Alice McDermott - After This

“And yet, here you all are,” David Wallace said. “All on the same evening.”

Quietly, Professor Wallace slipped out of the room, through the door to what Annie guessed was the kitchen. She wished for the courage to join her, but felt the anchor of Grace, sitting beside her, who was now saying, “Yes, isn’t it funny?” and once more raising her glass.

“Great minds think alike,” Ben said, leaning over his lap on the small chair. Whether he intended to or not, he sounded bitter.

Mr. Wallace then questioned the three about their hometowns. Monica was from Long Island, too, and Nate from outside Albany. Ben was from Staten Island, “A city boy,” Mr. Wallace said, to which Ben replied, with a tilt of his beer bottle, “I hate New York City.”

David Wallace nodded, touched his silk cravat. They could now smell their dinner in the kitchen. “Unfortunate,” he said, as if resisting his own disappointment in the boy. “Yet understandable. No doubt you’re a Wordsworth fellow as well,” he added.

But Ben seemed to miss the connection. He glanced at Monica and Nate before he spoke. “What’s a Wordsworth fellow?” he asked.

Now David Wallace looked puzzled. “A fan,” he said, as if the word were a colloquialism he wasn’t quite sure of. “Of Wordsworth. Since you don’t like the city, I assumed you’d be a devotee of someone like Wordsworth. The romantics. The pastoral poets.”

Ben was looking at Mr. Wallace with what Annie had come to recognize as a particularly American look. He suspected Mr. Wallace was putting him on the spot and even before he’d demonstrated his own lack of knowledge, he was preparing his case for how useless what he didn’t know really was. “Wordsworth’s okay,” he said, with some caution. “I guess. I don’t know a lot about him.” So fuck you, was only implied.

Mr. Wallace asked, pleasantly, “Well, what inspired you to study in England then?” and Ben laughed once, through his nose, and raised the bottle in his hand. “The beer,” he said.

Nate dropped his head, amused at his friend. Monica leaned down over her lap to whisper something in his ear, her thick hair falling to shield them both.

Mr. Wallace turned to the two girls. “Well, that’s honest at least,” he said, although his face, Annie thought, also said he was sorry the conversation had taken such a boorish turn. He looked at both of their glasses. “Let me refresh those for you,” he said, gently, and took the glasses out of their hands, out of their laps. Grace said, “Thank you,” looking up at him, her throat and chin growing flushed. “It won’t be long,” he said, kindly. Annie knew he meant until dinner, but felt he might just as well have said, Till we’re alone again, the way Grace’s breath seemed to catch on the words. The way her fingers, reaching up to touch her frames, were trembling.

Just as he returned with their fresh drinks (over his shoulder, “Can I get you gentlemen another. Young lady?”) Professor Wallace came through the door again with a tray stacked with dinner plates and silverware and a huge pot that rilled the room with the woodsy odor of meat and mushrooms. In what struck the girls as marvelous choreography, one neither had ever seen in her own home, Mr. Wallace swung back into the kitchen and emerged with another large pot and then, without a single word of instruction between them, the two began to fill plates with pasta, to ladle sauce, to distribute plush throw pillows in silky Indian prints that seemed to appear miraculously from behind the couch. “You’ll want these on your laps,” Professor Wallace told the students. “To shorten the distance from plate to lips,” she said. She shook out huge napkins to place over each pillow; she might have tucked another just under their chins, the way they all, suddenly, with pillows and napkins and plates of steaming food on their laps, felt swaddled, childish and also cared for.

Mr. Wallace took his place beside Grace again, with only a napkin, no pillow on his knee. Professor Wallace made the rounds with a small glass dish and a tiny silver spoon, sprinkling parmigiana like fairy dust over each plate.

Then she sat with her own next to Annie.

“This is delicious,” Monica said. Nate had abandoned her knee and her lap and was hunched now over his plate. He may even have moved away from her a bit. “Oh God,” he said, looking up. There was a fleck of sauce on his chin. “So good.” It was a kind of moan. “The food in hall is so freaking bad.”

Professor Wallace smiled. “Poor dears,” she said. “I’m sure it takes some getting used to.”

Beside Annie, Grace was struggling with plate and pillow and fork and the stubby glass she still held in her hand and just as Annie was about to suggest she put it down, Mr. Wallace leaned over and took it from her and put it gently on the small table at her elbow. “There,” he said softly. “Easier to manage.” And Grace touched her glasses and nodded and said, “Thank you.” Now her skin flushed up over her chin and down, Annie noticed, the length of her plump, pale arms.

David Wallace was questioning them again. “Where are you going and where have you been?” he asked. Monica and Nate had been to Stratford and Bath and London. Annie and Grace to London and Stonehenge. Ben would be joining his parents in Dublin over Christmas. The girls wanted to get to Bronte country, of course. Ben’s father wanted him to visit the village near Dover where he had been stationed during the war. Nate was hoping to get to Pamplona in the spring. (Mr. Wallace turned to Grace and said, “Hemingway, you see,” as if it were an old joke they had long shared. He lifted her plate, and then her glass from the small table. Took both away and then returned with her glass once again full.)

When all the plates had been cleared, Professor Wallace brought a tray of fruit and cheese and placed it on the footstool, serving them again, this time using small plates painted with branches and birds. She recommended the Rambling Club at the university to all the American students. A lovely and inexpensive way to see the countryside. She would suggest, she said, kneeling among them, slicing a ripe pear, finding a focus for your travels. Historical, literary. Lawrence walked through the Pyrenees looking for roadside crucifixes. Read his essay. An American student once followed the route of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Another made a trip to the Hebrides, for Virginia Woolf’s sake.

“Something like that,” Professor Wallace said. She proffered the slices of ripe pear, the Americans reached for them, childish, Annie thought, grateful. Nate had scooted farther away from Monica, across the Turkish rug to the footstool. Closer to the food, but also to Professor Wallace’s feet.

“It’s nice to have a focus,” Professor Wallace said, taking the couch next to Annie once again. “It’s nice to see a pattern emerge out of travels that might, otherwise, seem random.” She turned to Annie, looked at her down her long nose, kindly, fondly, perhaps. “You might follow in Wharton’s footsteps, for instance,” she said. “Find that hotel in Paris where she was so thoroughly happy.”

“So thoroughly shagged,” David said, and only Grace laughed with him, her blush having settled in permanently now. He looked at the other men in the room. “We were discussing it earlier,” he said. “She’d been a married virgin, Edith Wharton.” He turned to his wife. “Until what age, Elizabeth? Forty-five?”

Annie saw Professor Wallace put her fingertips, forefinger and thumb, to a crescent of pear on her plate and hold them there, as if, briefly, measuring something. “That’s right,” she said without raising her head. Then she leaned a little into Annie, there was a hint of perfume on her velvet shawl. “Poor David,” she whispered and then, looking up, she said across the two girls. “My dear, I’m afraid your mind has been in that hotel room all evening.”