“God, I need to piss,” Niamh says.
Viola lingers outside of an old Gothic church while Niamh runs in to use the toilet, thumbing through cheap cardstock prints of famous paintings.
“Anything good?” Niamh asks when she comes out.
Viola plucks out a grotesque, prancing Botero, its clownish fat rippling along behind it.
“Sexy.”
“Get it, I dare you.”
“Come on.”
“I’ll buy it for you. But you have to promise you’ll hang it over your bed.”
“Okay, fine.” Viola feels impish, watching Niamh pay for the print in coins that still feel comically large in her hands.
“You have to tell all your lovers it’s serious.”
“Ha ha.” They both know she doesn’t have any of those. Niamh has a habit of poking around Viola’s horrible virginity, a function of her pickiness, her quest for the ideal in all things.
Niamh pauses at a corkboard and removes from her bag a stack of freshly printed pages advertising an experimental production ofThe Bacchaeset in a techno rave.
“Rowan said if I put these up I could have free wine.”
“Who’s Rowan?”
“You know Rowan.”
“Oh. That Rowan.”
Rowan once walked in on Viola coming out of the shower on staircase seven, sopping and naked, and she had screamed (truly screamed), and his evening on mushrooms had taken a turn for the worse. Men were a rare sight at Sylvia’s, their all-female college, let alone six-foot-tall men in fur coats. She found it difficult to forgive him.
“Oh, look, it’s that guy,” Niamh says, pointing at another flyer. “From that film.”
“Who? Oh.”
Of course, it’s Orson Grey. She still watches all of his films, including the risqué psychodrama where he walked stark naked through a car wash in the dead of night. Hollywood seems unsure what to do with him these days, his heartthrob status passing with his youth. She’s followedthe turbulent relationship with the Armenian supermodel (off-again). Of course he still features in her imaginative landscape. Of course her breath catches in her throat when the camera zooms and the light hits his lip just so. Is it funny yet, the heft of her crush? Is she ready to surrender his memory to hopeless humor? No.
“I can’t believe they keep asking these celebs to the Union,” Niamh is complaining. “Absolute star-fuckers, if you ask me. Have some genuine political discourse for Christ’s sake.”
A key turns inside of her, an engine igniting.It’s happening.The cosmic approach she spent years imagining, as inevitable as it has always felt. The only obstacle is The Union: the beating political heart of the university, full of future cabinet ministers and technocrats, a place where loud voices carry and men (still, largely men) grow exercised about freedom of speech and rituals of debate. Generally, she avoids it. Its denizens are experiencing their time at university in an entirely different way, as though it were already behind them. As though they are simply steering their past selves from their lives beyond this city, using them as conduits for weightier midlife aims. Does it make her equally guilty, the sensation she is having now, that everything she has done to get here has only been a prelude to this encounter?
After Niamh has finished stealing a pin from (and balling up) an advertisement for the Conservatives Association, they cruise toward their feminine enclave. Across the ancient green, buses are collecting frazzled tour groups. Darkness descends so early here, and if you don’t look carefully, you might collide with a cyclist bearing some improbable object—a double bass, a Christmas tree.
“Pub?” Niamh asks. It’s a sensible suggestion, under the dimming sky. But no. She needs to run, to think.
“I’ll catch you later,” Viola says. Legs activating already, carrying her through the porter’s lodge, past the mail room slotted with personal pigeonholes, circling the manicured quad, skipping up staircase seven and into her room (reassuringthunkof the door), jeans, shirt strippedto the floor, her articulated ribs, her unprovocative breasts. And then it begins: the binding of her chest, the fluorescent green shorts and top, hair pulled back tight now, curls coerced onto her scalp.
Quickly, into the park, past the tennis courts, over the familiar bridge, the rhythm of her own breath carrying her. The Cam, the distant turrets. The rushes bowing over to kiss the water, the familiar unfamiliar faces bleeding into one another, into the peripheral park, the falling darkness, families clearing out, pulling away. Consider, again, the value of a promise: an obligation created by an act of will, a sacrifice of freedom. The foundation of monogamy, trust, accountability.That’s romance, right?Don’t say it if you can’t keep it—faithfulness is the bottom line. And don’t stop moving when you get to the road in front of The Granta pub, not even if you see anyone you know, not even if the person you see is Orson Grey.
Orson Grey.
Standing outside chatting to a group of girls in the smoking area.
No, this is certainly not how you are meant to encounter him, sweating and unbodying, thinking in philosophical terms about the failings of your mother. It isn’t your fault if you make eye contact, if you hold it for a moment too long, waiting ostensibly for the street in front of you to clear (it is already clear). Keep moving, don’t look back, don’t shatter the future just yet.
Six hours later she finds herself predictably with Niamh, at the after-party forThe Bacchae, exchanging gushy comments about the quality of everyone’s performance for tiny—but crucially, free—plastic cups of wine.
