After This (31 page)

 

Beside them, David Wallace seemed not only the member of some
more advanced, more refined civilization but a creature who must also
be ranked a good deal higher on the phylogenetic scale.

 

“Sit, sit,” David was saying once again. He had poured Chianti
for Monica and opened bottles of beer for both boys. Grace caught
Annie’s eye and patted the empty cushion beside her, tilting her head,
pleading, and against her better judgment, Annie stood and crossed
over to sit with her friend. Monica took the velvet chair, Nate at her
feet, his elbow in her lap. Ben went to another chair, a gold ladderback
with a dark turquoise seat. It looked somewhat fragile under his thick
thighs in their new jeans, although he declined, smiling, when David
offered him his own chair beside the couch. “This is good,” he said,
the brown bottle held between his legs. Annie could see him
regretting his decision to come along with Monica and Nate, and
thought of her mother’s injunction never to be a third wheel.
“Yes, well,” David Wallace said as his wife distributed pate and
crackers, olives and celery to the new guests. Annie prayed that he
wouldn’t again mention Binghamton because she knew if he did she
would think less of him. “Will there be more of you?” he asked the
assemblage. “Tonight? Any more of you coming? That you know?”
The Americans looked at each other, frowning, shaking their
heads. Grace offered, eagerly, that she didn’t know.

 

“You don’t consult?” Mr. Wallace said, smiling. “All you American
students? It’s rather remarkable to have five of you here all at once. I
thought perhaps it was part of a plan.”

 

They continued to look at one another, shaking their heads, “No,”
they said. It was clear the two boys were wary of Mr. Wallace; they
suspected he was making fun of them.

 

“No, of course not, David,” Professor Wallace said. “They hardly
travel en masse. They’re an independent bunch, our American
students. Aren’t you?” she said, looking around the room. “You’re
made to come together, what is it, once a month, to see how you’re
getting on, but that’s it, isn’t it?”

 

“Actually,” Grace said, “it’s every fortnight.”

 

“Is it?” Professor Wallace asked.

 

“It’s ridiculous,” Nate said from Monica’s knees. “I quit going.”
Monica put her hand in his curly hair. She was loose-limbed, slim, and
large-breasted. Her face was plain but there was a luster about her
skin and her hair, a luster of sex and of good health. She shook his
head a little, playfully gripping his scalp. “You were at the last one,”
she said in a tone that seemed to imply that the last one had ended in
some mad sexual transaction.

 

Grace had turned to Mr. Wallace, explaining. “Only a few of us
live in the same halls,” she said, piling on the Britishisms (Annie,
stubbornly, still said dorms). “We’re scattered about campus precisely
so we don’t stay to ourselves. It’s sort of the point of the whole
program.”

 

“And yet, here you all are,” David Wallace said. “All on the same
evening.”

 

Quietly, Professor Wallace slipped out of the room, through the
door to what Annie guessed was the kitchen. She wished for the
courage to join her, but felt the anchor of Grace, sitting beside her,
who was now saying, “Yes, isn’t it funny?” and once more raising her
glass.

 

“Great minds think alike,” Ben said, leaning over his lap on the
small chair. Whether he intended to or not, he sounded bitter.
Mr. Wallace then questioned the three about their hometowns.
Monica was from Long Island, too, and Nate from outside Albany. Ben
was from Staten Island, “A city boy,” Mr. Wallace said, to which Ben
replied, with a tilt of his beer bottle, “I hate New York City.”
David Wallace nodded, touched his silk cravat. They could now
smell their dinner in the kitchen. “Unfortunate,” he said, as if
resisting his own disappointment in the boy. “Yet understandable. No
doubt you’re a Wordsworth fellow as well,” he added.

 

But Ben seemed to miss the connection. He glanced at Monica
and Nate before he spoke. “What’s a Wordsworth fellow?” he asked.
Now David Wallace looked puzzled. “A fan,” he said, as if the
word were a colloquialism he wasn’t quite sure of. “Of Wordsworth.
Since you don’t like the city, I assumed you’d be a devotee of someone
like Wordsworth. The romantics. The pastoral poets.”

 

Ben was looking at Mr. Wallace with what Annie had come to
recognize as a particularly American look. He suspected Mr. Wallace
was putting him on the spot and even before he’d demonstrated his
own lack of knowledge, he was preparing his case for how useless
what he didn’t know really was. “Wordsworth’s okay,” he said, with
some caution. “I guess. I don’t know a lot about him.” So fuck you,
was only implied.

 

Mr. Wallace asked, pleasantly, “Well, what inspired you to study
in England then?” and Ben laughed once, through his nose, and raised
the bottle in his hand. “The beer,” he said.

 

Nate dropped his head, amused at his friend. Monica leaned down
over her lap to whisper something in his ear, her thick hair falling to
shield them both.

 

Mr. Wallace turned to the two girls. “Well, that’s honest at least,”
he said, although his face, Annie thought, also said he was sorry the
conversation had taken such a boorish turn. He looked at both of their
glasses. “Let me refresh those for you,” he said, gently, and took the
glasses out of their hands, out of their laps. Grace said, “Thank you,”
looking up at him, her throat and chin growing flushed. “It won’t be
long,” he said, kindly. Annie knew he meant until dinner, but felt he
might just as well have said, Till we’re alone again, the way Grace’s
breath seemed to catch on the words. The way her fingers, reaching up
to touch her frames, were trembling.

 

Just as he returned with their fresh drinks (over his shoulder,
“Can I get you gentlemen another. Young lady?”) Professor Wal-
lace came through the door again with a tray stacked with dinner
plates and silverware and a huge pot that rilled the room with the
woodsy odor of meat and mushrooms. In what struck the girls as
marvelous choreography, one neither had ever seen in her own home,
Mr. Wallace swung back into the kitchen and emerged with another
large pot and then, without a single word of instruction between
them, the two began to fill plates with pasta, to ladle sauce, to
distribute plush throw pillows in silky Indian prints that seemed to
appear miraculously from behind the couch. “You’ll want these on
your laps,” Professor Wallace told the students. “To shorten the
distance from plate to lips,” she said. She shook out huge napkins to
place over each pillow; she might have tucked another just under their
chins, the way they all, suddenly, with pillows and napkins and plates
of steaming food on their laps, felt swaddled, childish and also cared
for.

 

Mr. Wallace took his place beside Grace again, with only a napkin,
no pillow on his knee. Professor Wallace made the rounds with a small
glass dish and a tiny silver spoon, sprinkling
parmigiana
like fairy dust
over each plate.

 

Then she sat with her own next to Annie.

 

“This is delicious,” Monica said. Nate had abandoned her knee
and her lap and was hunched now over his plate. He may even have
moved away from her a bit. “Oh God,” he said, looking up. There was
a fleck of sauce on his chin. “So good.” It was a kind of moan. “The
food in hall is so freaking bad.”

 

Professor Wallace smiled. “Poor dears,” she said. “I’m sure it
takes some getting used to.”

 

Beside Annie, Grace was struggling with plate and pillow and fork
and the stubby glass she still held in her hand and just as Annie was
about to suggest she put it down, Mr. Wallace leaned over and took it
from her and put it gently on the small table at her elbow. “There,” he
said softly. “Easier to manage.” And Grace touched

 

her glasses and nodded and said, “Thank you.” Now her skin flushed
up over her chin and down, Annie noticed, the length of her plump,
pale arms.

 

David Wallace was questioning them again. “Where are you going
and where have you been?” he asked. Monica and Nate had been to
Stratford and Bath and London. Annie and Grace to London and
Stonehenge. Ben would be joining his parents in Dublin over
Christmas. The girls wanted to get to Bronte country, of course. Ben’s
father wanted him to visit the village near Dover where he had been
stationed during the war. Nate was hoping to get to Pamplona in the
spring. (Mr. Wallace turned to Grace and said, “Hemingway, you see,”
as if it were an old joke they had long shared. He lifted her plate, and
then her glass from the small table. Took both away and then returned
with her glass once again full.)

 

When all the plates had been cleared, Professor Wallace brought a
tray of fruit and cheese and placed it on the footstool, serving them
again, this time using small plates painted with branches and birds.
She recommended the Rambling Club at the university to all the
American students. A lovely and inexpensive way to see the
countryside. She would suggest, she said, kneeling among them,
slicing a ripe pear, finding a focus for your travels. Historical, literary.
Lawrence walked through the Pyrenees looking for roadside crucifixes.
Read his essay. An American student once followed the route of
Eleanor of Aquitaine. Another made a trip to the Hebrides, for
Virginia Woolf ’s sake.

 

“Something like that,” Professor Wallace said. She proffered the
slices of ripe pear, the Americans reached for them, childish, Annie
thought, grateful. Nate had scooted farther away from Monica, across
the Turkish rug to the footstool. Closer to the food, but also to
Professor Wallace’s feet.

 

“It’s nice to have a focus,” Professor Wallace said, taking the
couch next to Annie once again. “It’s nice to see a pattern emerge
out of travels that might, otherwise, seem random.” She turned to
Annie, looked at her down her long nose, kindly, fondly, perhaps. “You
might follow in Wharton’s footsteps, for instance,” she said. “Find
that hotel in Paris where she was so thoroughly happy.”

 

“So thoroughly shagged,” David said, and only Grace laughed
with him, her blush having settled in permanently now. He looked at
the other men in the room. “We were discussing it earlier,” he said.
“She’d been a married virgin, Edith Wharton.” He turned to his wife.
“Until what age, Elizabeth? Fortyfive?”

 

Annie saw Professor Wallace put her fingertips, forefinger and
thumb, to a crescent of pear on her plate and hold them there, as if,
briefly, measuring something. “That’s right,” she said without raising
her head. Then she leaned a little into Annie, there was a hint of
perfume on her velvet shawl. “Poor David,” she whispered and then,
looking up, she said across the two girls. “My dear, I’m afraid your
mind has been in that hotel room all evening.”

 

He threw back his head and shouted a laugh. “It has!” he said.
“Isn’t it odd?” Now Professor Wallace was laughing, softly. If Annie
hadn’t been sitting beside her, feeling the laughter through the velvet
shawl, she would not have known that was what she was doing. On
her face, there was only that wry smile. David made a gesture that
encompassed the room. “Three young beauties here for dinner and I’m
a voyeur in some Parisian hotel room, wondering what it was like. I
mean, at fortyfive, Elizabeth. Think of it.”

 

“It was just as it would have been at twentyfive,” Professor
Wallace said warmly, and now another kind of mad, sexual transaction
was implied. The Americans suddenly felt they had vanished from the
room. Monica had Runty in her lap and she paused with both her
hands in the cat’s fur. Nate on the floor, an elbow on his raised knee,
held a forgotten piece of cheddar in his hand. Ben bowed his head, as
if in deference to some sweet intimacy, and Grace—Annie was sure of
it—raised a knuckle to her glasses to

 

hide a tear. “She was in love, darling,” Professor Wallace said softly. “I
can tell you without hesitation what it was like. It was marvelous.”
David Wallace smiled at his wife. It wasn’t an imaginary hotel
room he was thinking of now. “I’m sure,” he said. “I’m sure you’re
right.”

 

After the fruit and the cheese, there was a chocolate gateau and
the box of candy the girls had brought, and Ben’s Drambuie. Professor
Wallace ran the small glass of it under her nose and closed her eyes
and then told them that when she was a child her grandmother had
kept a decanter of Drambuie on the table in the front hall. During the
war, she said, after they’d been down in the cellar for an air raid, she
and her cousins, who had also been sent to the safer distance of their
grandparents’ little farm, would come up the stairs and into the hall,
where their grandmother would give them each a teaspoonful of the
liqueur, to reward them, or to prepare them for sleep, or only, perhaps,
to steady her own nerves. Professor Wallace closed her eyes and put
her lips to the glass. “It comes back,” she said after she had drunk.
“That time.” She opened her eyes. “We would wrap ourselves in
blankets and dressing gowns. In anticipation, I suppose, of shattered
glass. My grandmother would divide us into groups of three, two
children and an adult, my grandfather, my mother, herself, my aunt.
Each adult with a child under each arm, scattered to different corners
of the cellar, in case.” She sighed. “In case, I suppose, some part of the
ceiling came down, not, one would hope, on us all.” She paused again.
Annie recalled her own family, huddled in the basement, long ago.
Milk that tasted like candles in their mouths. A tree had fallen.
Forever after, Jacob had kept a flashlight by his bed.

 

“You must have been scared to death,” Monica said.

 

Professor Wallace shrugged. “I was very young,” she said, as if to
acknowledge that the memory might be flawed. “I don’t recall
being frightened at all, only thrilled. By the adventure. Even when we
could hear the bombs, the whistle and the long silence—the worst
part of it, people have said, that terrible silence before the impact—I
don’t know that I ever cried.”