The Last Enchantments (12 page)

“What do you think this is, William?” she asked. She had come to the door to hug me, and now she was rifling through her clothes.

It was some symphony. I looked very serious, narrowed my eyes as if I were thinking hard, and said, “This is
Cats,
right?”

She looked back at me disbelievingly, a blue top in one hand, and said, “No, you idiot, it’s
Finlandia.
”

“No, no, this is from
Cats.
I saw it on Broadway with my grandmother.”

“It’s not fucking
Cats
!” She grinned and shook her head. “I’m getting in the shower.”

I drank more than half of the wine from the bottle I had brought while she was showering, and e-mailed some friends about Alison. I felt shivery, manic. It had been a long time since the future was a secret. I turned off
Finlandia
and put on loud music.

When she came back she called out over the noise, “Turn it down! Let’s talk!”

She was in a white towel, smooth-skinned, still damp. For half a second I thought about trying to kiss her.

“I have vodka,” she said, walking over to her desk. “Let’s do a shot.”

“To what?” I asked.

“To evensongs. Prost.”

I took a shot glass from her. “To evensong.”

We drank that one, then another. “Can I tell you a secret?” she asked a few minutes later, as she put her makeup on in the mirror.

“What?”

She turned and grinned at me. “I might let Tom kiss me tonight. If he’s lucky.”

“What!”

“I feel frisky. Dressing up. Drinking. You know.”

“You punk rock chicks.”

She laughed. “We love to kiss dudes, it’s true.”

“How about second base?”

She gave her boobs a heft over her towel. “He should be so lucky.”

The drinks hit me all at once, or something else did, and I said. “Let me see.”

She looked at me, in the mirror. There was a soft smile on her face. “My tits?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re drunk.”

“Before you’re Tom’s.”

“Are you crazy?”

“You don’t have to. I was joking.”

She squinted at me in the mirror, smiling but suspicious. Then, after a beat, she turned and let her towel drop, and I felt a huge pulse somewhere down in the root of my body. Her nipples were hard, small, and pink; a strand of wet hair stuck to her left breast.

“Wow.”

She giggled and lifted up her towel. “That’s the only time that will ever happen.”

You would think it might be awkward after that, but it wasn’t; the drinks had done their work. I felt ready to see Sophie; ready to start the whole folly, love and fucking and fighting, over again. I texted Alison something comforting and indeterminate then turned my phone off for the night.

*   *   *

Jem had been working all day with a committee of five first-year girls to turn the college bar into the Moulin Rouge. The night before he had sent out a Facebook message inviting two dozen people to come early, including Ella, Tom, and me, nightly stalwarts of the bar. We stopped by my house and shouted up the stairs for Tom, but he wasn’t there.

Anil answered instead. “Hey, gangsters!”

“Anil, come down!” Ella said.

“It takes a great deal of time to become the brown Frank Sinatra!” he shouted.

“Well, fucking hurry!”

“I’ll be there in good time, my friends!” he shouted back at us. “Go without me!”

At the bar Jem’s exhausted harem was putting the final touches to the decorations, then staggering upstairs to put on their sluttiest dresses. (The reward for their labor was free drinking till eleven, by which time they wouldn’t need any more.) Jem waved us to the bar, where a line of undergrads stood. He addressed us.

“All right,” he said. “This is a lockdown situation. The bop starts in twenty minutes and before then nobody will get into this room, and I mean not the fucking Master himself. Not the fucking chancellor of Oxford.” Everyone nodded, awed. “Let’s do some shots.”

With some ceremony he depressed a button on the jukebox, and a whoop went up at the opening chords of the college anthem, “Back for Good,” by Take That. When it came on everyone in the bar would wait until the chorus and then sing along:
Whatever I did, whatever I said, I didn’t mean it: I just want you back for good.

Jem poured fifteen shots of lime vodka and at the chorus we downed them and then sang in unison as he poured another round. On the second chorus he had two shots ready. Fifteen minutes later we were already drunk. Jem opened the doors.

The first people in were Anil, wearing a fedora and a pinstriped suit, with a cigarette holder between two fingers—I felt a wave of affection for him—and Tom, who, true to his public school breeding, had dressed up as a woman: Shirley MacLaine.

“You look ludicrous,” I said.

“I feel marvelous.”

The bop started at nine o’clock, and by nine fifteen it was a melee. At nine thirty Jem, looking harassed, beckoned me up to the bar and shouted over the dance music, “You wanted a job, right? Come work for forty-five minutes, just while the first rush is on, and it’s yours.”

“I should warn you I’m drunk.”

“That’s ideal.”

So I poured drinks for the dense press of people, sweating in my suit, mixing up orders, accepting five-pound notes from high-spirited girls whose outfits would have shamed their teachers at Marlborough, until at last there was a break in the crowd—just in time for me to see Sophie come in.

I waved at her. “Come get a drink!” I called.

She looked beautiful. Do I say it too much? Certainly I thought it all the time. She wore a white, summery dress that just showed the push of her breasts, and a white headband pulled her hair back. She leaned in and kissed me on the cheek, then instead of retreating held her face close to mine so that we could understand each other.

“Who are you supposed to be?” I asked over the noise, still having to shout.

“Lauren Bacall! You know she named the Rat Pack, right?”

“Shit, I should’ve been Bogie. He went to my high school.”

“What are you doing back there?”

“Bartending.”

“Are you going to work all night?”

“Only until ten o’clock.”

“Come have a cigarette with me when you’re done.”

I smiled. “Okay. Do you want a drink? On me.”

“D’you know, I still feel tipsy from that gin in the punt.”

“One more won’t hurt.”

She smiled at me, her cheeks dimpling, and in her mellifluous English accent said, “Just a Red Bull and vodka, then.”

I made it and handed it to her, promising I’d be outside at ten.

As it happened I couldn’t get away from the bar until ten thirty—I texted her to change the time to then—and when I waded out among the revelers Ella caught up with me from behind, wasted.

“Are you off to kiss her?” she shouted, hips swaying, the red straw in her glass crimped under her finger as she took a sip.

“Who?” I asked.

She grinned at me. “Just do it. Don’t even think about it.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Where the hell is Tom?” she asked.

“Are you off to kiss him?”

“Fuck you, Baker,” she said and laughed.

By then the feverish dancing was at its crest, and when I went outside to the flagstone terrace it was mostly empty. Sophie was on the phone, the ice cubes in her empty drink crowding each other as she tipped her cup up to get one last sip from it. When she saw me I got an apologetic eye roll, and she mouthed, “Just a second,” and walked away.

I sat down on a bench, cooling off in the night air.

“Sorry,” she said when she was done.

“It’s fine. Cigarette?”

She looked behind her toward the bar, where we could see Anneliese and Timmo. “Yeah, but let’s hide from Anneliese. She’ll get cross with me.”

“Shall we go out by the river?”

“Oh, let’s,” she said and smiled.

I couldn’t tell what I thought about her, as she walked a half step ahead of my pace. Was it love? No, I was too cynical to agree to that, and too jarred.

She intimidated me. I had reached the point in life when the ignominies of middle school were long gone, but still as I watched her walking that night, her cool, pale shoulder blades jutting above the back of her dress, the gazes of pimpled undergraduates following her, I understood that like all beautiful women she reflected back to me a simultaneously heightened and attenuated sense of what I was worth.

The black night was crisp, full of stars and moonlight, and as we crossed the wide lawns the trees by the river listed in the wind. We went and leaned up against the boathouse. I took a pack of Dunhills out of my jacket pocket and gave her one, which I lit.

“Cheers,” she said.

“Are you cold?”

“It’s warm enough.”

Probably it sounds as if we were alone, but in fact it was quietly chaotic by the river. There was a newly minted couple discreetly making out against a tree, and two drunk freshmen who were shouting at them from a safe distance, and someone trying to unlock the punts to steal them, and someone else trying to climb into the tennis court, which was surrounded by a high fence.

Our hands found each other, and she looked over at me quickly, smiling.

“Can I kiss you again?” I asked.

She put her arms around my neck. “I wish you would.”

We stood there for twenty minutes then, our hands underneath each other’s clothes and in each other’s hair, our breath quick, our skin a strange mixture of hot and cold. I felt overwhelmed by a longing for her body—not a sexual one exactly, but as I kissed her I wished I were kissing her, as I touched her breasts I wished that I were touching her breasts. My desire overran reality. I couldn’t understand it.

Finally we stopped, only because the undergrads had at last loosed one of the punts from its chains and were making down the river in it without a pole or paddles, laughing wildly, drinking from bottles of beer, unsure of what they were doing.

“Tossers,” she said affectionately. We watched them until they were around a bend in the river; then she turned to me and took the lapels of my jacket in her hands, pulling me close and grinning. “Alison’s a lucky girl.”

The one thing I knew I wasn’t going to do was tell her that Alison and I had broken up. It was too soon. I didn’t even know my own mind yet—and though I wouldn’t have admitted it, there was also part of my brain that was worried about losing Alison’s father. I kept thinking about that job.

I looked at Sophie and my mind changed.

“I broke up with Alison tonight,” I said. “After we went punting.”

She let go of my jacket and looked at me. “You did?”

“Yeah.”

“Shit, Will.”

“It doesn’t mean anything about us—not at all. It was just the right thing to do, regardless of … of whatever.”

“Shit,” she said again.

“What?”

“There’s something you should know. You remember my boyfriend, right?”

“Your ex?”

She never talked about him, though once she’d mentioned that he had just left Sandhurst. She looked up at me without speaking, and after a second I understood it.

“Oh,” I said.

“That day—”

“Right, right.” I paused. “You said you liked me.”

“I do.”

“But…”

“No.” She took her arms away and turned toward the river. “I made a mistake. I thought you had a girlfriend.”

Faintly I could hear the noise of the bop. I felt sick with unhappiness; I could still taste her mouth on my lips, but it already seemed to have happened, our kissing and touching, a long time ago, somewhere else.

“Maybe you should break up with him,” I said.

“I can’t do that.”

“Why?”

She stepped back. “I’ve been wrong,” she said. “I’m sorry, Will. Really I am, I swear.”

As I was going to say something, a cry came up from the lawns, a hundred feet away, and we both turned to look. It was Anil, tearing toward us and laughing helplessly. On his heels was Tom, his dress drenched, shouting, “Anil, you fucker, get back here!”

Anil flew by us with a huge, winning grin, and then Tom, now laughing, too, smacked my arm as he careened by, and as I turned to watch them go Sophie squeezed my hand and said, “You stay here,” and took off back for the large bright din of Fleet.

CHAPTER
FOUR

Michaelmas ended not much later, twelve days. There was a weeklong break; very few people from the Cottages planned to remain in Oxford for it. Anil had flaunted his first-class ticket to Mumbai, Tom was going to meet Katie in Dubai for four nights, and even Ella, chronically short of money, was traveling to Budapest with the Fleet Chamber Orchestra. My original intention had been to return to New York. When I knew that I didn’t have to see Alison, however, I called Delta and pushed my flight to Christmas.

The fallout at home from our breakup was severe but distant from me, the way a thunderstorm sounds when you’re swimming in the ocean and dive down. Friends called me to express their disbelief; my mother cried; in Oxford, of course, no one had met her, though Tom, Ella, and Anneliese were all sympathetic. Really the only part of it that affected me at all was Alison’s voice—for we still spoke nearly every day. Our conversations were mild, unimportant. I think we were trying to make our separation gentle. There’s that horrible moment after a breakup where you realize you’ve gone from knowing everything about a person to knowing nothing about them, when you go from getting worried if they’re twenty minutes late to dinner to learning months after the fact that they went who knows where, on safari, to Antarctica, to the moon …

“You could still come back,” she said when I told her I was going to be alone for a week.

“I should work,” I said.

I wouldn’t be alone, either: The other person who stayed behind was Anneliese, and we spent the week together.

Everyone departed on a Friday, and she and I had a bleak night at the Turtle, emptied now of all but its hardiest patrons. Even half of them seemed to be asleep. The leather twins, scowling, simply waved us by without checking our IDs.

As we left, one drink later, we vowed not to repeat that dejected experience, and by Sunday we had developed a routine. Each morning we went to get coffee and eggs at a restaurant in town called Porter’s, and then we would retreat to the warmth of the MCR to spend the rest of the morning watching a movie. After that we separated for a couple of hours to work at our libraries, and then at five o’clock we would bike into town—I had acquired a clumsy black single-speed bike by then, a necessity in Oxford—and find somewhere to hang out.