The Last Enchantments by Charles Finch Read Free Book Online

and they shared a cutting little laugh. “I played in school. Not at uni. I’m a graduate student. We both are, in fact.”
    “I reckoned you might be. Listen, how would you feel about trying out for Fleet? We have a good deal of fun. Last year we came in seventh, which isn’t shabby considering that there are forty teams. If you want we could have a throw now, I could tell you about it.”
    Tom nodded, looking curious. “D’you mind?” he asked me.
    “No, no. I want to check out the boathouse anyway.”
    The two of them started walking away down the lawns, talking and hurling the ball at each other with the teeth-baring aggression that passes for friendliness among upper-class Brits.
    The river was glossy, narrow, and quick, a beautiful green color, with the white and maroon striped college punts strung along the near bank. (The punts are riverboats, low flat things you pole along the river in, notionally with champagne and strawberries, in real life more often with beer and crisps.) The sun, westering, heavy, and hazy, was in those great final throes of energy before the sky whitens and clears, and evening comes. I stood and watched it. That immense body, dying trillions of feet away from me, still warming my face with its steady insensate chemistries.
    Sometimes we’re available to change. The grass was high by the river, and when I was five or six feet from the water, half-stumbling in it, I saw Sophie for the first time. She was tall and thin, with long auburn hair down her back, wreathed in the gold light of a late summer five o’clock. I thought I had never seen anyone so beautiful in all my life.
    *   *   *
    I felt a terrible longing for Alison.
    In the ten days since the Turtle, my guilt had become constant. There was no residual joy—or very little—in thinking of Jess, except occasionally when I remembered what her body felt like. Certainly if I could have erased what I had done I would have.
    It had also made me clingy, and when Alison and I spoke on the phone I spent the time reassuring myself that she still loved me. Of course, for her nothing had changed, and so I could never elicit quite the tone I wanted.
    “I wish I could see you,” I would say as soon as we started talking on the phone.
    “You, too!” she would answer, too lightly for my taste. “So much has been going on at work, Martinez, you know, in the fifth—”
    Then, feeling actually close to tears, “I would seriously pay a hundred bucks to just lie down with you for ten minutes.” (Oh God, the cringing when I think of this.)
    “You’re so sweet.”
    “I mean it.”
    “And a little bit of a girl.”
    “Ha.”
    She laughed. “Don’t sound so miserable, I’m only teasing.”
    I’m sure it gratified her to know that we had reversed roles—that I was handling the change badly, not her. “I don’t know if I can wait a month to see you. When’s the last time we spent that long apart, the summer after college?”
    “I’m doing okay with it, I really am.”
    “Thanks.”
    “I just meant that I can live with it. It’s only a year.”
    “I was wrong, a year is fucking forever.”
    “Oh, shit. That’s my dad on the other line. He might have some good news about the governor’s bullshit seaport thing for me. I’ll call you back in like four minutes.”
    “I’m supposed to go to the pub, but I can wait if—”
    “No, go, make friends, we’ll talk tomorrow—I love you—bye—shit, there it is again—bye—”
    I would picture her familiar face, her slender hands, and feel a wave of anguish. What was I doing here? That was my frame of mind in Oxford, that afternoon.
    I was walking along when I saw Sophie, but I had accidentally come too close not to say hello. “Hey,” I called out.
    She turned with her arms still crossed. “Oh, hi,” she said. She had been looking down the river and turned back to it, leaning over the water and staring. “You can’t see a scull coming up toward us, can you? You’re