The Last Enchantments (4 page)

Even though Anil dressed and spoke like Jay-Z, his accent was perfect BBC, educated India. He never turned his “er” into an “a”—it was always “player” or “gangster” exactly. I think it took away from his credibility as a member of the underground hip-hop community. So probably did the fact that he was studying applied economics.

“Welcome,” I said.

“Is it true you’re from New York?” he asked.

“I am. What about you?”

“The very elites of Mumbai.” Neither Tom nor I knew how to respond to this. Anil rode the pause before saying, “So, do you gents like rap music?”

“Some of it,” I answered.

“Hate it,” Tom said cheerfully. “Will, listen. We’re going out tonight, and our new housemate wants to come along. What do you think, is he in?”

“For sure,” I said.

So at eight o’clock we went to the Fleet Tavern. This time there were two people there. One was Jem, the bartender, wearing a Stiff Little Fingers T-shirt, smoking and staring at the jukebox again. He greeted us and went around the bar to pour pints.

The other person there was new: an Asian girl with pink and black hair, a half-visible tattoo sneaking below the sleeve of her T-shirt. She had huge breasts. Her iPod headphones were in, and she was reading a textbook.

“Hey!” Anil called out immediately and walked toward her.

“Oh no,” said Tom.

“What are you reading?” asked Anil.

She removed one of her earbuds, and we could hear what sounded like electronica to me. “What?”

“What are you reading?”

“An essay about pluripotent stem cells.”

“Doesn’t sound very interesting,” Anil said doubtfully.

“Well, I finished Harry Potter.”

“Do you want a drink?” Anil asked, but she said she was okay. She started to read again.

“Are you a new grad student?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, eyes still on her book.

We waited for a minute. Behind the bar, Jem was grinning at us. He gave an exaggerated thumbs-up. “Well, hope to see you around,” I said.

No answer. “Is it too soon to tell her that I want to spend the rest of our lives together?” asked Tom as we left the table.

We played bar billiards and spent several rounds of drinks—orange juice for Anil—glancing constantly and covertly in her direction. She never looked up from her textbook.

Surprisingly early Jem called out for last orders. I went up with my empty glass. “Last call at nine thirty-seven?” I asked.

“Fleet time,” he said, shrugging.

“What’s that?”

He looked at me with new interest. “Oh, are you a new student, then? I figured you were just one of the graduate students I never saw during term. I’m Jem.” We shook hands. He had a thick midlands accent. “I’m a third year. Undergrad.”

“Cool.”

“Yeah, the bar doesn’t usually close till midnight, but before term we only keep it open from five to ten for you lot. I’m the manager, actually. It’s good fun. There are about ten of us who bartend.”

“Any grads?”

“No, all undergrads.”

“You should think about hiring a graduate student. It might get more people to come here.”

He laughed. “You asking for a job?”

I hadn’t been really, but suddenly it seemed like it could be fun, and I said, “Sure, if you have one open.”

“I’ll let you know.” He lit a cigarette and took a sip of his own pint. “What are you here to study?”

“English. You?”

“Oh, classics. I work on Sallust these days.”

“Are you going to be a classicist?”

“Lord no.”

“Then what?”

“Fuck all, hopefully. I wouldn’t mind traveling. Probably a banker.”

“You?”

He grinned. “Me.”

“So what is Fleet time?”

“It’s a college joke. You’ll start hearing it if you pay attention. Fleet’s pretty relaxed, you’ll find, compared to Merton or somewhere swotty like that, and if you’re a bit late or early you just say, ‘Well, Fleet time,’ and it’s a big laugh. You can even say it at a tutorial once or twice a year. I use it as an excuse to close early.” He smiled, cigarette hanging loose in the corner of his mouth, his glasses slipping down. “Nice to meet you, though.”

I went back and played a last game of pool with Anil and Tom while Jem closed up. When I had finished my beer Tom said, with a look of resignation, “To bed for you?”

I said no, that I felt energized and awake, and immediately he brightened. “The Turtle?”

“Why not,” I said. “Anil?”

“This is a nightclub?”

“Yeah.”

“Then I am coming. We must invite our new friend, too,” he said and went straight up to the girl with her textbook. To Anil’s genuine surprise she declined his invitation. Tom gave her a hesitant, unacknowledged wave good-bye, and we left.

As we passed the Cottages I asked them if we could stop so that I could send an e-mail. Really I wanted to check, though. There was still no word from Alison.
Fuck her, then,
I thought, and ran back outside to meet up with my housemates.

*   *   *

The Turtle didn’t look like much from the outside: a stairwell leading down to a basement; a few loud girls troubling the alley upstairs, smoking and arguing. There were two mountainous bouncers checking ID under a dim yellow streetlight. As far as I could tell they wore nothing but leather. They squeaked when they moved.

Tom was enthusiastic. “I haven’t been here since I was fifteen, but I loved it. Ungodly hot, of course, because it’s underground. They play great music, lots of eighties songs.”

“And hip-hop,” said Anil.

“I don’t think so.”

“None?”
Tom shook his head, and Anil said, “That does not meet my definition of clubbing, friends.”

Tom laughed. “A thousand pardons.”

“They let you in when you were fifteen?” I asked.

“My sister found me a driving license.”

We made it past the leather twins and downstairs. At the front bar there were seven girls in short skirts, with a line of twenty-one shots in front of them. Tom went and took the menu from the end of the bar and said something to one of the girls.

“Orielgasms,” he reported when he returned. “Vodka and Midori.”

It turned out there was a shot named after every college, not just Oriel; Fleet’s was called the Golden Fleets, a rare literary allusion on that list, and it was made of Goldschläger and apple vodka. (
The nectar of Hades!
reported the menu excitedly.) We ordered three of them right away, of course. I drank two, because Anil didn’t want his.

Even sober Anil was confident about his appeal to women. Several times when I was speaking he would hold up a single finger, turn to a passing girl, and stare at her intensely. “Sowing seeds,” he would say after the girl had gone. Then there was his catchphrase, dashed liberally into his lectures about hip-hop and the elites of Mumbai: “Haters gonna hate.” It wasn’t clear that he perceived with any great depth of comprehension what the phrase actually meant, since he said it with a complete lack of contextual discrimination—he got it right occasionally, more often not. There was joy (“Have you ever been to London? I love that place! Haters gonna hate!”), there was disappointment (“I can’t believe that girl wouldn’t give me her number. Haters gonna hate.”), and there was occasionally even philosophy. (“We all get old some day, you know? Haters gonna hate.”)

The more we talked with Anil the more Tom and I seemed like old friends. He and I drank more than I usually would have, shots first, then a round of Vodka Red Bulls, then some more shots (house vodka only cost a quid, probably because it was literally toxic), then a round of Snakebites, then another round of shots, and pretty soon the world was blurry, and I kept ordering drinks, with a feeling of obscure revenge against Alison, and Anil seemed like the funniest man alive.

The Turtle was made up of seven or eight rooms that together formed a long, narrow, zigzagging corridor. (“No truth to the rumor that this was actually Hitler’s bunker,” said Tom at one point, with the air of someone repeating a joke they had once found incredibly funny.) Each room was different than the last, one all neon, one crowded with couches that smelled like pot. We moved from room to room, stopping to get drinks in each one.

By the time we reached the dance room, a long narrow cave toward the very back of the club, it was past one o’clock. We were shouting because of the noise, except Anil, who hadn’t had anything to drink and mistakenly thought that we could still hear his stories.

“DO YOU DANCE?” I yelled to him and Tom, interrupting a long description of the Gupta family’s rivalry with the Mauryans.

“YES!” Tom shouted, and Anil said, with becoming scorn, “OF COURSE I DO.”

“LET’S GO OUT THERE!”

“I DON’T WANT TO LEAVE!” said Anil, and I said, “NO, LET’S GO DANCE WITH SOME GIRLS!”

Once in a while dancing is immaculate, a perfection; you understand why raves exist: When you’ve timed the drinks correctly and they lift your mood and your energy, the songs are ones you all know, and you look around at the girls, their happy lost faces, their long earrings, something limbic, their skin just damp with sweat to the touch, the whole thing. That night I almost couldn’t take the joy of it. Tom and even Anil, too, looked gleeful. With Anil as our leader we moved among a few amorphous groups of girls, some of them interested, some not, until in one of them I came across Jess.

She was blond, not too tall, and very pretty, with an angled face; she was flushed with the exercise of dancing, her hair fixed back and high with a clip. We danced with her and her friends for a song, and then I started to dance just with her, though cautiously at the start, so that it never seemed exactly as if it was just the two of us; we remained part of the group, only on a longer and longer tether from them. She was a great dancer. Finally when a Daft Punk song came on her face lit up and she grabbed my hand, as if she couldn’t believe it, and after that just the two of us danced, the pretense of the group forgotten. Then at some point our faces brushed and we kissed.

How did it happen? I can’t remember. We didn’t stop and kiss exactly. We went on dancing, and even returned to our friends now and then. Then near three o’clock the songs slowed down, and she led me by the hand over to a wall, where we kissed—more deeply. Tom kept looking at us, but I ignored him. I remember thinking that I didn’t care, it wasn’t me, it was something else, and soon the sovereignty of my impulses grew confused and I started to think about Alison and Jess as the same person. We did a shot off of a tray from a roving waitress, and then Jess went to the bathroom and I was alone. I started to think about my father, how I had the same boring undistinguished decisive traumas as everyone else, and the delight of the people on the dance floor looked muted and far away. Then Jess came back with more drinks and kissed me, and the dark moment passed, the exhilaration returned. We went back out to dance. She was with four friends, all British like her. They had nothing to do with Oxford. Tom had his hand on one girl’s hip; I couldn’t say where Anil was. They greeted us with catcalls, and I smiled modestly, as if to convey that my conquest spoke for itself. Then Jess told them we were leaving and led me back through each of the rooms of the club and outside, where we hailed a cab.

*   *   *

Have I lost your sympathy? I lost my own, of course; almost immediately, but not in the cab on the way back to her apartment, not yet, I was still thinking about those e-mails. Then, too, it was the first time I had cheated on Alison, and simply to have a new body under my hands, new breasts, new skin, was overpowering. I don’t know. I don’t know what I was doing.

“Is this called pashing?” I asked her in the cab

She laughed into my neck. “You Americans. What are you, a student?”

Styudent.
“I am. What about you?”

Again she laughed. I found her lightheartedness irresistible, after all the sheer emotion of the past few weeks with Alison. So little was at stake for once. “No, I’m not.”

She had a crowded flat that she shared with two other girls. “It’s ever so messy,” she said, “but then they’re still at the Turtle, so it’ll be quiet. Here, come on, this is my room.”

We fell onto the bed. It was cluttered with clothes and magazines and makeup, the usual magic of a girl’s room. She pushed them to the floor. There was the scent of her perfume in her hair as we kissed, and her breasts, which I could see the tops of in her scooped T-shirt, full and pinkish, looked beautiful. I put a hand to them.

“Mm,” she said and unloosed her bra.

I hadn’t realized how much I missed first hookups: when the awkwardness is pooled between you, something to laugh about together, that high school feeling of excitement and apprehension before routine and comfort set in. She pulled off my shirt and then hers and we kissed like that, both still in jeans and shoes, our naked chests together, giving each other goosebumps, nipples hardening as they brushed skin, all of it warm, all of it soft.

“Did you roofie me?” I asked after a while.

She laughed and pushed me onto the bed. “You’re cheeky.” Then she straddled me, kissing my neck and my lips, her back arched so she was pressed into my hard-on. She started to undo the buttons of my jeans. “Let me have it,” she said.

I stopped her hand and said, “I have a girlfriend.”

“In the States?”

“Yeah. Is that a problem?”

She covered her breasts with her arm. “It’s a pity.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before.”

She was silent for a moment, then lay down beside me, one arm over my chest. “It’s all right. I had fun.”

“Me, too.”

“Maybe find me on Facebook, in case things change. I like you.”

“What’s Facebook?” I said. It was 2005.

She laughed. “Look it up and find me. It’s Jessica Marten.”

I took my shirt from the floor, and we kissed again for a time, standing up. She let her arm drop and pressed up against me.

“Oh, well,” she said, her breasts softening into my ribs. “This is nice, at least.” Soon, though, there were voices in the hall, her roommates returning, and she gave me a last kiss and pushed me out through a side door, saying good-bye.