Hiding behind the trunk of the elm, Donna leans over and licks something. Absolutely a joint. His smile broadens.
He lets the curtains fall back and tries to remember, against the odds of all the champagne he’s had, why it is that he came up to his old room in the first place. Something about fetching a book. Yes, that’s it: his old German exercise book from lower sixth form. His mother had invited his old German teacher from Sherborne to the wedding (they belonged to the same gardening club, as Ollie understood it), and five minutes ago Frau Winkler had cornered him and asked him if he had any of his old work lying around.
“Your declension work was lovely,” she said, her breath smelling like vodka and butterscotch candy. “You managed to screw up in the most gorgeous ways. Really, I’ve just got to show Jane.”
He looked over at his mother, smiling shyly behind Frau Winkler, then said, “Let me see what I can find.”
In his room he scans the titles on his bookshelf—an old copy of Canterbury Tales, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, three Hardy Boys novels, a bunch of other shit he’s never read—until he finds a small black notebook with his name and GERMAN scrawled across its cover. He knows that he should be surprised that he still has it—he’s cleared out this bookshelf more times than he can remember, keeping only the titles that either (a) are intellectually impressive or (b) have sentimental value—and yet he’s not. He has a knack for having what people need, and, in this case, Frau Winkler needed his lower sixth German notebook. It’s a strange talent he’s had ever since he was an infant (his mother likes to talk about how, as a newborn, he always seemed to sense her moods, often predicting her needs before she knew them herself), and which he became consciously aware of as a teenager. People needed someone to have a pint with—he was there. People needed someone with a joke—he had one. It’s for this reason, he suspects, that so many people call him likable, that tag that he used to associate with boring, but that now, after having met so many insufferably interesting people who are dreadfully mean, he’s proud to have earned. People like being around him. They like that he’s not the smartest guy in the room, but that he’s not a dolt, either. They like that they can safely expect him to succeed, to be impressive but not threatening, without pinning their hopes for the world onto him. In other words, they like that he’s easy. They like that his life is easy.
And it is easy—almost embarrassingly so. This used to be a fact that caused him great consternation. Once, when he was fifteen, a fifth-former from the girls’ school had told him that he would never understand what it was like to suffer.
“Everything’s been just given to you,” she’d said. He was sitting with her and a few friends on the rugby pitches that separated the boys’ school from the girls’. Her father, a Russian oilman, had just been thrown in prison in Moscow, and she was sobbing. Her name, he thinks, was Tatiana. “You’re gorgeous, and rich, and don’t have any siblings to contend with, and you’re captain of the football team even though everyone knows Thomas Dodge is the better player.” Ollie looked at Thomas; Thomas looked down. “So just face it, Ollie, when you tell me that everything will be all right, you’re lying, because you don’t actually know what it’s like for things not to be all right.”
This notion that his own coddled life was preventing him from understanding the plights of others pained Ollie greatly. It threatened, in so many ways, his own likability, the sole part of himself that, at the very unsure age of fifteen, he was absolutely sure of. For the next year he did everything he could to pop the bubble in which he’d been accused of living. At night, while his friends were sneaking cigarettes behind the abbey in town, he stayed in his room and struggled through books that might, somehow, open his eyes to a world that had heretofore gone unseen. God, the things that he read during those twelve months! Things Fall Apart. The Joy Luck Club. Notes of a Native Son. They were moving, surely, but also so terribly sad. Halfway through Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (a book that was, he admits, already pretty slim), he decided it was probably best to just give up.
The thing that he figured was most important was that he was good, and kind, and above all else likable. People expected him to be easy—they expected him to be happy, and fun, and always ready for a good time; all those things that he felt he already naturally was without having to cringe over tragic literature—and so those would be the things he would focus on being.