Last Enchantments, The by Finch Charles

Author:Finch, Charles [Finch, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2014-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

At unexpected moments, not very often, I glance up from whatever I’m doing and realize that I have a longing to be inside an airport, on my way somewhere else.

When I returned to Oxford it was about the second of January, and there were still six days until school started again. Not everyone was back. The people who were back didn’t have much time, it seemed; Sophie was working hard on her long essay, and I was trying not to stake too much hope to our date for the James Bond bop, Anil was still in Mumbai, Anneliese and her family were visiting the Azores, and after that MCR meeting Ella and Tom were in and out of each other’s rooms at all hours. I had assumed the three of us would spend our time together, but Tom, with a fervor unusual for him, seemed to want only Ella’s company. It didn’t bother me. The first two or three weeks are always that way.

So I slipped away like a Bedouin one morning and boarded the early train to Paris. I had a friend there, a girl named Kristen Johnson, and I had e-mailed her the night before, asking if I could still visit.

“I’m dying of boredom, you have to come,” she wrote, and it was she who came to meet me in the open air of the Gare du Nord, which was windy and cold, a few snowflakes hanging in the gray air. I hadn’t been there since I spent three months interning at the International Herald Tribune one summer during college.

“Will Baker,” she said, a big smile on her face. She gave me a hug. “I haven’t seen you in forever.”

We knew each other from the brief, endless, intense final month of the campaign. She had been my best friend there other than Alison. “Since Ohio, right?”

“Jesus, that was shitty, wasn’t it?”

“It still sucks.”

“And you don’t even remember that terrible Gore campaign.”

“Aren’t you younger than I am?”

“Right, but I took a semester off of college to work for him. You remember the election—come on, this way—but I mean being inside that campaign when the recount was going on, watching him concede to Bush. It was fucked up.”

“Did you see about—”

“Lieberman?”

“Yeah, Lieberman. What a dickhead. Murtha, that wasn’t bad, though.”

“Fucking Murtha.” She sighed. “No, it’s a big deal. I’m just a pessimist these days.”

Kristen was blond and slight, with light freckles around her nose and quick cheekbones; a live, thin, endearing person, full of energy, with a hoarse laugh. She would make an endlessly entertaining wife and mother to some suburban family one day. That’s not to say she was destined to be a housewife—in Paris she was a consultant, having grown up bilingual because her mother was from the St. Lawrence River Valley, near Montreal—only that she had the sort of open, good nature upon which a whole family can come to rely without entirely realizing it.

We were out in the seedy area around the train station, with

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