Chapter 2

As they laid face to face, both Daniel and Susan felt a thrill from the other’s warm breath, and their pale cheeks glowed red. Susan quickly gathered her wits and popped up, momentarily straddling Daniel before catching her knee on the bottom of her robe, falling over. The people hustling to get out of the hotel paid no attention at first, but Susan’s assistant, Hiba, finally noticed them, as did the American students from the high-top tables and a small collection of hotel refugees. Hiba stifled her laughter, but the others roared in enjoyment of a most unusual sight.The alarm suddenly cut off, and Daniel and Susan remained sprawled out in an embarrassed daze.As the crowd began to file back into the building, Susan rolled back onto her bottom, and Daniel sat up, hopped into a squat, and looked at Susan, who was still as red as the flashing light of the alarm system. As she began to get to her feet, Daniel stared at a pair of speakers overhead that were issuing soft music onto the porch, where guests normally waited for taxis. “Careless Whisper,” he muttered.“I beg your pardon?”“Careless Whisper is playing. A top-ten pop song of all-time. Underrated.”“Oh, yes. I hear it. George Michael. Or is it Wham?”“Both,” Daniel declared. Coming to his senses, he extended his hand in an awkward combination of a shake and a help-up. “I’m Daniel Perrin. Are you all right?”“Yes, thank you. And I know who you are. I’m Susan Anguish. I represent Her Majesty’s government. I’m helping you lot get to your universities. I’m new at this. Well, not new to the civil service. Or new to working with foreign students. But new to this.”“New to crashing into people in your bathrobe?” Daniel joked, instantly regretting it. Sarcasm always made him sound mean, never funny. Susan reddened more, and Daniel’s rosy cheeks returned too. He changed gears. “Anguish, huh?”“It is probably an Anglicisation of Angus,” she replied breathlessly. “Unusual, but found in parts of Norfolk, where my father’s people come from. Walsingham, you know.” She finished her sentence with a posher flourish than came naturally to her, as she closed her robe and inhaled deeply through her nose.Neither Daniel nor Susan could think of what came next. Susan defaulted to efficiency. “So much commotion, and I am terribly jet-lagged. I shall see you in the lobby to go to the Embassy tomorrow morning, Daniel.” She spoke as if she was not in her nightclothes on a busy city sidewalk, and was instead saying farewell to a client at the end of one of her usual meetings with university officials on matters like technology grants for Ghanaians or Saudis. “Very nice indeed to have met you, Mr. Perrin. Good night.” She turned, walked straight into a nearly full elevator and kept her head down as she turned back toward the hotel exit, where Daniel stood with his mouth agape. She looked up and caught his eye once more as the doors closed.“Good night,” Daniel whispered.As he passed from the swampy early autumn D.C. sidewalk back into the cold air conditioning of the hotel lobby, Daniel noticed the party had not reconvened at the high-top tables in the bar. The place was nearly empty, apart from guests still making their way back upstairs. He retrieved his bags and walked to the desk to get his room key. “Welcome Mr. Perrin. Lieutenant Mawhinney has already settled in the room, but I believe he has gone out.”“Who?” asked Daniel.“Your roommate. It says here ‘Second Lieutenant Thomas Mawhinney, United States Marine Corps.’ You will be sharing a suite together during your stay at the Palomar.”Daniel went up to his room on the fifth floor, a relatively high perch for D.C., and he noticed the twin towers of the façade of the National Cathedral, with the even taller Gloria in Excelsis Tower fixed centrally behind them, staring back at the hotel from a couple of miles northwest. “I wonder why those 9/11 terrorists wouldn’t rather aim the planes at buildings like those?” he thought. “Wouldn’t a big church make their point better than a big bank?”As Daniel was told to expect, there was evidence of another inhabitant of the room. He saw a standard suitcase open on a luggage rack, with uniform regalia and civilian dress clothes folded neatly inside. In the corner of the room nearest the door, standing level with the shoulder-height thermostat on the wall, was an enormous military duffel marked USNA.“The Naval Academy. Right,” thought Daniel.Feeling suddenly anxious, Daniel sat down on the bed and decided to make a phone call home. Why not? It was on the British government’s bill. For some reason, however, Daniel always felt guilty splurging beyond the basic offerings of another’s generosity. But Her Majesty was already paying for his graduate degree, he thought. And she was making him share a room.But which home would he call? His mother would be out teaching her college class.Dad then.His father picked up before the first ring had finished.“Hello?” he said in his deep but pleasant voice. Daniel knew smoke was pouring into the little holes in the receiver. What would Dad be drinking? G&T season was over. Was it back to Bourbon?“Daniel! Have you lost it yet, son?”“What? Lost it? What could I have lost, Dad?”“Your mind! Washington is full of pod people.” He laughed deeply, giving way to a thirty-second coughing fit. “Oh, sorry about that. Drink went down the wrong pipe. Anyway, mindless zombies. A few days up there – hell, a few hours there – you’ll forget how to think. All ambition, no substance.”Daniel changed the subject. “Hey, my roommate is from the Naval Academy.”“A sailor, huh? They give those fancy scholarships to the academy guys all the time. Excuse me, guys and gals, not that anyone cares about the fact that drastically lower muscle mass and lung capacity make women a liability on the battlefield in many cases. They get raped onboard ship all the time – not that I’m excusing rape, but come on. The guys get so horny when they’re out there they go after each other. That’s bad enough. ‘In the Na-vy,’” Roger sang. “You know that Village People song?”“Yeah,” Daniel replied in frustration. “Anyway Dad, he’s a Marine. Why am I telling you this?”“A Marine! Damn. Don’t challenge him to a push-up contest, son,” he laughhed. “Hey, but seriously, this military guy can get you good deals on stuff at the American bases over there. Our big installation at Lakenheath is twenty-eight miles from Cambridge, son. I looked it up. You can get American steaks, beer, whatever you want. Cigarettes. You won’t need those, will you? What about electronics? No sales tax if this guy gets you in with his I.D.”“Dad, I’m going to Oxford, not Cambridge. Why do you have trouble remembering this? You never forget anything. Besides, they have steaks and beer and everything in normal stores over there. And how am I going to cook steaks anyway? I don’t know why I told you about the Naval Academy guy. I haven’t even met him yet. He’s not here right now.”“Well, I’m no Marine but tell him Semper Fi and thank you for serving our country in its hour of need. Not that going to graduate school in England is doing us any good back home.” Roger erupted in laughter again, followed by another, shorter short coughing spell.“Well, I gotta go, Dad. I’ll call you somehow when I get to England.”“Alright. The Rays and Red Sox are back from commercial now anyway. I love you, son.” The dial tone sounded immediately.Daniel lay down on the bed in his clothes and replayed in his mind the collision with Susan from a few minutes earlier. Unable to sit with his thoughts for long, he grabbed the tv remote and flipped through the cable channels until he found Bravo. James Lipton was doing the Proust questionnaire with Ben Stiller on one of Daniel’s favorite programs, Inside the Actor’s Studio. “What is your favorite word?” Lipton asked, followed by “What is your least favorite word?” Daniel was sound asleep before he could get to the famous finale question: “If heaven exists, what you would like to hear God say when you arrive at the pearly gates?”Two hours later, Daniel awoke with a start. The shower was running in the bathroom. Inside the Actors Studio was long over and something else was blaring on the television. It was a movie called The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. The shower turned off, and fifteen seconds later a large man with a crew cut and a hairy barrel chest burst out of the bathroom door, wrapped at the waist in a white towel. He said in a loud voice, “Whoa. Is that General Zod dressed like a woman? Dang.”“Oh,” Daniel replied groggily. “Yeah, Terence Stamp. He played General Zod in Superman II. This is a weird movie. I…I fell asleep.”“No worries, buddy. Tom Mawhinney. Baker City, Oregon.” Tom casually dropped his towel and took a pair of white jockey underpants from his suitcase. He put them on in no particular hurry, and with no concern for being seen. “I’ve just been out with some of my academy buddies. I don’t drink, but they took me to a smoky bar. I hate that stink. Hey, a couple of the girls downstairs said you made a scene in the lobby or something.”“A scene? What girls? No, we all had to leave the building and a woman crashed into me. Actually, it was the English lady in charge of our scholarship. Who told you I made a scene?”“Ah, doesn’t matter. Just fight through it. Fight through it, buddy. You crashed into Susan, huh? She’s a rose. Great lady. She means business, but she’s a sweetheart.”“You know her?”“Talked to her when I first arrived. Seems super nervous. She’ll fight through it. Hey buddy, I need to do my nightly devotions real quick. Bible time. Mind if I turn off the tv or should I just fight through it?”“No, no. Go ahead.”“You wanna join me?” Tom asked.“Well, I don’t know,” Daniel replied pensively. “I don’t believe in an interventionist God. I don’t believe in the existence of angels. That sort of thing. But I consider myself a Christian.”Tom looked at him skeptically, as if ignoring the significance of any words besides “yes” or “no.” Daniel paused and silence hung in the air between them for a few seconds until he finally got to the point. “No thanks, I won’t join you. I need to go downstairs for a minute.”“Roger that. You’re a smoker, I can smell it. Suit yourself, buddy.”Daniel avoided the elevator, thinking it was less likely he would run into anyone who had seen his earlier mishap with Susan if he took the long way down. The stairwell came out on the far side of the lobby, almost completely out of sight of the bar, which now appeared to be closed anyway. He walked around the corner to 21st Street, where he could see bright lights and hear the noise of traffic on Massachusetts Avenue up ahead. He smoked two Kamel Reds and retreated back up to his hotel room, where he found the lights out and Tom sound asleep already. Daniel showered and returned to his bed, wishing he could turn the television back on to lull himself to sleep, but he feared the judgment of his disciplined roommate. “Fight through it,” Daniel decided. As his head lay on the pillow, he thought about taking a walk in the morning to explore. He thought about what Oxford would be like. And he thought about Susan Anguish.At the same time, Susan was tossing and turning in her room down the hall. She had not grown up on television as Daniel had, and it did not occur to her to channel-surf as a way to numb the combination of jet lag and nerves she was experiencing on her first trip to the United States. In fact, she did not even consider the fact there was a television in the room until she completely gave up on sleep at around midnight. She pressed the power button on the remote control on the bedside table. “Ah, that’s queer,” she thought, “it’s the chap from Far from the Maddening Crowd. Dressed like a woman.” She drifted off less than an hour later, and she woke up to the sound of a man on her screen selling an “O-Matic” device. She remembered the incident with Daniel and smiled to herself, then cringed. She got up, drew the curtains, and spotted the sun peeking above the horizon.“America,” she sighed. 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