The Last Enchantments Read Online Free PDF Page B

Tom at one point, with the air of someone repeating a joke they had once found incredibly funny.) Each room was different than the last, one all neon, one crowded with couches that smelled like pot. We moved from room to room, stopping to get drinks in each one.
    By the time we reached the dance room, a long narrow cave toward the very back of the club, it was past one o’clock. We were shouting because of the noise, except Anil, who hadn’t had anything to drink and mistakenly thought that we could still hear his stories.
    “DO YOU DANCE?” I yelled to him and Tom, interrupting a long description of the Gupta family’s rivalry with the Mauryans.
    “YES!” Tom shouted, and Anil said, with becoming scorn, “OF COURSE I DO.”
    “LET’S GO OUT THERE!”
    “I DON’T WANT TO LEAVE!” said Anil, and I said, “NO, LET’S GO DANCE WITH SOME GIRLS!”
    Once in a while dancing is immaculate, a perfection; you understand why raves exist: When you’ve timed the drinks correctly and they lift your mood and your energy, the songs are ones you all know, and you look around at the girls, their happy lost faces, their long earrings, something limbic, their skin just damp with sweat to the touch, the whole thing. That night I almost couldn’t take the joy of it. Tom and even Anil, too, looked gleeful. With Anil as our leader we moved among a few amorphous groups of girls, some of them interested, some not, until in one of them I came across Jess.
    She was blond, not too tall, and very pretty, with an angled face; she was flushed with the exercise of dancing, her hair fixed back and high with a clip. We danced with her and her friends for a song, and then I started to dance just with her, though cautiously at the start, so that it never seemed exactly as if it was just the two of us; we remained part of the group, only on a longer and longer tether from them. She was a great dancer. Finally when a Daft Punk song came on her face lit up and she grabbed my hand, as if she couldn’t believe it, and after that just the two of us danced, the pretense of the group forgotten. Then at some point our faces brushed and we kissed.
    How did it happen? I can’t remember. We didn’t stop and kiss exactly. We went on dancing, and even returned to our friends now and then. Then near three o’clock the songs slowed down, and she led me by the hand over to a wall, where we kissed—more deeply. Tom kept looking at us, but I ignored him. I remember thinking that I didn’t care, it wasn’t me, it was something else, and soon the sovereignty of my impulses grew confused and I started to think about Alison and Jess as the same person. We did a shot off of a tray from a roving waitress, and then Jess went to the bathroom and I was alone. I started to think about my father, how I had the same boring undistinguished decisive traumas as everyone else, and the delight of the people on the dance floor looked muted and far away. Then Jess came back with more drinks and kissed me, and the dark moment passed, the exhilaration returned. We went back out to dance. She was with four friends, all British like her. They had nothing to do with Oxford. Tom had his hand on one girl’s hip; I couldn’t say where Anil was. They greeted us with catcalls, and I smiled modestly, as if to convey that my conquest spoke for itself. Then Jess told them we were leaving and led me back through each of the rooms of the club and outside, where we hailed a cab.
    *   *   *
    Have I lost your sympathy? I lost my own, of course; almost immediately, but not in the cab on the way back to her apartment, not yet, I was still thinking about those e-mails. Then, too, it was the first time I had cheated on Alison, and simply to have a new body under my hands, new breasts, new skin, was overpowering. I don’t know. I don’t know what I was doing.
    “Is this called pashing?” I asked her in the cab
    She laughed into my neck. “You Americans. What are you, a