The Last Enchantments (11 page)

It seemed a funny ambition, because she was so different, her hair, her clothes, her tattoo. In the next few weeks, as we grew surprisingly close to her, we began to understand: Both parts of her, angry and ambitious, were characterized by drive, but like so many people of that nature she was, if you were in her heart, exceedingly gentle.

Tom paid for the next round; it was obvious to me that halfway through it, unbeknownst to Ella herself, he was infatuated with her. I never heard him say the word “Japs” again, anyway.

*   *   *

On the Saturday of Sixth Week there was going to be a bop, the first big one of the year at Fleet’s bar. The theme was Moulin Rouge. Because it had been my hardest week of work so far I was looking forward to it especially; most of the last four nights I had stayed up finishing an essay on
Enemies of Promise.
My usual haunts at Fleet—the bar, the Hall, the Cottages—I had abandoned in that time for a solitary carrel and a thermos full of coffee.

On the Saturday of the bop I got a text from Sophie.

Are you going tonight? If so dressing up?

Of course.

What about now? Am at loose ends.

With Tom, we’re bored. Punting?

Perfect.

It was my first time. We went into the boathouse and fetched the pillows that went in the middle of the punt and the long pole that you used to push yourself along.

“I’ll go first, shall I?” asked Tom.

“I don’t see why you should. I want to have a go,” said Sophie.

“I’ll just start us off. I did it once with my sister.”

So Sophie and I sat facing each other in the middle of the boat, or really came closer to lying down, our hips about even and our legs crossed and propped on opposite sides of the punt. She was wearing a hooded sweatshirt and jeans, the hood pulled up against the wind and stray wisps of auburn hair flying across her face.

It was beautiful. The swift river was no wider than an alley in some parts, and there was a breeze, scattering red and yellow leaves onto the water. High above us the towering trees on either bank met and twined in the warm sky.

We had two half-bottles of wine rolling around the bottom of the punt, outriders for the great troop to follow that evening, and we had ice, gin, a bottle of tonic, and three glasses stolen from Hall. It took one gin and tonic to get Sophie tipsy.

We were a ways down the river when she said, hiccupping, “Let’s play I Never.”

“Is that the same as Never Have I Ever?” I asked

Tom looked uncertain, but Sophie said, “It is, it is. Jack played when he visited the States.”

“You go, Will,” said Tom.

“Why me?”

“You’re the American, you’re supposed to be an extrovert. Sophie and I’ve got British restraint.”

Just as he said that Sophie hiccupped. “Extremely genteel,” I said.

She laughed, and then someone, maybe even her, started the game. By the time we got to the pub, we had passed through several rounds:

Tom:
Never have I ever had sex in the Bod.
Nobody drank. “We all have to do it at some point,” said Tom. “It’s an Oxford rite of passage.”

Will:
Never have I ever hooked up with a British person.
Tom and Sophie drank.

Sophie:
Never have I ever hooked up with an American.
Tom and I drank.

Tom:
Never have I ever worn a T-shirt that misidentified both my nationality and gender.
I drank.

Will:
Never have I ever fallen into the Cherwell.
Nobody drank, but I tried to push Tom in as retaliation.

Sophie:
Never have I ever had a threesome.
Nobody drank. “Sophie’s raising the stakes,” I said.

“STORY!” bellowed Tom, giving the punt a hard shove forward.

“No!” she said. She was laughing. “I’ve never done it. I thought all boys wanted to. I think it’s disgusting.” She had the giggles, which made us laugh, in lessening waves, until there was a long moment of silence. She dragged her fingertips along the water, looking up at the warm autumn sun, and said, “I love this. I want to stay forever.”

“In Oxford?”

“It already feels like home,” she said. “Better than real home.” It was a strange thing to say: Of the people I knew at Oxford, the three in that boat were those most inclined to self-concealment, and she more than either Tom or me, I think. I don’t mean that she was a cipher—indeed sometimes her feelings were too plain, her coloring making it easy for her to flush, her sensitivity real and acute and deeper than most people’s. Nevertheless there was always a final expressionless retention of privacy to her, even at moments of great intimacy. I thought it was the same as for me: early pain, and then the impassive years, retreat, outward blankness, panic. Tom, whose parents had died so recently, was less cool, more erratic, more available.

“Five years of French, though,” I said.

“I like French.”

“Have you heard of the Swift?” I asked.

She laughed. “Of course. Who would I have to sleep with?”

“Maybe you should apply.”

“I wouldn’t get it. French isn’t very academic, unless you do theory or literature. I’d like to be a historian somewhere pretty, who gets to visit Paris twice a year.”

This, too, was odd about her: Her friends from Cheltenham and Durham were in the usual garrulous professions, marketing, fashion, the BBC. Another sign of interiority, perhaps. Or ascesis. Or liability even.

Soon we reached the pub. It was the usual docking station, but we didn’t have time to go in because the punts were due back an hour later. Tom said he would run inside to get us beers for the trip back downriver.

The wind gusted up after he left, loud and blustery. Each of us looked away. Ammons said it—how strange we humans are here, raw, new, how ephemeral our lives and cultures, how unrelated to the honing out of caves and canyons. We looked up at the trees and down at the river, the difficult majesty of the world. We were silent.

Her hand found mine then and took it, until our fingers were twined like those high branches over the river. She had been looking over her shoulder at the fields across from the pub, scattered with cows and hedges, incidents of life, but she turned back to me and in her gaze acknowledged for the first time in five weeks, since that first Hall, that there was more than friendship between us. I felt my heart quicken.

“You know I like you,” she said quietly.

“What do you mean?”

She sat up and crossed her legs Indian-style, so that our faces were close together. “What do you think?”

“Like that?”

“Like that. But you have a girlfriend.”

We were still for a moment, staring into each other’s eyes. Then I kissed her. It was only a touch of lips, but I felt dizzy with happiness; I could smell her hair, feel the cold of her cheeks, I could feel her body moving closer into mine; it seemed all imminence, all future. Our hands were still together.

“Mm,” she said, eyes closed, a sound of satisfaction, the sound she made sometimes when she smiled.

I saw Tom opening the door with an armful of beers. “He’s coming,” I told her.

“Don’t say anything.”

“No, of course not.”

*   *   *

I don’t remember punting home. When I got back to my room I was hollow with nerves. I called Alison.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey. What’s up?”

“I was asleep.” I heard her moan, shifting under the covers. “Shit, it’s late. I went out last night with Christian and Margaret, down to a new place on Jane Street. I can’t remember what it was called, but there were tons of people you know there, for one that asshole Patrick—”

“Alison, I have to say something.”

Her guard went up right away. “What is it?”

Are there are any words you can say, during a conversation like that, that don’t sound as if they came from television? In a way, as well, she was the one person I most wanted to tell about Sophie, the person who knew me best, who could have comforted me. She would have understood the faint anguish of wondering for every minute of the last six weeks what Sophie was doing. There was nobody who understood more than Alison, and as I considered this I loved her especially.

“I can’t believe I’m doing this on the phone, but I think we need to take a break.”

There was a long silence. “You’re joking, right?”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Oh my God, Will. Oh my God, don’t say that, you can’t—”

You know what she said, all of the usual things, specific to us this time around but part of every conversation two people have who have loved each other and are breaking up. I searched for relief in her voice, or anything that would pardon me, registration, even ambivalence. None of it was there. Only disbelief and anger.

After we had been speaking for more than an hour, she asked, sniffling, “Do you love me?”

“I love you as much as anything.”

“Then what the fuck, Will.”

“I’m not ready. It could be that in a couple of years I’ll be ready.”

“I wish you knew how shitty that sounded.”

“I do.”

She laughed somberly. “No, you don’t. What’s funny is that I knew the second you applied that this shit was going to happen. Do you remember me telling you that? On the stoop that day? You’re so fucking restless all the time. Listen to me: You’re going to hate this. You’re going to be so unhappy. Because now I’ll be what you don’t have.”

“I know it’s true.”

“But still?” When I didn’t say anything she started to cry again. “Oh my God, you asshole.”

I was hurting someone I loved, and as the words came out of me I think I almost would have taken them back. Her voice made me want to cry, too. She had experienced none of the emotions I had since I had come to Oxford, neither the sense of alienation nor the subsequent fear of that feeling, the clinging love it induced.

“Is there someone else?” she asked.

“Of course not. I can’t imagine loving someone other than you, or wanting to be with someone more than I want to be with you. And maybe we will end up together! But right now—”

“Just don’t do this till Christmas, Will. Wait until then and we can actually
see
each other and touch each other and—”

“I’m sorry.”

“What about my dad? What about—”

“What?”

“What about our stocks?”

“What, that Apple stock?” Her father had given this to us once, as an early wedding present, he said—we had laughed that off but had both, I believe, felt bound by it, just as perhaps he had intended. “I don’t know. That’s not a reason … I don’t know.”

“So you just want to split it?”

“I don’t care about it, no, or I mean—listen to me, it’s not that I can’t see us still having a life together, Alison, but right now I feel like I’m twenty-five and I…”

There was another pause. “What? You feel like what?”

“I’m sorry.”

She was silent for a while. “I was just thinking, yesterday, I was thinking about that night senior year? At Miya’s. Your surprise birthday.”

When she said that my eyes started to sting, and a lump came into my throat. “Al.”

“Do you remember how happy we were? I was thinking about it because I saw Patrick, he was there, and I can still picture exactly where everyone was sitting, and how much we all loved each other.”

“Maybe down the road—”

“This is the road, stupid.” She started to cry again.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“You’re not, you’re not,” she said helplessly.

“I do love you.”

“Will you call me tomorrow?” she asked. “Just call me, so this isn’t it. This specific conversation can’t be it, this conversation.”

“Of course I’ll call you tomorrow. Tomorrow morning.”

“We had Christmas at your house last year.”

“I know.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“Don’t do anything. Just give it a day.”

She blew her nose. Her crying had subsided. “Okay.”

“Alison, I never want to hurt you.”

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” she said at last, her voice distant now, as if she were calling from a faraway world, where people kept their promises. “I’ll let you go.”

She didn’t, though; we were on the phone another forty minutes, until at last we hung up. I didn’t feel any of the sense of liberation I had expected. I tried to remember Sophie, but it didn’t give me any joy, away from the spell of the trees and the water, not just at that minute, and I went over to my desk and looked at the picture of Alison and me that I had there, from Halloween, her dressed up as a cowgirl, me as a cowboy, and I was still buzzed but in an unhappy way now, and it all felt like too much, I felt alone, and I wanted to take it all back, I wanted none of it to be true.

*   *   *

Tom was in town, picking up his costume for the bop, and I couldn’t get Anneliese on the phone, so I called Ella.

“Hey, it’s Will,” I said.

We had hung out nearly every day, meeting up to watch movies or have lunch, in the three weeks since evensong at Merton. “How was punting?”

“Can I come hang out?”

“Your voice sounds funny.”

When she said that I decided not to tell her. I cleared my throat. “Better?”

“Yeah. Come over! I’m getting ready for the bop. Can you bring drinks?”

“I have wine.”

“Perfect. If I’m in the shower, just let yourself in.”

Before I left I put on my costume for the bop—a bunch of us were going as the Rat Pack—and took a shot from a bottle of Patrón that Timmo had left in my room. I fucking hate tequila, and the bile of the taste, my theatrical shuddering, improved my mood.

Ella lived two doors down from us in the Cottages, in the kind of room that anyone who has been to college has seen a hundred times, with a corkboard full of photos of her and her friends, scarves dimming the lamps, a prettily made bed, and a live, unplaceable scent, a girl’s room, candles and laundry, drifting in the air. If you met her you would never have guessed she had that kind of room. Except for the posters. They were all for bands I didn’t know.

She only listened to two kinds of music: punk and (the one that had taken her to Merton that day) classical. Her parents had made her practice the clarinet for hours every afternoon as a child, and instead of making her hate the music it had made her love it. She listened to it constantly, and after she put a CD on she had the vexing habit of asking, “Do you know what this is?” when she knew nobody had any idea.