Sitting in a row on the couch, the Third Years squirmed and sipped their champagne too quickly, like children waiting to be excused. They asked polite questions about the paintings and the Cottage library. Do the books circulate outside the building? Did they really have a first-edition Abecedarian Arcana in the hand of Pseudo-Dionysius himself? Really. And when was the Cottage first constructed? Really! Wow. That’s old. That’s, like, ancient.
Then, after a suitable interval, they disappeared en masse into the pool room. They showed no particular desire to be chaperoned there, and Quen tin and Alice had no particular desire ever to see them again, so they stayed where they were. As the evening wore on, the sounds of adolescent bonding could be heard. It became apparent to Quentin and Alice that they were relics of an earlier era that had worn out its welcome. They had come full circle. They were outsiders again.
“I feel like an elderly docent,” Quentin said.
“I already forget their names,” Alice said. “They’re like quadruplets.”
“We should give them numbers. Tell them it’s a tradition.”
“And then we could always call them by the wrong number. Freak them out. Or we could call them all the same thing. Alfred or something.”
“Even the girls?”
“Especially the girls.”
They were sipping tepid leftover champagne. They were getting drunk, but Quentin didn’t care. From the pool room came the glittery tinkle of breaking glass—a champagne flute, probably—and then, a little later, the sound of a sash being raised and somebody throwing up, hopefully out the window.
“The problem with growing up,” Quentin said, “is that once you’re grown up, people who aren’t grown up aren’t fun anymore.”
“We should have burned this place down,” Alice said gloomily. They were definitely drunk. “Been the last ones out the door and then tor ched it.”
“Then walked away with it burning behind us in the background, like in a movie.”
“End of an era. End of an epoch. Which one? Era or epoch? What’s the difference?”
Quentin didn’t know. They would have to find something else, he thought mazily. Something new. Couldn’t stay here anymore. Couldn’t go back. Only forward.
“Do you think we were ever like this?” Quentin asked. “Like these kids?”
“Probably. I bet we were even worse. I don’t know how the others put up with us.”
“You’re right,” he said. “You’re right. God, they were so much nicer than we are.”
That winter Quentin didn’t go home for the holidays. Around Christmas-time—real-world Christmas—he’d had the usual conversation with his parents about Brakebills’ unusual schedule, which he had to remind them about every year, lounging inside the old phone booth under the back stairs with one foot braced up against the folding wooden door. Then by the time Brakebills-calendar Christmas rolled around, it was already March in the real world, and it didn’t seem like such a big deal not to go back. If they had asked him—if they’d put it out there for an instant that they were eager to see him, or that they would be disappointed if he didn’t come—he might have caved. He would have, in a second. But they were their usual blithe, oblivious, glassine selves. And besides, he got an independent feeling from coolly informing them that he had other plans, thanks very much.
Instead Quentin went home with Alice. It was her idea, though as it got closer to the holidays Quentin wasn’t exactly sure why she’d invited him, since the prospect obviously made her suicidally uncomfortable.
“I don’t know, I don’t know!” she said when he asked her. “It just seemed like the kind of things boyfriends and girlfriends do!”
“Well, whatever, I don’t have to come. I’ll just stay here. Just say I had a paper to finish or something. I’ll see you in January.”
“But don’t you want to come?” she wailed.
“Of course I do. I want to see where you come from. I want your parents to know who I am. And God knows I’m not taking you back to my parents’ house.”
“All right.” She didn’t sound any less anxious. “Do you promise to hate my parents as much as I do?”
“Oh, absolutely,” Quentin said. “Maybe even more.”
The opening of the portals home for vacation was always a complicated and tedious procedure that inevitably led to huge numbers of Brakebillians backed up with all their luggage in a ragged line that wound down the dark, narrow corridor leading to the main living room, where Professor Van der Weghe was in charge of getting people where they needed to go. Everybody was relieved that exams were over, and there was always a lot of giddy pushing and shoving and shrieking and casting of minor pyrotechnic spells. Quentin and Alice waited together in silence with their packed bags, solemnly, side by side, Quentin looking as respectable as he could manage. He hardly had any clothes anymore that weren’t part of his Brakebills uniform.
He knew Alice was from Illinois, and he knew Illinois was in the Midwest, but he couldn’t have pointed to the precise location of that state within a thousand miles. Apart from a European vacation in junior high he’d barely ever been off the East Coast, and his Brakebills education hadn’t done much to improve his grasp of American geography. And as it turned out he hardly saw Illinois anyway, or at least not its exterior.
Professor Van der Weghe set up the portal to open directly into an anteroom inside Alice’s parents’ house. Stone walls, flat mosaic floors, post-and-lintel doorways on all sides. It was a precise re-creation of a traditional bourgeois Roman residence. Sound echoed in it like a church. It was like stepping past the red velvet rope at a museum. Magic tended to run in families—Quentin was an exception in that respect—and Alice’s parents were both magicians. She had never had to sneak around behind their backs the way he had to with his parents.
“Welcome to the house that time forgot to forget,” Alice said sulkily, kicking her bags into a corner. She led him by the hand along an alarmingly long, dark corridor to a sunken living room with cushions and hard Roman-style couches strewn around at careless angles and a modest plashing fountain in the middle.
“Daddy changes it all around every few years,” she explained. “He mostly does architectural magic. When I was little it was all Baroque, gold knobs on everything. That was almost nice. But then it was Japanese paper screens—you could hear everything. Then it was Fallingwater—Frank Lloyd Wright—until Mom got sick of living in a mildew farm for some reason. And then for a while it was just a big old Iroquois longhouse with a dirt floor. No walls. That was hilarious. We had to beg him to put in a real bathroom. I think he seriously thought we were going to watch him defecate into a pit. I doubt even the Indians did that.”
With that she sat down heavily on a hard leather Roman couch, opened a book, and became absorbed in her vacation reading.
Quentin understood that it was sometimes better to wait out Alice’s black periods than to try to coax her out of them. Everybody has their own idiopathic reaction to their childhood home. So he spent the next hour wandering around what looked remarkably like an upper-middle-class Pompeian household, complete with pornographic frescoes. It was obsessively authentic except for the bathrooms—a concession had obviously been granted on that score. Even dinner, when it arrived, served by a squad of three-foot-tall animated wooden marionettes who made little click-clacking noises as they walked, was revoltingly historical: calf brains, parrot tongues, a roasted moray eel, all peppered beyond the point of edibility, just in case they weren’t inedible to begin with. Fortunately, there was plenty of wine.
They had progressed to the third course, the stuffed and roasted uterus of a sow, when a short, portly, round-faced man suddenly appeared in the doorway. He was dressed in a well-worn toga the gray of unlaundered bedsheets. He hadn’t shaved for several days, and his dark stubble extended well down his neck, and what hair he had left on his head could have used cutting.
“Ave atque vales!” he proclaimed. He gave an elaborate, made-up-looking Ro
man salute, which was essentially the same as a Nazi salute. “Welcome to the domus of Danielus!”
He made a face that implied that it was other people’s fault that the joke wasn’t funny.
“Hi Dad,” Alice said. “Dad, this is my friend Quentin.”
“Hi.” Quentin stood up. He’d been trying to eat reclining, Roman-style, but it was harder than it looked, and he had a stitch in his side. Alice’s father shook his outstretched hand. He seemed to forget he was doing it halfway through, then looked surprised to find a fleshy alien extremity still in his grip.
“Are you really eating that stuff? I had Domino’s an hour ago.”
“We didn’t know there was anything else. Where’s Mom?”
“Who knows?” Alice’s father said. He bugged his eyes out like it was a wacky mystery. “She was working on one of her compositions downstairs, last I saw.”
He jogged the few steps down into the room, sandals slapping the stone tiles, and served himself some wine from a decanter.
“And that was when? November?”
“Don’t ask me. I lose track of time in this damn place.”
“Why don’t you put in some windows, Daddy? It’s so dark in here.”
“Windows?” He bugged out his eyes again; it appeared to be his signature facial expression. “You speak of some barbarian magic of which we noble Romans know nothing!”
“You’ve done an amazing job here,” Quentin piped up, the soul of obsequiousness. “It looks really authentic.”
“Thank you!” Alice’s father drained the goblet and poured himself another, then sat down heavily on a couch, spilling a purple track of wine down the front of his toga in the process. His bare calves were plump and bone white; black bristles stood straight out from them in static astonishment. Quentin wondered how his beautiful Alice could possibly share a single base pair of genetic information with this person.
“It took me three years to put it together,” he said. “Three years. And you know what? I’m already sick of it after two months. I can’t eat the food, there are skid marks on my toga, and I have plantar fasciitis from walking around on these stone floors. What is the point of my life?” He looked at Quentin furiously, as if he actually expected an answer, as if Quentin were concealing it from him. “Would someone tell me that, please? Because I have no idea! None!”
Alice glared at her father like he’d just killed her pet. Quentin stayed perfectly still, as if that meant that Alice’s father, like a dinosaur, couldn’t see him. They all three sat in awkward silence for a long beat. Then he stood up.
“Gratias—and good night!”
He tossed the train of his toga over his shoulder and strode out of the room. The marionettes’ feet clack-clacked on the stone floor as they mopped up the spilled wine he left behind.
“That’s my dad!” Alice said loudly, and rolled her eyes as if she expected a laugh track to kick in behind her. None did.
In the midst of this domestic wasteland Alice and Quentin established a workable, even comfortable routine for themselves, invaders staking out a safe perimeter deep in hostile territory. It was weirdly liberating to be in the middle of somebody else’s domestic agony—he could see the bad emotional energy radiating out in all directions, sterilizing every available surface with its poisonous particles, but it passed through him harmlessly, like neutrinos. He was like Superman here, he was from off-planet, and that made him immune to any local villainy. But he could see it doing its ruinous work on Alice, and he tried to shield her as best he could. He knew the rules here instinctively, what it meant to have parents who ignored you. The only difference was that his parents did it because they loved each other, Alice’s because they hated each other.
If nothing else the house was quiet and well stocked with Roman-style wine, sweet but perfectly drinkable. It was also reasonably private: he and Alice could share a bedroom without her parents caring or even noticing. And there were the baths: Alice’s dad had excavated huge, cavernous underground Roman baths that they had all to themselves, huge oblong aquifers scooped out of the midwestern tundra. Every morning they would spend a good hour trying to fling each other into the scalding caldarium and the glacial frigidarium, which were equally unbearable, and then soaking naked in the tepidarium.
Over the course of two weeks Quentin glimpsed Alice’s mother exactly once. If anything, she looked even less like Alice than Alice’s father did: she was thin and tall, taller than her husband, with a long, narrow, animated face and a dry bunch of blond-brown hair tied back behind her head. She chattered earnestly to him about the research she was doing on fairy music, which was, she explained, mostly scored for tiny bells and inaudible to human beings. She lectured Quentin for almost an hour, with no prompting on his part, and without once asking him who he was or what exactly he was doing in her house. At one point one of her slight breasts wandered out of the misbuttoned cardigan that she wore with nothing under it; she tucked it back in without the slightest trace of embarrassment. Quentin had the impression that it had been some time since she had spoken to anybody.
“So I’m a little worried about your parents,” Quentin said that afternoon. “I think they might be completely insane.”
They had retreated to Alice’s bedroom, where they lay side by side on her enormous bed in their bathrobes, looking up at the mosaic on the ceiling: Orpheus singing to a ram, an antelope, and an assortment of attentive birds.
“Are they?”
“Alice, I think you know they’re kind of weird.”
“I guess. I mean, I hate them, but they’re my parents. I don’t see them as insane, I see them as sane people who deliberately act like this to torture me. When you say they’re mentally ill, you’re just letting them off the hook. You’re helping them elude prosecution.
“Anyway, I thought you might find them interesting,” she said. “I know how mentally excited you get about anything magical. Well, voila, for your enjoyment, two career magicians.”
He wondered, theoretically, which of them had it worse. Alice’s parents were toxic monsters, but at least you could see it. His own parents were more like vampires or werewolves—they passed for human. He could rave about their atrocities all he wanted, he knew the villagers would never believe him till it was too late.
“At any rate I can see where you get your social skills,” he said.
“My point is, you don’t know what it’s like to grow up in a family of magicians.”
“Well, I didn’t know you had to wear a toga.”
“You don’t have to wear togas. That’s exactly the problem, Q. You don’t have to do anything. This is what you don’t understand! You don’t know any older magicians except our professors. It’s a wasteland out there. Out here. You can do nothing or anything or everything, and none of it matters. You have to find something to really care about to keep from running totally off the rails. A lot of magicians never find it.”
Her voice was strangely urgent, almost angry. He was trying to catch up to her.
“So you’re saying your parents didn’t.”
“No, they didn’t, despite their having had two children, which would have given them a minimum of two good options. Well, I think they might have cared about Charlie, but when they lost him, they lost their way completely. And here they are.”
“What about your mom and her fairy orchestras? She seems pretty serious about them.”
“That’s just to annoy my dad. I’m not even sure they exist.”
Suddenly Alice rolled over on top of him, straddling him, hands on his shoulders, pinning him down. Her hair hung straight down at him in a shimmering curtain, tickling his face and giving her the very authoritative appearance of a goddess leaning down from the heavens.
“You have to promise me we’ll never be like them, Quentin.” Their noses were almost touching. Her weight on top of him was arousing, but her face was angry and serious. “I know you think it’s going to be all quests and dragons and fighting evil and whatever,
like in Fillory. I know that’s what you think. But it’s not. You don’t see it yet. There’s nothing out there.
“So you have to promise me, Quentin. Let’s never get like this, with these stupid hobbies nobody cares about. Just doing pointless things all day and hating each other and waiting to die.”
“Well, you drive a hard bargain,” he said. “But okay. I promise.”
“I’m serious, Quentin. It’s not going to be easy. It’s going to be so much harder than you think. They don’t even know, Quentin. They think they’re happy. That’s the worst part.”
She undid the drawstring on his pajama bottoms without looking and jerked them down, still staring directly into his eyes. Her robe was already open at the waist, and she had nothing on under it. He knew she was saying something important, but he wasn’t grasping it. He put his hands under her robe, feeling her smooth back, the curve of her waist. Her heavy breasts brushed against his chest. They would always have magic. They would have it forever. So what—?
“Maybe they are happy,” he said. “Maybe this is just who they are.”
“No, Quentin. They aren’t, and it isn’t.” She twined her fingers into his hair and gripped it, hard, so that it hurt. “God, you are such a child sometimes.”
They were moving together now, breathing hard. Quentin was inside her, and they couldn’t talk anymore, except for Alice just repeating:
“Promise me, Q. Promise me. Just promise.”
She said it angrily, insistently, over and over again, as if he were arguing, as if he wouldn’t have agreed to absolutely anything at that moment.
GRADUATION
In a way it was a disaster of a vacation. They hardly even went outside except for a few walks (undertaken at a brisk trot) through the freeze-dried Urbana suburbs, so flat and empty it felt like at any moment they could fall off into the immense white sky. But in other ways it was perfect. It brought Alice and Quentin closer together. It helped Quentin understand why she was the way she was. They didn’t fight once—if anything the terrifying counterexample of Alice’s parents made them feel young and romantic by contrast. And after the first week they’d finished all their homework and were free to lie around and goof off. By the time two weeks were up they were thoroughly stir crazy and ready to start their last semester at Brakebills.