The Last Enchantments (26 page)

“Not quite.”

She rested her fingers in the declivity between my stomach and my right hipbone. “One more time, that will be the last.”

“Okay.”

*   *   *

I was going back to America for two weeks, the term break. My flight was a late one from Heathrow to Logan, and I spent the day before I left doing laundry in the MCR. Timmo, Anil, and Anneliese hung out with me for most of it, playing table football and watching the entire
Lord of the Rings
trilogy. Nobody seemed to have any work.

I was leaving for the airport at six, and at half past five I walked over to Sophie’s house, hoping to say good-bye. We hadn’t exchanged fifteen words since we slept together.

Her room was directly at the top of the stairs on the second floor, so that she had less privacy than most of the rooms. When I was near it I realized she was talking to someone.

I hesitated long enough to hear a male voice, cracking with emotion, say, “I just can’t believe it.”

“Baby,” said Sophie, as soft as motherhood.

“One stupid week.” With a shock I realized that it was Jack’s voice, vacated of its customary command. What were they talking about? “I need the loo.”

I was poised on the top step, one foot lifted to its toes, listening, and the door opened too quickly for me to start back down the stairs. The bathroom was just adjacent to Sophie’s room, and Jack must have thought he could slip into it without anyone seeing him. He hadn’t bothered to wipe his cheeks dry.

“Will?” he said, confused.

“Hey.”

His stare hardened. He went into the bathroom and slammed the door. Sophie then came to her door to discover what had happened and saw me.

“Jesus, Will,” she said, “what are you doing here?”

“I was seeing if—if Marta was in,” I said. Marta was a sixty-year-old Brazilian woman, headmistress of a school in Pernambuco on leave to study education, who spent the majority of her waking hours on the phone, talking to her husband. I can say with incontestable certainty that she didn’t know my name. “I’m going stateside for a while.” I gestured toward the bathroom. “Is everything okay?”

“Jack’s going to Afghanistan next Tuesday.”

“Shit.”

“No, no, it’s good. It’s good for his career.”

“Oh. Good, then. When did he find out?”

Her face was unreadable, but her eyes flicked to the door, to check if he could hear perhaps. Her arms were folded across her chest. “About a week ago.”

I thought of her visit to my room, of course. “Wish him luck for me.”

“I will.”

“Good-bye.”

For the rest of the day and all through my flight home, I thought about Jack. I couldn’t stop imagining the ways he might die in the war. There were helicopter crashes, stray bullets, improvised roadside bombs, ground-to-air shoulder launchers, there were plain old car accidents, and of course the fighting, which I understood only somewhere between the abstraction of terror and the overrealism of movies and TV.

Those were black years, during those two wars; every day I brooded over America’s politics, and brooded then on top of that because I had removed myself from them, and therefore, in a sense, relinquished my right to object. The fantasia of Oxford, its self-regard, its late nights—how pointless it seemed when I considered the state of the world elsewhere.

The worst part for me was thinking about him and Ella. A month before, we had all been together at the Fleet bar and he and Ella, previously just civil, out of nowhere became intensely absorbed in a conversation about classical music. Both of them listened to it, it turned out, and as Jack picked up on her answers, offering names I didn’t know (“Albinoni’s cello suites!”) his face softened out of itself into something like warmth. After that the two of them could always chat together. They even traded music sometimes, I believe, though I can’t remember for sure. I kept thinking about it on the plane.

We landed at around midnight American time. The first thing my eyes lit on was a metal garbage can, and its familiar American shape. It had suffused me all at once with the prestige of my own memories, located in the dull objects of life as much as in people. The garbage and the whole terminal of restaurants it implied and spawned by its existence. I realized I was home. It felt strange. At the exit I saw my mother, and her presence was almost difficult to register, since all of my feelings were already so quick to arise at the slightest pressure, at the garbage can. How was I supposed to handle anything as full of meaning as my mother’s cheerful face, her halo of dark hair? I started to cry, which I don’t imagine I had done in her presence since I was nine or ten.

“Sweetheart!” she said. “My goodness, what is it?”

“Hey.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. Seeing you is hard.” It all seemed like too much to handle. “My friend is going to Afghanistan.”

“Oh, Will.”

I let her hug me. “And I miss Dad, obviously.”

CHAPTER
EIGHT

I was an unhappy child: intelligent, anxious, solitary. My parents divorced seven violent years into my life, and when in college I read
Tender Is the Night
I noted with special interest that the Divers’ son and daughter had “that wistful charm, almost sadness, peculiar to children who have learned early not to cry or laugh with abandon.” My father and the stepfather who followed him were angry men. At the footsteps of either I would slip into an empty room if I could and wait. I did my schoolwork perfectly and my chores as well as I could, hoping to escape notice. I read a lot of books.

Until I was twelve or so my life was full of deep terrors. I used to be convinced beyond persuasion, for example, that one day I would be kidnapped. In one of the lunatic misunderstandings of early childhood, I would have guessed then that around ten percent of children were stolen at some stage. Especially at the age of seven or eight I would lie in bed envisioning how it might happen. I never wanted to bother my father—later, my stepfather—so I would remain in bed, paralyzed with fear, clenched all along my body, until my terror reached its highest pitch and I would sprint, sobbing, to my mother. It was a transgression my stepfather in particular hated, but that I could never manage to stop myself from committing. How bizarre that I should have been reprimanded! What was I back then? A little particle of being. Why would it have angered them to see me afraid?

Of course I was happy, too—and bored, devious, gluttonous, curious, normal. I loved baseball. As comfort I had my mother, a particular grandfather, and books. I think probably I was more grown up than most children; I knew from a very young age that my father, who at that time was a drug addict—heroin, I think, but nobody has ever spoken about it with me, though by the time I reached middle school he “only took pills”—was untrustworthy. I loved him.

He died six months before I departed the States for Oxford, a heart defect. It was a month or so afterward that I had submitted a late application to the university. When I left Alison and America I annexed the fact of his death away to one of the least-visited chambers of my heart. I don’t think anyone at school knew other than Anneliese, whom I had told in a fit of self-pity one afternoon.

Seeing my mother jerked something primal in my brain, and I thought,
Yes, that’s right, the other human I’m half of is gone.

What was he like? “You always take the side of the dead,” Gabriel García Márquez wrote. So I will say that my father was terrifically bright and fun, at home in conversation, though with sometimes a scary avidity in his eyes—a manic one. He had a terrible temper. He had less sense of right or wrong than most people. He was small, shorter than I am. His weight fluctuated. He was seedily handsome.

His childhood was conventional like mine. My grandfather (who outlived his son) had been born into the true New York Episcopalian aristocracy, which existed from around 1850 to 1950. How to describe it? He and his brothers, my father’s uncles, grew up in a town house on Fifth Avenue that is now the consulate of Gambia. When the diocese needed a new bishop my great-grandfather sent a succession of men up to Andover to deliver guest sermons, a kind of road test, and selected the one his boys recommended for the job. For two straight years in the thirties the family had a horse finish dead last in the Kentucky Derby. Each Sunday they had a supper in which every dish was white. They had a huge farm in northern New Jersey, which they sold in the fifties, and is now a two-hundred-unit apartment complex. When my great-grandfather died many of the flags of Park Avenue flew at half-mast, north of Fifty-ninth. When the family cat was lost and then found there was a story about it on the front page of the
New York Herald.
What’s left of that? Portraits, silver, gold carriage clocks, the family nose, old menus from the Waldorf, some money.

After Yale and Yale Law my grandfather became a partner in a New York law firm and moved his family to Sixty-fifth and Fifth, with a cook and a maid who lived in. My father was a passable, distracted student but a great athlete—baseball and golf. The first hint of change came in college, though in his telling some trauma of youth had been boiling away before then, whatever would lead to his addiction, ultimately. Perhaps. However it came to pass, he started taking drugs. During his sophomore year at Vassar, he dropped out and took the refund on his tuition to move to New York. It was the first of a dozen times that he took money from his father without bothering to tell anyone.

New York: Heroin was his primary addiction from all I can gather, then methadone when I was a child, then heroin again, but he smoked pot, dropped acid, took pills, did coke … He disappeared for the first years of my life (after six months of an attempt at marriage with my mother, inspired solely by her pregnancy) into a blank netherworld of drugs and downtown, music, squalor. My grandfather, who had a deep soft spot for his only son, gave him an allowance, so he never worked. One of my favorite things to do as a child was sit in a big plush armchair at this grandfather’s law firm, eating pink rock candy and listening to tales of my father’s childhood athletic feats. My grandfather always wore a suit and a hat, and ran rule over dozens of subordinates, but during those afternoons he left behind his grown-up ways and the two of us, seventy-five and eight, escaped into a conversation in which my father was perfect once more, unaged, immortal.

Until I was seven I wasn’t permitted to see him. It was when he was on methadone, which is the drug you take when you’re getting off heroin, that I could. From my seventh birthday to my twelfth or so he was tolerably healthy, then again from my seventeenth birthday on, when he stopped using drugs again. Around then a manuscript he had begun about the golden age of jazz began to absorb him, and between that, the Dodgers, and a daily trip to the clinic, he just about led a normal life. Normal, well; he was violent, narcissistic, angry, spiteful, a bully, to the people—me and his father—who loved him most. There were moments in between when everyone loved him again. It never lasted.

He was a figure of fascination to me. When I was seven or eight he would lurch back into my life for an occasional Sunday, usually first to the church where we had both been baptized for the ten o’clock service, Christ dissolving on our tongues, then to a lunch, then, the afternoon appearing endless, in an aimless trek between baseball card shops, record stores, movies, and restaurants. (All of his childhood passions were intact, so our interests coincided.) I remember a great deal of advice about alcohol. He drank at lunch and again when we stopped for my ice cream sundae at three thirty. Only hold a champagne glass with your left hand, close to your heart; a rosé is acceptable during a picnic in the South of France between May and August; a Bull Shot, not a Bloody Mary. Wrinkles of the WASP code. It gave me such happiness to be with him.

Then there was a bad Sunday, and for three years afterward we weren’t together unsupervised.

It was spring. He picked me up in the morning and we got straight into a cab, which surprised me because in general he didn’t have much money, his father covering his few steady expenses directly. The cabdriver double-checked the address with him, surprised, which in retrospect was an ominous sign, and then we made our slow way through upper Manhattan: first past the gleaming pitiless brick buildings of Park Avenue, doormen outside them wearing gold-buttoned coats, like generals in the Crimean War, then toward the shabbier reaches of Yorkville, yellow tenements with zagging black fire escapes, crowded with dead plants and smoking mothers, and finally across the Rubicon of 125th Street.

“Where are we going?”

“To see a friend of mine,” he said.

“I have to pee.”

“Afterward.”

We stopped in a poor neighborhood. I was scared of black people when I was five, I don’t think I knew better. (I still often am, I suppose, it’s awful but it’s true, even writing it makes me realize that, and I feel a horrible compression of guilt.)

My father found the door he was looking for, which belonged to a vacant brownstone. “Wait ten minutes?” he asked the cabdriver.

The cabdriver looked at me and then shook his head. “Sorry.”

We stood on the sidewalk. This was the eighties, before corporate money disciplined the city into Orlando, swept Times Square free of needles, and gentrified Harlem. As the taxi pulled away my father looked down at me. “I’ll be inside five minutes. Tops.”

“I can’t go in?”

“It’s not for little boys,” he said. “Wait right here. You’ll be fine, I’ve walked around here a million times. People are friendly. When I’m back we’ll go to Joe’s and get a slice.”

I watched him go in and then sat down on the stoop, miserable, feeling waves of sickness. I felt like I wanted to cry. For so long I had heard that my father was unstable, and here it was, the terrible proving moment. (I think now: What was I wearing? Who was that boy? Orwell: “What have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.” I imagine my Yankees jacket, my one indispensable piece of clothing then, some blue jeans, my Yankees backpack.) We were supposed to be at the Great Lawn. My glove would have been in my backpack. It’s pure treacle, evanescence, stupidity, but I can think so clearly of the glove—the signature of Don Mattingly in it, my favorite player, careful creases where I had left it folded underneath my bed. Self-pity can be gratifying, true, strange. Strange to think it all happened, it was briefly as real as right now. It was the newest event in the world.