‘I’m so grateful you could come, Dad. I need you this evening.’
‘Don’t be silly, it’s my very great pleasure.’
‘You’ve become so British,’ she smiled, straightening my tie. ‘Would you like a glass of something? There’s champagne.’
‘That would be lovely.’
‘God! So British.’
‘How is that British, sweetheart?’
‘Americans just don’t say lovely in the same way.’
‘Is it wrong? Should I try to change?’
‘No! Of course not.’ She handed me a glass of champagne that had been passed to her by a waiter with whom she communicated by a slight tilt of the head in my direction.
‘Who’s here tonight? Can you tell me now?’
‘Sorry for the subterfuge, it’s a working dinner for Peter. Albert Fogel and his wife, and Fogel’s mother. The rest are all Peter’s colleagues,’ and here she dropped her voice, ‘most of whom I can’t stand, but you know, they were all at the same prep schools and colleges and they’re all millionaires many times over. These are the people who are really running the country, and most of the time they have no idea how pervasive the effects of their power are, but there you go, this is the world we live in.’
It broke my heart a little to hear my daughter sound so jaded and I wondered if marrying into money was responsible for that, not that her mother and I were poor, her mother especially, and one has to acknowledge that Meredith went to one of those colleges and one of those private schools and it was because of that educational access, not to mention her distinctive, slightly old-fashioned beauty, the face of a Vermeer, the creamy pale skin of a Manet, all those random genetic inheritances, in combination with her fine mind and exceptional taste, that made her so attractive to a certain population of wealthy young men who had an eye for beauty but also for intelligence, who could see that my daughter, not spoiled from birth but well looked after, nurtured and kept level-headed, would be a stable partner at least for the first decade of their professional lives. A colleague at Oxford quipped on hearing of Meredith’s engagement a few years ago, one can but hope to see one’s children reach their tenth wedding anniversary: to hope for any more would be foolish, even hubristic. The age of constancy has passed.
That evening Albert Fogel, New York’s newly elected Mayor, was seated next to Peter at one end of the table, the Mayor’s wife next to Meredith at the other, and I was saddled with Caroline, the Mayor’s widowed mother, who fancied herself an artist. The rest of the places were taken up by Peter’s colleagues, most of them either editors at his magazine or at other magazines or newspapers, although I wondered whether they actually called their publications by such old-fashioned names these days, if instead they thought of themselves as the titans of ‘news outlets’ or ‘information platforms’ or even ‘media ecosystems.’
‘And what do you do?’ Caroline asked me over the monkfish, by which time I had spent half an hour listening as she rhapsodized about Meredith’s brilliant career, and what a bright light she was already becoming and how she hoped that perhaps I might put in a good word for her with my daughter, because in her day she had been lucky enough to have shows at some of the big galleries, and she was still producing art, not yet out of the game, she was working on a series of paintings about the aging human body, ‘self-portraits of my own isolated body parts. And what do you work on, Jeremy?’
‘Twentieth-century German history and political thought, some political theory. I wrote a history of East Germans who worked as coerced informants for the Stasi.’ Mrs. Fogel nodded, but I sensed I had lost her attention. ‘Now I’m teaching a course on film, and I guess that’s what I’m most interested in at the moment, perhaps it’s a sign that my brain is beginning to atrophy, that I no longer have the patience for the hard archival work and would rather just watch movies.’
‘Film. How interesting,’ she said, and I was certain I had lost her. ‘My first husband was a director. He was always trying to film me in the nude. I finally dumped the schmuck and married Albert’s father. He was a lawyer. Just as prying, you know, but not so invasive. I think he might have been a homosexual. Don’t look so shocked! He was never very interested in sex or even in seeing me naked, and frankly that suited me fine, but God, he wanted to know everything about my mind. It was exhausting but he moved me out to Connecticut, which was heaven.’
‘You don’t like New York?’
‘It’s so dirty, so busy. I hate all the dog crap on the sidewalks. It makes me sick.’
‘I’ve just moved back after more than a decade in Oxford.’
‘Why would you want to come back to New York? Oxford is pretty, so peaceful. I used to dream of having a little English cottage with a thatched roof surrounded by a meadow. Something like Howards End, you know, with the tree and the pigs’ teeth in the bark and all that. So romantic. So English. Why would you leave all that behind? There’s nothing like that here, not in New York, and the American countryside is so wild, so dangerous. You can take a breath and fall over dead.’
‘It’s not quite that bad.’
‘All I know is that I love the pastoral quality of the English countryside, the Constable landscapes, the coziness of it, nothing that can kill you but your own stupidity. Oh, you’re making me want to go! I should plan a trip for next spring, when the bluebells are in bloom. I remember a bluebell wood outside of Oxford, back in the ’60s, and I felt like I’d stumbled into fairyland. Albert was only a baby then and the three of us had this delightful two-week holiday driving around the south of England. How could you bear to leave all that behind?’
I thought of the trucks that thundered past my Oxford house, shaking the windows even though it was a residential street, and the student parties next door that would sometimes require phoning the police, or the banal ugliness of so much of East Oxford, the construction that seemed to go on for years along the Cowley Road, the unstable sidewalks made of one-foot-square concrete slabs that would subside in the rain and flip up to drench my legs, not to mention the drone of the ring road circling the city. There is little truly peaceful about Oxford these days.
‘The truth is, I missed America. And NYU offered me more money and less teaching. And of course Meredith and Peter are here, and my mother is in Rhinebeck. It was about family as much as anything.’ I told Caroline this because people never want to hear that a place about which they have romantic associations is just as mundane and imperfect as anywhere else, and I know that Oxford is beautiful in a way that is quite special, despite its flaws, but I was also still in the first flush of my renewed love affair with New York, with this great global city that seems truly unlike anywhere else in the western world, and that night I did not want to hear anyone trying to convince me that Oxford would have been a better place to see out my professional life, in my cushy College Fellowship and university professorship. Nothing could possibly have kept me from staying despite a desire to do less work and to be paid more money and to see my daughter more than twice a year and to live again in the city that once gave me so much.