Alice McDermott - After This

“Oh, Ethan Frome” she said, shrugging a little. “The Age of Innocence.”

Mr. Wallace said, “No doubt you’re a James fan as well.”

And his wife said, “Being a James fan is de rigueur for Americans in England, I should think.”

“Portrait of a Lady,” Grace chirped, not to be outdone. She held her stubby glass and her little plate to her clasped knees, hunching over them. “I read it again this summer,” she said. “Before I came.”

“He was a big poof, you know,” David said and his wife cried, “Really, darling,” and Grace ducked and giggled, and drank more whiskey, touching her fingertips to the edge of her glasses as she did. Gently, Professor Wallace leaned over and took the small plate from her lap and placed it on the cushion between them. And then, as if she were caring for a child, with her shoulder pressed languidly to the back of the couch, she lifted a cracker and spread it with pate.

“Well, if we’re going to bring up Edith Wharton’s moldy virginity,” he cried, charmingly, “then we might as well get it all out. Henry was a poof and William a religious fanatic and Alice was a sexual deviant, flummoxed by shyness, who figured the only way she could get professional men to come see her in her nightgown was by taking to her bed.” He turned his attention to Grace, who was beet red behind the Waterford crystal, hunched and laughing into her ice cubes. “Varieties of Religious Experience, indeed,” he said. “Have you read it?”

Professor Wallace gave her one of the spread crackers. “Never mind,” she said gently, although Annie couldn’t say if she was addressing her husband or the girl.

“A prototype for the modern American family,” David said, smiling. The light from the lamp at his elbow only burnished his glow. “Hedonism plus Puritanism yields both deviant sex and deviant religion. What could be more American?” His eyes met his wife’s. Annie thought that there was a complex intelligence even in their unspoken conversation. Only more to envy. To despair of. “But we were talking about Buffalo,” he said, more gently. He turned again to Grace, who had just, obediently, bitten into the cracker, which had, in turn, broken apart in her hands. There was a tiny shower of crumbs falling from her lips to her palm to her sweater.

Graciously, he diverted his attention across the room. “And what of Long Island?” he asked Annie. “We seem to get as many from Long Island as from Binghamton.”

She smiled. She did not want to appear flummoxed by shyness. “There’s a lot of us,” she said. She was aware of the fact that it was as close as she had come since she’d arrived to speaking a full sentence.

“And your parents are there?” he asked, more gentle still, luring her into a conversation. “Brothers? Sisters?” Implying that he recognized her shyness but knew it was his duty as her host to relieve her of it, as if it were only a heavy coat. “Big family? Small?”

“Small,” she said. She would not make herself more interesting to him, more American, by mentioning Jacob. “A brother and a sister,” she said. “An aunt who lives with us,” she would not say “a moldering virgin,” to prove herself clever. She took another sip of her wine. She saw that Professor Wallace was smiling at her, as if-it was all unaccountable-admiring her restraint. Then the buzzer rang downstairs and Professor Wallace stood, her skirt sweeping. “I’ll get that,” she said. They were in a play again. “If you’ll refresh the girls’ drinks.”

Behind her when she returned were three more American students, two boys and a girl. Entering, they looked at Grace and Annie with some resentment, as if the ratio of Americans to English in the room suddenly made the occasion less interesting. Mr. Wallace stood, there was the bustle of introductions and new drinks. For a moment, the music disappeared. Monica and Nate were a couple-a bond they had formed at the same time Annie and Grace had formed theirs, in the five hours of pillow talk that was the transatlantic flight. Ben was, perhaps, Nate’s version of Grace. A friend from their New York campus who held on to Nate perhaps a little too tightly now that they were abroad together, comfort in a strange land. He was a big guy, a little thick around the jaw, with dark curly hair. At his side he held a bottle in a brown paper bag, grasped by the neck as if he had just taken a swig of it and planned to take another. He greeted Mr. Wallace and said, “Beer would be great,” before he seemed to remember it was there. Awkwardly, he handed it to Professor Wallace and she said, “Thank you,” and “Lovely,” as she slipped it out of the bag. “Drambuie,” she said to her husband as she placed it on the server. “How nice,” he said. Together, Ben and Nate made Professor Wallace’s cozy living room seem smaller. They looked so starkly American, so comically American male that it seemed the room should have filled with the odor of gunsmoke and horse manure.

Beside them, David Wallace seemed not only the member of some more advanced, more refined civilization but a creature who must also be ranked a good deal higher on the phylogenetic scale.

“Sit, sit,” David was saying once again. He had poured Chianti for Monica and opened bottles of beer for both boys. Grace caught Annie’s eye and patted the empty cushion beside her, tilting her head, pleading, and against her better judgment, Annie stood and crossed over to sit with her friend. Monica took the velvet chair, Nate at her feet, his elbow in her lap. Ben went to another chair, a gold ladderback with a dark turquoise seat. It looked somewhat fragile under his thick thighs in their new jeans, although he declined, smiling, when David offered him his own chair beside the couch. “This is good,” he said, the brown bottle held between his legs. Annie could see him regretting his decision to come along with Monica and Nate, and thought of her mother’s injunction never to be a third wheel.

“Yes, well,” David Wallace said as his wife distributed pate and crackers, olives and celery to the new guests. Annie prayed that he wouldn’t again mention Binghamton because she knew if he did she would think less of him. “Will there be more of you?” he asked the assemblage. “Tonight? Any more of you coming? That you know?”

The Americans looked at each other, frowning, shaking their heads. Grace offered, eagerly, that she didn’t know.

“You don’t consult?” Mr. Wallace said, smiling. “All you American students? It’s rather remarkable to have five of you here all at once. I thought perhaps it was part of a plan.”

They continued to look at one another, shaking their heads, “No,” they said. It was clear the two boys were wary of Mr. Wallace; they suspected he was making fun of them.

“No, of course not, David,” Professor Wallace said. “They hardly travel en masse. They’re an independent bunch, our American students. Aren’t you?” she said, looking around the room. “You’re made to come together, what is it, once a month, to see how you’re getting on, but that’s it, isn’t it?”

“Actually,” Grace said, “it’s every fortnight.”

“Is it?” Professor Wallace asked.

“It’s ridiculous,” Nate said from Monica’s knees. “I quit going.” Monica put her hand in his curly hair. She was loose-limbed, slim, and large-breasted. Her face was plain but there was a luster about her skin and her hair, a luster of sex and of good health. She shook his head a little, playfully gripping his scalp. “You were at the last one,” she said in a tone that seemed to imply that the last one had ended in some mad sexual transaction.

Grace had turned to Mr. Wallace, explaining. “Only a few of us live in the same halls,” she said, piling on the Britishisms (Annie, stubbornly, still said dorms). “We’re scattered about campus precisely so we don’t stay to ourselves. It’s sort of the point of the whole program.”