the phone and told Weisz what everyone else knew about his own children. When he was finished Weisz was silent. Boulier raised his eyebrows and shot his wife an anxious glance. Do you know what I’m thinking? Weisz said at last. I can only imagine, said Boulier. I’m thinking of how rarely I am mistaken about people, Monsieur Boulier. Judgment of character is essential in my line of work, and I pride myself on the acuity of my own. And yet I see now that I erred with you, Monsieur Boulier. I admit that I never took you for an intelligent man. But neither did I take you for a fool. Here the headmaster began to cough again, and also to sweat. Now if you’ll be so kind as to excuse me, I have someone waiting, said Weisz. Good afternoon.
Mostly it was Yoav who told me these stories, often when we were lying naked together in his bed, smoking and talking in the dark, his penis resting against my thigh, my hand tracing the protrusion of his collarbone, his hand behind my knee, my head in the crook of his shoulder, feeling the special, hair-raising excitement of being newly thrown into the fragile position of intimacy. Later, when I got to know Leah, she sometimes told me things as well. But the stories were always left incomplete, something about their atmosphere elusive and unexplained. Their father was a figure only partially sketched, as if to draw him fully would threaten to blot everything else, even themselves, from view.
IT ISN’T EXACTLY true that I met Yoav at a party, at least not for the first time. I first encountered him three weeks after I arrived at Oxford, at the house of a young don who had once been a student of one of my college professors in New York. But we didn’t speak more than a few words to each other that night. When we met again, Yoav tried to convince me that I’d made an impression on him at the dinner, enough that he had even considered finding a way to see me again. But as I remember it, he looked alternately bored and preoccupied throughout the meal, as if, while one part of him was drinking Bordeaux and cutting his food into bite-sized morsels, the other half was engaged with shepherding a herd of goats across a bone-dry plain. He didn’t talk much. All I knew about him was that he was a third-year undergraduate reading English. After dessert, he was the first to leave, explaining that he had to catch a bus back to London, though when he said goodbye to our host and his wife it was clear that, when he wanted to, he could be charming.
The doctoral program was meant to take three years and had few requirements. Aside from meeting with my supervisor every six weeks, I was left to my own devices. The trouble for me began soon after I’d arrived, when the topic I’d planned to work on—the influence of the new medium of radio on Modernist literature—reached a dead end. It had been the subject of the senior thesis I’d written in college back in New York, for which I’d won praise from my professors, and even come away with an award, the Wertheimer Prize, named after a retired professor wheeled to the ceremony from the pastoral graveyard of Westchester. But the don who’d been chosen to look after my academic work at Oxford, a bald Modernist at Christ Church named A. L. Plummer, quickly tore the thesis apart, claiming that it lacked theoretical integrity, and insisted I come up with a new topic. Cramped in a rickety chair between the towers of books in his study, I tried, weakly, to argue the worth of my work, but the truth was that I myself had lost interest in the idea, and that whatever I’d had to say about it had already been said in the hundred or so pages of my undergraduate thesis. Dust motes floated down in the ray of light that fell through a small, high window (a window through which only a dwarf or child could escape), coming to rest on A. L. Plummer’s head and, presumably, my own. There was little choice but to go wading into the infinite holdings of the Bodleian Library in search of a new subject.
I spent the following weeks in a chair in the Radcliffe Camera, one of those comfortable upholstered chairs stained