Alice McDermott - After This

“Well, good,” he said. He had picked up another piece of loo paper and was holding another glass up to the golden lamplight. “We’ve had two Americans from Binghamton here in the past two weeks and I think I’ve learned all there is to know about the place. State University,” he said. “Three hours to New York.”

“That would be Lydia,” said Grace, the good student. She touched her index finger to her cheek, tapped it, raised her eyes to the shadowy ceiling, pantomiming thought. Then Grace pointed the index finger at Mr. Wallace. “And Kevin Larkin,” she said.

He raised his eyebrows. “Right you are,” he said. “Kevin. Rugby player, all taken up with Rupert Brooke.”

Grace popped again. “That’s right,” she said.

“And Lydia,” he went on. “Pretty girl. Mad for Wordsworth.”

“Yes,” Grace said, warming to the conversation. He was, after all, more or less sitting at her feet. Annie thought only of what a thing it would be to hear Mr. Wallace say of her, “Pretty girl.” Lucky Lydia. She sipped her Chianti. She supposed it was the way it was meant to taste.

“But Buffalo,” he said. “I’m not sure we’ve had anyone from Buffalo yet. What’s it like?”

Grace was now clutching the stubby glass in both hands, leaning toward him. “Boring,” she said and barked a short laugh, the ends of her blunt-cut hair swinging forward along her chin and then swinging back. She touched her glasses, returning to the more successful serious student guise. “No,” she said. “It’s nice, I guess. My parents like it. I have a lot of family there.” She hunched a little more. Her head snapped to the right for just a second. It was a curious little tic Annie had seen in their tutorials; it meant that she felt her point was not yet made, that she knew her intelligence had not yet burned through the obscuring fog of her plain, chubby face. “It’s where Dick Diver ends up in Tender Is the Night” she added. “It has that going for it.”

Examining the row of glasses before him, Mr. Wallace raised his eyebrows when she said Dick Diver, and then placed his hands on his brown corduroy knees. It was likely that he was somewhat younger than his wife. He leaned toward her, rolling on his haunches. “And is it Fitzgerald you’re mad for?” he asked. “You wouldn’t be the first American to come to England to study Fitzgerald, or Hemingway. You’re all mad for Hemingway as far as I can tell.”

But Grace sat up a little straighter. It might have been in imitation of Professor Wallace-as much as a girl like Grace could aspire to imitate Professor Wallace. “I’m not, really,” she said. And then added, “I love Spenser.” She touched her glasses again and took another nip at her whiskey.

What a smile he had. While his wife’s had been thin-lipped and wry, forgiving, insightful, his was warmly amused, reservedly delighted. He had, Annie was convinced, the best teeth in all of England. A boon, she thought, for the entire nation’s dental gene pool. “Well, you’ll be teacher’s pet then,” he said. “At least for Elizabeth,” his smile grew a bit wider, a sparkle, at his wife’s name. “Spenser’s her man.” Annie thought the smile more charming still if its source was not Grace’s declaration but his pleasure at hearing his wife’s man championed, or perhaps, more simply, the pleasure it gave him to say his wife’s name.

Suddenly she found herself both fully enchanted and heartsick. To live, as these two did, in a comfortable, warmly lit room full of velvet chairs and old books, with cats and, yes-she was only just hearing it, or perhaps Professor Wallace had just put it on in another room-classical music playing softly somewhere, low enough for conversation, loud enough to add romance to the air. To reach over your knees at the end of a day, the book falling from your lap, to take such a man’s handsome face into your hands. It was a life from a novel. It was a still life, beautifully arranged. It was a life she’d never attain. When he turned to her and said, “And who’s your man?” she said, “Edith Wharton,” without thinking and without an inkling of truth in it, her only impulse being that she should name a woman, since the life she wanted-their life-was all unattainable and she must begin to prepare herself to be a woman alone.

She glanced quickly at Grace to see if she would contradict her, but Grace had the glass to her lips again, her eyes on David Wallace. Annie imagined Grace felt it, too: the enchantment and the despair.

Professor Wallace swept into the room with a large, tufted footstool held high in her hands, like a farcical English maid with a tea tray. “Edith Wharton?” she said and then spun a little, her long skirt flaring, her little leather boots. “How interesting,” and then, “David, my love,” in that way she had of speaking in soft asides, “you’ll have to move your glasses and your loo paper so I can put this down.”

With a kind of salute, he stuck the roll of toilet paper under his arm. Leaning forward, he moved a few of the glasses, one at a time, as if they were chess pieces, to the side of the couch, and then gathered up the rest in his hands, the crystal clinking, and placed them and the paper on a side table. “Careful,” she said. “Always,” he told her. And then, so smoothly, he was on his feet again, taking the stool from her hands.

He lowered it to the ground. It was a maroon upholstered footstool with four wooden, turnip-shaped legs and on it were half a dozen small plates, black cloth napkins, a silver bowl of olives and celery, and a small black crock containing what Professor Wallace announced was pate. She handed a napkin to each of the girls, smeared a tablespoon of pate onto each little plate, added some olives and some thin crackers, all the while saying, “Although she married fairly young I think it’s well accepted that she was a virgin until she was somewhere around forty-five.” She gave Annie a little plate, and started putting together another. “She’d divorced her husband at last and fallen madly in love and taken up residence with her lover in Paris. Forty-five or so.” She handed the plate to her husband, who was now in a small chair at Grace’s side.

“It appears she wrote Ethan Frome while in the midst of a girlish middle-aged passion. Which has always struck me as curious, given the short shrift she gives poor Mrs. Frome, with all her middle-aged ailments.”

Professor Wallace spun around again in her soft little boots and then took the other corner of the couch. Grace was smiling at her, ogling, Annie would have said. There was a lightness about Professor Wallace at home, a physical buoyancy she didn’t have in the lecture hall. It made it seem possible that she was not older than her husband after all. “A lesson for you girls,” she said, looking up, “in matters of the heart.” She raised her long nose and trilled the word. “Patience,” she said.

But David laughed. “Surely, Elizabeth,” he told her, “you’re not making a case for forty-five years of virginity.” He smiled at both girls, full knowing, it seemed, that if there were sides to be on, they were on his. With his handsome face before them, forty-five years of virginity seemed worse than cruel. “I’d call that corrupting the morals of a minor,” he said and his eyes flashed. They sparkled.

There was the sound of Grace’s whiskey glass colliding with the bridge of her glasses.

Professor Wallace smiled her wry smile at her husband and then seemed to sip the air the way a bird sips water, her throat all exposed. “Surely I’m not,” she said. And then she turned her head, regally. “But Annie must tell us,” she whispered, “what it is about Wharton that she loves.”

She felt all their eyes on her. Felt suddenly like a bird herself, a baby bird, helpless, wordless, her mouth opened. The truth was that she had read very little of Edith Wharton. Had thought, until a few minutes ago, that Edith Wharton was a spinster, homely and professional (she recalled a mannish jaw, a heavy pile of dark hair), with no exquisite husband waiting for her at home. It was the sole reason she had said her name. She had a vague memory of Ethan Frome, of laughing at it. Suicidal sled rides. Sex and death. She couldn’t recall finishing The Age of Innocence.