Alice McDermott - After This

Gracefully, he stretched out his legs and stood, sweeping up two of the glasses in one hand, the faint sound of a bell ringing. He studied their faces carefully as they introduced themselves. He was not as tall as he’d seemed sitting, not as tall as his wife, but it made no difference to the girls, who were just now noticing the long apricot lashes. “Some wine?” he asked. “We have a lovely Chianti.” And then turned to a sideboard, marble-topped and piled with books. And then turned back. Asked over his shoulder, “Or do you American women prefer whiskey?”

“Wine, thank you,” Annie said, but Grace pushed her glasses up her nose with her index finger and said, “Whiskey.”

Annie bowed her head as she accepted the glass of wine, afraid that if she met his eye, her hand would tremble. “My dear,” he said, handing it to her. And then to Grace, “I’ve got just the thing.” He reached for a square decanter. “Straight up or on the rocks?” he asked and Grace said, shuffling a bit, “On the rocks.” There was a silver ice bucket and silver tongs.

Professor Wallace’s face wore the expression Annie would have liked to wear, or would work at wearing in the future. Under Professor Wallace’s long nose, her mouth was a thin, wry grin. Her small black-brown eyes were warm and understanding and forgiving. They said she understood that Grace had probably never had whiskey before in her life and would probably not like it when she had it, but that an attempt was being made here, at worldliness, at sophistication. An attempt on Grace’s part to undercut the stumpy body and the dowdy clothes and the reputation she had already secured, six weeks into the term, as the smartest but dullest of the fifteen American students studying this year at the university. An attempt to promote the impression that beneath the cliché of smart and plain and studious was something like uncharted depths, even danger. Whiskey, indeed, Professor Wallace’s smile said. Well, yes, of course, go ahead, her smile said. You will not be the first unhappy girl to seek to transform herself here, go ahead.

As if the injunction had actually been spoken, Grace stuck her nose into the stubby glass as soon as it was in her hand and took a large gulping swallow, sliding the ice cubes into her lip and knocking the rim of the glass against the bridge of her glasses. Coughing a little as she swallowed, of course.

Mr. Wallace, David, was either the most gracious man on earth or simply oblivious to the pretense and the struggle. He took Grace’s elbow as if this were only one of many evenings in which they had met for a drink and a chat-as if, Annie thought, Grace were an old, dear friend in elbow-length satin gloves, a tapered cigarette holder in her left hand rather than the trademark (already) crumpled bit of Kleenex. He led her to the couch. “Do sit,” he said and then held his hand out to Annie, indicating a red velvet chair with brown fringe. “My dear,” he said again, warmly, as if she were indeed.

There were piles of books beside the chair as well-old books with dark covers, the room was scented with them-and as soon as she sat, a dark Siamese cat curved around the pile to her left and brushed itself against her legs. “That’s Runty,” Professor Wallace said. She herself was wrapped in a large velvet shawl, as black as her lecturing robes but spotted with gold beads, trimmed with a bit of lace. She had lifted her glass from somewhere-another crystal goblet, only half full of the nice Chianti-and now held it beside her ear as she stood, looking down on the cat, one arm across her middle, the other resting its elbow in her hand. “So named for the obvious reasons,” she said. “Bozo’s around here somewhere. And Tommy, the tiger-striped.”

Both girls added to their growing list of things to love about Professor Wallace the fact that her cats had nonliterary names. “But Runty,” she said, “is the sycophant.”

And that she did not ask them, as an American professor might do, if they knew the meaning of the word.

Six weeks ago, the American students had stumbled out of Professor Wallace’s first lecture with their breaths held, tripping over one another to be the first to say, out of earshot of their humorless British counterparts, “My God, the Wicked Witch of the West,” to imitate her accent as she said, trilling it, “Edmund Spencer’s The Faerie Queen.” But six weeks into the term, they were all enchanted. She had only to turn up a corner of her thin mouth in the middle of a lecture, or to raise a single eyebrow as she recited, or to touch her hand to her breast as she made some aside (“As You Like It” she had said, “not, necessarily, my dear ones, as I like it”) to get them all grinning, clutching the edges of their small desks, leaning to see that the other Americans in the lecture hall had gotten it too, the wry pun, the witty reference, the experience they were all having, basking in her brilliance, growing literary and worldly-wise, nearly British.

When they discovered, on a bulletin board crowded with Carnival flyers and club schedules, tutorial appointments and reading lists, a small index card that said Professor Wallace is home every Thursday evening, followed by brief directions-the bus number, the shop on the corner, “fourth house in, red shutters”-it had taken some time for any of them to get the courage to take her up on what the English students told them was simply an opportunity to have a nice meal. But one of the American boys-Caleb, a bit of a sycophant himself-had gone along with a pair of African students in the third week of the term and returned to tell the other Americans of curry and Sauternes and incredible conversation. One by one, the others made plans to go, Annie knowing that she and Grace would have to go together since it was Grace who had sat beside her on the flight from Kennedy. Grace with whom she’d eaten dinner and watched the movie and exchanged biographies with blankets up to their chins and their faces turned to each other like lovers. Poor Grace who, it sometimes felt, had slipped her hand into the crook of Annie’s arm during those five hours and kept it there ever since. Her own private Pauline.

David bent down to scoop Runty from her feet. “I don’t mind,” she said, but then he was crouched before her, brushing the cat hair from her trousers, touching her instep and her knee, the cat pressed to his golden shirt. “Come what may,” he said softly. “He’ll be in your pocket by the end of the evening.” He smiled up at her, his face rising over her lap as he straightened. The strong cheekbones and the dimpled chin, the adorable lock over the forehead. He paused, speaking to her from just the other side of her knees. He lowered his voice, as if to share a secret. “We don’t want to encourage him too early in the proceedings.”

Professor Wallace stepped forward to take the cat from his arms. Annie noticed that there were cat hairs, too, along the hem of her sweeping black skirt. And that she wore soft leather booties and bright purple tights beneath it. Like a character from D. H. Lawrence. Or Virginia Woolf herself.

“Thank you, darling,” he said. Side by side, the extremes of their physical beauty were startling. Professor Wallace all hooked nose and bun, white skin and black hair, David soft and warm-hued. One to be photographed, the other painted. Professor Wallace turned, spinning her skirts a bit, and disappeared through the door beside the server. Mr. Wallace sank to the floor once more, behind his ring of crystal goblets. “Now,” he said, looking up at them both, “which one of you is from Bingham ton?”

The girls exchanged a look. Grace, with her whiskey, had not allowed herself more than the last six inches of the sofa’s seat and so sat somewhat hunched over her knees, more curved than she needed to be. She touched her glasses, of course, as she said, popping up a bit like a good student, “Neither of us.” She touched her sweater. “I’m from Buffalo,” she said. “Annie’s from Long Island.”