The Last Enchantments (24 page)

At the start of the year I had hoped in a way that I would fall in love with academic life, and even that morning I think I would probably have guessed that I would stay and finish a doctorate. For weeks I had been carefully filling in my application for the Swift.

Now I thought of what she had said, and of next year. Oxford wouldn’t be new to me any longer. Sophie would be gone. The joy of being in love, even unfulfilled love, would be imprinted in inverse upon my days, as they extended farther and farther from the magic of my first arrival in the city. Like a woodblock, the first impression leaving a deep and vivid stain, and each successive year, as the paint faded on the block, fainter, less saturated with color, until I was left without any of the novelty of Oxford and all of its minutiae of mind and spirit, without love, Pninish: blankness.

*   *   *

That evening after class, in a clatter of anxiety and self-doubt, I pulled out my address book and started calling campaign people. There was Chuck Rode in the office of the junior senator from California, Tyler DeGiovanni doing ground operations for a congressional campaign in New Mexico, the prodigy Alfie Steinberg consulting on K Street, there was James Pincus, Jimmy Pink, writing speeches for the mayor of Los Angeles.

I called them all. It wasn’t so much that I wanted a job; I wanted to know I could get one, if I felt I needed to.

There weren’t any.

It was Tyler in New Mexico who was most honest. “It’s a great time to be a Democrat. We’re going to slay these midterms, but the one name nobody wants to hear is John Kerry. Believe me, I was in Ohio with you, I know you’re capable—but it’s going to be tough for you to find a way back in. There’s a smell on that campaign.”

“Even now?”

“That’s why I took this no-hope job. And here we are, about to win! Our opponent is terrified and running these incompetent attack ads—I’ve gotta send you the videos, remind me about that, like literally twelve of the thirty could be an ad for us—and we’re basically margin of error behind in the poll.”

“Yeah,” I said glumly. “I sent you guys fifty bucks.”

“Hey, thanks. Listen, if anything comes up in my campaign, or if I hear about anything, I’ll let you know. Have you tried Alison’s dad?”

“Not yet.”

“I got a Christmas card from that family this year and I was stoked. That’s a solid connection, man. Stay on top of it. Really I don’t even know why you’re calling me.”

“Alison and I are on a break.”

“Oh. Shit.”

I was unhappy. By nature I’m a planner, provident and cautious. I stayed up late, answering the questions of the Swift Prize application, class half forgotten—options, I wanted options. When I woke in the morning I went to my computer to look at the job listings the university posted: banking, consulting, management. These applications were simpler. By ten I had filled out three and felt better. In the next days I filled out another dozen.

Why not sell out? I said as much to Anil (“If I don’t have a true vocation, like politics or academics…”) in the way people sometimes do as they test out things to say in future conversations on someone whose opinion they don’t especially care about. As was only right, given that condescension, Anil’s insight took me aback.

“I’m not surprised at all. We’re both foreign. I don’t think people like us end up here because we know exactly what we want to do with our lives.”

“You know what you want.”

“Do I?”

“Aren’t you going to move back to Mumbai and go into business?”

He smiled ruefully. “That doesn’t mean it’s what I
want
. I’ll end up doing it, but I want to own a record label, as you know.”

“If I can’t think of anything amazing to do with my life, I should at least live in a nice house.”

“Maybe.”

There was a pause. “You want to own a record label?”

“Yeah.”

“What, an Indian one?”

“I would like to own Def Jam records”—he grinned—“but even an Indian one would be exciting to me, yes.”

“Could you afford it?”

“Oh, sure. I even know a couple of people in Mumbai, on the music scene. There I’m considered quite knowledgeable.” I noticed he hadn’t said anything about gangsters or haters for our whole conversation, which was uncommon. This was serious Anil.

“Rappers?”

“But of course.”

“Then why don’t you do it?”

He laughed. “I see you haven’t met my father.”

*   *   *

February was dark and cold; I remember it chiefly for how welcome a pint in the King’s Arms became after a day’s work in the Bod, and soon enough we were all joining Tom there. It seemed to get dark at about noon. I worked long hours and did good research, met with my adviser, wrote two-thirds of my dissertation, and permitted myself until June to complete the rest, a slow pace. Twice in three weeks I went to St. John Jarvis’s house and had coffee with him. I played a great deal of chess with Peter, my redheaded friend, in the MCR.

For the first time I found myself longing for home. It would irritate me that Oxford didn’t have decent pizza, or that the movies there were three months old in America. Even the British themselves started to irritate me—the way any nation comes to seem provincial in time, except perhaps more so, because they were from an island. There is a caricature there of the Little Englander, which runs across every line of the inelastic, indissoluble class system: the poor miner who hates the darkies next door, the closed-minded privet-hedge Dursleys, the underlearned, overfed Tory squire who finds the French “beastly” and thinks the poor ought to work harder. Oxford was too international, too cosmopolitan, to permit of many of these types, and yet I began to see that even the most enlightened Englishman had a homeopathic trace of the feeling. How strongly they seemed to believe in the village, the hedgerow, the vicar snoozing over tea! Think of that famous 1930s newspaper headline,
FOG IN CHANNEL, CONTINENT CUT OFF.
No other people I had met were either as self-loathing or self-idolizing as the English. America, whatever its faults, however panicked its borders, has the luxury of not always contemplating itself. It’s too massive and too powerful to worry about its significance.

I came to miss the generosity of America. Every time I walked into one of those sparsely supplied English bars I thought of their overgrown twins in New York, which seemed to have thousands of bottles in them, liquid in every hue of brown and clear, wine reaching clear to the ceiling, that easy profusion, as if none of us would ever die. Probably there was no worse decade in which to come from the United States, and yet I could see its virtues, now, from afar. The American lack of reserve came to seem like an achievement of civility; what the English call manners, or reserve, was blazingly often a cover for simple recalcitrant meanness. No shop would stay open an extra minute to help you. A mocking little laugh when you ordered the wrong book at the Bodleian; should have got it right. The psychopathic national hatred of anyone who did well in public, anyone who made good. The love of valiant failure.

Work, boredom, staleness. It was only a period of a few weeks—weeks without Sophie—that I felt this irritation, this angst. I wished for an American girl of the kind I had grown up falling in love with: the shabby sneakers duct-taped over the laces, the cigarettes, the curly dark hair, the existentialism reader, the rich parents, St. Dymphna’s and Muldoon’s where they didn’t card, the sweet pliability in bed. A longing for the age of sixteen.

Soon enough, thank God, it was spring, and all that ended. One day in mid-March they pushed the clocks back an hour and our lives were suddenly flooded with daylight. People found they were willing to go out at night, now that it was warmer. There were hints of warmth, of summer, of hope, in the wind and the sky. Larkin, who else, said it best:

The trees are coming into leaf

Like something almost being said;

The recent buds relax and spread,

Their greenness is a kind of grief.

…

Last year is dead, they seem to say,

Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Afresh, afresh, afresh.

*   *   *

It was a week before the clocks went forward—during the early part of March—that we went on our disastrous trip to London: Tom, Ella, and I.

They were in a strange state. Not many nights passed when he didn’t sleep in her room, but they weren’t a couple. “It’s as much to stave off the cold as anything,” Tom would say with an impression of his old, mischievous grin. In the presence of others they never behaved as if they were dating, but around Fleet people nevertheless assumed that they had become a couple, and treated them that way.

We left for London on a Friday afternoon. A friend of Tom’s at King’s had told him about a blowout at the King’s bar, on the South Bank. Their bar was famous for having the best view of the Thames in London; it was on the seventh floor, and an entire wall of it was a window that showed a panorama of the city, Docklands to Westminster. We were going to crash with his friend.

As a concession to Ella and me, we spent the late afternoon as tourists. We walked through St. Paul’s, then crossed the Millennium Bridge to the Tate Modern. (What a terribly lightless and despondent museum, alas. Its great hall must be the worst place to look at art that I’ve ever visited.) Then we found an Italian restaurant in Soho and had a dinner full of high-spirited toasts with red wine. Tom paid for Ella’s part of everything. When we were done eating we went to see his friend.

Tom was fond of calling himself a disowned Harrovian; in his last year at Harrow he had nearly gotten kicked out for public drunkenness. His closest friend from school, a much-discussed figure named Wilkie, was out on a Portugese fishing boat for fourteen months, spending his wages on the nightlife in port. It was Timmo who told me that being a “deckie” was upper-class, a rough playground for those who wished, interstitially, to live hard. Like all the things the aristocratic Brits I knew achieved in that line—hunting, rugby, date rape—it seemed by that time in the year slightly pitiable to me. Jackal had ruined the glamour of his class for me.

At any rate, Alex, Tom’s friend at King’s (the fifth or sixth best of the big British universities, after Oxbridge, Durham, LSE, Imperial) was another disowned Harrovian; the same incident that had seen Tom nearly expelled had been the end of Alex’s tenure there. They were both secretive about it. Some rite of initiation or passage, I would hazard. He was good-looking in a Glastonbury way, with shaggy brown hair and flip-flops.

It was to his spacious, smoke-filled room at King’s that we went after eating dinner, and for an hour or so we listened to music and drank mineralish wine. A morose exquisite blonde was playing a PSP in the corner of the room, and after introducing herself as Gemma she fell silent and shortly afterward disappeared from my life forever, much regretted. Later Alex explained that she was his sister, not his girlfriend, and that she was only fifteen. I stand by my assessment of her looks. Prosecute me.

While Tom and Alex engaged in a lot of rapid-fire nostalgia about school, Ella and I talked. “Is Tom going to be boring all night?” she asked me and giggled, visibly happy.

“What’s going on with you two, anyway?”

“It’s good. I think he’s been drinking less.”

“What about pills?”

She looked at me quizzically. “I don’t think so. Why?”

It was ten o’clock by then, and we were going to the party at eleven. At a quarter past ten there was a knock at the door and someone named Percy was outside, a bottle of Bollinger aloft in one hand, grinning.

“It’s me,” he announced.

Apparently he was another old schoolmate of Tom and Alex’s—they reacted as ecstatically as if he had been lost at sea. He was a student at Cambridge now, obdurately laddish. My primary recollection of him is that he wore a paisley waistcoat and torn jeans. He was pale with garish orange hair. Later Tom told me, with a mix of admiration and revulsion, that he had spent thirteen months in Buenos Aires after university, producing and directing videos of local girls having sex. He sold them on the Internet. Eventually he made about sixty thousand pounds: coals to Newcastle.

“But I thought you couldn’t come?” said Tom and Alex almost at the same time.

“I didn’t think I could, but I managed to shake Melanie, the slag,” said Percy.

That was Lady Melanie Rothmere, I learned when we later met her at the Boat Race. “Well, it’s fucking brilliant,” said Tom. He had the good grace to look at us expectantly. “You two don’t mind if Perse joins up, do you?”

Ella and I both said of course we didn’t, the more the merrier, world without end.

“Now listen,” said Percy, when everything had settled down. “I’m going to pop this champagne, and we’ll neck it, and then who’s up for some good-natured druggishness?”

Tom shrugged. “Yeah, sure,” he said.

Alex nodded; I said I was okay, and Ella, rather bravely, said she didn’t do drugs.

Percy didn’t comment on that. “A school reunion in the bathroom for the three of us, then.”

They were in there forever. Ella and I chatted and drank Percy’s champagne, ignoring the sudden tension, the pressure on the night’s expanded surface area; there was a kind of aggression pooled among Alex, Tom, and Percy that hadn’t been there before. At eleven fifteen she went to the bathroom door and said, “Boys, don’t we have to go?”

“Fleet time,” said Tom in a singsongy voice. “Fleet time, Fleet time, Fleet time.”

There was laughter inside. Ella looked at me as if to say
what can you do?
and then went behind a freestanding Japanese changing wall and put on her yellow dress, the one she bought with her conference money.

“The yellow dress,” I said.

She looked at me lightly, but imploringly, too. “Will, be nice.”

“You look great. I feel underdressed.”

“Don’t I?” She pirouetted.

The guys came out just as she did that and all burst into laughter. “Well, don’t let us stop the ballet,” said Percy.

“You look like a banana,” said Tom and then laughed to undercut the harshness of his words.