Read The Last Enchantments for Free Online Page B

matching sofas and chairs,” my mother reported to her sister when we visited Alison’s parents for lunch in the city once, not thinking that I could overhear her from the next room. Years before that she had told the same sister that a friend from college had left his knife and fork akimbo on his plate, and that another had seemed to brag (imagine!) about going to Southampton.
    In this way I grew up conflating stylistic and moral choices. Drapes , home , gift. Purchase. Anything that savored of upsell. The code was self-effacement—my people were Yankees, and when I see the popular representations of WASPs I cringe at the vulgarity, the Greenwich and Nantucket imprint in the public consciousness, lobster reds, sneering ski-slope kids. My male relatives wore unbranded khakis, windbreakers, and digital watches. They carried combs. Their shoes were as cheap as possible and ordered in bulk from catalogs printed in black-and-white; the only articles of clothing upon which it was acceptable to spend a great deal of money were a suit, a shirt, and possibly a hat. My grandparents, all four of them, would rather have walked through Times Square naked than utter the word “summering.” Society has shifted toward money now, and money is what makes you a socialite. There was an older way.
    In one way this was a small part of my life, and in another all of it. It had the poverty of imagination that wraps like an involucre around any dead world—meeting on the platform at New Haven, all those Fitzgerald second-order signifiers—but it would have taken a greater strength of character than I had to reject their accretion of meaning as false.
    This has something to do with Oxford. Not long before I moved to England I turned twenty-five, and like everyone I slipped into adulthood like a delinquent through the back door, never quite sure I hadn’t been seen. The future was decided: Alison and I were settled together; we would work in politics; we would live in New York.
    It was not an unhappy thought to me, but there was a titration of loss in those certainties, and perhaps for that reason, Oxford in those first days seemed to me like the last of something in my life. Once more I could look out upon the coming years, as I had for so long, and see a future full of nothing, full of everything, before all the choices I made started to become irreversible. It was only a year—and I very probably wouldn’t even have taken that year if it hadn’t been for the terrible and disorienting things that happened around the time I put in my application.
    I don’t know. I do remember that on the afternoon in my second week at Fleet when Tom and I first went out and visited the lawns, I felt a difference in myself. Space could induce what I had once imagined only time could: forgetting. I thought, Oh, so this is why people leave places. This is what a new start feels like.
    *   *   *
    As I said before, Fleet’s lawns were considered unusually fine. The college had a lot of land, and from the stone terrace outside of the bar, just behind Third Quad, the long stretch of grass looked almost limitless because you still couldn’t quite see the natural boundary of the river. The lawns were divided in two by a slim stone path, and just at the river there were loose groups of interchangeable teak chairs and tables, one of them usually overturned, none of them very tidily arranged.
    Tom and I went out there at the end of the afternoon. He had a rugby ball and tossed it underhand to me. I caught it—“See, you’ll have it in no time”—and we started jogging farther and farther apart, so that we had to give the ball long heaves.
    After ten or fifteen minutes an older man with a tennis racket started walking toward us from the courts nearby, waving. “Hello,” he called when he was still twenty feet off, looking at Tom and not me. “I’m Gobbs, statistics. Have you played before?”
    We stood up and shook hands. “He hasn’t,” said Tom,