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That Tuesday, November 26th, two days before Thanksgiving, I did not eat well. I remained in bed except to go to the bathroom, to make myself coffee in the morning, to eat a bowl of cereal and some fruit for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch. For dinner I ordered in spring rolls and vegetarian pho and ate in bed like a dissolute sultan pondering the course of his life, surveying the record of his thoughts and whims, his petty histories, the banality of his triumphs and defeats, printed so coldly before him.
I remembered the last time I ate in bed, more than a decade ago, in that bleak Christmas vacation during my first year in England. Though at the time I was still unsure if my marriage to Susan was definitively over, whether the separation would translate itself into a divorce or if some renegotiation of the terms of our bond might yet be possible, I had decided to see other people, or rather Susan and I had agreed that as part of the separation we would, in her words, ‘explore the widest spectrum of our desires.’ I have a rather limited palate, so I went looking for someone who, I see in retrospect, was merely a different shade of Susan, another academic woman, a person of learning and intellect and mild attractiveness.
There was a young postdoctoral Fellow in the College, then in her late twenties, working on some aspect of post-war British history, though it was never entirely clear to me what the subject or point of it was, it seemed more philosophy than historiography. We had, after a particularly dissolute High Table dinner, found ourselves alone in the front quad at three in the morning. Our rooms were on opposite staircases, though both on the top floor so that on several occasions, when the days were warm — and there were some lovely warm autumn days during my first weeks in Oxford — we had glimpsed each other sitting on the battlements in the sunshine and as a consequence started chatting whenever we met in the Senior Common Room. By the night of debauchery, which was also in late November, we were calling each other Jeremy and Bethan. I am certain she made the first move, offering me yet another drink in her rooms. I followed her up the narrow unvarnished wooden stairs and found myself struggling to remain conscious as she fumbled with the key to her door and then, alone in her suite, which was very like my own, she poured us both a whisky that I could not bring myself to drink. We talked, half reclining next to each other on her couch, the black skirt inching up her legs, shoes kicked off, and after an hour we both began to fall asleep. The couch was deep enough that we could lie next to each other comfortably and so remained there until dawn. Since it was a Saturday there was no scout coming to clean the room and the sun woke us, or at least me, and when I opened my eyes I also became conscious of Bethan’s finger tracing a legend in my back. She leaned her face into mine and we kissed, though both of us, I think, were aware of the foulness of our breath and the scents of the previous evening’s meal on our clothes and the complexities and complications that might arise if we took the moment further.
‘We should talk, perhaps,’ I said, and she nodded as someone knocked at the door.
I slipped from the couch and tiptoed into her kitchen where I waited as she made excuses to the youngest of the College porters, Robert, who had a crush on her. He had brought her a package that was delivered that morning, though usually it would have been left in the College lodge for her to pick up later in the day. My first encounter with Bethan went nowhere, but we tentatively began meeting for coffees and dinners outside of College, a rather old-fashioned round of dating without sex, since Bethan did not seem in any hurry to go to bed with me and, though I found she had nice legs and a reasonably fine face, she was not beautiful, not nearly as beautiful as Susan; I felt little in the way of passion, scant desire to complicate my new life in College or the Faculty by making love to a younger colleague. If sex alone was what I was missing, I knew I could wait.
Left alone that Christmas, however, discovering that in Britain everything closes down for Christmas Day itself and it is impossible to go to the movies, as had been my and Susan and Meredith’s habit in the years before our family split apart, I slipped into a state of such profound depression that I knew I had to get out of Oxford, where there was no snow, just a thin layer of ice that covered the sidewalks and seemed perfectly to reflect the state of my heart. I knew Bethan had gone home to Derbyshire for the holidays and was staying with her parents, but I phoned her nonetheless to see how she was doing. I admit now that I was hoping for an invitation, telling her how lonely Oxford seemed and how deserted it was with all the students gone for the vac.
‘Why don’t you come here for New Year’s?’ she said at last. ‘There’s plenty of room. But you’ll have to be prepared for the disco on New Year’s Eve.’
Her parents managed an inn in the Peak District, living in a flat at the back of the establishment, above the kitchen. It seemed an opportunity to see a different version of British life, though Bethan warned me that her parents were negotiating a separation, possibly a divorce, her father was an alcoholic, and he and Bethan’s mother were no longer sharing a bedroom, her mother having taken over Bethan’s own childhood room while she slept on a couch in the lounge or in a room in the inn if one happened to be free, on the understanding she would be responsible for cleaning it the next morning.