“Everyone’s a third cousin,” Gaz said, twirling her and dipping her with surprising grace.
My edges were fuzzy, thanks to the alcohol. Everyone’s edges were fuzzy a lot of the time at Oxford, which is probably why most of these details never leaked: People think they’re telling the truth, but no one can remember for sure. Sometimes when we went out, I’d get a phone number written on my hand, and then forget and wake up with only half of it still there. Other times I’d stumble home on my own. But, more often than I ever intended, I’d end up with Clive. I had no interest in a relationship that would constrict my time in England—which makes me laugh out loud now, given that I ended up in the most constricting relationship in England—and it wasn’t the shrewdest move to jump into bed with a guy living practically on top of me, but the whiskey wasn’t always on my side. Fortunately, Clive was. He swore leaving Oxford with a steady girlfriend would make it too hard to build a serious journalism career, because he’d need freedom to chase a story (or presumably, an attractive source), making our friends-with-benefits arrangement mutually satisfying.
Mostly. Making out with Clive sometimes felt like sucking face with a math experiment. He fixated on a weird numerical pattern, nine turns of the tongue clockwise and nine turns the other way, like he’d memorized instructions from a magazine. It seemed odd at first, a guy with so much else going for him having so little game, but the longer I watched him with Nick the more I understood Clive did himself no favors. He took his role as Nick’s wingman-in-chief almost as seriously as his journalistic aspirations. In fact, generations of men like Clive had spent their lives making sure their own Nicks didn’t get snookered by opportunists or social climbers or enemies, nor poisoned, nor impulsively married to the peasant girl selling flowers on Tottenham Court Road. Whether Nick wanted to be or not, he was the sun, and everyone revolved around him. And anyone who resented this arrangement had the very fabric of the universe working against them: Like me and Lacey, like gravity itself, it simply was.
Chapter Three
When Nick and I got engaged, a newspaper column claimed I’d come to Oxford to sweep Nick off his feet as a way of legitimizing my father’s fridge-furniture empire to the world—which is patently absurd, not least because the Coucherator was already the top-selling appliance in Luxembourg. The truth is, I rarely thought about Nick at first, and saw him even less. He’d been absent from communal meals in the Dining Hall, and wasn’t particularly gregarious during passing encounters in the hallway. I got more information from the papers than from living with him: There was a story about him spending his reclusive mother’s birthday with her at Prince Richard’s country estate, Trewsbury House, complete with grainy photos of him exchanging a terse-looking handshake with his father (NICK AND DICK: NOT SO THICK? the headline wondered); and a gossipy tidbit claiming he’d gotten his teeth whitened after an heiress named Davinia snubbed his summer advances because she thought they were too yellow. Clive, who seemed to relish having the inside scoop, dissected these for me at length whenever we walked to lunch or the market (he swore Nick’s teeth were lighter). I knew Lacey was dying of curiosity from her room at Cornell, so I dutifully listened for repeatable tidbits, but frankly, I had other priorities. The first of which involved giving Lady Bollocks no reason to poison my Weetabix.
And the second of which should have been school, but this was my first trip overseas, and everything outside academia felt so much more alluring to me: the identical array of gothic arches on the Bodleian Library; the Bridge of Sighs, an ornate, arcing enclosure gracefully connecting two parts of Hertford College; the snarky gargoyles atop the spire of the town’s biggest church. They begged to be sketched, and I answered whenever I could, often in the peaceful, chilly morning hours when I could pick a spot and let the town wake up around me. Drawing has always taken me out of my own head. At Oxford, it helped me be in the moment completely, instead of wondering what Lacey was up to, or which baseball announcers were bugging Dad the most. Despite how welcoming most people had been, I missed my family. I missed knowing which way to look before crossing the street. I missed network TV and American football and the way Diet Coke tastes in the States. But with a sheet of paper and a pencil in front of me, I’m home.
On the last morning of First Week, I got up predawn and headed across the street to Christ Church. Ostensibly I wanted to draw the glow of sunrise over the college’s meadow, all wild grass and pastured cows and squawking geese, but the Iowan in me also itched to stretch her legs, and my body demanded cardiovascular activity to offset the noble sport of drinking I’d undertaken. I started down the mud-and-gravel trail, under the canopy of tall, spiky trees whose leaves were preparing for their seasonal suicide leap, and snaked around the river—blissfully alone with my sketchbook and my thoughts, interrupted only by the occasional bark of the coxswain and the rhythmic splash of the crew team’s oars reaching me through the mist. The road led me past a quaint folly bridge arching over the Isis that would fit perfectly into a series I was doing on the curves of Oxford. I hopped off the path and scrambled around the wooded edge in search of a flat rock to sit on, so lost in trying not to fall over a tree’s root that instead I tripped over the outstretched legs of a man in a hooded sweatshirt. I let out a shrill yelp and he leapt to his feet, knocking over his light and landing in a weird defensive position.
“Shit!” he said.
I squinted at him. “Nick?”