Great House

  The doctoral program was meant to take three years and had few requirements. Aside from meeting with my supervisor every six weeks, I was left to my own devices. The trouble for me began soon after I’d arrived, when the topic I’d planned to work on—the influence of the new medium of radio on Modernist literature—reached a dead end. It had been the subject of the senior thesis I’d written in college back in New York, for which I’d won praise from my professors, and even come away with an award, the Wertheimer Prize, named after a retired professor wheeled to the ceremony from the pastoral graveyard of Westchester. But the don who’d been chosen to look after my academic work at Oxford, a bald Modernist at Christ Church named A. L. Plummer, quickly tore the thesis apart, claiming that it lacked theoretical integrity, and insisted I come up with a new topic. Cramped in a rickety chair between the towers of books in his study, I tried, weakly, to argue the worth of my work, but the truth was that I myself had lost interest in the idea, and that whatever I’d had to say about it had already been said in the hundred or so pages of my undergraduate thesis. Dust motes floated down in the ray of light that fell through a small, high window (a window through which only a dwarf or child could escape), coming to rest on A. L. Plummer’s head and, presumably, my own. There was little choice but to go wading into the infinite holdings of the Bodleian Library in search of a new subject.

  I spent the following weeks in a chair in the Radcliffe Camera, one of those comfortable upholstered chairs stained by human secretions that can be found in almost every library in the world. It was next to a window overlooking All Souls. Outside, water was suspended in the air like a science experiment—an experiment that had been going on for thousands of years, and constituted the weather in England. Occasionally a figure or pair of figures dressed in black robes crossed through the inner quadrangle of All Souls, giving me the impression that I was watching the rehearsal of a play from which all the words and most of the stage directions had been erased, leaving only the entrances and exits. These empty comings and goings left me feeling vague and uncertain. I read, among other things, the essays of Paul Virilio—the invention of trains also contained the invention of derailment, that is the sort of thing Virilio liked to write about—but never finished the book. I didn’t wear a watch, and usually I would leave the library whenever I couldn’t stand to be cooped up any longer. On four or five occasions I came out of the library door at exactly the moment that a student passed by wheeling an upright bass along the cobbled street, like someone guiding an overgrown child. Sometimes he had just passed the instant before, and other times he was about to pass. But once I exited the library doors at the exact moment he was passing them, and our eyes locked in one of those looks that sometimes happen between strangers, when both wordlessly agree that reality contains sinkholes whose depths neither can ever hope to fathom.

  I was living in a room on Little Clarendon Street, where I spent most of my time when not in the library. I have always been, but was especially then, a shy and overly self-conscious person who had gotten by with having one or two close friends, even a boyfriend, with whom I spent time when not alone. I figured that eventually I’d meet such a person, or people, at Oxford. In the meantime, I stuck to my room.

  Aside from a large carpet remnant lugged home on the bus from the northern end of Banbury Road, an electric kettle, and a flea market set of Victorian cups and saucers, there wasn’t much in it. I’ve always liked the feeling of traveling light; there is something in me that wants to feel I could leave wherever I am, at any time, without effort. The idea of being weighed down made me uneasy, as if I lived on the surface of a frozen lake and each new trapping of domestic life—a pot, a chair, a lamp—threatened to be the thing that sent me through the ice. The only exception was books, which I acquired freely, because I never really felt they belonged to me. Because of this, I never felt compelled to finish those I didn’t like, or even a pressure to like them at all. But a certain lack of responsibility also left me free to be affected. When at last I came across the right book the feeling was violent: it blew open a hole in me that made life more dangerous because I couldn’t control what came through it.

  I’d majored in English because I loved to read, not because I had any idea of what I wanted to do with my life. And yet during that fall at Oxford, my relationship to books began to change. It happened slowly, almost without my noticing. As the weeks passed, I had less and less of an idea about what I could spend three years writing a dissertation about, and became overwhelmed by the immensity of the task. Anxiety, vague and subterranean, began to encroach on me whenever I was in the library. At first I hardly realized what it was, only aware of a twinge of uneasiness in the pit of my stomach. But day after day it grew stronger, closing in around my neck, as did my sense of aimlessness and futility. I read without absorbing the meaning of the words. I would flip back and begin again at the last place I remembered reading, but after a while the sentences would dissolve again and I would go back to skidding obliviously across the blank pages, like those insects you find on the surface of stagnant water. I felt more and more unnerved and began to dread going to the library. I became anxious about becoming anxious. Entering the library, I began to panic. The fact that the panic was bound up in reading—the thing that had been at the center of my life for as long as I could remember, and which in the past had formed a bulwark against despair—made it especially difficult. I’d been sad often enough before, but I’d never felt this siege from within, as if my own being had developed an allergy to itself. At night I lay awake feeling that even as I lay still there, on some other level I was becoming further and further unbound.

  Unable to work, I spent my days wandering the streets of Oxford, watching movies at the Phoenix Picturehouse, browsing the old print store on the High Street, or wasting time wandering through the skeletons, tools, and little cracked bowls of lost peoples on display at the Pitt Rivers Museum. But I barely noticed the things in front of me. I felt a deadening in my mind and a muteness in my being, as if somewhere a signal box had been shut down. As the weeks passed, I lost all sense of myself. Overnight, it seemed, someone had drained the contents from my physical shell, which was still walking around as if nothing had happened. But emptiness didn’t mean apathy: anxiety, loneliness, and despair seemed to lurk around every corner, waiting to sabotage my physical progress down the street. Negotiating this obstacle course, stripped of any sense of purpose, all I longed for was to be home in my childhood bedroom, tucked under the covers with their familiar smell of laundry detergent, listening to my parents murmur down the hall. Walking back to my room one evening after hours of pointless wandering, I stopped in front of a gourmet food store on St. Giles’. As I watched people come out with their bags of marmalades, pâté, chutneys, and loaves of fresh bread, I thought of my parents sitting in their kitchen in slippered feet, their backs rounded as they bent over their dinner, the evening news broadcast from the small television in the corner, and suddenly I began to weep.

  I might have packed up and left had I not so dreaded my parents’ disappointment. They wouldn’t have understood. It was my father who had pushed me to apply, who had gone on at the dinner table about all the doors such a scholarship would open. (My parents’ bathroom was mirrored, and if you opened both of their closet doors at the same time and stood in the triangle they made, a sickening infinity of doors and selves hurtled back in every direction: it was this image I thought of whenever my father used that phrase.) He had little interest in whatever it might allow me to study. I think he imagined that after I collected enough academic accolades I would end up raking in a big salary as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs or Mackenzie. But once I’d gotten the scholarship and knew I was going to Oxford, my mother, who hadn’t said much on the subject until then, came into my room and with wet eyes told me how happy she was for me. She didn’t say that it would have been her dream at my age, had such a dream been the least bit plausible. As it was, she had known better than to receiv
e encouragement from her hardscrabble immigrant parents for her own intellectual interests, and I couldn’t help thinking that, in marrying my father, my mother had decided to suffocate them in one fell swoop, as one drowns a litter of unwanted kittens. It was terrible to think that she thought there was no other way for her—her parents were religious, and my father, twelve years older than she, was not, and I suppose it was enough for my mother at the time to escape from them. But she was only nineteen when she married in 1967, and had she waited a few years all that was changing around her might have given her more courage. Though in that case I’d have never been born.

  I don’t pretend to know just how much my mother crushed in herself. As the years passed she couldn’t hide her weariness, but she gave little clue about the weather and traffic of her inner life. All I knew was that some intractable part of my mother’s curiosity and hunger had never drowned, much as she might once have wished it would. There was always a small pile of books by her bedside that she turned to once everyone was asleep. It was many years before I even made the connection between my own love of books and my mother’s, since, though there had always been books around the house, I rarely saw my mother reading until she was older and had more time. The only exception was the newspaper, which she scoured from front page to last as if she were searching for news of someone lost to her long ago. When I was in college, I’d sometimes come across my mother reading the semester course offerings at the kitchen table, lips moving soundlessly. She never asked me what I planned to take, or in any way intruded on my independence; when I entered the room, she closed the course book and went back to whatever it was she had been doing. But the night before I left for England, my mother gave me the iridescent green Pelikan fountain pen her uncle Saul had given her as a child after she had won an essay competition in school. I’m ashamed to admit that I never wrote a word with it, not even in a letter to my mother, and that I no longer know its whereabouts.

  When my parents called on Sunday afternoons I went on elaborately about the wonderful time I was having. For my father, I made up stories about the debates I’d attended at the Oxford Union and anecdotes about the others on the scholarship—future politicians, law students with sharp elbows, a former speechwriter for Boutros Boutros-Ghali. For my mother, I described Duke Humfrey’s Library in the Bodleian where you could order up the original manuscripts of T. S. Eliot or Yeats, and the dinner I’d had at A. L. Plummer’s invitation (before he’d rejected my thesis) at the Christ Church high table. But things were going worse and worse for me. In the state I was in, it was difficult to go out and meet people. Even to open my mouth to order a sandwich at the Tuck Shop required a desperate scavenge for a few grains of assertiveness. Alone in my room, wrapped in a blanket, I whimpered and talked aloud to myself, recalling the lost glory of my youth when I considered myself, and was considered by others, a bright and capable person. It seemed that was all gone now. I wondered whether what I was experiencing was some sort of psychotic break, the sort that ambushes a person who until then has lived an ordinary life, auguring a new existence full of torment and struggle.

  During the first week of November I went to see Tarkovsky’s Mirror at the Phoenix, which has always been one of my favorite films. I continued to sit there after the lights went up, crying or on the verge of crying. At last I gathered my things and got up, and in the lobby I ran into a bright, loudmouthed, gay political science student named Patrick Clifton who was on the same scholarship as I. Flashing his pointy little teeth, he invited me to a party that night. I don’t know why I agreed, since I was hardly in any shape to go. Out of desperation, perhaps, and an instinct for self-preservation. But as soon as I arrived, I regretted it. The party in South Oxford was held in a two-story house whose rooms were bathed in different shades of light, one purple, another green, giving the place a morose feeling, exaggerated by the music which I could only think to describe as Neolithic funereal. People were getting high on the stairs, and in the room where the music was loudest there was a motley collection of swaying bodies that seemed indifferent to one another. In the back was a long galley kitchen with cracked, dirty tiles, and buckets of beer on ice. Twenty minutes after we’d arrived I lost track of Patrick and, not knowing what else to do, went in search of a bathroom. The one I found on the second floor was occupied, so I leaned against the wall to wait. Laughter erupted from inside, belonging to two or even three people. It seemed unlikely that the occupants were going to come out anytime soon, but I continued to stand there. After ten minutes Yoav Weisz materialized in the blue-lit hall. I recognized him immediately, because he looked like no one else. He had thick auburn hair that rose in high waves from his head and fell in a sweep across his forehead, a long and narrow face, very wide-set dark eyes, a steep nose that ended in arched nostrils, and full lips that naturally turned down at the corners, a face that could look beatific in one instant and devilish the next, and seemed to have come down from the Renaissance, or even the Middle Ages, without revision. You, he said, with a lopsided grin.

  The bathroom door opened and a couple tumbled out, and at the same time a wave of nausea came over me and I knew I was going to throw up. I dove into the bathroom, lifted the toilet seat, and sank to my knees. When I finished I looked up and to my horror Yoav was standing above me. He offered me some cloudy water from the tap. While I drank it he watched me with concern and even tenderness. I said something about the food from the kebab van I’d eaten earlier. We sat in silence, as if, now that we had it, we were bound to stay in the bathroom for as long as the other couple had. I caught a glimpse of my reflection, dark and a little deformed in the mirror; I wanted to look more closely to see how bad things had become but was embarrassed in front of Yoav. Am I that hideous? he said at last. What? I asked, and gave a little laugh, though it came out more like a snort. If anyone’s hideous—I started to say. No, he said, moving a strand of hair away from my eyes, you’re beautiful. He said it just like that, with a directness that took my breath away. I’m embarrassed, I said, though I wasn’t.

  He reached into his pocket, took out a Swiss Army knife, and unfolded the blade. For a split second, I thought he was going to do something violent, not to me but to himself. Instead, he took the bar of soap sitting on the sink, a dirty bar caked with the grime of all the hands that had drifted in and out of that bathroom, and started to whittle. It was such an absurd thing to do that I laughed. After a while he handed me the soap. What is it? I asked. Can’t you tell? I shook my head. A boat, he said. It didn’t look like a boat, but that was fine with me. It had been a long time since anyone had made something in my honor.

  It was then, looking at his strange face, that I knew that a door had opened, but not the kind of door my father had imagined. This one I could walk through, and right away it was clear to me that I would. Another wave of nausea came over me, nausea mixed with happiness and also relief, because I sensed that one chapter of my life had ended and another was about to begin.

  Of course there were awkward moments, or moments that seemed to throw things into question. The first time we slept together something strange happened. We were lying on the carpet in Yoav’s bedroom on the third floor of the house in Belsize Park. The windows were open, the sky almost black with an approaching storm, everything eerily silent. He took off my shirt and touched my breasts. He had very soft and inquisitive hands. Then he took my pants off. He didn’t take off my shoes first, though, he just peeled my underwear down over the top of my pants and kept pulling until he reached my feet, at which point, of course, he got stuck. A struggle ensued, as they say in Russian novels, although thankfully it was a short one. My shoes came loose, and the pants slipped free. Then he took off his own clothes. At last we were naked. But instead of continuing in the vein we’d been going in, Yoav switched course and started to roll. An actual somersault, with me attached to him. Once we’d gone around 360 degrees, he started to roll again. I had gone along with plenty of strange or kinky things during sex, but this was the
strangest because there was nothing remotely sexy about it, not for me, and, as far as I could tell, not for him. We were like two people practicing for the circus. You’re hurting my neck, I whispered. That was all it took. Yoav let me go. I dropped back to the floor and lay very still for a while, catching my breath and trying to decide whether I wanted things to begin again where we’d left off, or whether I wanted to get my clothes and leave.

  I was still undecided when I heard the muffled sound of crying. I sat up. What’s the matter? I asked. Nothing, he said. But you’re crying. I was just thinking of something, he said. What? I asked. One day I’ll tell you. Tell me now, I started to say, moving closer to him, but didn’t get all of the words out, because then his mouth was on mine and I was pulled into a kiss soft and deep, as if he had reached in and performed some brisk emergency surgery with the most deft and delicate touch, causing something to surge and come alive, flooding me with vitality I had been deprived of. That night we had sex three or maybe four times. From then on, we were rarely apart.

  When I was with Yoav, everything in me that had been sitting stood up. He had a way of looking at me with a kind of unabashed directness that made me shiver. It’s something amazing to feel that for the first time someone is seeing you as you really are, not as they wish you, or you wish yourself, to be. I’d had boyfriends before, and I was familiar with the little mating rituals of getting to know each other, of dragging out the stories from childhood, summer camp, and high school, the famous humiliations, and the adorable things you said as a child, the familial dramas—of drawing a portrait of yourself, all the while making yourself out to be a little brighter, a little more deep than deep down you knew you actually were. And though I hadn’t had more than three or four relationships, I already knew that each time the thrill of telling another the story of yourself wore off a little more, each time you threw yourself into it a little less, and grew more distrustful of an intimacy that always, in the end, failed to pass into true understanding.