Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

There was more to Xavi, too, though he hid it. His family belonged to the Tutsi tribe, a group mistrusted across the African Great Lakes region as an intellectual elite. In the summer of 1994, when he started at Rutgers, extremists from a rival tribe, the Hutu, were seeking to exterminate every Tutsi in Rwanda. Most of his boyhood friends joined a rebel force to fight the Hutu supremacists. Perhaps he should have gone back to fight. But he had not, submerging himself in American college debauchery instead, learning the rules of beer pong, promiscuity, and the backward baseball cap. After the genocide — eight hundred thousand of his people and their allies slaughtered within weeks — Xavi still failed to return. Indeed, he stopped writing letters to his fiancée, then to his family. Yet all his college cavorting ended. Five years later, any party he attended was for networking, a word he’d learned in B-school. Xavi willed himself to success, which alone could rationalize what he had and had not done.

Her other pal there was Emerson’s girlfriend, Noeline, often found marking essays in the living room. A recently appointed assistant professor in the English department at Columbia, she was about thirty, with multiple earrings, a discreet nose stud, platform sandals, and toe rings. She and Tooly shared cigarettes on the fire escape, taking them from a soggy pack of Camel Lights, although Emerson — a health freak — made it known that the stench of smoke on Noeline disgusted him. Born to a Dutch mother and an American father, she’d grown up shutting between The Hague and Houston. Her parents were biologists who had conceived her while at Harvard, only to find university positions on opposite sides of the Atlantic. As an undergrad at Smith College, Noeline had engaged in a three-year affair with a female professor. For grad school, she attended Columbia for comparative literature, embarking on her first romances with men there, with a mixture of misgivings and enthusiasm. She’d met Emerson at a graduate seminar, and maintained that it was just a fling, their relationship a feminist irony: with all the clichés about the older male prof seducing the co-ed student, she had reversed roles. (Though, as her ex-lover at Smith observed, in that cliché the professor spirals into disgrace and ruination.)

As for Emerson, he believed he was certain to follow her path to a faculty position. But he was more cocksure than scholarly. To save time, he avoided reading books, preferring reviews, especially vicious ones, which filled him with relief, while raves made him sullen and sent him to Yonkers and back for a restorative bike ride. (He ran, biked, and swam unworldly distances.) In Emerson’s view, every important thinker had one key work, and he sought to own a copy. However, his chief activity seemed to be arguing with Noeline. “Either address the issue or don’t,” he said. “But, please, spare me your drive-by bitching.”

That such a bright and layered woman had fallen for Emerson — a mediocrity in search of an admiration society — was a cosmic vote for pessimism. So Tooly avoided talking to Noeline about him, dwelling instead on what linked them: books. They had read hundreds of the same works, yet in a completely different way. Tooly took a book as the creation of one particular brain, while Noeline viewed text as context, each work the fruit of its times, sown by manifestos, fertilized by historical events, harvested in orchards that petered out, burst forth again, producing a landscape known as the Culture. Such classification, Tooly argued, wrecked a work — akin to seeking the soul of a girl by dissecting her body.

Thankfully, Duncan had no objection to Tooly’s extended sojourn there — if anything, it offered relief from his terror of the December exams. Casebooks rose on his desk, higher than his hairline. “I am, quite literally, over my head,” he said, surfacing every few hours with an attempted witticism about Wabash, St. Louis & Pacific Railway Company v. Illinois , then returning to what he called “my pit of litigated despair.”

Despite (or because of) his anxiety, Duncan wrote his exams without apparent disaster. Afterward, he swore that he wouldn’t read another word of case law until the end of the millennium, by which he meant just over two weeks.

Soon everyone would be leaving for winter break, and Tooly suggested a year-end meal. All were invited, warring parties included. Duncan insisted on cooking, since she had fed him throughout his exam period. Xavi was responsible for bringing strawberry cheesecake. Emerson and Noeline provided the Merlot.

The apartment assumed an air of goodwill that had been absent in preceding weeks. With the worst of their stress gone, the students recalled their status: they belonged to the educated elite, damn it, and it was time someone cleaned the toilet! Gallantly, Emerson volunteered, yellow rubber gloves up to his elbows. Xavi did his part, too, scrubbing the kitchen, while Duncan swept the common areas, disposing of soda cans, take-out menus, month-old sections of The New York Times . They set up Emerson’s boom box in the living room and played Prince’s “1999,” whose chorus prompted Duncan to request that they not party like it was 1999. “I didn’t party at all this year.”

“If you party like it’s 1999,” Xavi said, “we all leave, and you log on to a chatroom with people from Finland.”

Noeline uncorked the wine and everyone gathered to inspect the label, playing at being grown-up. Perhaps that was all adults did anyway, only some of them convincingly.

Duncan banned everyone from the kitchen, his pasta sauce faintly bubbling. Tooly leaned in, offering assistance — but only if needed!

“Actually,” he replied, pulling her in.

She tucked her hair behind her ears, clasped her hands behind her back, and looked over Duncan’s shoulder into the pot, where his sauce had reduced into a tomato glue. She tapped her lower lip, turned to him, and, overwhelmed by affection, kissed his cheek.

He couldn’t find her an apron but offered a dish towel, which she had him tuck into the top of her sweater. To preserve herself from Humphrey’s cooking, Tooly had taught herself dishes over the years, typically from cookbooks collected at charity shops. She set to work now, dicing and sautéing and simmering, he watching with elbows on the counter, chin cradled in his palms, thanking her repeatedly, muttering that he was an idiot, then falling silent and frowning like a little boy. So much did he convey this impression that she reached over and touched his nose with her fingertip.

“Sorry,” he said.

“For?” She returned to the pot. “I’m not promising deliciousness, given the limited ingredients. But edible, I can predict.” The meal was meatless spaghetti bolognese since Emerson had recently become a vegan.

She had Duncan deliver the serving bowl to the table, at which point there was a belated scramble for the vinyl chairs, with textbooks and mail-order catalogs flung to the floor.

The chatty bunch of them fell quiet while blunting the sharp edge of appetite. Tooly plunged her fork into a tangle of spaghetti, left it upright, throat clenching as she swallowed saliva. She watched them eating for a moment, relishing her role, the capable cook, really part of this place.

Xavi opened his full mouth to tell Duncan, “I love you, brother, but you did not have a hand in making this. It is highly good.”

Only Emerson offered no praise, nose wrinkled as he picked out flakes of dried oregano. “I know this is vegan, supposedly. But were any animal products used at all?”

“Do you consider the onion an animal?” Xavi asked.

“I don’t.”

“You may be safe, then.”

As their inebriation increased, Xavi pinged Emerson with provocative questions, urging him to tell the table about his upcoming seminar: “Originary and Beyond: The Gap in Alterity Discourse.”