‘How was your weekend, Professor O’Keefe? You said something came up? Did that go okay, whatever it was? Sorry, I don’t mean to pry, I just wanted to make sure everything was okay.’
I had been hoping Rachel would not ask such a question.
‘My daughter was hosting a business dinner, and she wanted my advice,’ I lied. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t make a habit of rescheduling like that, but it was a very important occasion for her.’
As Rachel listened to the excuse, which felt even stupider the more I talked myself into it, her eyes began to narrow in a way that made me anxious, and when I had finished speaking I saw them pop wide again, whatever confusion there might have been giving way to surprise, or at least the affectation of surprise.
‘So I didn’t realize your daughter lives in New York, too?’
‘That was one of the attractions of this job, to be near my daughter again after too much time away from her, you know, and as you get older that desire to be close to your children only becomes more acute, I can’t really explain why, it’s as much about wanting them close if something goes wrong as wanting to be available to help them, not that I’m old and need help and not that my daughter needs much in the way of assistance, but you understand what I mean.’
Rachel was nodding vigorously, trying to maintain eye contact even as my own gaze wandered out the window to Washington Square Park, which changed during my absence from the city in ways that seem both subtle and curiously profound, as though it is the same park but a cleaner and tidier version of itself. A man across the street paused, looked towards my office window, stood still for twenty seconds or so staring, and then continued on his walk.
‘So what’s it like moving to America?’ Rachel asked. As I watched the man walk across the park, turn, and then loop back to pass my window once more, I felt a flutter of unease. Second encounter? Third? I began to feel as though I needed a ledger, a way of recording moments that felt strange or uncanny. After the events of Saturday and Sunday, this was the next occasion of what I can only think to call weirdness. ‘Professor O’Keefe?’
‘Sorry? The. .?’
‘I meant is it difficult, moving to America? Do you feel welcomed?’
In a comparable situation in Britain such small talk would be kept to a minimum; this being a professional relationship, there is no requirement or expectation on my part that we should become friends. The point of our meeting was to discuss the work on which I am charged with giving advice and guidance in the hope that my substantial foundation of knowledge in the field will help Rachel or whatever student might be sitting before me not to look like an idiot when it comes time to let a wider group of scholars read what she has written. Rachel, though, is not going to look like an ass. She works like the devil and has an almost preternatural ability to see the problems before they are even on the horizon, and, having realized they are approaching, reroute herself to avoid them or acquire the necessary tools to attack and disable the problems when they arrive (i.e. improve her German so as to read Ernst Bloch in the original, master enough French to read Bernard Stiegler, also in the original, spend a little more time with the work of Hayden White). The question she had asked me, though, was perhaps the real source of my irritation, because it betrayed her failure to understand that I am not British in anything other than a legal sense. One might even say that my Britishness is a legal fiction, except legally it is true, but the legality of it produces a fiction of belonging or acculturation that is nothing short of fantasy for me now. When I was still living in Britain, and believed I might go on living there for the rest of my life or at least until my retirement, it was, perhaps, a matter of self-delusion or even of wishful thinking.
‘What can I say, Rachel? It’s like coming home.’
Once again, the moment I started speaking, she began nodding. I wondered whether, if I said something preposterous, like our planet is simply a simulation run by an unseen and unseeable computer and free will is only an illusion, or if I began spouting racist or sexist bile, if she would continue to signal her agreement so robotically.
‘Wow, how interesting,’ she smiled, cocking her head as if to suggest the weight of a thought, ‘I guess that’s because American culture is so dominant globally?’
‘No, Rachel, it’s because I’m American.’
Her face clouded with an expression of total confusion, almost bordering on disgust. ‘But you sound British. Were your parents British?’
‘No, we’re all-American Americans, here for centuries. My mother’s side was English, but they came over at the end of seventeenth century, and my father’s side, all of them Irish, arrived in the 1840s, like so many others.’
‘I just assumed because of the accent. .’
‘I don’t have a British accent. The British don’t think so either. To them I sound American.’
‘But you don’t, not at all.’
‘It’s a question of intonation. If you listen to my vowels, they’re entirely American. It’s just the phrasing and the emphases, maybe the vocabulary as well, that has drifted from origins.’
She was still shaking her head but by then I’d had quite enough of her insistence that I was not what I am, so I asserted in a rather English way — with an excess of understatement — that if we did not get to work there was little point in such meetings and at the end of the hour we would both feel the result was rather unsatisfactory. Thus, from a state of confusion, we moved on to Rachel’s chapter, which we discussed for the next forty-five minutes. She was relieved to hear I thought it needed very little work. Still, throughout the meeting, there was a look of puzzlement on her face, as though some part of her brain was continuing to think about the sound of my voice, the way I speak, listening for the roundness of my vowels, the vocabulary and idioms I use, and when she tried to put it together with her idea of what a fellow American sounds like — although one may be American in every sense and still not necessarily a first-language English speaker — she found I did not fit her paradigm of American-ness.
‘It’s not just intonation. I think it’s about cadence,’ she told me at the end of the hour, ‘it’s the cadences you use and the volume, which is softer than most Americans speak, and it’s also your constructions and vocabulary, you’re right, you have British-English constructions and words slip in that Americans just don’t use, which is why a lot of us assumed you must be British, and also of course because we know you just came from Oxford, so you have that origin story if you know what I mean—’
I nodded, but was distracted again by the same young man in Washington Square Park, pausing for an instant outside my window. It was impossible to see his face in the twilight, even with the park’s lamps on, but it was obvious he was standing there just long enough to check that I was still in my office. As Rachel was speaking, I stood up and closed the blinds.