some other Ivy League place,” I said. “Maybe a more progressive one, but I said I just want to be free, you know? Like now.” I finished off the toast. My voice sounded dead: “I’m free.” I got off the stool. “Well, um. I better . . . go to work.”
“Vic never talks about what happened,” said the woman. “It’s dangerous for him to talk about it. It triggers things.” She looked at one of the men. “I told him he shouldn’t hang around that meat market. Why seek out what you’re most afraid of?” She held the fridge door open. “Vic is terrified of meat.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah,” said one of the men. “Ever since the accident in the woods when he was in the army, he can’t go near it. The doctor told him not to go near it.”
“I can empathize with that though,” I said. “I only ever want what I hate.”
“Well, you’re special.” She pulled out some raspberries and closed the fridge.
I was about to leave and never come back, but then I changed my mind and ran upstairs. I tried every door before I got the right one. There he was, a corpse. I got out my notebook. I thought about writing him a love poem.
“Vic?” I knelt beside him. “What did you do? What happened in the woods?”
Nothing.
“Did you kill someone?”
Still nothing.
I wrote down my number and left it on the bookshelf, which wasn’t well stocked at all. There was a military memoir and Fifty Shades of Grey and—oddly—something by Fay Weldon. For all his positive attributes, Vic was not an educated man.
TWO
I NEVER SAID that Allegra could come into my room, but she came in anyway.
Her gift to me was a box of postfeminist cupcakes decorated with tiny gold balls. I had been listening to an Amy Winehouse lament, writing an essay on Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws. The sweetness of those cupcakes was harrowing. The sponge collapsed in my mouth like a cloud. And she would claim later that I was the witch.
That was three years ago, during freshman orientation, before I got thrown out for calling one of the guards a cunt. The college was supposed to be proud of its all-girls tradition, owner of the second-largest feminist art collection in the world. We ate dinner under a portrait of an Iranian woman wearing a hijab, aiming a Kalashnikov.
“Oh, I can’t tell you,” Allegra had babbled. “I can’t tell you what a relief it is to have found someone who I can really relate to. Someone who makes me feel real.” She produced a bottle of cheap red wine, rinsed out two cups, and toasted to our newfound sistahood.
One wall of my dorm room was taken up by a huge window that let in a lot of light. It looked out on to the college lawn, the sign saying “Keep off the lawn,” and the red star of the Texaco gas station across the road. I was living for Sebastian’s weekend visits, when we would lie together all day and night in my single bed. But he wasn’t there that day. It was a Tuesday.
Allegra told me that she was studying law under the duress of her family, that she wanted to be a performance artist, that she was heavily influenced by the Theater of Cruelty, that she felt she couldn’t create anything unless she, you know, really forcibly broke some eggs. She feared that the eggs that she would have to break were her family.
I stared at her liquid-black hair, her chalk-white skin.
“Except my brother Samuel,” she went on. “He’s a chess champion at Eton and simply too good-natured.” She said that she had waited all her life to meet a great man who would really wreck her youth and break her heart and make her feel something. “Anything would do.” She looked at me with her gray eyes.
And then she went completely mad.
She grabbed the saltshaker and the packet of coffee and the sugar and started chucking them around the room. Then she grabbed the remaining cupcakes and smeared them over the exposed brick walls, along the ridges of the radiator, over the lightbulb. She seemed to like the sensation of burning her fingers. She mashed the coffee into the sponge on the wall, forming a brown paste. She made abstract expressionist gestures.
I sat on the bed, impassive. I watched her fuck the place up.
Soon she sank, exhausted, beside me. She smiled.
Then she passed out.
I was thinking about Allegra as I journeyed back to Clapham after my night with Vic the war criminal. I was never more than five minutes away from thinking about her; my thoughts looped and returned always to the same point: she had ruined my life.
On Clapham High Street, I stared at the glistening kidneys in the window of the organic butcher for a while, the strung-up pheasants, the stags. Stephanie Haight’s face was enlarged on a poster in the window of the bookstore. She had drooping eyes and scraggly blonde hair. Her lips were petulant. She must have been about sixty but the years had been injected out of her face. She wore jeans and a tartan shirt that recalled Generation X, to which she was too old to belong.
I went into the shop.
The bell rang and the man with the ponytail behind the counter looked up and smiled. “Hello there!” he said. “And how is your young man?”
“He’s fine, thanks. Don’t know where he is actually.”
“He came in here just last week and was telling me all about how you two are thinking about getting engaged.”
“Did he?”
“He wanted to order a special edition of Vasari’s Lives of the Artists. For his uncle.”
“Oh, you mean Freddie. Freddie’s fucking nuts.”
I stared intently at the Mind, Body, and Spirit section, hoping that the man would stop talking to me. There was one other customer in the shop. A tiny dog was poking out of her handbag. I moved over to Gender Studies. The man’s questions were incessant. Yes, I was glad that that awful psychotic phase had ended. Yes, the standardization of education was to blame for the fact that I’d totally lost my fucking marbles.
“The only thing to do is claw them back,” he said.
I found Stephanie’s book. Falling Out of Fate was printed in pale blue letters above an image of a woman falling out of a cage made of hearts. She was plummeting through an empty blue sky to her death.
“Going like hotcakes,” he said.
I flipped to “About the Author:”
Stephanie Haight was born in Bermondsey and educated at her local secondary modern before winning a scholarship to St Anne’s College, Oxford. She completed her PhD on romantic masochism in the work of Simone de Beauvoir at Harvard University in 1980. She has written widely for titles including the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. Her books include Master or Slave? How Submission is Reversed and Other Tales from the Women’s Movement, and a novel, Abreaction. After many years of living in New York, she has recently returned to London.
The
