After This (32 page)

 

“Brave girl,” David said. But Professor Wallace shook her head.
“It wasn’t real, to a child,” she said. “The danger wasn’t real.
You’re all sensations at that age, aren’t you? The smell of the cellar
and my grandfather’s pipe smoke on his clothes. Oh,” she said and
touched her jaw, “and the satin collar of my dressing gown. That’s
what I remember. My cousins and I would look across the darkness at
one another as if to say, Isn’t this something, what do you think will
happen next? The way we might have glanced at each other in the
middle of a film or a play.” She ran the small glass under her nose
again. “And then the teaspoon of Drambuie. Like a little jewel. I’d hold
it in my mouth for as long as I could.” She took another sip, pursing
her lips and drawing down her long nose. “It comes back,” she said
again.

 

They were all watching her, even her husband. Enchanted by her,
her voice and gesture, and as if she suddenly noticed this, noticed how
they were all watching her, even her husband, she raised the little
glass and grimaced, freeing them from the spell she herself had cast.
“What can be more tedious,” she said with a laugh, “than someone
else’s childhood?”

 

“It’s kind of disgusting,” Nate said from the floor, and for a
moment they all believed he was agreeing with her. He looked up.
“How long it took the United States to notice you guys were getting
the shit bombed out of you by Hitler.”

 

“Really,” Monica said, agreeing, shaking her hair. “We knocked
ourselves out to save bloody Vietnam but we sat back while London
got blitzed.”

 

Beside Annie, Grace raised her own little glass, gulping the
Drambuie as if she had to catch a train. She had, Annie knew, no
interest in politics or current events. In their tutorials she had
announced more than once that history had meaning for her only as
far as it pertained to
Henry V or A Tale of Two Cities.
On its own, she had
said, it was all circumstance and repetition, temporal, not eternal. No
more significant than the weather.

 

“Nixon sucks,” Ben was saying.

 

“LBJ sucked, too,” Monica added.

 

From across the room, Ben said, “Spiro Agnew.”

 

Both Professor Wallace and her husband were nodding, tolerantly,
as if the Americans were merely complaining about their parents.
“At least in World War II we knew what we were fighting for,”
Monica went on, as if, Annie thought, she and General Eisenhower
were contemporaries. “At least there was Hitler.”

 

“At least,” Ben said, “we won.”

 

Grace touched her glasses and then dug her elbow into Annie’s
side. She put a hand to her mouth and whispered from behind it.
“Come with me.” Annie stared straight ahead for a second. What an
effect it would have on the assembly, she thought, were she to say,
“My brother.” But she felt David Wallace’s eyes on them as Grace
poked her again. “Please,” she said and stood quickly, swaying a little
as she did, in the narrow space between the couch and the big
footstool. Against her will, Annie stood, too. They both sidestepped
past the couch and between the small table with the lamp and Mr.
Wallace’s knees. Gallantly, he held a hand out to Grace as she made
her way around him. She touched it briefly. Before either girl thought
to ask, Professor Wallace told them, “It’s just through that door there,
first on the right.”

 

Annie followed Grace into the small bathroom. She shut the door
behind them both and leaned back against it. “Are you going to get
sick?” she asked. Grace nodded. She was already heaving a
bit, hyperventilating, her glasses fallen down her nose and her pale
skin greenish behind the spilled red of her flush. Annie leaned forward
to lift the toilet seat. She stepped back again. “I’m here,” Annie said,
imitating her mother. Grace leaned down, heaved a bit, then knelt and
vomited her dinner into the toilet. Annie turned her head away, and
then, reluctantly, stepped closer to the girl to hold back her hair.
Grace’s neck at the nape was thick, her hair thin and almost
weightless in Annie’s hands. “You’re okay,” Annie said. This, too, was
what her mother said to her sick children. “You’re okay.”

 

When she had finished, Grace flopped back onto the tile floor, and
Annie could tell by the way her body fell that she was ready to give up
all pretense of sobriety or control, that it was not merely drunken
spinning that made her collapse, but a long-awaited giving in to
despair. She pulled off her glasses, dumped them in her lap, gulped
some air, and then, unabashedly, her legs folded in front of her, her
arms limp at her side, she began to cry.

 

Annie flushed the toilet and turned the water on in the sink. The
guest towels were starched linen, old-fashioned and neat. There was a
ceramic clamshell with a small cake of fragrant soap. She wet some loo
paper, making a compress of it, and handed it to Grace. “Put this to
your lips,” she said. “It will make you feel better.”

 

But Grace merely held it in her hand, the hand still in her lap. She
let her head fall back against the wall, the tears falling freely. “Oh,
God,” she said. “Oh, God.” Her shoulders were shaking with her sobs.
Her face was terrible, the pale, myopic eyes and the torn mouth, the
short forehead and the bloated cheeks. “I love him,” she said. “I’m so
in love with him.”

 

Annie smiled a little. “Oh, come on,” she said, gently, the way you
do, the way she’d done before, to a drunken girl crying. “You don’t
love him.”

 

But Grace put her fist to her soft stomach, and then to the space
between her breasts, as if the love were lodged there and so there was
no denying it. “You don’t understand,” she said, sobbing. “I’ve never
had a boyfriend, nothing, no one. I’m ugly and stupid and fat.”
“You’re not,” Annie said. She crouched down beside her. “You’re
pretty, you’re brilliant.”

 

But Grace pressed her fist into her breast as if it were a dagger,
leaning over it to bring her face to Annie’s face. There were wet flecks
of her dinner at the corners of her lips. “You don’t understand,” she
said, ferociously, her eyes both furious and oddly unfocused—or
focused, perhaps, on something other than what she saw. She was
grimacing, showing her teeth. Annie would not have been surprised if
she had punched her. “I’m lonely,” she said; she seemed to extract the
words from the place her fist had pierced. “I’m completely lonely.” She
slowly tilted her head in that gesture of hers: she wasn’t making
herself clear. Her eyes were a blur of tears. “I’m lonely,” she said a
third time, and then collapsed back again, into her tears.

 

After some minutes, Professor Wallace rapped at the door and
asked, through it, “Is everything all right?” Annie said, “Yes, thank
you,” and Professor Wallace asked, gently, “May I come in?”
Annie began to stand, but Grace grabbed her wrist, looked at her
through her red eyes, and then let her go. Annie opened the door and
began to say, “Grace isn’t feeling too well,” when Professor Wallace
looked beyond her to Grace on the floor and said, “My dear girl.”
She was in the room, touching Grace’s forehead, then helping her
to stand. Grace was still crying but more gently now, as Professor
Wallace said, “Silly girl,” and led her out. The other Americans had left
and all signs of dinner had been cleared away and the couch
she and Grace had been sitting on was now made up into a bed, fresh
floral sheets and a comforter and a blanket and a crisp-looking pillow.
“Well, you’re not the first,” Professor Wallace was saying, getting
Grace to kick off her shoes. “My husband is known to be a bit liberal
when he pours. Poor girl.”

 

Annie stood by the velvet chair as Professor Wallace pulled back
the sheet and fluffed the pillow for Grace, who was still crying but
seemed weak with it now, not ferocious. “He’s so beautiful,” Grace
said, a cartoon drunk. “You’re both so beautiful.”

 

“Yes, well,” Professor Wallace said. “Drink will do that.” She
glanced at Annie, perhaps to assess how sober she was. “If I don’t
keep an eye on him, my husband will get everyone who enters blind
drunk. He believes he alleviates suffering.”

 

There was a satin bathrobe thrown over the back of the velvet
chair, but Professor Wallace didn’t mention it as she guided Grace
onto the couch, between the sheets in her clothes. Grace crawling in
like a weary child. “I’m so in love with him,” she said as her head
touched the pillow, but now she said it as if he were merely a character
in a novel, as if the love were merely a source of comfort and delight.
Merely a part of the delight she felt at the moment, with Professor
Wallace shushing her like a child and touching her face. “Silly girl,”
she said again. “Is the room still spinning?” Grace, the good student
once again, shook her head. “Only a little.”

 

“There’s a basin here,” she said, and indicated the ceramic bowl
at her feet. “If you’re sick to your stomach.”

 

Grace smiled a little, her cheek to the pillow. “Thank you,” she
said.

 

Professor Wallace looked down at her, almost fondly, and said
again, “Silly girl.” She turned to Annie. “I can set up a cot for you if
you’d like to stay as well. You’re more than welcome.”

 

But Annie shook her head. It wasn’t that late, she said. She’d get
the bus.

 

“David will walk you down,” Professor Wallace said and as if on
cue, David appeared in the far doorway, creeping softly into the room.
“Everything all right?” he asked. He looked over the back of the couch
to Grace, who Annie knew was only pretending to sleep. “Poor child,”
he said, and Annie was certain Grace smiled.

 

David Wallace walked her to the bus stop, offering her a cigarette
as he did. They stood smoking together as they waited. In the wet
lamplight, with his collar turned up, he was even more handsome. He
chided himself for pouring Grace too many whiskeys, and then praised
Annie for handling her wine. “She leans on you a bit, does Grace,” he
said gently. “You’re kind to be good to her.” Annie shrugged. At the
end of the street there was a large crescent moon, rolled over on its
back. She was thousands of miles from home, across a vast ocean, out
on a wet night in a strange country, and standing next to a beautiful
man whom, in another life, she would have loved. He threw the
cigarette into the street as the bus approached. “Or good to be kind,”
he said softly, “whichever you prefer.” He smiled at her and she smiled
back. He waited until she had taken her seat inside before he turned to
walk away, back to the house and the room with the books and the
cats and the music and the rugs, pate and Chianti, and a woman
whose name alone lights up his handsome face. And Grace, tonight
and tomorrow morning when she woke, snug in the middle of it all.
No matter who leans on whom, Annie thought, it was Grace who,
tonight, had gotten what she wanted.

 

She put her head against the cold window. She had said Edith
Wharton because she saw herself as a woman alone, square-jawed and
mannish, making do, but she had been wrong. Edith Wharton had
been both married and then, at a later date, madly in love. But it
hardly mattered. She had seen tonight that she was a woman alone
because their life was the one she wanted and she couldn’t have it. She
could imitate: she could adopt Professor Wallace’s wry smile, she
could fill her rooms with books and cats, she could find a man with
ginger hair, but it would all be just that, an imitation, a diminished
version of the unattainable original. Elizabeth and David Wallace
themselves, precisely, was what she wanted: his eyes looking over her
knees, her clever mind. Their exact lives in that exact place, not some
substitute, and suddenly she found her eyes filling with childish tears,
like Grace’s tears, tears of utter, miserable despair.

 

It was a despair she already understood because she had also,
once, wanted a life with both her brothers in it.

 

Suddenly, a boy slid into the seat beside her. He was scruffylooking, a sparse beard over his pale cheeks, long hair, a long black
coat. She had seen him as she got on, his feet up on the seat beside
him, his back to the window and his eyes closed; she had instinctively
avoided sitting opposite him. He leaned into her. “Are you all right?”
he said. Aww right. She looked at him over her shoulder. His eyes
were black with long lashes. He smelled heavily of cigarette smoke and
beer.

 

“I’m fine,” she said. There was a single tear caught on the edge of
her lid and speaking made it fall. She felt it on her cheek and then her
chin but didn’t bother wiping it away.

 

He seemed to watch her for a few seconds and then shrugged.
“Whatever it is,” he said, “it’s not worth crying over.” She had begun
to recognize the flat sounds of a Midlands accent. He raised his left
arm to grab the handrail on the back of the seat in front of them. It
became a wall over which they spoke. A safe distance. “Trust me.” She
was surprised to see that his fingernails were clean, everything else
about him seemed so dirty.

 

Looking straight ahead, he asked her if she was going back to the
university and she said yes. He asked her which hall she lived in and
when she told him, he grimaced. “Kind of a convent,” he said. She
said, for lack of anything else, “I suppose.” And then he turned his
face toward hers, grinning, his arm still between them but their faces
as close as strangers could comfortably get. His skin beneath the
patchy beard was a bluish white and his face was probably childish
without it. His teeth were small. “Speaking of sex,” he said, “I was
wondering if I could convince you,” he leaned down to look out into
the dark street, “in three more stops, to have a drink with me.”
She turned toward the window; they were still on the residential
streets that made up the wasteland between the university and the
city. “Where?” she said.