The Last Enchantments (37 page)

“I don’t deserve this,” I said.

“Lula told me you two kissed,” she said and for the first time in a while looked straight at me.

I heard the words and felt a sense of injustice. How could I possibly explain to her how entitled I felt to those kisses, and how badly they had done the job I set them out to do? I couldn’t say any of it. Nor could I explain that it was different if I wrote to Alison, even though I knew in my heart it wasn’t. “She did?”

“Did you?”

“This has been the best summer of my life,” I said, more to myself than to her.

“Did you?”

Finally I nodded.

“Well,” she said.

I threw up my hands. “It’s not like what you think, though. I was drunk and I was, I was mad at you. I overheard you telling Plum you missed Jack.”

“You eavesdropped?”

“Not on purpose.” Then I paused. “No, that’s a lie. Half on purpose.”

“Then you deserved to hear whatever you heard.”

“I know,” I said. We looked at each other unhappily. “Does Jack want you back?”

She nodded. “Yes.”

“What did you say?”

“I told him no, of course.”

My heart lifted slightly. “Good.”

“He said that he couldn’t promise he would never cheat, but that he would try, and if he did he would tell me, and it wouldn’t be with anyone I knew…” She said this as if she knew the madness of it, in a dismissive voice, but to my shock I discerned that beneath her attitude she saw some glimmer of reason in the offer, she didn’t altogether mind it. My deferred conviction of his cruelty returned and deepened. Then I thought,
She’s his Alison.

“Will you stop?”

“I’ll stop,” she said.

“Do you promise?”

“Yes, I promise. Will you kiss anyone?”

“Never again if you don’t want me to. Except you.”

She looked at the wet windshield, at the thicket of trees off to the side of the road. “I’m tired.”

I turned on the car. “We should go home, I guess.”

“Let’s do. It would be nice to fall asleep together.” She leaned her head on my shoulder as we drove. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s been a day.”

Slowly we started to say warm words to each other again, but none of them seemed to count.

*   *   *

I probably haven’t conveyed the contentment we had felt that summer. From the outside that night in the car might have seemed like merely another reversal in the now somewhat wilted drama of our relationship, but that would be wrong. Almost as if in compensation for those reversals, the summer had been impenetrably calm. Immediately we had become comfortable living together, she just as comfortable as I. For a very long stretch of time, until Lula’s party I guess, it didn’t even cross my mind that we wouldn’t be married, and we talked about distant plans, about returning to Fleet for reunions together in five or ten years, about long trips we would take, about the places she wanted me to show her in America. There was none of that teleological weight some summer relationships bear, like the pages thinning toward the end of a book; there was no skittishness in her attitude toward me. She was as stable as Alison had ever been. I wasn’t sure if it meant me living in England for the rest of my life, or if she might be willing to move to my country, but I didn’t especially care. She didn’t either. At Lula’s party I was touched again by that fear I had once felt of losing her, that obsessive feeling, but almost immediately I had accepted and forgotten what she said. It was only natural that she worried about Jack.

Now something changed. There was no diminution in Sophie’s affection toward me in the next weeks, as August ended, but our conversations cast a shorter shadow. When we spoke about the future it was in less expansive terms. Perhaps I was in the wrong—I worried that she was writing to Jack, and it might have affected the mood of our companionship.

Others were luckier.

One morning a few days shy of September Sophie left my room to go to the library, to do research, giving me a kiss as she left. I went to the bathroom, and when I came out I saw that standing with Tom in his doorway was Jess.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey, Will,” she said, then to Tom, “Okay, I should go.” She put her arm around his waist and squeezed him.

“Bye.”

He walked her out, and when she was gone he came back to my room. “Beer?”

“It’s like ten.”

He went and got a beer from his refrigerator, a bottle of water for me, and we sat down in my two armchairs by the window. “That’s back on, Jess,” he said. “I broke it off with Daisy.”

“When did that happen?”

“Last week.” His face took on an embarrassed defiance. “I missed her.”

“And she was happy to come back?”

He smiled. “Do you know why I love her? When I called her she just came back. And not like a doormat, or like she was waiting for me to call. She told me she’d been seeing someone else, even. But she didn’t see the point in shouting at me or in pretending she didn’t want to be together.”

I nodded. “Do you remember what your sister said about Daisy when we had lunch?”

Caution stole over his face. “What?”

“Oh, nothing.”

“No, what?”

“Well—she said that you felt the need to date girls like Daisy, but if she had her choice she would see you with someone different. I can’t remember how she put it exactly. Someone like Jess, I think.”

He looked out at the clear sky. “Funny, I didn’t remember that. I always think I’ve remembered it all and then someone reminds me of a part I forgot.”

“She knew you best.”

“I woke up this morning, and I thought, it popped into my head randomly,
I’m going to marry this person
.”

“Wow,” I said.

“You sound skeptical.”

“No, no, not at all.”

I was, though; and I was wrong.

*   *   *

A few days before I was meant to move out of my room and to London, Sophie came over. Her face was tired. We hooked up, and afterward we lay together for a while, silent.

“Jack comes back on leave next week,” she said at length.

“How do you know?”

“He e-mailed me. He e-mails me every day.”

“Do you write back?”

“No. I promised you.”

“Are you going to see him?”

“I don’t know.”

“Please don’t.”

She sat up on the side of the bed, still frankly naked, her beautiful hair falling down around her shoulders. Her high pink coloring and the faint freckles around her nose made her look as if she had just come back from a trip to a cold place, or maybe been sunburned badly once, long before.

“I do love you, Will,” she said.

“I love you.”

She put a hand on my face and looked straight into my eyes. “I think I need to give him another chance.”

This was what she had come to say to me, I saw. “I love you.”

“And I—”

“No, no, I love you.”

Those words: They had never not been enough to say before, in any of my previous relationships. I looked at her face and saw a blankness that chilled me. At this time I was reading Proust and becoming obsessed with certain sentences he had written, to the point that I would read them when I woke up and before I went to bed, puzzle over them throughout the day, sentences that seemed to me to describe not just life but how we conceive of life. “To have a kind heart was everything” was one of these sentences, and as I looked at her I wondered if she had a kind heart. I thought perhaps that she didn’t. Then I realized that Alison could have said the same of me, even as I tried to be kind to her, and that now I was the one who loved without reserve, not Sophie. It didn’t mean that she didn’t love me.

“Please just wait until his next leave,” I said.

“Oh, Will,” she said pityingly and lay down next to me, holding me tight.

It would be hard to portray the crashing, ruinous unhappiness I felt from that hour forward. In the next days we spent more time together than we had even at our happiest in June and July, and slept with each other over and over, having sex until we were ragged with exhaustion. She drove that even more than I did, and I wondered what she was storing up. I called her cold, called her hateful, and she merely acquiesced to those judgments. All of these hours I could describe in their minute particulars, what we ate and what we drank; how kind Tom and Anneliese were from afar, and then after Sophie left up close; how she left, to go visit Jack, with pained apologies.

Instead what I think of is a different memory completely. It’s from one of those first beautiful, breezy days at Oxford, just after I arrived that fall. I was at an MCR new students’ picnic. Sophie was speaking to someone—it was the day after I first met her—and when she saw me looking at her she rolled her eyes imperceptibly and grinned over the person’s shoulder.

It felt so intimate somehow. She had chosen me. Then what happened next: She made her excuses to whomever she was speaking with and started to walk toward me across the lawn, her tan arms at her sides, her high pink cheeks, her wonderful corona of copper-auburn hair, her white smile. I think it was in that moment, when she started coming toward me, when the world was full of time for us, that I gave over to her mercy my entire future and all its happiness.

Larkin wrote a poem about the maiden name of a woman he loved:

Now it’s a phrase applicable to no one,

Lying just where you left it, scattered through

Old lists, old programmes, a school prize or two

Packets of letters tied with tartan ribbon—

Then is it scentless, weightless, strengthless, wholly

Untruthful? Try whispering it slowly.

No, it means you. Or, since you’re past and gone,

It means what we feel now about you then:

How beautiful you were, and near, and young,

So vivid, you might still be there among

Those first few days …

On my last morning in Oxford, all of my stuff bundled into a moving van, the job in London lying ninety miles south, she came back to the city and saw me, an hour or so before everyone gathered around to say good-bye. We stood along the street before the Cottages, the indifferent white stone of Fleet high off to our right, and she gave me a long and tight hug.

“I’ll always love you, you know,” she said.

I didn’t say it back because I feared it would be true. I didn’t ask her to change her mind either, as I had for the last few days. I felt numb. She looked prepared to discuss it, but also decided; so I didn’t say anything, and I saw myself far in the future—a future that for her would contain a whole life, that I didn’t get to see for myself—feeling as I had felt about her at that dumb picnic on the lawns:
how beautiful she was, and near, and young
.

We said our last, meaningless words and hugged again—even kissed for a few minutes—and then like that she left.

*   *   *

Here is something everyone starts saying to each other when they turn twenty-six or twenty-seven, near the end of parties, the complacent grandeur of melancholy in their voices, and it’s true: When you’re finally a grown-up, one of the things you find out is that there are no grown-ups.

For a month I burrowed like a mole into the investment firm, only seeing occasional glimpses of my friends—Anneliese was taking pictures, Tom lived two streets down and came over to mine for beers late most nights, still in his Freshfields suit and tie, Anil visited on weekends—and learning how to be a banker. I loathed it. The exhaustion of the work was annealing, however, after the self-indulgence of Oxford. Punting seemed like an impossible vanity after I had spent eighteen hours staring at a spreadsheet and adding numbers on it, trying to decipher whether the books of a pharmaceutical holding company in China were too pristine.

One morning Franklin, my cousin’s husband, didn’t show up at the office, and four days later the firm quietly shuttered its doors. There was no great drama about it, no Ponzi scheme. They just ran out of money. It was late 2006—he was one of the first to go under, though of course far from the last. Franklin himself still had the three houses and the helicopter, as I heard it. I got a month’s pay, though I had barely been there a month.

The next several weeks I spent at loose ends in London, until finally I knew that it was time, and I packed my things for a second time to take a plane back home.

The last person I saw from Oxford was Anil. His friend Shateel was taking over my lease, and Anil had come down as a favor to him to get the keys from me, because Shateel was in Edinburgh for a conference. When he arrived I was already packed, still an hour or so before I had to leave, and he suggested we get breakfast. He was in terrific spirits then because he had a new Welsh girlfriend, Pippa, from St. Hilda’s (Tom called her the Hildabeast, though she was petite and pretty), and he was full of plans to stay in England past the end of his course, to be with her.

In the café we sat at a table by the window. Anil picked up the menu sitting on the table and lifted his glasses with a small frown, peering at it with his accustomed rabbinical focus, which at restaurants always led to decades of vacillation. I felt a huge affection for him. I stood up.

“If she comes by get me the full English and a decaf, okay?” I asked.

He nodded without looking up, brow furrowed, and I went to find the bathroom.

It wasn’t immediately clear where the bathroom might be. I took a short hallway leading back away from the street, but it must have been the wrong way, because at the end of it I reached only a small room.

This room looked different than the other parts of the restaurant. There was a Persian carpet in it, and from the floor to the ceiling, in a ring around the whole room, were bookshelves lined full with books. Just off-center there was a single table, and sitting at it was an extremely skinny little boy with blond hair. He had a plate with toast and jam on it, one or maybe two bites gone, and a mug of something steaming, hot chocolate I would guess. There was a stack of books on the table. He was reading something bound in blue cloth, I couldn’t see what. He was ten or eleven.

I lifted my hand to waist height and said, “Sorry!” and simultaneously he said, “Oh, sorry!” We laughed. I wondered if he was the son of the owner. He looked a bit like me. I glanced around the room at the bookshelves for another beat while he stared up at me expectantly. After a moment I looked back at him and smiled and said, “Sorry again,” and then waved good-bye.