The Last Enchantments (8 page)

That was the worst moment of her life—and you could judge her for that, for of course many people have many worse moments every day, but only if you don’t remember what it’s like to be little, and how it seems as if nobody could ever understand you.

“Is she still alive?” I asked.

“Just about. But she’s old. Every time my mother calls I’m sure it’s to tell me she’s dead.”

During high school she had spent a year away in France. She went to university at Durham—which is a kind of mimic Oxbridge, a consolation for the unlucky—and studied French literature. She was somewhat scornful of England, but she was loyal to her class, in favor of the monarchy, supportive without much interest of England’s rugby and cricket teams, unable to imagine residing anywhere else permanently, even France. Still, she had imprinted on her character the restlessness, the half-hidden strangeness, of the traveler. I went to boarding school much later, at fourteen, but I think it helped me understand her.

She was telling me about Durham when Anil interrupted us.

“Sophie,” he said, “would you like to hear how we cook soup in Mumbai?”

“Of course,” she said politely, though it was evident that Anil had allowed for no other possibility in his mind.

As he rambled on I got pennied again. My hand had slipped from my cup as I stared at her in some indirect way; and I drank deeply again, and started to forget.

*   *   *

After Hall finished and the professors had processed away to wherever they drank port, we went to the lawns. There was a traditional handbell concert in Anna’s Court at ten, but none of us were in a rush to see it except Anneliese, who ran down every English tradition she could find, corgis, clotted cream, faded gravestones. She must have seen the Ceremony of the Keys six times.

I was drunk. Tom and I lay on our backs, our ties loosened, gazing up at the stars. I’ve never been able to tell the constellations, though I don’t mind. To know them would organize away what amazes me about stars, their random density, their numerousness.

They were all curious about America. It was Timmo who said, “Is it true everyone in America’s fat, then?”

“Yes,” I said.

His potato face expanded with pleasure. “Really!”

“Not the movie stars. Or the president. Or me.”

“But mostly?” said Anneliese.

“No, no. I do remember thinking midwesterners were fat when I lived there.”

“Where?”

“The middle part of the country.”

“The Great Plains, they call it,” said Tom knowledgeably.

“Some of it,” I said.

“Where’d you go?” Anneliese asked.

“I was in Ohio. Iowa, actually, then Ohio.”

“How fat were they?” Timmo asked, eyes gleaming. I’ve always thought there was something humorless about people in peak fitness. “Very fat?”

“I’m not sure how to say…”

“Well, how many stone were they?”

“How much is a stone?”

“Fourteen pounds,” said Sophie.

I thought for a second. “Maybe the fat men are twenty stone, or something. Really it’s the fat kids, though. You would see a family of four, each eating like two hamburgers and a large fries, with a large Coke, and then maybe a McFlurry after that.”

All of them looked gratified, especially Anil, at this intelligence. “Oh, dear,” he said.

“I can’t say I haven’t done the same,” I admitted.

“Why were you in Ohio?” asked Sophie.

“I was working for John Kerry.”

“Mate, bad luck!” said Timmo, looking genuinely moved.

It was a sign that even someone as civically diffident as Timmo would commiserate with me, and there was a chorus of agreement. This was during the middle of the war in Iraq, two years after “Mission Accomplished,” and Bush’s reputation in England—which had never been high—was as a martial coward and an enemy of the poor.

“Was it fun at least?” asked Sophie. “The campaign?”

“It was amazing.” The bottle of wine came to me. “Everyone’s working really hard, and you’re all tired but you’re in it together, too, if you know what I mean, and there are constant little romances, and once every few days your candidate will come in and give a big rousing speech, and then you’re always putting out fires.”

“But losing must have been just awful,” Anneliese said.

“It was.”

It still felt fresh. I had been disappointed, for Kerry and for myself. I had been relieved to go home. I had been tired, definitely really tired.

Above all, I had been angry. I became interested in politics during high school, probably because it was considered a mark of intelligence, and when I reached college, and Clinton was president, the field had possessed a glamour for me—in its plain ambition, its competitive cleverness. I was a traditional liberal, for reasons that seemed self-evident, and which I probably acquired naively. Of course poor people ought to have better schools; of course the death penalty was wrong.

That glamour soured and my opinions intensified and clarified in the early 2000s. By the time I was in Oxford—partly because of the personal ignominy of losing the campaign—those feelings were too deep, ranting, almost embarrassing. I could see people retreat to politeness when I began to express myself, even like-minded people. I hated the president and his privileged, plausible, errant allies. What angered me almost to madness was that their rich and luxurious lives were,
like mine,
predicated on inherited privilege, and yet I felt—one always feels—that I was different. The inequality of circumstance for which I had felt guilty my entire life was to the president something to enshrine in the law. I would rather have shot myself than direct some minimum wage worker to pull himself up by the bootstraps. I looked at his face and could see a deformed version of my own—the British dream, inherited money and status, not the American dream, which seemed to me an outright falsehood by that stage. We went to the same high school and same college, Bush and I. I think I hated him even more than I hated the suicide bombers, young idiot kids, with who knew what mythology of early death and sorrow behind them, with who knew what loss traced into their rage.

I admit that even greater than my public anger was my own selfish anger. I had been born into a generation doomed politically by its stupid, credulous, narcissistic parents. These baby boomers! They were the reason Europeans grew wary now at my accent. They had squandered my good name, and the planet, too; they had squandered their own parents’ legacy of stoicism in their welter of sexual and narcotic self-indulgence; in a few years they would squander into their maws the whole economy of the world and become the only American generation better off than both the parents and their children; and for all that they believed they had the moral high ground! They talked about Selma, Birmingham, and Vietnam, while my friends and I, brighter I think, certainly more responsible, at ease with the endowments of sex and drugs, smart, ambitious—we got to walk in pointless, well-meaning marches against Iraq, global warming, whatever. I had to live guiltily in the half-shadow of those my age who died at war, while all I could do was run off to Oxford, from the real world into a dream world, a coward with his self-righteousness and his anger, doing nothing about it now that the campaign was over. A hider.

Anger and anger and anger—and behind it disappointment, in the world and myself. That was what I felt when I thought about the campaign now.

There was no point in saying it just then.

*   *   *

“Aren’t we supposed to go back to the lawns for the bell ringing?” asked Anneliese. “It’s starting soon, too!”

“Fleet time,” I said, yawning.

“I need to stretch my legs,” said Sophie. “I’ll be right back.”

It was colder and my head had cleared. I watched her go, her long, lean body falling into the shadows. After a decent interval, I said, “I’ll see what happened to Soph,” and Tom winked at me. I frowned at him.

She was on the phone when I found her, and I noticed, with some surprise, that she was smoking.

She hung up just as I was reaching her. “You’ve caught me,” she said repentantly. “But I’m glad it’s you.”

“Can I have one?”

“If you promise not to tell.”

“Promise.” I lit the cigarette she gave me, cupping my hand around the match to keep it out of the wind. “Aren’t you glad you came out to Hall tonight?”

“I am glad, I am. I spent too long worrying about Jack for my own good.”

“That’s your ex?”

“Mm.” After that answer she went silent, looking into my eyes for a period that grew less and less excusable. I found her so beautiful, painfully beautiful, her hazel eyes, her long and thick hair, with a thousand rich shades of copper, brown, auburn, and blond in it, falling around her bare throat, flying up around her face in the cold night, the faint scent of it creating some previously absent intimacy between us.

Why is it that a person can seem just right to you, once in a while? Perhaps it wasn’t Sophie herself but everything about my life just then, being in Oxford, the heightened sense of chance, the distancing away from myself. As we stared at each other I felt sharpened by this newness into love. The stars and trees and wind, all of it.

As I had known she would when she handed me the cigarette, she leaned in and kissed me.

“Sorry,” she said after a moment. I started to say something halting, and she laughed and turned her head away. “I’m sorry. Really, that was stupid. I drank too much.”

“I like you. I barely know you, but I—”

“I like you too.”

Oh fuck,
I thought.

*   *   *

Here’s a story.

Alison and I went to work for John Kerry at the same time, during the weeks before the Iowa caucuses. We were in Des Moines, operating from the state headquarters. At that point it looked certain that Howard Dean was going to win both the caucuses and the candidacy itself. Inside our campaign there was the disheartening sensation that we stood in opposition to a great popular tide of liberalism—but we believed that Kerry could beat Bush, and that Howard Dean, though many of us secretly preferred his politics, couldn’t.

Alison was in the press shop, where she wrote the campaign’s press releases for local news outlets, many of them to do with farming, the manufacture of farm equipment, and food processing, which were the three most significant industries in the state. She also occasionally appeared on camera, usually either for insignificant outlets (the Davenport, Iowa, CBS affiliate) or when they needed a young face (she was once on MTV). I was on the senior staff, meanwhile, consulting on the statewide vote strategy and, especially toward the thin end of the campaign, trying to organize endorsements. We had narrowly missed out on Al Gore, who had come out for Dean a week or two before, and we needed someone big. That night my job and Alison’s dovetailed, because we were both trying to get Mike Polsky on the phone.

Polsky was a writer at the
Des Moines Star-Herald,
where he ran the editorial page. He was a bratwurst-and-beer guy with a thick mustache and big glasses, very intelligent but in his outlook essentially provincial. For forty-five out of every forty-eight months he wrote about ethanol subsidies, highway bills, that kind of thing. When he wrote about national subjects during those forty-five months nobody but Iowans listened or cared.

For three months out of every four years, however, around the time of the caucuses, he became more important, to those who really know about these things, than any national media member. His endorsement meant everything in central Iowa. About a week before the caucuses we had turned down Tom Brokaw because our guy, Kerry, only had twenty minutes between campaign stops, and Polsky wanted to talk to him. That was how significant the
Star-Herald
endorsement could be. Even Polsky’s Christmas party, which for three years before the caucuses was probably more like a polka convention than anything you could find in D.C., turned into a K Street and Capitol Hill reunion.

That’s the guy we were trying to get on the phone. He always published the morning of the caucuses, and before he filed we wanted to get a last word in—he loved Alison, liked me—or even, if he wanted, get him on the phone with Kerry one last time.

For hours now he hadn’t picked up his phone.

“He’s going with Dean,” said Alison.

“It can’t be Edwards, right?”

She snorted. “Come on.”

We were in a closet with two phones and a desk, which because of the scarcity of space in any campaign headquarters was a grand fiefdom. Some junior organizer peeked around the door. “The Davenport turf is—”

“Get the fuck out of here and bother someone else,” I said, in a tone that I can’t imagine I ever used at Oxford but was second nature to me during the campaign.

The organizer apologized and left. Alison sighed and tore a chunk of crust off of a piece of cooling pizza. “What the hell are we going to do?”

Just then someone altogether more respectable, Rix, came in. He was the candidate’s point person in Iowa, erratic but politically a savant. “Polsky?” he asked.

“Nothing yet.”

“Jesus Christ, get your thumbs out of your pussies.”

“We’re on it,” said Alison.

When Rix was gone, I said, “We’re on it,” in an eager voice.

She laughed and threw the crust at me. “What are we going to do?”

Around the campaign office we were a kind of golden couple. The candidate himself knew us by name and joked with us about our relationship. We were certain our first kid’s godfather would be a president. Embarrassing to admit it.

“Maybe we should just go find him. We know he’s not at the
Star-Herald
offices, right? I’ve bugged Myers about it like six times, Jennifer Fabianski, too. Neither of them has seen him over there.”

Those were Polsky’s bosses. “So he’s at home. We can’t go see him at home.”

I smiled. “Why not? That’s what Carville and Stephenopolus would have done.”
The War Room
was our favorite movie. “Those guys didn’t wait for things to come to them.”

She sighed. “But if we rub him the wrong way—”

“Do you honestly think he’ll endorse John fucking Edwards because two Kerry staffers bothered him at home?”