. They’re so very lovely, and too stupid to know it.” He smiled and opened the door. “Have fun. Come see me again in a month or two.”

*   *   *

As I walked back across the fields toward college, I called Alison.

“Hey, it’s me.”

“Will! Hey! I’m running out of the door, though, I can’t talk.”

“To where?”

“To work.”

“Oh, of course.” I could hear the click of her high heels on the hardwood floors of our apartment.

“What’s up?”

“What do you think I should do after this year?”

“I don’t know. Get a job?”

“Thanks, problem solved.”

She laughed. “It’s tough here right now. Kerry people are having a shitty time.”

“What about your dad?”

I heard her turn the sink on. “He could probably help you, but more with a staff position like I got, or maybe with the DNC or the DCCC. None of the House campaigns are hiring, but who knows how it will be in a year.”

“That guy I told you about last night, Jarvis, is in charge of this thing called the Swift Prize.”

“Okay.”

“Not that I would ever apply, it’s just crazy. It comes with five years of room and board, and the annual stipend is twenty thousand pounds. There’s no teaching, no … but only four people get it a year.”

“So?”

“Nothing, really.”

“Do you want to keep doing English? We talked about that. You can always come back and do your doctorate at Columbia.”

“This professor—”

The sink turned off. “Will, you have to tell me you’re not staying in fucking Oxford for five years.”

“No! I’m telling you about this guy.”

“I would love to see you do English, but I don’t care about some prize that keeps you over there for a hundred years. As long as we’re together, right?”

This was a talismanic phrase of ours. “As long as we’re together.”

“Shit, there’s the doorman calling, my car is here. I’ve got to go, really I do. Bye, sweetheart. Call me later. Don’t do this, please, don’t make me worry. I love you.”

I walked home, unconsoled, through a misting and irresolute rain.

*   *   *

That Saturday’s Formal Hall was my first. It had been a busy week—classes had started, a few hours a day with a bright group, all of whom were consumed by Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, one or the other, nearly without exception. I was settling into the city. I could find all the main streets by now. I had forgotten about Jess, the whirl of life making that night seem very distant. When you start to feel as if you belong to Oxford, its walls rise around you. She was outside of them.

Tom, Anil, and I walked into Formal Hall together. We ate most of our meals in the same room, but it had been transformed, pushed backward in time. You can picture it, I’m sure, the sparkling candlelight cast upon half-full glasses of red wine, the byzantine ceremonies, the head porter in his tails, the young men and women in robes, the witty chatter building to a white noise. Along the walls were portraits of the Tudors; the food was inedible, the wine excellent; there was a series of ancient rituals to observe at each mealtime. All for the sake of twenty-year-olds on their way to dance to Usher songs at a place called Filth.

The first tradition we learned about, from the older students at the table around us, was grace. Before each meal the master said grace in Latin, and there was a bitter, centuries-old dispute between Fleet and Merton as to whose grace was longer. In recent years things had escalated. Fleet added a word to their grace to make it twenty-six words, Merton added two to make theirs twenty-seven, Fleet bumped over top of them again with twenty-eight. Then Merton made
theirs
twenty-eight, too, as a conciliatory gesture, but all the dons at Fleet put their heads together and added a word anyway. The term before I arrived, Merton, in the equivalent for Oxford graces of a nuclear attack, rewrote theirs to make it thirty-five words long. Fellows at Fleet felt the shame of this keenly. For months while I was there the dean walked around in a state of unconstrained grief.

The second tradition was pennying. If you could bounce a penny off of the table and into anyone else’s glass while they weren’t touching the glass, that person had, was absolutely required, to drink it down to the bottom. This was theoretically to save the queen, because the queen’s picture is on the penny. (“These little bastards, ruining the best of Fleet’s cellar by tossing copper into the wine,” I once overheard the same dean say when he thought nobody was listening except the master.)

We arrived at Hall in high spirits. Tom and I, ready early at the Cottages, had spent half an hour watching Anil put on a fashion show. After several changes he emerged from his room in a black velvet jacket with gold epaulets, wearing a tie of scorching neon yellow.

“That tie is a little bright,” I said.

“Haters gonna hate,” said Anil, and he had a point.

At Hall we sat with Timmo and Anneliese, and then vigilantly watched the entrance of the undergraduate girls. They had arrived a few days before with trains of duffel bags and weepy mothers.

“At LSE the grad students got the pick of the undergrads,” Tom whispered to me.

“At Yale the grad students were like lepers.”

“Americans do everything backward. Even your toilets go backward.”

“That’s Australia.”

We sat, poured out a glass of wine each, and were immediately pennied. As for Anil, he was pennied dozens of times but refused, imperiously, to drink, which alienated him from the undergrads around us. It also made him a celebrity. At the end of the night there were thirty or forty pennies in his untouched glass of wine, and the captain of the undergraduate rugby team had come over from high table to see the apostasy for himself, a look of deep consternation on his face. “Aren’t you going to drink it?”

Anil, arms crossed, said, “Absolutely not.”

“Blimey,” said the captain.

That was later. Before they had served any food, Tom grabbed my arm. “Look,” he said in an urgent whisper.

It was the Asian girl from the bar, with the pink and black hair and the tattoos. She was wearing a not-much-of-a dress. “Maybe she’ll sit with us.”

As if she had heard—though she couldn’t have—she turned in our direction and caught us staring dead at her. She rolled her eyes and sat down in the first open seat she could find. In a way it made me glad Sophie hadn’t come.

Except that then, ten minutes after our twenty-nine word grace, as we were eating soup, she appeared at the door, in a long gold and white dress, hair up, a glittering black clutch held in her two hands, almost as if she were nervous. She was alone. I wondered if she knew her housemates yet, and waved at her tentatively, as she scanned the room. When she saw me she smiled and came toward us. My heart fluttered. I made Anil move down.

I introduced them to her. She and Tom had friends in common, and places, too, which they discovered quickly enough. Then she spent some time querying Anil about his course and his origins. When the soup was gone and there was a moment when Anil and Tom were talking to each other, she turned to me, and we talked.

“I can’t believe you saw me cry. You’re in select company.”

I laughed. “How did the breakup go?”

“It had to be done.”

I nodded and raised my glass. “Congratulations.”

“And you, do you have a girlfriend?”

“I do.”

“What’s she called?”

“Alison.”

“She’s here?”

“No, in New York.”

In an idle tone, she said, “I wonder if it’ll last.”

For the rest of the meal she and I talked exclusively to each other, without any break. It was unusually easy, and as they brought dessert, a gelatinous cylinder of something, mousse, panna cotta, who knew, I realized that it was making me miss Alison, the presence of a woman near me—and that it was making me miss having sex, too. Sophie looked more ethereal than Alison did, as if she held more back, and also as if she lacked Alison’s sturdy intelligence, but she traded it in for something more evasive, more alluring. She had very high cheekbones; light hazel eyes; slight, reddish lips; and a body that was slender but curved, long-limbed. She smiled more to herself than to me. I found her enthralling.

Though she was never very autobiographical, that night and in the next weeks I did discover a little bit about her. Neither of her parents worked. She grew up in a stone parsonage in Yorkshire, though they spent a month each spring in London and a month each fall in the French countryside, where she had learned to speak the language. Her father kept horses and pigs, and her best memories of childhood were of their matutinal visitations to the barn, each with a mug of tea. At the age of eight her parents had sent her—“I was sent,” she said, using the passive voice, which seemed indistinctly sad, as if nobody were quite responsible—to boarding school. There she was unhappy, though she never elaborated on how, or indeed even said outright that it was the case. I could simply tell.

She did tell me one story about it. As a child she had asked for a dog every birthday, and on her sixth birthday she had woken up to find a springer spaniel puppy outside her door. Before an hour was out they were inseparable, and within a year I think she was closer to Chessie—as she called the dog—than to any human. She had no brothers or sisters. When the dog had thrush at a year old, Sophie didn’t sleep for forty hours.

Two years later, with the car loaded to take her to boarding school for the first time, Sophie had gotten into the backseat of her parents’ Land Rover—rather bravely, from the sound of it—with her dog.

“Why d’you have Chessie in the car?” her father had asked.

“She’s coming with me, of course.”

Her father laughed, a laugh that no doubt seemed innocent of meaning to him but to her, as a child, felt like a Roman emperor’s whimsical malice—parents forget how long a single word can bore into a child, forever—and said, “No, no, she has to stay here. None of the girls will have a dog. Imagine!”