Some years later, however, Stephen suggested we ‘and a couple of other bachelor members of the SCR’ keep watch on the High Table reservation list and try to find a night when a small party of sympathetic souls might dine alone. ‘And then, after dinner, you must come back to my flat to try some very excellent single malts.’
I remember nothing of that dinner itself, nor of who else might have dined with us, though it was likely one of the Fellows in English and his boyfriend, and possibly the Fellow in German, but at the end of the dinner Stephen and I quickly departed, walking down Turl Street, across High Street, down Alfred to Blue Boar, along to St. Aldate’s, all the way past Christ Church and Pembroke and the line of cutesy Alice in Wonderland-related shops, past the Music Faculty and the grungy police station, down to the unromantically modern brick structure of Folly Bridge Court, where Stephen owned an apartment that spanned the top floor, on one side overlooking the Thames and that island in the river clustered with a number of buildings, and on the other a Victorian school converted into flats.
Stephen’s place was modern, with a plush off-white wool carpet (we both removed our shoes), a bathroom whose walls were lined in white subway tiles, a kitchen with a slate floor and shiny white cabinetry, two bedrooms into which I was not allowed to look, and then a large living and dining space, with views to the north and the south, furnished with a glass and steel dining table, steel chairs with black leather seats, an assortment of black leather couches and chairs, and the walls covered with metal bookshelves and packed with books as well as a large collection of DVDs, all in the same gray plastic covers, numbered rather than labeled with titles. The DVDs gave me a chill, for they suggested to me, in my naïveté, a collection of pornography, and Stephen Jahn seemed exactly the kind of man who might be in possession of such a comprehensive-looking assemblage of vice.
He directed me to the couch nearest the south-facing window, though it was impossible to see much without going right up to it since the apartment was effectively in the attic of the building and all the windows were angled into the slanted roofline.
‘Let us begin with a young specimen, before we move on, in carefully judged stages, leading up to our arrival at a place of greater maturity. We’ll begin with a ten-year-old,’ and with that he crouched down in his socks to remove several bottles with labels I did not recognize from a black-lacquered sideboard, along with two crystal glasses of a suitably modern turn. He poured us each a glass, removed his jacket so he was only in his white shirt sleeves, gray waistcoat, and gray trousers (black socks, of course, because the understatement seemed to suit him; he was not, like some assimilated migrants to Britain and many homegrown British men, given to wearing brightly colored or patterned socks with sober suits), and sat down on the couch opposite like a schoolboy, or perhaps like a maiden aunt entertaining her first suitor in twenty years.
His jacket was draped over the back of a chair, though he had done this with considerable care, making sure to fold it along its central seam and laying out the sleeves so they would not be rumpled. I wondered, however, why he did not just take a moment to hang the jacket in his closet in one of the bedrooms. Perhaps because he did not want to leave me alone to snoop around his bookshelves, although I had little interest in Stephen Jahn’s life or whatever secrets he might have held. In fact I felt distinctly as though our acquaintanceship had evolved in sudden spurts of parallel but unequal growth, so that by the time of my visit to his Folly Bridge flat I understood, perhaps only at the edges of consciousness, that I was much more interesting to my colleague than he was to me. Why this should be so I could not then imagine, and there was no element of false modesty in that feeling, for I was, apart from the fact of being an American abroad like him, and being employed by the University of Oxford and one of its constituent Colleges, also like him, no more remarkable than any other academic anywhere else in the world, and arguably less remarkable because I had, to my own discredit, failed to make tenure at Columbia University, where I would have remained in all happiness for the rest of my working life had I been allowed to do so. It was possible, I supposed then, that Stephen Jahn was attracted to failure, or to failure rehabilitated, which was how I then thought of myself: I had not made a total secret of my shipwrecked career in American academia and the ways in which this move to Oxford was in a very real sense an escape from a more robust and more discriminating system, to one that was more fluid, less secure, and far worse paid.
And yet he was not a man who asked direct questions, or did so only rarely, offering instead statements to which one was expected and on many occasions compelled to respond.
‘Now, this one,’ he said, swirling his glass, ‘you probably won’t have heard of. It’s from the Isle of Mull’s Tobermory distillery, called Ledaig, made with burning peat. Distinctive, I think you’ll agree.’ His eyes popped a little as he nodded, taking a sip. ‘Saline, gracefully peaty, almost dainty, like a bright little dancer, almost a very fine sherry, walnuts and the scent of pine forests, charred at the edges and regrown. Call me perverse but when I sip this whisky I think of that young colleague of ours, Bethan. A fine young scholar, very bright, quite intelligent, a little burned at the edges. Attractive, I should suppose, to those attracted by such types.’
I wondered if he already knew of my brief relationship with Bethan or if he merely suspected, or was entirely innocent, although Stephen Jahn gave no impression of being innocent of anything, no matter how little known or unexpected. Worldliness was his abiding character. I knew his area of expertise was the Middle East, particularly Arab-Israeli history and relations, and he was, by reputation, fluent in Hebrew and Arabic as well as Persian, French, German, Yiddish, Turkish, and Kurdish, and claimed to be conversant in Italian and Spanish as well. Such people are less uncommon in Oxford than elsewhere, and no doubt he had groundings in Latin and Ancient Greek, perhaps also — one never knows where the limits of such a person’s mastery may end — even more arcane languages like Balochi and Azerbaijani.
‘Yes, she is attractive, in her way.’ Though I was conscious of not wanting to be drawn into deriding her, my relationship with Bethan had been professional if chilly since I fled her family’s home that New Year’s morning a few years earlier. We had devised an elaborate dance that meant, in the intervening months, we managed never to sit next to each other at a College meal, and if one of us entered the Senior Common Room to find the other the only person there, we would both pretend as if no one at all had appeared or been present. In America this would have been extremely strange, but in Oxford, in Britain more generally, it is possible, even common, to ‘blank’ people one knows, either out of an avoidance which is predicated on a fiction of not having noticed the presence of the other person and is therefore regarded as being polite, or out of a studied and unveiled desire to let the other person know that she or he simply does not signify, is not worth noticing, must be reminded of her or his subordinate place. It was a custom to which I could never wholly adjust, even in moments of falling back on the behavior myself, but in Oxford I had to learn — at least in the realm of the College — to raise my eyes discreetly, and if it was Bethan or someone else I wished to avoid, lower them again into whatever book, newspaper, or journal I was taking a few moments to read in those semi-public spaces and wait until the person had departed.