After This

Joining the crowds in the long hallway, Clare checked the books in her arms. She was headed for geometry. This year, much to her own surprise, it was the one class where she felt sure of everything.

Her husband was exquisite. Ginger-haired, as the British would have put it, but the two American girls would have said ginger as well-although not for the color but the taste: gingersnaps, gingerbread, ginger ale. Some mild and easygoing spice that nevertheless prickled the tongue.

He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by wineglasses. He wore brown corduroy pants and a shirt that was a soft, autumn-evoking shade of gold, an ascot-a pattern of greens and browns-tied loosely at his throat. His ginger hair curled over a broad forehead that might have been deeply ta

“Loo paper,” he said by way of greeting. And held up a single sheet. “The cheapest kind. Nothing like it for getting lint off the crystal.”

Professor Wallace had a hand to the small of their backs, ushering them in. “David,” she whispered, reverentially, bending to place her cheeks beside theirs, as if David were some distance away, on a pedestal perhaps, and, like his namesake, carved out of white marble. “My husband.” And then, straightening, raising her voice. “Two more of our American students.”

Gracefully, he stretched out his legs and stood, sweeping up two of the glasses in one hand, the faint sound of a bell ringing. He studied their faces carefully as they introduced themselves. He was not as tall as he’d seemed sitting, not as tall as his wife, but it made no difference to the girls, who were just now noticing the long apricot lashes. “Some wine?” he asked. “We have a lovely Chianti.” And then turned to a sideboard, marble-topped and piled with books. And then turned back. Asked over his shoulder, “Or do you American women prefer whiskey?”

“Wine, thank you,” A

A

Professor Wallace’s face wore the expression A

As if the injunction had actually been spoken, Grace stuck her nose into the stubby glass as soon as it was in her hand and took a large gulping swallow, sliding the ice cubes into her lip and knocking the rim of the glass against the bridge of her glasses. Coughing a little as she swallowed, of course.

Mr. Wallace, David, was either the most gracious man on earth or simply oblivious to the pretense and the struggle. He took Grace’s elbow as if this were only one of many evenings in which they had met for a drink and a chat-as if, A

There were piles of books beside the chair as well-old books with dark covers, the room was scented with them-and as soon as she sat, a dark Siamese cat curved around the pile to her left and brushed itself against her legs. “That’s Runty,” Professor Wallace said. She herself was wrapped in a large velvet shawl, as black as her lecturing robes but spotted with gold beads, trimmed with a bit of lace. She had lifted her glass from somewhere-another crystal goblet, only half full of the nice Chianti-and now held it beside her ear as she stood, looking down on the cat, one arm across her middle, the other resting its elbow in her hand. “So named for the obvious reasons,” she said. “Bozo’s around here somewhere. And Tommy, the tiger-striped.”

Both girls added to their growing list of things to love about Professor Wallace the fact that her cats had nonliterary names. “But Runty,” she said, “is the sycophant.”

And that she did not ask them, as an American professor might do, if they knew the meaning of the word.

Six weeks ago, the American students had stumbled out of Professor Wallace’s first lecture with their breaths held, tripping over one another to be the first to say, out of earshot of their humorless British counterparts, “My God, the Wicked Witch of the West,” to imitate her accent as she said, trilling it, “Edmund Spencer’s The Faerie Queen.” But six weeks into the term, they were all enchanted. She had only to turn up a corner of her thin mouth in the middle of a lecture, or to raise a single eyebrow as she recited, or to touch her hand to her breast as she made some aside (“As You Like It” she had said, “not, necessarily, my dear ones, as I like it”) to get them all gri

When they discovered, on a bulletin board crowded with Carnival flyers and club schedules, tutorial appointments and reading lists, a small index card that said Professor Wallace is home every Thursday evening, followed by brief directions-the bus number, the shop on the corner, “fourth house in, red shutters”-it had taken some time for any of them to get the courage to take her up on what the English students told them was simply an opportunity to have a nice meal. But one of the American boys-Caleb, a bit of a sycophant himself-had gone along with a pair of African students in the third week of the term and returned to tell the other Americans of curry and Sauternes and incredible conversation. One by one, the others made plans to go, A

David bent down to scoop Runty from her feet. “I don’t mind,” she said, but then he was crouched before her, brushing the cat hair from her trousers, touching her instep and her knee, the cat pressed to his golden shirt. “Come what may,” he said softly. “He’ll be in your pocket by the end of the evening.” He smiled up at her, his face rising over her lap as he straightened. The strong cheekbones and the dimpled chin, the adorable lock over the forehead. He paused, speaking to her from just the other side of her knees. He lowered his voice, as if to share a secret. “We don’t want to encourage him too early in the proceedings.”