at Grace and Annie with some resentment, as if the ratio of Americans to English in the room suddenly made the occasion less interesting. Mr. Wallace stood, there was the bustle of introductions and new drinks. For a moment, the music disappeared. Monica and Nate were a couple-a bond they had formed at the same time Annie and Grace had formed theirs, in the five hours of pillow talk that was the transatlantic flight. Ben was, perhaps, Nate’s version of Grace. A friend from their New York campus who held on to Nate perhaps a little too tightly now that they were abroad together, comfort in a strange land. He was a big guy, a little thick around the jaw, with dark curly hair. At his side he held a bottle in a brown paper bag, grasped by the neck as if he had just taken a swig of it and planned to take another. He greeted Mr. Wallace and said, “Beer would be great,” before he seemed to remember it was there. Awkwardly, he handed it to Professor Wallace and she said, “Thank you,” and “Lovely,” as she slipped it out of the bag. “Drambuie,” she said to her husband as she placed it on the server. “How nice,” he said. Together, Ben and Nate made Professor Wallace’s cozy living room seem smaller. They looked so starkly American, so comically American male that it seemed the room should have filled with the odor of gunsmoke and horse manure.
Beside them, David Wallace seemed not only the member of some more advanced, more refined civilization but a creature who must also be ranked a good deal higher on the phylogenetic scale.
“Sit, sit,” David was saying once again. He had poured Chianti for Monica and opened bottles of beer for both boys. Grace caught Annie’s eye and patted the empty cushion beside her, tilting her head, pleading, and against her better judgment, Annie stood and crossed over to sit with her friend. Monica took the velvet chair, Nate at her feet, his elbow in her lap. Ben went to another chair, a gold ladderback with a dark turquoise seat. It looked somewhat fragile under his thick thighs in their new jeans, although he declined, smiling, when David offered him his own chair beside the couch. “This is good,” he said, the brown bottle held between his legs. Annie could see him regretting his decision to come along with Monica and Nate, and thought of her mother’s injunction never to be a third wheel.
“Yes, well,” David Wallace said as his wife distributed pate and crackers, olives and celery to the new guests. Annie prayed that he wouldn’t again mention Binghamton because she knew if he did she would think less of him. “Will there be more of you?” he asked the assemblage. “Tonight? Any more of you coming? That you know?”
The Americans looked at each other, frowning, shaking their heads. Grace offered, eagerly, that she didn’t know.
“You don’t consult?” Mr. Wallace said, smiling. “All you American students? It’s rather remarkable to have five of you here all at once. I thought perhaps it was part of a plan.”
They continued to look at one another, shaking their heads, “No,” they said. It was clear the two boys were wary of Mr. Wallace; they suspected he was making fun of them.
“No, of course not, David,” Professor Wallace said. “They hardly travel en masse. They’re an independent bunch, our American students. Aren’t you?” she said, looking around the room. “You’re made to come together, what is it, once a month, to see how you’re getting on, but that’s it, isn’t it?”
“Actually,” Grace said, “it’s every fortnight.”
“Is it?” Professor Wallace asked.
“It’s ridiculous,” Nate said from Monica’s knees. “I quit going.” Monica put her hand in his curly hair. She was loose-limbed, slim, and large-breasted. Her face was plain but there was a luster about her skin and her hair, a luster of sex and of good health. She shook his head a little, playfully gripping his scalp. “You were at the last one,” she said in a tone that seemed to imply that the last one had ended in some mad sexual transaction.
Grace had turned to Mr. Wallace, explaining. “Only a few of us live in the same halls,” she said, piling on the Britishisms (Annie, stubbornly, still said dorms). “We’re scattered about campus precisely so we don’t stay to ourselves. It’s sort of the point of the whole program.”
“And yet, here you all are,” David Wallace said. “All on the same evening.”
Quietly, Professor Wallace slipped out of the room, through the door to what Annie guessed was the kitchen. She wished for the courage to join her, but felt the anchor of Grace, sitting beside her, who was now saying, “Yes, isn’t it funny?” and once more raising her glass.
“Great minds think alike,” Ben said, leaning over his lap on the small chair. Whether he intended to or not, he sounded bitter.
Mr. Wallace then questioned the three about their hometowns. Monica was from Long Island, too, and Nate from outside Albany. Ben was from Staten Island, “A city boy,” Mr. Wallace said, to which Ben replied, with a tilt of his beer bottle, “I hate New York City.”
David Wallace nodded, touched his silk cravat. They could now smell their dinner in the kitchen. “Unfortunate,” he said, as if resisting his own disappointment in the boy. “Yet understandable. No doubt you’re a Wordsworth fellow as well,” he added.
But Ben seemed to miss the connection. He glanced at Monica and Nate before he spoke. “What’s a Wordsworth fellow?” he asked.
Now David Wallace looked puzzled. “A fan,” he said, as if the word were a colloquialism he wasn’t quite sure of. “Of Wordsworth. Since you don’t like the city, I assumed you’d be a devotee of someone like Wordsworth. The romantics. The pastoral poets.”
Ben was looking at Mr. Wallace with what Annie had come to recognize as a particularly American look. He suspected Mr. Wallace was putting him on the spot and even before he’d demonstrated his own lack of knowledge, he was preparing his case for how useless what he didn’t know really was. “Wordsworth’s okay,” he said, with some caution. “I guess. I don’t know a lot about him.” So fuck you, was only implied.
Mr. Wallace asked, pleasantly, “Well, what inspired you to study in England then?” and Ben laughed once, through his nose, and raised the bottle in his hand. “The beer,” he said.
Nate dropped his head, amused at his friend. Monica leaned down over her lap to whisper something in his ear, her thick hair falling to shield them both.
Mr. Wallace turned to the two girls. “Well, that’s honest at least,” he said, although his face, Annie thought, also said he was sorry the conversation had taken such a boorish turn. He looked at both of their glasses. “Let me refresh those for you,” he said, gently, and took the glasses out of their hands, out of their laps. Grace said, “Thank you,” looking up at him, her throat and chin growing flushed. “It won’t be long,” he said, kindly. Annie knew he meant until dinner, but felt he might just as well have said, Till we’re alone again, the way Grace’s breath seemed to catch on the words. The way her fingers, reaching up to touch her frames, were trembling.
Just as he returned with their fresh drinks (over his shoulder, “Can I get you gentlemen another. Young lady?”) Professor Wallace came through the door again with a tray stacked with dinner plates and silverware and a huge pot that rilled the room with the woodsy odor of meat and mushrooms. In what struck the girls as marvelous choreography, one neither had ever seen in her own home, Mr. Wallace swung back into the kitchen and emerged with another large pot and then, without a single word of instruction between them, the two began to fill plates with pasta, to ladle sauce, to distribute plush throw pillows in silky Indian prints that seemed to appear miraculously from behind the couch. “You’ll want these on your laps,” Professor Wallace told the students. “To shorten the distance from plate to lips,” she said. She shook out huge napkins to place over each pillow; she might have tucked another just under their chins, the way they all, suddenly, with pillows and napkins and plates of steaming food on their laps, felt swaddled, childish and also cared for.
Mr. Wallace took his place beside Grace again, with only a napkin, no pillow on his knee. Professor Wallace made the rounds with a small glass dish and a tiny silver spoon, sprinkling
Then she sat with her own next to Annie.
“This is delicious,” Monica said. Nate had abandoned her knee and her lap and was hunched now over his plate. He may even have moved away from her a bit. “Oh God,” he said, looking up. There was a fleck of sauce on his chin. “So good.” It was a kind of moan. “The food in hall is so freaking bad.”
Professor Wallace smiled. “Poor dears,” she said. “I’m sure it takes some getting used to.”
Beside Annie, Grace was struggling with plate and pillow and fork and the stubby glass she still held in her hand and just as Annie was about to suggest she put it down, Mr. Wallace leaned over and took it from her and put it gently on the small table at her elbow. “There,” he said softly. “Easier to manage.” And Grace touched her glasses and nodded and said, “Thank you.” Now her skin flushed up over her chin and down, Annie noticed, the length of her plump, pale arms.
David Wallace was questioning them again. “Where are you going and where have you been?” he asked. Monica and Nate had been to Stratford and Bath and London. Annie and Grace to London and Stonehenge. Ben
