After This (30 page)

 

David bent down to scoop Runty from her feet. “I don’t mind,”
she said, but then he was crouched before her, brushing the cat hair
from her trousers, touching her instep and her knee, the cat pressed to
his golden shirt. “Come what may,” he said softly. “He’ll be in your
pocket by the end of the evening.” He smiled up at her, his face rising
over her lap as he straightened. The strong cheekbones and the
dimpled chin, the adorable lock over the forehead. He paused,
speaking to her from just the other side of her knees. He lowered his
voice, as if to share a secret. “We don’t want to encourage him too
early in the proceedings.”

 

Professor Wallace stepped forward to take the cat from his arms.
Annie noticed that there were cat hairs, too, along the hem of her
sweeping black skirt. And that she wore soft leather booties and bright
purple tights beneath it. Like a character from D. H. Lawrence. Or
Virginia Woolf herself.

 

“Thank you, darling,” he said. Side by side, the extremes of their
physical beauty were startling. Professor Wallace all hooked nose and
bun, white skin and black hair, David soft and warm-hued. One to be
photographed, the other painted. Professor Wallace turned, spinning
her skirts a bit, and disappeared through the door beside the server.
Mr. Wallace sank to the floor once more, behind his ring of crystal
goblets. “Now,” he said, looking up at them both, “which one of you is
from Bingham ton?”

 

The girls exchanged a look. Grace, with her whiskey, had not
allowed herself more than the last six inches of the sofa’s seat and so
sat somewhat hunched over her knees, more curved than she
needed to be. She touched her glasses, of course, as she said, popping
up a bit like a good student, “Neither of us.” She touched her sweater.
“I’m from Buffalo,” she said. “Annie’s from Long Island.”

 

“Well, good,” he said. He had picked up another piece of loo
paper and was holding another glass up to the golden lamplight.
“We’ve had two Americans from Binghamton here in the past two
weeks and I think I’ve learned all there is to know about the place.
State University,” he said. “Three hours to New York.”

 

“That would be Lydia,” said Grace, the good student. She touched
her index finger to her cheek, tapped it, raised her eyes to the shadowy
ceiling, pantomiming thought. Then Grace pointed the index finger at
Mr. Wallace. “And Kevin Larkin,” she said.

 

He raised his eyebrows. “Right you are,” he said. “Kevin. Rugby
player, all taken up with Rupert Brooke.”

 

Grace popped again. “That’s right,” she said.

 

“And Lydia,” he went on. “Pretty girl. Mad for Wordsworth.”
“Yes,” Grace said, warming to the conversation. He was, after all,
more or less sitting at her feet. Annie thought only of what a thing it
would be to hear Mr. Wallace say of her, “Pretty girl.” Lucky Lydia. She
sipped her Chianti. She supposed it was the way it was meant to taste.
“But Buffalo,” he said. “I’m not sure we’ve had anyone from
Buffalo yet. What’s it like?”

 

Grace was now clutching the stubby glass in both hands, leaning
toward him. “Boring,” she said and barked a short laugh, the ends of
her blunt-cut hair swinging forward along her chin and then swinging
back. She touched her glasses, returning to the more successful
serious student guise. “No,” she said. “It’s nice, I guess. My parents
like it. I have a lot of family there.” She hunched a little more. Her
head snapped to the right for just a second. It was a curious little tic
Annie had seen in their tutorials; it meant that she felt her point was
not yet made, that she knew her intelligence had not

 

yet burned through the obscuring fog of her plain, chubby face. “It’s
where Dick Diver ends up in
Tender Is the Night”
she added. “It has that
going for it.”

 

Examining the row of glasses before him, Mr. Wallace raised his
eyebrows when she said Dick Diver, and then placed his hands on his
brown corduroy knees. It was likely that he was somewhat younger
than his wife. He leaned toward her, rolling on his haunches. “And is it
Fitzgerald you’re mad for?” he asked. “You wouldn’t be the first
American to come to England to study Fitzgerald, or Hemingway.
You’re all mad for Hemingway as far as I can tell.”

 

But Grace sat up a little straighter. It might have been in imitation
of Professor Wallace—as much as a girl like Grace could aspire to
imitate Professor Wallace. “I’m not, really,” she said. And then added,
“I love Spenser.” She touched her glasses again and took another nip
at her whiskey.

 

What a smile he had. While his wife’s had been thin-lipped and
wry, forgiving, insightful, his was warmly amused, reservedly
delighted. He had, Annie was convinced, the best teeth in all of
England. A boon, she thought, for the entire nation’s dental gene pool.
“Well, you’ll be teacher’s pet then,” he said. “At least for Elizabeth,”
his smile grew a bit wider, a sparkle, at his wife’s name. “Spenser’s her
man.” Annie thought the smile more charming still if its source was
not Grace’s declaration but his pleasure at hearing his wife’s man
championed, or perhaps, more simply, the pleasure it gave him to say
his wife’s name.

 

Suddenly she found herself both fully enchanted and heartsick. To
live, as these two did, in a comfortable, warmly lit room full of velvet
chairs and old books, with cats and, yes—she was only just hearing it,
or perhaps Professor Wallace had just put it on in another room—
classical music playing softly somewhere, low enough for
conversation, loud enough to add romance to the air. To reach
over your knees at the end of a day, the book falling from your lap, to
take such a man’s handsome face into your hands. It was a life from a
novel. It was a still life, beautifully arranged. It was a life she’d never
attain. When he turned to her and said, “And who’s your man?” she
said, “Edith Wharton,” without thinking and without an inkling of
truth in it, her only impulse being that she should name a woman,
since the life she wanted—their life—was all unattainable and she
must begin to prepare herself to be a woman alone.

 

She glanced quickly at Grace to see if she would contradict her,
but Grace had the glass to her lips again, her eyes on David Wallace.
Annie imagined Grace felt it, too: the enchantment and the despair.
Professor Wallace swept into the room with a large, tufted
footstool held high in her hands, like a farcical English maid with a tea
tray. “Edith Wharton?” she said and then spun a little, her long skirt
flaring, her little leather boots. “How interesting,” and then, “David,
my love,” in that way she had of speaking in soft asides, “you’ll have
to move your glasses and your loo paper so I can put this down.”
With a kind of salute, he stuck the roll of toilet paper under his
arm. Leaning forward, he moved a few of the glasses, one at a time, as
if they were chess pieces, to the side of the couch, and then gathered
up the rest in his hands, the crystal clinking, and placed them and the
paper on a side table. “Careful,” she said. “Always,” he told her. And
then, so smoothly, he was on his feet again, taking the stool from her
hands.

 

He lowered it to the ground. It was a maroon upholstered
footstool with four wooden, turnip-shaped legs and on it were half a
dozen small plates, black cloth napkins, a silver bowl of olives and
celery, and a small black crock containing what Professor Wallace
announced was pate. She handed a napkin to each of the girls,
smeared a tablespoon of pate onto each little plate, added some
olives and some thin crackers, all the while saying, “Although she
married fairly young I think it’s well accepted that she was a virgin
until she was somewhere around fortyfive.” She gave Annie a little
plate, and started putting together another. “She’d divorced her
husband at last and fallen madly in love and taken up residence with
her lover in Paris. Fortyfive or so.” She handed the plate to her
husband, who was now in a small chair at Grace’s side.

 

“It appears she wrote
Ethan Frome
while in the midst of a girlish
middle-aged passion. Which has always struck me as curious, given
the short shrift she gives poor Mrs. Frome, with all her middle-aged
ailments.”

 

Professor Wallace spun around again in her soft little boots and
then took the other corner of the couch. Grace was smiling at her,
ogling, Annie would have said. There was a lightness about Professor
Wallace at home, a physical buoyancy she didn’t have in the lecture
hall. It made it seem possible that she was not older than her husband
after all. “A lesson for you girls,” she said, looking up, “in matters of
the heart.” She raised her long nose and trilled the word. “Patience,”
she said.

 

But David laughed. “Surely, Elizabeth,” he told her, “you’re not
making a case for fortyfive years of virginity.” He smiled at both girls,
full knowing, it seemed, that if there were sides to be on, they were on
his. With his handsome face before them, fortyfive years of virginity
seemed worse than cruel. “I’d call that corrupting the morals of a
minor,” he said and his eyes flashed. They sparkled.

 

There was the sound of Grace’s whiskey glass colliding with the
bridge of her glasses.

 

Professor Wallace smiled her wry smile at her husband and then
seemed to sip the air the way a bird sips water, her throat all exposed.
“Surely I’m not,” she said. And then she turned her head, regally. “But
Annie must tell us,” she whispered, “what it is about Wharton that
she loves.”

 

She felt all their eyes on her. Felt suddenly like a bird herself, a
baby bird, helpless, wordless, her mouth opened. The truth was that
she had read very little of Edith Wharton. Had thought, until a few
minutes ago, that Edith Wharton was a spinster, homely and
professional (she recalled a mannish jaw, a heavy pile of dark hair),
with no exquisite husband waiting for her at home. It was the sole
reason she had said her name. She had a vague memory of
Ethan Frome,
of laughing at it. Suicidal sled rides. Sex and death. She couldn’t recall
finishing
The Age of Innocence.

 

“Oh,
Ethan Frome”
she said, shrugging a little.
“The Age of Innocence.
“

 

Mr. Wallace said, “No doubt you’re a James fan as well.”
And his wife said, “Being a James fan is de rigueur for Americans
in England, I should think.”

 

“Portrait of a Lady,”
Grace chirped, not to be outdone. She held her
stubby glass and her little plate to her clasped knees, hunching over
them. “I read it again this summer,” she said. “Before I came.”
“He was a big poof, you know,” David said and his wife cried,
“Really, darling,” and Grace ducked and giggled, and drank more
whiskey, touching her fingertips to the edge of her glasses as she did.
Gently, Professor Wallace leaned over and took the small plate from
her lap and placed it on the cushion between them. And then, as if she
were caring for a child, with her shoulder pressed languidly to the
back of the couch, she lifted a cracker and spread it with pate.
“Well, if we’re going to bring up Edith Wharton’s moldy
virginity,” he cried, charmingly, “then we might as well get it all out.
Henry was a poof and William a religious fanatic and Alice was a
sexual deviant, flummoxed by shyness, who figured the only way she
could get professional men to come see her in her nightgown was by
taking to her bed.” He turned his attention to Grace, who was beet red
behind the Waterford crystal, hunched and laughing

 

into her ice cubes.
“Varieties of Religious Experience,
indeed,” he said.
“Have you read it?”

 

Professor Wallace gave her one of the spread crackers. “Never
mind,” she said gently, although Annie couldn’t say if she was
addressing her husband or the girl.

 

“A prototype for the modern American family,” David said,
smiling. The light from the lamp at his elbow only burnished his glow.
“Hedonism plus Puritanism yields both deviant sex and deviant
religion. What could be more American?” His eyes met his wife’s.
Annie thought that there was a complex intelligence even in their
unspoken conversation. Only more to envy. To despair of. “But we
were talking about Buffalo,” he said, more gently. He turned again to
Grace, who had just, obediently, bitten into the cracker, which had, in
turn, broken apart in her hands. There was a tiny shower of crumbs
falling from her lips to her palm to her sweater.

 

Graciously, he diverted his attention across the room. “And what
of Long Island?” he asked Annie. “We seem to get as many from Long
Island as from Binghamton.”

 

She smiled. She did not want to appear flummoxed by shyness.
“There’s a lot of us,” she said. She was aware of the fact that it was as
close as she had come since she’d arrived to speaking a full sentence.
“And your parents are there?” he asked, more gentle still, luring
her into a conversation. “Brothers? Sisters?” Implying that he
recognized her shyness but knew it was his duty as her host to relieve
her of it, as if it were only a heavy coat. “Big family? Small?”
“Small,” she said. She would not make herself more interesting to
him, more American, by mentioning Jacob. “A brother and a sister,”
she said. “An aunt who lives with us,” she would not say “a moldering
virgin,” to prove herself clever. She took another sip of

 

her wine. She saw that Professor Wallace was smiling at her, as if—it
was all unaccountable—admiring her restraint. Then the buzzer rang
downstairs and Professor Wallace stood, her skirt sweeping. “I’ll get
that,” she said. They were in a play again. “If you’ll refresh the girls’
drinks.”

 

Behind her when she returned were three more American
students, two boys and a girl. Entering, they looked at Grace and
Annie with some resentment, as if the ratio of Americans to English in
the room suddenly made the occasion less interesting. Mr. Wallace
stood, there was the bustle of introductions and new drinks. For a
moment, the music disappeared. Monica and Nate were a couple—a
bond they had formed at the same time Annie and Grace had formed
theirs, in the five hours of pillow talk that was the transatlantic flight.
Ben was, perhaps, Nate’s version of Grace. A friend from their New
York campus who held on to Nate perhaps a little too tightly now that
they were abroad together, comfort in a strange land. He was a big guy,
a little thick around the jaw, with dark curly hair. At his side he held a
bottle in a brown paper bag, grasped by the neck as if he had just
taken a swig of it and planned to take another. He greeted Mr. Wallace
and said, “Beer would be great,” before he seemed to remember it was
there. Awkwardly, he handed it to Professor Wallace and she said,
“Thank you,” and “Lovely,” as she slipped it out of the bag.
“Drambuie,” she said to her husband as she placed it on the server.
“How nice,” he said. Together, Ben and Nate made Professor Wallace’s
cozy living room seem smaller. They looked so starkly American, so
comically American male that it seemed the room should have filled
with the odor of gunsmoke and horse manure.