Living in Oxford all those years, I found Thanksgiving produced the most acute feelings of homesickness and nostalgic longing, made worse by the fact that on those fourth Thursdays every November I would usually spend the whole day teaching, and often at least one of my students was an American and the two of us would look at each other in recognition of our displacement and the fraught togetherness produced by the holiday that we were both missing — or if there were no other Americans about, some thoughtful British student would usually wish me a Happy Thanksgiving at the end of the tutorial and ask if I was going out for dinner. Sometimes, I devoted part of my lessons on that day to the origins of the holiday. Thanksgiving, first recorded in English in 1533, a quotation from Tyndale, I would read out from my OED: thankes giuyng, and then, two years later, in a translation of the Bible, thankesgeuynge. The Book of Common Prayer, 1552, and then Shakespeare used it, Love’s Labour’s Lost, 1598, before the Pilgrims had their own in 1621. Lincoln made it national. One or two of the Colleges, although not mine, made a point of catering to the homesick longings of its American members and would produce an ersatz version of a turkey dinner. I attended such meals on half a dozen occasions but always found that instead of assuaging my sense of homesickness they only made it more acute. Surrounded by so many British people (many of whom seemed to think the whole affair vaguely ridiculous, sneering at any tradition, holiday, or manner of speaking that had grown up on this continent), I would forswear going to such gatherings in the future and might decline similar invitations the following year, only to find the experience of being alone in England and passing the day with no acknowledgment of the holiday was even worse than an imperfect celebration. In a way, there could be nothing more typical of Thanksgiving than a day spent in disappointment, or in only partial merriment, a holiday in which someone among the group irritates the hell out of you with his offensive jokes or rude behavior, but whose company you are obliged to tolerate for the sake of wider peace, or because he is your sister’s new boyfriend or your daughter’s husband or, as in Oxford, your senior colleague who exercises a different kind of power over your life. It was, after all, a holiday made official in a time of civil war, an occasion that was, perhaps in its broadest philosophical impulse, about bringing together opposing sides in a domestic conflict and letting them cease their fire long enough to break bread and tear a dead bird limb from limb, a holiday tradition built on giving thanks for the success of the first settlers’ attempts to colonize.
This was my first Thanksgiving back in America, and part of me would have preferred to be only with family, taking Meredith and Peter up to my mother’s house, or even going to Peter’s parents’ place in East Hampton (like my mother they were expected later in the day), instead of feeling like a grouch and a paranoiac in a room full of people as interested in mingling with potential business contacts as in watching the parade outside and enjoying the champagne and cinnamon rolls that circulated as if there were a limitless supply of both. I did not want to live in a world of fanciful abundance, of abundance predicated on a belief that nothing should ever run out for as long as there was someone ripe with desire. My own parents, children of the Great Depression, grew up with a sense of scarcity that made them frugal and practical, sometimes so much so it drove me nuts, but they also savored what was good, and enjoyed the large and small treats of life with a pleasure that was genuine. Looking around Meredith and Peter’s living room, there was without question a sense of pleasure, but of a kind born in the expectation of such luxuries always being available. And there was Michael Ramsey, helping himself to more food, more drink, chatting to Peter, laughing as if they were old, close friends, although most of these people were already in high-gear party mode and everyone they met was potentially an old friend, someone they would have known forever if only they had been given the chance, provided of course that the person was worth knowing, could offer something in exchange for the friendship.
I was on the verge of explaining to my daughter why I was feeling so paranoid when Susan arrived. Meredith stood to greet her mother and I could see in the slight tremble of my daughter’s hand how she was nervous about her parents meeting again for the first time since the wedding, though our divorce has been largely amicable. At the wedding itself we had become almost — I liked to think at the time — quite warm with each other, as if my ex-wife and I were both imagining a more serious rapprochement might be possible, such that one day we could even contemplate reuniting. I had to remind myself I had come for Meredith more than anyone else, the world did not revolve around me, and at twenty-five it can still feel as though you are the center of the universe and every event and relationship in your life is ultimately about you. Meredith wanted me there, I was certain, to support her in the face of her mother, and so I attached myself to my daughter in the partial belief that I was supporting her with my presence, even as I knew, at a more distant remove, that I could not quite bear to circulate on my own, to risk spending another moment alone with the strange Mr. Ramsey. Then, by one of those flukes of social gatherings, I found myself separated from Meredith and standing next to Susan, who has hardly aged in the years since we last lived together, looking to my eyes as though she might still be in her early forties.
‘Where’s your wonderful mother, Jeremy?’
‘They’ve sent a car to fetch her from Rhinebeck. She won’t be here until after noon.’
‘What a shame. She’ll miss the balloon animals.’
‘You know my mother hates parades.’
‘Still cultivating her misanthropy?’
‘As attentively as her African violets.’
‘She’d be much happier if she could just decide to like people.’
‘She always liked you.’
‘But I was such a bitch to her.’
‘She thought that meant you respected her.’
‘You know I’ve always been mean to people who scare the shit out of me.’
As we smiled at each other I felt for a moment that the previous decade had never happened and when we left the party we would go home to the same apartment at the top of a converted brownstone on 75th Street and when I went to bed that night, overstuffed and satiated, I would be going to bed with Susan, and there would be nothing strange about this, no resumption of what once had been but a continuation of what had always been, as if my decade in Oxford were only some transient series of hallucinations, one vision piled on another, all unfolding over the course of a single New York night.
I knew, however, that Susan was content with her life and had no interest in returning to me. Paranoid I might have been, but delusional I was not. She was drinking a cup of coffee and I watched her lips curl in to take the hot liquid, careful not to drip, and a light smear of coppery lipstick adhered to the white china as though the cup were a soft and susceptible skin. Her gaze turned away from the room and we looked at each other as we had not really looked for more than fifteen years, since in the final months of our living together she averted her eyes whenever I stared too closely, as though she feared my scrutiny, or as if the experience of being observed by her husband caused pain instead of pleasure. Now, however, she smiled and warmed under my gaze and it was that response, her evident enjoyment of my company, that allowed my mind to wander off and imagine what it would be like to live with her once again, to make all our lives so much less complicated than they had become since my departure.