14

London Snog

“STOP!”

James Honey had tucked himself into one of the little wooden Speech Room chairs in the front row, with a quilt thrown over his knees and the script in his lap. He followed the lines with the point of a pencil, and was staring at Andrew over his reading glasses. “I can’t understand a word, Andrew,” he moaned, his pencil point pressed to the paper. “Not a word.”

The stage manager whispered in Honey’s ear.

“One moment, please,” the director barked.

Rebecca sidled up to Andrew onstage. “Have you done your kissing scene with Persephone yet?” She wore yet another short skirt, glossy pink lipstick, and a kind of velvety top that made her resemble a slutty and very fetching member of Robin Hood’s Merry Men. Her voice was insinuating, full of venom.

“You mean, in the play?”

“Oh, are you doing other kissing scenes?”

Andrew opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He blushed scarlet.

Rebecca smiled. “All I can say is, be careful. If Sir Alan finds out, it’ll be murder. You know he keeps a Roman sword hanging over his mantel?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Funny,” she continued. “I thought she was still going with Simon.”

Andrew turned to her—too quickly. He saw another smile creep across Rebecca’s face.

“She was with him such a long time,” she persisted.

“Yeah?” he said, forcing himself to sound casual.

“Oh, yeah. She’s obsessed with him.”

Andrew’s heart shriveled.

“But they went through a lot. Maybe that finally broke them up.”

He could no longer stand it. “What do you mean, went through . . .”

“All right, here we go,” Honey bayed. “From the beginning.”

“Don’t let what I said distract you,” whispered Rebecca.

“Just tell me what you mean by—”

“When you’ve quite finished,” Honey snapped at them.

Andrew yammered his lines without feeling. Honey kept stopping the scenes to correct him, hopping up onstage and mocking his slumping posture. Rebecca batted her eyes at him. She made pouty, poor-baby smiles. At the end she hugged him. Be better next time, she said, and wrapped him in her perfume, a cloud of cloying late-summer blooms.

BY THE TIME Andrew reached the tube station a little later, he was as soiled and exhausted by his mental journey through Jealousy as any traveler in the bush. Persephone had deceived him. She had maintained a relationship all along with some slick, rich, tall, upright, world-traveling English aristocrat; blond, no doubt, with a huge chin; sporty; with a car. Andrew had been kept in the dark. Some side arrangement while Simon—Simon, Simon, of course it was a Simon—did whatever Simons did. Went to Egypt for a dig. Or studied finance in Singapore. Andrew retrieved the mental snapshots of his every encounter with Persephone and ripped them down the middle. All the preparation for the weekend—the chit from Fawkes; Andrew’s roundabout explanation about a “group get-together” with members of the cast (he did not want Fawkes to know), and his lie that Sir Alan had approved the trip; and the nonstop daydreaming—had been for nothing. Less than nothing—they had added to his insult.

WHEN SHE ARRIVED—striding down the Hill in a dress that dropped only to mid-thigh, a pattern aswirl with Matisse colors, bloodred and jungle green, her legs bare, her hair a snake swarm of black curls, sunglasses balanced over her brow—his heart skipped three beats. He forced himself to remain cold. He realized what a clod he looked like alongside her, with his khakis and his checked oxford shirt and his sneakers. He was glad. Let her be disappointed. Let her see what a poor match they were, now that they were stripped of the school uniform. She was stylish, European, upper crust; he was an American middle-class nothing. Let her regret it, as much as he did.

“Hello,” she said brightly. Then she took in his scowl. “Everything all right?”

“Yup,” he replied coldly. “Let’s go.”

“Why are you acting strange?”

“How am I acting strange?”

“You’re all funny.” She bit her lip. “I sent you a crass text and now you think I’m a whore. Is that it?”

“Nope. You’re late.”

“I was getting ready,” she said, striking a pose. “And now you’re supposed to say it was worth the wait.”

“Come on.” He turned and mounted the filthy stairs of the tube station and shoved his credit card into the ticket machine.

THEY RODE IN silence on the squishy, purple-flecked cushions of the Metropolitan line, through every flavor of suburb. Persephone dropped her sunglasses to her nose and scowled. Andrew kept his face turned to the window, watching pass the wide, green fields of some minor college, dotted with flocks of pigeons—or were they seagulls?—then the tract housing, slabs of that grey brown brick unique to English row houses; then finally the industrial yards: rusting train cars, a depot for old postal vehicles. At the Finchley Road stop, Persephone rose and without a word bolted out into a redbrick station and pounded up the stairs. Andrew followed, and continued to follow her up a steep hill. A bustling commercial street gave way to curling drives where muscular, mansionlike homes perched on landscaped lots, hedged in by brick walls and rhododendrons. Persephone maintained her furious pace forward, sunglasses down, forcing him to follow at a sheepish distance. At last they reached a plateau, where a few shops and a pub popped into view. Persephone finally stopped outside the pub.

“If we’re not going to speak, we may as well get drunk,” she announced.

Beaten copper lined the bar. Cigarette smoke and the smell of cooking beef and potatoes swirled inside. Andrew was starving but felt the single five-pound note and the two pound coins in his pocket, and saw the chalked menu above the bar—nothing below nine pounds—and instead calculated the number of pints he could buy. Beer. A sandwich in a can, his friends at home called it.

They ordered lagers. They were not carded. They did not tick glasses. They drank.

“So this is where you grew up,” Andrew observed.

She ignored this. They were in a fight. Somehow, without any prelude. So she was in no mood to share reminiscences. “How was rehearsal?” she asked in response, an edge in her voice.

Andrew stared at her. Should he say it? Should he ask her? He knew he would never get over it if he didn’t. And he wanted to get over it. Her dress scarcely covered her, wrapping her no better than the skin of a summer nut when it bulges ripe from its casing.

“Who’s Simon?” he asked.

She sat stunned a moment. Then her face twisted. “Rebecca,” she said. “I knew it.”

“What about her?” Andrew backpedaled quickly.

“I lied to my father to set up this weekend, you know. I lied to my mother to get permission to use the house. I told her I was having Kathy and Lizzie and Louise over, all my old friends from North London Collegiate, because we haven’t seen each other, and it was going to be so much fun, couldn’t we please. And she knew it was balls. She kept saying, You were not such good friends with those girls. And she’s right. I wasn’t.” She looked at him. “I take a risk. Only to have you”—she spat out the word, disgusted—“take their side—again. You fling it in my face. Why didn’t you say something before we got on the bloody tube?” she snapped. “I would have left you there.”

Andrew said nothing. He knew he was ruining it. Spoiling their weekend—and all that was supposed to go with it. But he didn’t know what else to do.

“Well, if you want to ask me a question, ask it.” Persephone was nearly shaking in anger.

“I just did. Who’s Simon?”

“Simon was my boyfriend,” she said. “There.”

“Was?”

Andrew watched, bemused, as Persephone glugged half a pint of beer. She didn’t answer. Should he leave it at that? But no; it was not enough.

“Rebecca,” he said, “seemed to think you were still together.”

“Well, Rebecca is a cunt!”

Heads turned: half amused, half surprised. A few murmurs of commentary.

“Did you and Simon go out for a long time?”

“Stop it, Andrew!”

“How do you think I feel?” he countered. “I thought we were . . . I don’t know . . . going out . . .” She snorted. “Then I hear this . . .”

“Slander? Hearsay? Gossip? Malevolent crap from some stupid bitch?” Now people at nearby tables were turning to stare, conversation dying around them. “And you drag me all the way here to throw it in my face? When I’m taking you home with me?”

“All I wanted to know was whether . . .”

“Whether I’m a slut,” she finished. “It never goes away, with you. And I had a nice surprise for you. A surprise that I’d planned out. Did you know that? But I’m clearly wasting my time.”

She slugged back the remainder of her beer, banged the empty glass on the table, and marched out.

Andrew slumped in his chair.

His neighbors eyed him. He tried to decide whether to stay in London drinking up his five pounds, or do the prudent thing and go straight back to school.

He finished his beer.

He walked outside. There were some picnic tables there, in an enclosure, with beer logo’d umbrellas over each table.

Persephone sat at one, her back to him.

He hesitated. Almost walked off. But that would be cold. She was there. She was waiting. It was a peace offering. Take it. Cautiously, he approached. He waited, a step behind her, in her peripheral vision. She said nothing. So he sat down on the bench next to her. Still nothing. He lit a cigarette. He handed it over to her. He held it there a moment. Then, as if stirring from deep thought, her white, slender hand reached for it. She took it. Puffed. She shook her magnificent hair back, out of her face. Her sunglasses shielded her eyes.

“There’s something very satisfying,” she observed, “about the word cunt.”

“It’s a great Anglo-Saxon word,” Andrew agreed.

“It really is,” she replied. Then, after a moment: “Aren’t you going to offer me another drink?”

He practically leapt from the seat. Reconciliation. Hope. He returned with two more pints and a receipt for a credit card charge to his father’s account. Dad be damned. The sun winked through a thin spot in the woolly sky.

“What do you want to know about Simon?” Persephone asked when he sat down. “Let’s get it over with.”

Andrew’s throat tightened. “Are you still in love with him?”

“I hate him.”

“Why?”

“Honestly, I don’t like to talk about it. I could kill Rebecca.” She added: “You have nothing to worry about.”

“How long has it been since you’ve, you know . . .”

“Seen him?” she finished. “Months and months.”

They went through a lot together, Rebecca had said.

Don’t ask it, you idiot! She’s talking to you again. You got your answer.

He decided he would try starting the date over.

“You know,” he said, “that’s a lovely dress.”

She smiled, a growing rosy grin on those enormous, puffy lips. She understood. She raised her sunglasses.

“Why thank you, Andrew. And how nice of you to meet me today.”

“What’s my surprise?”

“You’ll see.”

Then Andrew asked her about herself. (That was what you were supposed to do on a date, wasn’t it?) Persephone, charged with adrenaline and an edgy tone of self-mockery, let it all hang out. Where did her father get his title? Was he a knight? A lord?

Sort of, Persephone answered. Baronet. It’s a shit title, really. Some seventeenth-century Vine bought it off the king, who used the money to kill Irish. That’s what my mother says. Drives my dad crazy.

And what was the deal with her parents? Were they divorced?

Her mother lived half the year in Greece. They were old-fashioned. Stayed married but hated each other. They fight over me. It’s like a contest, she said. I’m the sole judge in this endless Olympics, and they’re the U.S. and the Chinese, bribing me, sucking up, showing off, cutting down the other one. They haven’t had sex in twenty years. And where do you think it all goes? All the lust? They must have it. They are of the species. . . .

Andrew felt buzzed from the beers—the thin remnants of their second pints at the bottom of their glasses, and they still had had nothing to eat—and he didn’t really know if there was an answer to this question. But then it came.

It all goes to me, she finished—she was drunk now, slurring her words, telling him this almost aggressively, as if saying, Hey, you want to hear my shit? You want to see how worthless and scabby I am?—and he half wished he was not hearing it, because he could tell these things were painful to her, but he was also fascinated (maybe his baggage was not so heavy in comparison; he felt pedestrian, in fact, compared to this pan-European erotic dysfunction). Phone calls and dinners and presents, like I’m dating them both, trying to keep each one at bay so the other doesn’t go mad with jealousy. Monitoring how much attention the other gets. If it gets to be too much, threatening to take me to Athens or to Harrow altogether. That’s when I started sneaking out. Just . . . running away from all of it. That’s when I started going with Simon. The bad years. I was fifteen. The last time they lived together. (“Going with” . . . was that a euphemism? At fifteen? Andrew marveled. He remembered himself at fifteen with his learner’s permit and a brand-new Adam’s apple gawking around green Connecticut, just having shed his interest in manga.) She’d call me boulaiki, Persephone continued. Boulaikimou. My little bird. Very sweet of course. It also means, my little pussy.

Andrew coughed.

I’m getting pissed, said Persephone. Do you think I’m horrible yet?

Of course not, he said. You’re shocked, she countered. No, he said, even though he was; but he said it, because to him, here, in the heavy light, under the London sky, plastered, tragic, coming out of her dress and her pretenses, she was the dirtiest and most lovable girl he had ever met. Why don’t we go, he said.

THEY KISSED IN the hall. The alcohol on an empty stomach made him dizzy when he closed his eyes. They went to the living room. The house was a beachy combination of pink furniture, silver gewgaws, white walls, and seashell-themed everything. They kissed on the couch and moved down to the floor. Andrew untied her sash, stripped her dress off her, then her bra. He licked her breasts, tugged at her panties. They had been waiting for this. For weeks. It had all been building up. Now let’s do it, a voice inside him urged. Beer sloshed inside him. He went through the motions. Get her clothes off, check. Stimulate sex organs . . .

“Ouch,” she said. “Wait.”

She readjusted and helped him pull her panties off. Her legs were white and smooth and tapered; amazing his brain registered and there it is, the boulaiki, brown and casual there in the daylight. He felt nervous, suddenly. It was like meeting a famous person, a personal hero, with only a minute’s notice. Hey wait I’m not ready, not worthy. He felt sweat at the base of his back. Fear. That wasn’t good. Not good at all. He touched her. She was okay. Almost wet enough. He rubbed. But it all seemed to be taking too long. The voice nagged him. Get it done. He tried to enter her. But it wasn’t happening. She reached for him, to take him in her hand, but that was worse—now she would see he wasn’t hard. The sweat in his lower back became sweat all over him. He felt hot, oppressed. He pulled away.

“You okay, Andrew?”

“Not really. I drank too much.”

They leaned against the sofa together, their bare bottoms on the carpet. Suddenly they were very accustomed to each other naked. Too much so. She had belly rolls. He had ingrown thigh hairs. It was as if they had caromed past the exit on the highway where all the buildup and the Victorian anticipation happened, and veered straight into—what? A sort of jaded nullity. Just two naked bodies already bored with each other. Andrew had never been inside this house before and within twenty minutes he was in the living room, naked, and in despair. He laid his head back on the sofa and groaned.

“Want me to go down on you?” she asked.

“I just want some water.”

“I scared you off, didn’t I? With all that about . . .”

“No, no,” he objected. “Can I get some water?”

“If it makes you feel any better,” she said, making no move to fetch him water, “I can’t have an orgasm.”

“Can’t?”

“Can’t. Don’t.” She watched his expression closely. She wanted to make sure she hadn’t gone too far. Scared him away completely.

“Seriously?”

She shrugged.

“Well,” he said, at last. “We’re quite a pair.”

TO CHEER HIM up, Persephone dragged Andrew on a long trek to a cooler neighborhood thronged with leather-jacketed hipsters, and to a boutique where she bought him—on Sir Alan’s credit card this time—jeans that actually fit, a vintage shirt, and a jacket; then pulled him into a hair salon. Why do I need a haircut? he protested. The stylist, a woman named Charlie, had platinum hair and multiple earrings.

“Time to get rid of the Led Zeppelin,” Persephone told Charlie.

Thirty minutes later Andrew looked in the mirror.

“Now I’m a choirboy,” he declared.

To his surprise, Persephone jumped into the chair next to him. “I want to look exactly the same.” He watched her curls mingle with his on the salon floor before a dreadlocked assistant came and swept them away.

“TIME FOR YOUR surprise,” Persephone said as they left the salon.

“Is that what you were texting about?” he said. Persephone had been furiously thumbing her phone during his makeover.

“Maybe,” she said.

She led him on a long, twisting walk through a darkening London to a midscale commercial neighborhood that hosted a string of Middle Eastern restaurants with fluorescent lights, and hookahs in the windows, with men seated in pairs, puffing at them. Persephone led the way inside one of these, sidled up to the seats at the bar, with a direct view of the kitchen, and instructed Andrew to watch the best chicken butcher in London. They watched him slice apart several dozen birds, whacking their wings off with single glances of his cleaver, his hands shiny and larded with guts. They ordered platters. Andrew shoveled the food into his mouth. Thick hot sauce, pasty tahini, warm pita—it felt like his first meal in months. His head rang and his nose ran from the heat.

A voice came over their shoulders. “Persephone?”

A voluptuous redhead, freckled, and in a black cocktail dress, hugged Persephone, who introduced her as Agatha. Agatha hugged Andrew and kissed both his cheeks, then looked at him and Persephone and made a face and hooted, You’re not boyfriend-girlfriend, you’re twins! Persephone beamed. Agatha’s date was behind her, a tall, sharp-featured Indian in a dark suit, Vivek. He carried a plastic bag. Agatha, Persephone explained, was in her first year at Cambridge, and was her best friend growing up. They spent summers in Greece together. (By now these casual references to a life of exotic privilege rolled off Andrew; they merely added incrementally to his intoxication with Persephone and her world.) The newcomers drew up stools, Vivek immediately noticing and marveling at the butchery, Agatha eyeballing Andrew and sending knowing glances to Persephone, clearly the best-friend-who-has-heard-about-him-and-is-dying-of-curiosity. (Andrew was glad he had changed into his new clothes; his khakis lay folded in a shopping bag at his feet.) Normally Andrew would feel threatened by an unfamiliar couple materializing on a date, but he was flush with nutrition and with the swirl of London, and he embraced it.

Vivek asked the burly man at the bar for some plastic cups. “I’ll be flogged if they catch me,” he said to Andrew, privately. “Eighty lashes. They’re Muslims here. If you hadn’t noticed.” Vivek reached into his plastic bag and gripped the neck of a frosty champagne bottle. The cork popped softly, expertly.

Vivek poured golden, bubbling champagne into the clear plastic cups and they toasted. The burly man taking orders glanced at them angrily but allowed them to drink.

“So,” said Vivek. “The girls tell me you’re seeing the Lot ghost.”

Andrew turned to Persephone. Her cat’s-eyes glistened, amused and proud that she had kept her surprise a secret until now. But Andrew grew grim at the reminder of what was waiting for him back at school.

“You went to Harrow?” Andrew asked.

Vivek nodded. “I was in the Lot. I saw it, too.”

“Are you serious?” Andrew sat up straight.

“In my second year my parents divorced,” Vivek explained. “My brother and I were not getting along—he was in Fifth Form. I was picked on very badly. I was miserable and lonely and all those horrible things that get worse because they are happening to you at school, and you have nobody.” He said all this with a kind of matter-of-fact ease. Andrew noticed that Vivek wore a pocket square, and that the weave of his jacket was silky and many-threaded, and he wondered what breed of international gentleman this could be, whose life was so multifarious and rich that minor family tragedies were reduced to mere anecdotes, lyrically told, while pouring champagne in a North African chicken bar. “My escape was the bath. Aha! I see from your face I’m on the right track.”

Agatha and Persephone looked back and forth between the two young men, delighted by this mystery. Vivek refilled their glasses and continued.

“I was even skinnier than I am now, but I had to play on the house rugger team. One time I left the game early after being completely crushed, and I went back very angry. You know, to hell with these English people and their game. So I was going to transgress. I was going to take a hot bath in the prefect’s bath.” He smiled and raised his eyebrows to emphasize what a taboo this was. “So I filled the tub. Steam was rising. I couldn’t wait to steep my aching limbs. But when I took off my towel, I saw a face in the water.”

The girls made a show of shivering and oohing.

“I sprang back like I had an electric shock!” said Vivek with a laugh. “It was just there. Not like it was actually in the water, but like the surface of the bath was a window, and he was looking through it right at me. I ran to my room, completely naked. I was terrified.”

“What did the face look like?” Andrew asked.

Vivek started to answer. “No, you should tell me,” he said, instead. “And you know what, before you answer,” said Vivek, “give me a piece of paper.” Persephone handed him their bill, a long strip of cash-register receipt, and a pen. Vivek began doodling, hiding his work with his hand. Then he theatrically folded the bill and placed it in his pocket. “I just drew a picture of what I saw. Now: tell me what you saw.”

“He has white hair,” Andrew began, finding his voice suddenly small. “Sunken cheeks. And blue eyes. He has a speckling across his face. Like a rash.”

Vivek frowned.

“That’s creepy, man.” He nodded gravely. “Same guy. I don’t remember the rash or the cheeks. But the white hair—definitely.” He took the bill and placed it on the counter.

They crowded around to gaze at the figure he had drawn. It was a long face with a mop of blank white for hair, and Vivek had carved in the eyes deeply with repeated pen strokes, as if the memory of those in particular had not left him.

Andrew swallowed. He heard the girls commenting, but his eyes were glued to the scribbled figure.

“You all right, man?” Vivek said to him quietly.

“Yeah,” he managed.

Vivek patted him on the shoulder with a grimace of commiseration.

Before long their group bundled out into the street. Agatha and Vivek had a party to go to.

“Don’t worry,” called Vivek over his shoulder as Agatha pulled him down the block toward a taxi. “The ghost never harmed anyone. That I know of !” He grinned and waved.

PERSEPHONE LED HIM upstairs. The house was warm, stale, sterile; her bedroom was anonymous, serving now as a guest room. They stood before the dressing mirror. They saw their reflections together, symmetrical images of the two sexes, long white necks, dark curls.

Andrew placed his fingers on her neck. Persephone sighed. She still wore her wrap dress. Andrew peeled it off. Her skin was moist, sticky, vulnerable. They fell to the bed. She eased backward and guided him into her. The only sound in the silent, sealed house was their shallow panting. Only later, half asleep, did he remember, and sit up and whisper, Did you . . . ? Even though he knew, or at least suspected, the answer. Persephone found his hand in the dark and held it to her chest in a tight, possessive grip.