The Last Enchantments (14 page)

Finally I did hear from her, though, in the second week of the new term. She sent out a group text, which read:
Hey everyone—will you come out on Friday? My BF is in town and wants to meet you! Will be at the Turtle from 8:00, first round on me!
Then I got a personal text, in which, though I parsed it like a scholar of the Torah, I couldn’t discern much meaning:
Really hope you can make it.

I decided to go, though I knew it would be painful. Tom, Anil, and Ella, who had separately offered in light voices to do something else, seemed relieved, and the four of us went together, waiting patiently in line outside to receive the benediction of the two bouncers before we went again down the murky stairwell.

Sophie was at a table with four guys, and the one nearest to her had an arm around her shoulder, though he was turned back toward his friends. That was Jack, I knew. I had seen him on the river a couple of months before.

In time I came to know him. His full name was Jack Lyme-Taylor, but usually his friends, and even she, called him the Jackal, or just Jackal. He was tall and handsome, with a particular type of reckless charisma that I knew by then was bred into upper-class boys by their public schools. He was broad-chested, with short hair and ruthless blue eyes. His face had an expression free of self-doubt, and I think that despite his love of house music and ecstasy he was a vestigial creature, belonging to an age when a man might live eighty years without being contradicted by any person other than his father.

He was capable: He could score a try, tip a bellman, ride a horse, sit the stroke of an eight, dance a waltz, and slaughter whatever country estate animals the time of the year demanded. Then there was his name. It was Timmo who explained that a hyphenated last name—a “double-barrel”—was considered aristocratic in England, presumably because it meant one of his great-grandfathers had married a woman of such high birth that he had agreed to append her name to his own. His father was a half-famous man called Captain Waldo Lyme-Taylor, often in the glossies as the squire to a royal at some hunt ball. He’d had Jack very old, at fifty, and now lived most of the year in Africa. He always looked badly sunburned in his
Tatler
pictures, wizened up, preserved in the salt of his name.

“Jack, these are my friends from Fleet!” said Sophie when she saw us, nudging him in the ribs, and rose to kiss us all on the cheeks.

“Pleased to meet you,” he said, not quite looking at us, and turned back to the person he’d been talking to.

“Jack!” she said in an outraged voice.

“What?”

“Come meet them!”

He looked at us stonily, sighed, stood and shook hands, and said that he was Jack, in a tone that suggested the fact was currently more of a burden than a pleasure to him. He muttered his friends’ names.

“What up, gangsters?” asked Anil.

Oh Jesus,
I thought. “Yeah, what’s up,” said Jack.

“We haven’t seen much of you this fall,” I said. They had made room, and we sat down at the table.

“Been training,” he said.

“Training?”

He looked at me as if I were stupid. “The army. At Sandhurst.”

“Oh,” I said.

“You a Yank?”

“Yep.”

He nodded, as if really that said it all. A song ended, and the silence of our conversation merged uncomfortably with the silence of the club. At the opening notes of the new song Anil perked up, and said, “Oh, I love this! It’s Big Pun!” Jackal’s interest in Big Pun was so slight that he merely offered a phatic grunt and, as if conceding our failure to us, turned back to his friends.

“I’ll get the next round,” I said, and exactly as I had hoped she would, Sophie said, “Shall I come, too?”

Waiting our turn at the bar, she said, “I’m sorry if this is shitty for you, Will. I hope you don’t want any drama.”

In my mind I had grown so close to her, had made her such a part of my life, that this surprised me, because it showed that on some level she didn’t understand me at all, how highly and antiquely I value reticence. “Of course not,” I said.

“I am sorry, really.”

“It’s fine. I mean, I do like you, of course, but,” I said, trying to sound calm.

“The thing is I’m in love with Jack.”

“You mean with Jackal?” I asked.

She looked at me beseechingly. I noticed that she had on a gold and ruby pendant, which I thought was new. I couldn’t be sure, but I had mostly memorized her. “Will, please, just pretend nothing ever happened between us.”

Even as she said that, she took my hand in hers under the bar. “Okay,” I said.

“I have to go. I’ll tell them I have to go to the bathroom. Please, Will.”

Ella came up thirty seconds later, pink and black hair tucked back behind one ear and falling loose over the other, and I was relieved to see her, a friend—and she was a girl. Anneliese was away that weekend.

“Sophie had to go to the bathroom?” asked Ella.

“I guess.”

“I came up here to help you.”

“Thanks.”

She smiled. “They like Tom at least,” she said. “He’s ignoring us now, too.” She looked at me intently. “Maybe you and I should get two extra Orielgasms, just for us.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t be sad, please.” She studied me. “You like her, I guess?”

“Yep.”

There was a pause. “You know, I like Tom,” she said.

I was taken aback. “Really? Not just at bops?”

“He’s ignoring me. It doesn’t help that one of Jack’s friends keeps trying to feel my boobs with his elbow and make it seem like an accident, either.”

I laughed. “I don’t think he’s ignoring you,” I said. “He likes you.”

She looked up at me with hope. “You think so?”

It was one of those moments when you see that the depths of other people’s insecurity is the same as your own, that if only we could admit it, we’d see we’re all in the same bind—but we can’t. “I think so. If anything he’s probably given up. He had a crush on you.”

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me that?” she asked.

“You couldn’t tell?”

“At first when we all started hanging out I could, I thought I could, but then, I don’t know … maybe I got in my own head.” She looked guilty. “I wondered if maybe he didn’t like Asian girls. He’s so racist.”

In the next couple of hours Jack got very drunk, like military drunk, and sometime later when we were all dancing he heaved an anchoring arm around my shoulder. “Hey!” he shouted over the music and, it felt like, the lights. “You’re Will, right?”

“Yeah,” I said, thinking that he knew perfectly well that was my name.

“Just wanted to say, no hard feelings, mate.”

“Sorry?”

“With you asking her out. It’s no big deal. I wish everyone could have a girl as good as Soph. It’s a battle out there, love, you’ve got to fight hard, you’ve got to … but didn’t you know she had a boyfriend?”

“That was before I knew her very well.”

“No hard feelings, like I said.”

About ten minutes later, dancing near Sophie but not too near her, trying to be a friend—being pathetic, in other words—I spotted, out of the corner of my eye, my townie, Jess, in the same spot on the same dance floor where we first met. My face lit up, and we moved toward each other.

“It’s you!” she said.

“No, it’s you!”

I was drunk, and I tried to kiss her. She pulled away. “No, no, no. You’re the one with the girlfriend.”

“Not anymore!” I shouted back.

“Really?”

“Yep!”

“Are you lying?”

“I swear!”

She looked at me suspiciously, then sort of smiled and kissed me back. I wondered as we started to make out whether Sophie was watching.

*   *   *

It’s hard to be miserable when you’re having sex, though I tried, for form’s sake.

We were back at her apartment again. She put on a CD—the Yeah Yeah Yeahs—when we got to her room, and lit a row of tea candles along the windowsill. I loved looking at her body, her hard nipples, the bridge her panties made over her hipbones before she slid them off. I buried my face in her neck, in her dirty blond hair.

I had introduced her to everyone at the club, and Jack had, not very subtly, started to make fun of her accent. Finally they had fallen out.

“Where do you work?” he asked.

“In a teashop near Blenheim Palace.”

“And where did you prep?” Jack asked.

There was an explosion of laughter, but Jess, phlegmatic, rolled her eyes, less bothered than I would have been in her position. “Some of us have parents who don’t want to send their kids away to get bummed by prefects,” she said. “They love us.”

Jack’s smallish eyes went hard. “No, really, Jess, let’s hear it, where did you go to school? St. Paul’s? Maybe it was Marlborough?”

She stood up. “You’re a schoolboy Bullingdon fuckwit,” she said. “And just so someone tells you, you’re about twenty percent as good-looking as you think you are. Your forehead is huge, for one. Come on, Will, buy me a drink.”

Jackal’s face was surprised and then scornful. I shrugged and stood up with her, and Sophie, whose eyes had widened, almost smiled at me. Ella followed us loyally to the bar, not Tom.

“These Brits are such idiots,” Ella murmured to me as Jess ordered drinks, and I smiled and nodded in agreement. “It’s like imagine if we took country clubs seriously.”

Jess and I had our shots (woo-woos, God help me) and decided to leave. “Sorry about that guy,” I said as we got in the cab. “I barely know him.”

She ignored me and called up to the front seat, “Have you got the radio? Louder, please.” Then she said, “Let’s make out until we get home,” and put herself in my lap.

I didn’t sleep afterward, though she did. I lay there for a while, content. Finally I decided to go. “I have to get ready for a breakfast at college,” I whispered to her, gathering up my things.

“Liar,” she murmured in her sleep. “Find me on Facebook already, would you?”

“I will, I promise.”

As I was walking home in the pale purple light that fills the sky before the sun—it was the same path home I had taken on that first night Jess and I met—I called Alison.

I could hear the noise of a bar in the background. “What are you doing? Isn’t it like five in the morning there? It’s midnight here.”

“We had a night out.”

“Are you drunk?”

“Stone cold sober. I had my last drink like two or three hours ago. We’ve just been watching a movie. Listen, Alison—”

“What movie?” she asked.

“L’Avventura.”

“And that didn’t put you to sleep at three in the morning?”

“Listen, Alison, I need you to promise me you won’t hook up with anyone for a while. Don’t make out with anyone at the bar tonight, okay? Where are you, R Bar? Or one of those places on Rivington? Hop Devil?”

“Excuse me?” she said with an edge of anger in her voice. The noise of the bar got fainter, which must have meant she had left to hear better, and she was out on the sidewalk. I could picture New York around her so clearly, my home.

“I know, I know, but imagining you with someone else makes me unhappy. Can’t we say neither of us will hook up for, I don’t know, six weeks, or something? Just until then.”

“Do you know how weird that is to say to me?”

“Have you hooked up with someone already?”

“No. Have you?” she asked. “Did you tonight?”

“Jesus! No, of course I didn’t. It’s been on my—”

“Because you call me at five in the morning, telling me you don’t want me to hook up with anyone, and from where I’m sitting—”

“Alison, no. You’re misreading me. Please, I’m just asking that we have a grace period thing, where neither of us hooks up. For each other’s feelings.”

She was silent. “Okay,” she said at last. “If you promise you won’t.”

“I promise,” I said immediately.

I think of the great poem:
The self, what a brute it is. It wants, wants.
I can’t make any excuse for myself, beyond describing the almost existential sense of relief, of possessiveness, that I felt when she gave me her word. It was so much more powerful than the guilt. All of the white lies and the black lies I told Alison that year, I don’t know, I’m not sure. They’re even less defensible because I was so sensitive to pain myself. I was young. Still, I knew it was wrong even then. It doesn’t mean I didn’t do it.

*   *   *

For several days I didn’t see Ella. I texted her and she didn’t reply. Finally on a bright Thursday morning I went to her room and knocked on the door.

“Who is it?” she called out.

“Will.”

“One second.”

“I can come back,” I called out.

“No, you’re good, one second.”

She answered the door in her pajamas. Her hair was a snarl, her eyes puffy. “Hey,” she said.

“Are you okay? You’ve been missing.”

She frowned. “Not really.”

“You have, since the Turtle. For a second when you didn’t answer I wondered if Tom was going to be here.”

“God knows where he is.”

“Did anything happen?”

“Not really, no. I tried to kiss him.”

I wasn’t fooled by the dispassion of her voice. “He didn’t kiss you back?”

“He was acting weird. And then I realized that while I had been talking with Sophie, after you left and everything, that he had been with some girl, dancing. I think he went home with her. He knew her from somewhere. Jack did, too. You wouldn’t believe how they were acting, talking about all this stuff I don’t know about, posh stuff.”

“Shit.”

“I shouldn’t have tried. I feel like a fool.”

“Why haven’t you been around? Or answered my texts?”

She shrugged. “You two are best friends.”

“So? That doesn’t matter.” She didn’t answer, and I understood. I touched her arm. “Let’s go get coffee.”

“I have no money,” she said.

“That’s okay.”

“No, I really have no money.”

I saw her face: grim, as it had been the first times we saw her, and now perhaps close to dissolving. It was one of those times when the world feels against you. “My treat,” I said. “I just got a check from home.”

“Well, hooray for you.”

“When you have a hundred patents and I’m an English professor you’ll have to fly me to Davos, or wherever. Just consider it an investment.”