The life I led in Oxford was, for most of my time there, an isolated one, a bachelor existence in a world surrounded by many other bachelors (of both sexes), though there were the occasional one-night stands, nothing that lasted longer than a few hours or days before it became clear to both parties that it was either deeply unwise because of professional complications (they were often colleagues, like Bethan) or because these women had husbands or partners or boyfriends or lovers. They each of them used different words to describe the men on whose territory I was trespassing, though they themselves would have recoiled at my description of the situation in these terms, not wanting to be regarded as the territory or possession of anyone other than their own selves, and while I respect such a position I understand too the attitude of the men whose women were cheating on them with me, men who would have believed they had a claim at least on the loyalty of those women if not on the women themselves, although the distinction is perhaps a rather Jesuitical one, the species of sophistry I learned to appreciate in what I began to think of as the Oxford intellect, the endlessly supple reasoning that could so often bend logic to self-interest or, scarcely more nobly, self-defense.
There were one or two occasions, perhaps more, when my entanglements with these otherwise committed women of Oxford became quite painful for me, for them, and for their husbands or partners. It’s not that I was helpless in the face of my own desire, although one husband in particular felt compelled to intervene because his wife was threatening to leave him for me, despite having never asked me whether I was interested in a permanent relationship with her. The poor man turned up, hat in hand, quite troubled, at my doorstep on Divinity Road, pleading with me to break things off after having failed to convince his wife to do so herself. I showed him into the house and we sat down in the dining room where I poured him a drink. Quite apart from being aggressive or defensive, this fellow, Bryan, a medievalist who chewed his fingernails, nearly wept, saying that his wife, Anne, one of my colleagues in History, was threatening to take the children and move in with me. I could not imagine anything worse than having to share my life with Bryan’s children and wife and the messy complications of this arrangement, so promptly got on the phone and told Anne it had to end. She was so devastated that the Chair of the Faculty Board asked me to try to control myself in a way that suggested I had somehow been at fault, when in fact it was Anne who had made the first move, following a gaudy at her own College where I happened, by coincidence, to be the guest of another colleague. After dark on one of those extraordinary Oxford spring evenings when summer seems already to breathe its warm airs across the rivers and the overgrown grass of Christ Church Meadow, Anne and I were alone in the Fellows’ Garden of that College, or at least felt ourselves alone in the dark, in a corner, talking about Foucault or at least having the kind of inanely philosophical conversation fueled by excellent wine and incomparable port and the romance of decay forestalled by money that surrounds and encourages such encounters, when she reached a hand across in the dark and rested it against my left breast, pressing to feel the beating heart beneath my clothes and skin and ribs. I thought for a moment that she had reached out for balance, for she seemed to be swaying, but then she leaned in, and, being taller than me and I suspect quite a bit stronger, pushed me against a sandstone wall and prized my mouth open with her lips and tongue. I could not have imagined that our hurried fling in that garden, or the subsequent fucks in her rooms in College, or the weekend she spent at my house when Bryan had taken the children to his parents in Stoney Middleton, would lead to her developing a fantasy of a new life with me.
Anne and Bryan — troublesome though they were, and a lesson in how never to get involved with colleagues — could not have been the reason anyone might wish to pay such close attention to my life, nor could the aborted affair with Bethan in my first year at Oxford, nor, I hoped, my entirely professional run-ins with students like Jayanti, who threatened suicide and caused trouble for no reason and who was, I now feel, never serious in her threats, was making her threats in fact to terrorize me. No, I was certain — I remain convinced even now, as I write these pages, directed to my heirs, perhaps, if you have occasion to read them, or perhaps brought forth one day in my defense in a court either open or clandestine — that none of those people was the reason for the intense scrutiny of my entirely innocent activities.
I know the reason, or at least I suspect, have a ghost of a suspicion, as fleeting as the face I continue to see in the assemblage of text on a page, between the dark veils of those last moments of unconsciousness before waking each morning. By that Thanksgiving morning, talking to Susan, observing Michael Ramsey, and thinking back on my Oxford years, I should have begun to realize that it was not just one thing I had done, no single activity or stray word, not only my departure from home to live in another country, not just my choice of friends and lovers, but the enfolding of all these elements to create a kind of destiny.
~ ~ ~
‘And then they took me into this tiny room and I sat there for ages,’ the man was saying. He was one of Peter’s acquaintances, a South African lawyer from Johannesburg. ‘With the Americans you know where you stand. After three minutes the woman at the American Embassy smiled at me and said, “okay, thanks, dearie, there you go,” and I got my visa. The British make you wait and wonder. They ask you a million questions, as if they’re trying to catch you out, and then at the end of the interview the snide little man said, “now look up at that camera in the corner of the room.” This thing was minuscule, I hadn’t even noticed it was there until he mentioned it. I looked at the camera and the man said, “now, please say in a nice clear voice, ‘My name is Mark Wald.’” It was the first indication I’d had that my visa interview was being recorded, but I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me. What I don’t understand is why they would have me do that, the looking at the camera and saying my name.’
A man in an adjoining group, who’d had his back to Mr. Wald during the story, suddenly turned around. It was Michael Ramsey. ‘Facial recognition,’ he said.
‘Sorry?’ Mr. Wald said, looking displeased.
‘They do it for facial recognition. Now you’re on file. You could be walking down the street in central London and some technician or law enforcement officer will be sitting at a terminal and maybe they zoom in to get a closer look at you, and the computer can tell instantly that it’s Mark Wald, he’s on such and such a visa, he entered the country on such and such a date, he’s the son of X and Y, he specializes in whatever it is you do, etc.’
‘How do you know all that?’
‘Conspiracy nut,’ Ramsey said, smirking.
‘Well it’s fucking terrifying.’ Mr. Wald accepted another glass of champagne. ‘But that’s not the end of it. So I’m on the plane to New York from Heathrow, after the meetings in London are finished. I’m in Business Class, and as we’re boarding a man sits down next to me, around my age, balding, and I could tell even before he opened his mouth that he was American.’
A round of appreciative laughter rose as Mr. Wald continued.
‘So we exchange courtesies as we’re getting settled. Hello, good evening, etc. I take a glass of sparkling wine from the flight attendant, but my American friend is on orange juice. Okay, I think, he’s a health freak. He’s in great shape, very lean, like he’s at the gym every day or running thirty miles a week. Not like me.’ More laughter. ‘The plane takes off, and as the meals are delivered, he starts making conversation, but from the beginning he addresses me by name, “Mr. Wald.” I think, fine, he must have seen my ticket, or the tag on my case, or something, but then it becomes clear he knows who I am, what I do, where I live, who my wife is, how many kids I have, even who my parents are. This man is sitting next to me for a reason. It’s all prearranged. He asks me about the state of things in South Africa, what I think of the government and the president, and I’m getting even more uncomfortable, although my answers are almost certainly the ones he wants to hear. I don’t like this government, the president is corrupt, the country risks sliding towards chaos. By this point we’ve been talking for an hour or so. The meals have been cleared, he’s let the conversation ebb a bit, and then they dim the cabin lights and people around us get lost in movies and the like, and when he’s certain no one is listening, he leans close to me and says, not in so many words, that the US government would like me to spy on the South African government, “for the greater good,” and it’s my duty as a citizen of the free world to accept.’