The Last Enchantments (27 page)

After a minute my father came out, and my heart lifted, it was over. I was wrong. “Did your mom give you any money? For emergencies?”

I shook my head. “No.”

He looked at me as if I were useless. Then he went back inside. The worst part now was how badly I had to pee. I had had to since I left my apartment and it was getting close to intolerable, and even though the look on his face was running through my head on a loop like a GIF, I almost forgot the situation I was in, where I was. I thought about knocking on the door, but in the end what I did was go into the little alley next to the building and peed, with carnal relief, against the wall.

The alley connected through to another avenue block, and as I zipped up I saw something from my life every day: a New York City bus. I ran down the alley (yes, I must have been wearing the backpack, because I remember it bumping) and got on it without hesitation, submitting myself to the great uncaring safety of New York officialdom. Forty minutes later I was home. What I remember chiefly from the bus ride is thinking that at least we had been alone, that I didn’t want to embarrass him. I thought of how I could protect him in the way I told the story. I must have failed, because it was a year before I saw him again.

That was my father. How I miss him! We had the same name, and it occurred to me once that when I write my own name down I’m writing his, too. There’s a shiver of religion in that. But no, maybe I only wish there were, and there’s not. He’s gone. Nothing, not superstition, not even love, will change that.

*   *   *

That week was my mother’s fiftieth birthday, and there were two separate parties for her. Aside from that she made me go to yoga twice (the girls were beautiful, I’ve never been to a yoga class or a rock concert where I didn’t fall in love) and every evening we watched a movie.

After eight days in Boston I went down to New York and spent five more on my friend Matt’s couch, seeing everyone who still lived in the city—or, everyone. While they were at work during the days I went to my old places, Central Park and the Met. (The Petrus Christus Carthusian; Breughel’s mowers; the Lavoisiers; Dendur; the Frank Lloyd Wright room: I check in on those five every time.) Nothing makes a New Yorker feel at home after a long absence like walking through Central Park with coffee, while the tourists on the footpaths argue about where they are and consult massive, wind-flapped maps, stopping in large groups at inconvenient places. Give them a dirty look and an exasperated sigh as you step around them, and you feel with a derisive majesty that you’re once again a member of the federation that really possesses Manhattan.

I debated each day whether or not to call Alison. Finally, the day before I left, I did. We agreed to meet under the clock at Grand Central and then have lunch in the mezzanine.

Her brown hair looked thicker than I remembered, longer, too, and she was pale. She was a Thoroughbred: leggy, slim, tall, slightly restless. She had on long brown boots over jeans, a black blazer with the arms pushed up, and big hoop earrings. When she smiled, her teeth, even and brilliantly white, shone, slightly wetted.

I ordered as expensively as possible, which caused Alison to roll her eyes and smile. “You happy now?” she asked.

“Your dad still lets you use his account here, right?”

“Like he’ll notice anyway.” She smiled. “So how’ve you been?”

“Not bad. What about you?”

“How’s your mom?” she asked.

“Oh, she said hi and sent this.” I took a small wrapped box out of my messenger bag. It was a set of Hiroshige notecards. “Open it later.”

She smiled. “Thanks. I’ll write her.”

“So? How about you?”

“Oh, I’m okay.”

“Work is good?”

“Yeah.” She kind of smiled. “Anyway. Have you hooked up?”

“Not really.”

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“I kissed a girl.”

“Who, Sophie? Ella?”

They were just names to her, from the start of the year. “No, some random. What about you?”

She hesitated, whether because of prevarication or fear of vulnerability I couldn’t tell, and said, “No. Not me.”

“Thanks,” I said. “You can now. I was being stupid.”

She rolled her eyes. “I can’t wait to tell people I’m open for business.”

“No, I—”

“You’re going to be jealous.”

“Probably.”

“Would you be?” she asked. Her voice was as light as nothing.

“I don’t think I’ll ever be comfortable imagining you with someone else.”

She hesitated, staring into her sparkling water, then said, “I heard you called up Chuck Rode in Washington? He shot me an e-mail afterward, asking if it was true we were dunzo.”

“Yeah. There are no jobs. I’m going to sell out instead.”

“I can already see you in the McDonald’s uniform.”

“Hilarious. Oh, look, my glass of Mumm’s.” When the waiter had set it down and left, I lifted it by the stem with my left hand. “Tell your dad thanks.”

*   *   *

It was sunnier when I got back to Oxford. In Fleet’s beautiful sunken gardens, leading back to the river, were littered snowdrops and crocuses. At the bar at night the doors were opened out to the patio, letting in a breeze.

“What’s up, ugly,” said Tom, peering over the banister when he heard the door open. He came down the stairs and took one of my bags. “How was Murrika?”

“Fine.”

“Anil’s taken to singing in the shower.”

“Oh no.”

“This morning it was one that went ‘Sucka nigga, nigga nigga, I throw the sucka in the front for the ones who front. Sucka nigga, nigga nigga, nigga nigga.’ Then he repeated that about sixteen thousand times.”

“HATERS ARE GOING TO HATE!” Anil’s voice called down the flight of stairs to the second story.

I laughed. “How can you hear him over the shower?”

He looked pretty well. “Will, you’ve been gone too long. We could hear him because we listened at the door, of course.”

I tried Anneliese that night and agreed to meet up with her the next morning for breakfast. Sophie answered a similar text by saying,
Can’t hang out for a while, sorry.
Only Ella didn’t respond at all, to texts or phone calls. I didn’t see her until three days later at Hall. I asked her where she had been.

“Working,” she said. “It’s been terrible. Sorry about the phone calls.”

“That’s okay.”

She looked at me. “Uh, well, I promised I’d sit with Peter.”

That was my reserved chess friend, the one whose brave and futile battle against Giorgio and Richard was a source of admiration to us all. “You did?”

“Actually we’ve started seeing each other,” she said.

“You’ve—really?” Peter was sweet but so quiet, and Ella with her tattoos and hair and boobs: There couldn’t have been two more different people in college. As I absorbed this new information I saw Tom come toward me from the door to Hall and then veer off when he saw Ella. “What about Tom?” I asked.

“What about him?”

“You’re fine with that?”

“I’m fine with that,” she repeated sarcastically, as if I were being stupid. “Look, I’ve got to go. Are you sitting with Tom?”

“You can’t even sit with him?”

“Oh, no, I’m fine with sitting with him, but I said I’d sit with Peter.”

“Can we all sit together?”

“I’m not in the mood.”

“Then I’ll sit with you guys.”

Finally she smiled at me. “Really?”

“Yeah, obviously. I see Tom all the time.”

“Thanks,” she said.

For a week or so it was awkward to be friends with them, and certainly for a while Ella appeared upset when she saw him, in the subtle ways a friend can see. Gradually they could be in the same room. Tom, to his credit, always tried to include her. I guess her anger subsided. By May she, Tom, and I could all hang out together without any serious tension. Though it didn’t mean Ella had moved on.

*   *   *

Giorgio and Richard surpassed themselves that first week back, as they seemed to whenever Tom and I happened into a student government meeting.

We had gone to the MCR looking for a game of table football. Peter, now with Ella by his side, was faithfully recording for posterity every clause and sentence in the accreting record of Giorgio and Richard’s official madness. Ella and Tom exchanged nonglances when we came in.

There was obviously an argument going on. Peter, in his quiet way, kept mumbling, “But it’s a quarter of the spring budget,” and Bert, the third-year who always came to meetings, said, “And only seven people could go! Nobody I know even likes skeet shooting.”

“This is about skeet shooting?” I asked.

“Wait,” said Tom, “only seven people can go at a time? And are you two on that list?”

“In a supervisory capacity, Tom, yes, we must perforce be there,” said Richard.

“But not shooting. Simply supervising. That’s a relief, because it means seven people from the MCR can go.”

Richard reddened. “After all the energy we’ve put into this, we would shoot as well … Giorgio has a gun and I…” Here he trailed off in a growing din.

“So there are five open spots?”

“Well,” said Giorgio, with the good grace to look discomfited, “Chin and Xi have preregistered.”

That caused an uproar. Chin and Xi were two Chinese statistics students who, perhaps because they had grown up in a totalitarian regime, worshipped Giorgio. I actually liked Chin, who played basketball with me sometimes; it was Xi I didn’t trust.

“Where was preregistration?” asked Peter.

There was a long pause. “Online,” Richard answered at last.

The MCR had the least-visited Web site on the Internet. It required two passwords to access, and nobody knew one, never mind both, except Giorgio’s inner circle. After Peter successfully lobbied for the passwords over the course of two long, fraught, heated meetings, he found that the site’s only contents were a series of pictures of Giorgio and Richard (and occasionally Chin or Xi) having various expensive-looking picnics, all in a file generously marked
MCR PICTURES
. Peter had gone back in the record and discovered that these champagne-and-caviar affairs had been charged to the MCR.

So the Web site was a sore point.

“You’re not going skeet shooting,” said Tom flatly. “Over my dead body.”

“Fortunately you have no power in this meeting,” said Giorgio.

“I’ll go talk to Sir George.”

Laughing, Richard said, “Master Ballantine is a close friend to the MCR, Tom. You won’t get very far there.”

“Well, I don’t care,” said Tom hotly. “You’re not doing it.”

Peter stepped in. “We can certainly delay such a major expenditure by passing a vote to revisit a spending item over a thousand pounds at the next meeting.”

“Holy fuck, it costs more than a thousand pounds?” I asked.

Giorgio looked angry. The motion passed 15–3. The third vote was Anil’s. He wanted to go skeet shooting.

Then Peter, blushing and visibly unhappy, said, “And there is one other thing, in fact … I—it’s a bit awkward,” and as if to prove it he laughed a bit awkwardly. “It appears that someone has been having sex on the dining table in the MCR. Two separate people have reported something of the sort to me, on three different dates…”

There was a great deal of chatter at this intelligence.

“I’m only asking whoever it is to stop. Please pass the word. There’s no need to bring the master into it. Only I’m tired of coming in every morning to wash the table, just in case.”

*   *   *

On several nights in early and mid-April, Tom disappeared. In total it must have been about four separate times. He claimed he was going on a walk, and while that put me in mind of his long winter walk after our last eventful MCR meeting, he seemed more content these days. I didn’t think about it much.

One night just before I left for an evening seminar on Jane Austen, he departed as he had on those other occasions, popping his head around the door to say good-bye. I went out shortly after him and spent a few hours discussing
Persuasion.
Sullivan kept trying to introduce Joyce into the conversation, with increasing irritability—modernists are a fractious phylum—but the teacher wasn’t interested. I wasn’t either; spend a year with people who study them and you never want to hear about Joyce or Woolf again.

After class, mind pleasantly occupied, not ready to go home, I wandered toward Freud’s. I suppose I was thinking of Jess. It had been some time since I saw her, and Freud’s was the place where she and her friend Elena spent many nights, right past Worcester near the Oxford University Press, because, though it was expensive, they were friends with one of the owners, who had made good from their neighborhood of row houses. It was a big, darkish, eerie place, once an Anglican church, its altar converted into a bar. They served fancy drinks, Mojitos with freshly shaved sugarcane, that kind of thing.

There was a table in front of the DJ’s booth where Jess and Elena often sat, and I was pleased to see Jess there, with two dark-haired guys. Elena was absent. One of the guys made a joke and the whole table laughed, and then he put his arm around her.

With a shock, I saw that it was Tom.

After a moment he leaned over and kissed her on the mouth. She pushed him off in the mock-angry way, full of indignation, that I knew so intimately. Then, as she was flicking her ponytail, she caught sight of me.

It had been ages, and I was there that night because of a melancholy, lonely feeling that a brief phone call with Alison, no more than a check-in after our lunch in New York, had raised in me.

It was too late to slink out quietly. She waved me to their table, and I saw that she meant to brazen it out. A second shock to me was the person with her and Tom: Anil.

“Hey, Will!” said Jess. She was wearing a lot of makeup and a shirt that showed off her shoulders. She looked good.

“Hey,” I said. “How’s it going?”

“It’s brilliant! I haven’t seen you in eons.”

“I thought a friend of mine was supposed to be here, but he isn’t.”

Tom had stood up, and I think he must have thought that was a shot at him. Which it was. “Hey,” he said. “How was your class?”

“Fine,” I said.