The Last Enchantments (21 page)

On an impulse I took out my cell phone and texted Jess. She wrote back to me right away.

Hey, it’s Will.

So you ARE alive.

Sorry I didn’t write back on Facebook, I was abroad. Do you want to hang out?

Nothing else going on?

Would be fun to see you! Watch a movie and order food?

Then there was a long pause, until she wrote:

Too much of a palaver here with roommates. Can I come there?

Sure.

She appeared at my door an hour and a half later, her face decorated with the exaggerated but strangely beautiful makeup of the English working-class twenty-something, her arms bare and cold when she leaned in to give me a kiss on the cheek.

“I can’t believe you never wrote me back, to my message,” she said. I was always surrounded with BBC accents and always forgot her voice.

“It’s been a weird couple of weeks.”

She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, okay.”

“No, it has. Tom—actually, it’s funny, Tom is the one who always tells me to call you because you’re so hot—”

“That snot?”

“Yeah. Anyway, his sister—”

“No, it’s okay,” she said. “Get me inside, I’m freezing. How was your Christmas?”

“Lonely.”

“I’m sorry.”

I felt a swelling of affection for her, and now I think of what Michael Caine said in
Hannah and Her Sisters,
“I loved her more than I realized.” Just perhaps not enough.

*   *   *

Term started in earnest that Monday. Anneliese returned with a tan, and Peter, Giorgio, and Richard resumed their parliamentary wrangling. Anil came back full of plans to dress up for the imminent James Bond bop as James Bond, “but with a twist!” as he told me one day in the kitchen of our house. We were making tea.

“What’s the twist?”

“You know what?” He was full of sudden resolve. “I’m going to show you my costume. If you swear yourself to secrecy.”

“Why me?” I asked. “I’d have thought you’d show Timmo.”

“I know you’ve been to the 40/40 Club.”

I would never achieve anything greater in Anil’s eyes. “I have.”

“I need your opinion. You see, I’m going to the bop as James Bond—but black.”

“It seems like there’s the potential for that to be racist.”

“No, no, you’ll see. Wait here.”

I sat in the kitchen and read for fifteen minutes, waiting for his return.

It didn’t disappoint. He was dressed in a plain tux, but his body was baroque with accessories: a heavy gold chain, a huge watch, Adidas sneakers, and a flat-brimmed Yankees hat, from beneath which his chubby Indian face beamed.

There was a loaded silence, until I said, “It’s the best costume I’ve ever seen.”

He beamed at me. “Game recognizes game!”

If Anil was unchanged, Tom, in his own way, was the same. To me he seemed mostly like himself. As people returned they all wanted to see him with their own eyes, but other than that first MCR meeting, he had behaved as he always did. Perhaps it was Ella—though after their first flush of romance he did retreat from her slightly, even then he couldn’t bear to be apart from her for the night.

For her part Ella was ecstatic. Nothing in her speech or her manner showed it—if anything she was more diffident with him, and her
noli me tangere
air of the start of the year seemed to return, like a bulwark against possible hurt—but if you knew her as I did, it was obvious how tremulously and deeply affected she was. I think she had expected them to be a couple right away, but some final new distance in Tom prevented that. Still, as long as she got to see him every day it didn’t seem to bother her. She even canceled a trip to a conference in Leeds and had the money, paid for by her scholarship, refunded to her.

I remember exactly how she spent it. We were walking down the High Street together one morning, on our way to get lunch together, and she stopped at the window of a boutique.

“Remind me what Tom’s favorite color is, Will?”

“I have no clue.”

“Try and remember.”

“Is it important? I’m freezing.”

“Come on, you know. We were playing that drinking game you taught us? Favorites?”

Then I did remember. It was a game from college; whoever started off had to name a favorite, whether it was a color or a kind of beer, and anyone who shared that preference had to drink. The better you knew each other the more esoteric the categories became: favorite character on
The Simpsons,
favorite pub in Oxford proper, favorite philosopher. (Any Wiggum, the King’s Arms, and Hume were my answers to those.)

“I do remember, that’s right. It was yellow, wasn’t it?”

“Yellow,” she said, and I saw she had known the answer all along. “Will you come into the shop with me?”

“What do you have your eye on?”

“That dress in the window.”

“The yellow one? Because of Tom?”

“No! It just reminded me of that game. That’s why I thought of it. Because I drank at yellow, too. I love yellow, too.”

“Will your boobs fit in there?”

She smacked my arm. “Do you like it?”

“I just don’t think of you wearing dresses. There are no tears in it or safety pins or anything.”

She bought it. The dress was made by BCBG and cost 140 pounds. I remember the price clearly; it scared me to see her putting herself at Tom’s mercy like that, though I didn’t say anything.

Perhaps I should have. I didn’t know about Tom—we hadn’t been friends long enough for me to judge his precariousness. Recently he had taken to spending hours and hours in his room researching, of all things, his family history. There was something wild-eyed in it. He had found forums on the Internet devoted to genealogy, and he followed every branch, his maternal grandmother’s maternal grandmother, as far as it would go. He found that his father’s great-grandfather had been a Crane—my middle name—and set out to see if we were cousins (which we were, a hundred times removed, like more or less all white people). I know he wasn’t doing his work. The night before, I had gone into his room and seen him swallowing a pill.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Acetaminophen,” he said. “My family—you wouldn’t believe—” and on he ran.

The pill had come out of a prescription bottle, I saw. What had Ella let herself in for? There was something immovable and titanic hooking him backward. She wasn’t likely to pull against it successfully. Love, though: Who can say.

I understood the position well enough myself. Yet I had hope. Sophie and I were still texting every day, even if we hadn’t seen each other since I returned, and both of us were looking forward to the James Bond bop that Saturday, our date.

What should I be?
she texted me that Friday, and then, not fifteen seconds later,
I’m going to be Moneypenny! I need a new dress!

HOBNOBS!
I wrote back to her and felt a constriction of happiness and nerves in my chest. Part of me dared to wonder if the bop might be the night when she finally … what, became mine? Changed? Yielded? I didn’t know. It was more realistic to hope in blurry outlines than for anything specific.

*   *   *

Because of the bop I had had to tell St. John Jarvis that I couldn’t come to his annual Christmas party, which he held on the twentieth of January. When I wrote to say as much, he pidged back a note inviting me to have coffee or a cocktail that afternoon, so at three o’clock I headed out past the Fleet lawns, crossed the river, and walked through the fields on the other side to his house. It was gray and wet out, and the forecast was for a sharp drop in temperature that evening.

I arrived at his house soaked. He slapped me on the back, shepherded me through from the porch to his living room, and placed me in front of the huge fire burning in the hearth.

“Warm up here,” he said. “I’ll get you a drink.”

The decorations for the party were a marvel. In the living room there was what must have been a fifteen-foot tree, layered thickly with silver balls, fairy lights, ornaments, and Christmas crackers. On all the walls were ornate snowflakes made of green and red crepe paper. Except for two armchairs all the furniture had been cleared out of the room, and a huge sideboard was racked with thirty or forty bottles of liquor. Another sideboard, presumably for food, was still empty.

There is something sorrowful in an old man without children, and I wondered, as I sat alone, who the party was for—whether it was for himself, to surround himself with people and noise. When he came back into the room with two mugs, bearing a triumphant smile, and said, “Irish coffee—hope you like it,” I remembered that he was one of those humans who are sufficient unto themselves, a sovereign nation-state.

“Perfect, thank you,” I said, and he sat. “I’m sorry to miss this, by the way.”

“Oh, it’s my favorite holiday. Though I must say I loved Thanksgiving while I was over in your country, carousing with your uncle. There’s something deeply satisfying about watching American football on a full stomach, even if you don’t understand it. Christ knows I never did.”

“Do you do this every year?”

“Mm, a grand tradition, Christmas in January. They say the holiday should in fact be in August, or something like that—I can never remember exactly when. Apparently it’s only in December because of old pagan harvest rituals. I wonder what the pope thinks about that. Have you ever read Jessie Weston, or is she dated by now? I suspect she is. Even if you’re not fond of Eliot she’s well worth looking into, though, she holds up nicely. Although I forget, you’re a modernist. I imagine you’re devoted to Eliot.”

“Less than some. But why the twentieth of January?”

He grinned and took a gulp of the coffee. “Better to celebrate when people have returned. Oxford is such a tidal city, people in and out, and Christmas is a low tide. I’m sure you left, for instance. How was it? Christmas at home?”

“Yep.”

“Did you go back feeling like an Oxford man? Or do you wish you were still there?”

“It’s funny you ask that—”

“Ah, here we are. What’s the dilemma?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I was wondering if I should become an academic, actually. Something my—well, my once-upon-a-time father-in-law-to-be said to me, if that’s not too convoluted. It made me think that politics might not be right for me in the end.”

“What did he say?”

I told him. “I’ve been enjoying school, too. I didn’t think I would love the work this much.”

He looked at me appraisingly. “Remind me who your adviser is?”

“Harris.”

“Harris, Harris, that’s right. You’re Orwell. I once met a chap named Jack Common, Orwell’s chosen prole. He lived in one room with a wife and about fifty children and wrote terrible novels. Not that I blame him, mind you. Who could work in those circumstances? Can’t have been a real name, either. Anyhow, Harris. So you’re enjoying Orwell.”

“I am,” I said, my thoughts on the Swift Prize. “More than I expected I would. I’m thinking of a doctorate.” He smiled, eyes shrewd, and I rushed to add, “Though I’m not sure I want to write for an audience of the same twenty scholars my entire life.”

He shook his head. “Very foolish, that anxiety. Academics are the canaries in the coal mine. We shift an idea out into the world and it trickles from fifteen readers in a semiotics journal to a hundred listeners at a dinner party to ten thousand readers in a magazine to a million viewers on a television. I’ve seen it time and again. What were academics interested in the 1970s? Orientalism, in your field, our field. The perception of race and the other. And ever so slowly I watched as that debate flattened out and grew broad, and then, in the 1990s, finally, after a lifetime of waiting for it, I watched as people became, imagine it, ‘politically correct.’” He laughed. “What a triumph, to live to see the backlash against that.

“It’s not unlike modern art, which is a passion of yours as it is of mine, as I recall. In 1962 to walk into a gallery and see a painting by Barnett Newman, a few lines on a blank canvas…” He was lost in thought for a moment. Then he returned his eyes to me from the floor. “Now? You can buy a pale handed-down imitation of Ad Reinhardt at a hardware store for thirty pounds, comes with a gold frame, and all the throw pillows and rugs have those Rothko smears on them. Abstraction is decoration. These hedge fund managers buying Brice Mardens are buying decorations, DIY store decorations. They’re valuable the way the Ralph Lauren logo is valuable. Ideas have always descended from the high culture to the low culture, William. We open these gates and soon enough people walk through them. There’s nothing else I believe as fervently as that. Listen.”

“What if that’s not fast enough for me?”

He laughed. “I was once in that kind of rush,” he said.

“And?”

“There’s a balance. The key is to find a home outside of the academy, too—write for the papers, go on television, travel to foreign conferences and sleep with foreign women. That’s what I’ve done. There’s nothing drearier than a professor who stays at home all day and beavers away at his favorite Jacobin poet. I wrote for
The Observer
for years, you know.”

“How did you get that job?”

“When I was in Japan in the sixties, actually. England was such a self-absorbed little islet back then that if you went to Marseille they considered you an explorer. I might as well have been on Jupiter. I called up an acquaintance who worked for the automobile review section of
The Observer,
of all things, and offered to write a series of letters from Tokyo.”

“It’s too bad everywhere’s so close these days.”

“Yes,” he said. “The death of the great journey. All of the leaps mankind makes now will be informational, I’m afraid. It’s a shame. For a thousand years or so we struggled and strove to see the corners of the planet, and now that’s done. It’s why I have a computer. But tell me something of yourself. Why are you skipping my party tonight?”

“I paid in advance to go to a bop at Exeter.”

“How much?”

“Twenty pounds.”

“I daresay you could get twenty pounds of drink here—though of course you want to be with your friends. Have you got a girlfriend?”