Love in the Fall: A Novel

Daniel woke up to the sound of Tom getting dressed for morning PT, but he pretended to be sleeping until his Marine roommate had gone.Daniel then got right up, shaved, and pulled out clothes for the day, thinking he would have a walking adventure for a few hours and return just in time to keep the schedule. He relished the opportunity to wear his slightly baggy, thrift-store grey suit as a subtle statement - too subtle perhaps - of his Bohemian pretenses. But his fairly new, white dress shirt had gotten crumpled up in his suitcase, and a wrinkly shirt was a step too far. He called down to the desk and asked to have a full ironing board delivered. The miniature ones, Daniel thought, are not for people who really iron.As he waited, he dug the portable cd player out of his satchel and picked up the small stack of discs he had chosen to tide him over until the box containing his complete collection arrived at his college. The man at the shipping company in Fort Lauderdale had told him he would have his things about a week after he arrived. Needing to conserve space, Daniel chose a few recent albums from artists he already knew well so that he could forever associate their work with the sea change he was experiencing in his life.He decided on Reveal by R.E.M., Amnesiac by Radiohead, Love and Theft by Bob Dylan, Time (The Revelator) by Gillian Welch, and Vespertine by Björk. Seeing he had enough room for two more jewel cases, he impetuously grabbed Red House Painters’ Old Ramon, and then he spotted No More Shall We Part by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. He was relieved not to have to remove something else to include that one. He now opened the case, took out the disc, and inserted it into the player. It would be his accompaniment for the morning’s wanderings. Nick Cave would forever mean Washington D.C. on a warm early October morning. A cathedral visit.Daniel finished ironing, got dressed, and put his room key in his wallet. He pressed play on the Discman and dropped it into the front compartment of his satchel, then placed the headphones on his ears and carefully avoided pulling out the wire as he lifted the bag to his shoulder and walked out the door. He would skip the hotel’s continental breakfast in order to avoid the company of the other American scholars. He was sure he could find a place to sit down for decent cup of coffee and his first cigarette of the day on his own. He hoped northwest Washington would live up to the popular “kind of feels European” reputation he had heard his father explain to someone once while sitting in a plastic chair outside a strip mall coffee place next to a six-lane highway in Florida. As Daniel hit the stairwell, he noted Cave’s poetry, “We watched the world as it fell past.”As Daniel entered the lobby, he immediately spotted Sully, who was in full verbal stride with a group of young women eating stale bagels and a buffet fruit salad with a lot of melon and a few berries. Daniel pulled off his headphones to eavesdrop. “Now, Judith Butler argues there is nothing fixed or natural about men and women at all. It’s all a social construct that the patriarchy uses to flatten out the real differences of how a so-called man and a so-called woman experience and live their sexuality. But I’m no expert. You should ask Jonah here who’s really studying it.”Daniel put Nick Cave back on, kept moving, and avoided making eye contact. He suddenly remembered an embarrassing scene at his undergraduate German conversation group, der Stammtisch, where he had tried to make a pass at a known feminist Linguistics major. He praised a London art installation he had just read about that consisted only of a woman’s messy bed. Of course he didn’t really like the messy bed. He had never even seen it. Why did he think he could impress a girl by talking about it, especially in a language he did not know very well?Daniel’s mind then jumped to another awkward encounter with a girl. “I don’t know. I like the mirror-for-princes poetry. The royal stuff,” he said to a female graduate student from his Renaissance France seminar. She was twenty-four-years-old and had a pretty mouth, short syrup-colored hair, and far-apart brown eyes. She explained she intended to write about how Marguerite de Navarre was a transgressive figure whose devotional poems were proto-feminist jabs at male authority. “Wow, that’s great,” Daniel replied automatically; but he was really thinking, “I have no chance here. She’s dating the TA for French Civilization. He’s an actual Frenchman.”Daniel approached the concierge to ask whether there was a quaint café nearby. A short, smiling man whose name tag said “Muhammed” directed him to a place called Le Petit Prince, which was a few blocks south on 19th Street. Realizing this location was in the opposite direction from the Cathedral, Daniel decided just to walk north instead, noting the time was 7:32 a.m. on the clock over the door – the same door he had crashed through several hours earlier. As he walked out, he withdrew his Kamel Reds, took one of the last three in the box with his mouth, and lit it without the coffee he had intended to pair it with.He passed several breakfast and beverage chain restaurants on the way, but he continued at a brisk pace until he reached the hill leading up to the front doors of the cathedral. “The National Cathedral,” Daniel reminded himself. “National.” He stopped and read a tourist information sign that betrayed the building’s age. It had been finished just eleven years earlier, after almost a century of construction.Daniel walked around to the north side of building, casually looking up at the grotesques, when he spotted the unmistakable mask of Darth Vader, carved in Indiana limestone. He was no longer sure about proceeding with the visit. Nonetheless, he walked back around to the west side, where he was met by another surprise, a ticket booth. “Surely one just walks into a place like this,” he thought. The man behind the plexiglass was organizing stacks of tickets, and he was not prepared for visitors. He had patchy grey hair and a droopy face, and he wore a badge that read “Volunteer,” and underneath it, “Earl.”Daniel stood in front of the glass, eyeing the board, which displayed different options and prices. Earl stopped shuffling the piles of tickets and looked up, telling Daniel, “Entry is $6.50 for adults, $4.00 for students for self-tours, but not until 9. Guided tours at ten, one, and three. Free entry at five o’clock for the choral service.”Daniel was annoyed, as he often was in situations that were only mildly disappointing to most people. “Can’t I come in now? I’m here now! I’m an Episcopalian, by the way. And an American! Why should I have to pay to enter my cathedral?” He began quoting a line he remembered from the Book of Common Prayer: “We do not presume to come to this thy table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness…” Earl interrupted him. “I’m sorry, sir. You can go in in a half an hour for $4.00. I assume you’re a student.”“Forget it, Earl!” Daniel shouted at the man, who shrugged his shoulders and returned to his work.Immediately ashamed of himself for his protest, Daniel turned around and withdrew his penultimate cigarette. He lit it and began walking briskly to the south, figuring he would save the last one in the pack for Le Petit Prince.As the sun rose, Susan began her own preparations for the day. Instead of her usual routine of listening to Radio 4 while she performed her morning ablutions, she tuned the electric alarm clock to National Public Radio, which she quickly found to be both too serious and too hard to take seriously. Lots of thoughts, but no Thought for the Day. She switched it off. From her suitcase, she extracted a large parcel full of materials necessary for the next two days’ events, and she used the second queen-sized bed in her room to lay out the name badges and welcome packets, which she would ask Hiba to distribute to the scholars.The phone rang. It was Susan’s boss, the Minister of State for North America, calling from London to make sure the students would all wear their pins. He explained they were a “small but significant symbol of the partnership of the United Kingdom and the United States.” He elaborated, “This isn’t a normal year, as you well know. Even as we speak, plans are in place that will put our soldiers and theirs together on the battlefield. The War on Terror!”“Of course. The pins. Yes, sir,” Susan assured him. She called Hiba to come collect the packets and to confirm the travel arrangements to the reception. And she reminded her to double-check everyone’s pins before they set off.Like Daniel, Susan decided to dress early for the event later in the day. Especially after last night’s sleepwear affair, she needed to reestablish an air of professionalism from the moment she left her room. After all, she was going to meet the ambassador and speak in front of the entire crowd. These American students probably already viewed her as one of the many quaint British characters who would populate future anecdotes about their time in England. She feared she was already something of a Bridget Jones in their eyes. Her colleagues at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, however, would find this comparison laughable - not because she was not prone to occasional gaffs, but rather, most of them suspected she had never even slept with a man before. She was far from the sort of person, like Bridget Jones, who had to impose a personal austerity program of counting cigarettes, limiting alcohol units, and cutting down on sweets. She hated cigarettes, for one thing. No one back home took her for a slapper. In fact, she was obviously capable of real grace and beauty.Susan washed her hair and blew it dry with the little hotel hairdryer, a feat which took almost thirty minutes and made her break a sweat, even though she was standing under the air conditioning vent in nothing but her panties. The floral air freshener affixed to the wall was making her feel ill. She put on her new bra, which dug painfully into her side, then she applied her makeup and got into her black dress and black leather shoes with a small heel. She looked at herself in the full-length mirror inside the wardrobe door and nodded approvingly. She packed all her things and set them aside to retrieve later before going to the Embassy. The students were staying in Washington one more day, but she was returning to London that night.Knowing there would not be any decent tea at the complimentary breakfast, and more importantly, not ready to make small talk with America’s best and brightest, she took the elevator downstairs and inquired about cafés nearby. She wanted a strong cup of ordinary builders’ tea, but she had been warned that most American breakfast places would give her an old bag of Lipton’s from the back of a pantry, not-quite-boiling water, and half-and-half instead of milk. Horrid. She had better splurge for something more luxurious. And why not?“Ah, yes. Try Le Petit Prince,” Muhammad told her.As Daniel made his way south again back towards Dupont Circle, he pressed play on No More Shall We Part for a second time. As Daniel finally turned the corner on 19th Street and could see the sign for Le Petit Prince, a song called “Sorrowful Wife” began, which gave him pause. He had seen in his mother something of a sorrowful wife, but the idea of love causing real, lasting pain in his own life had not occurred to him. Whether it was arrogance, naïveté, or both, Daniel figured he could not possibly end up with someone who was “counting the days on her fingers,” as Nick Cave’s woman was doing for some reason. For an instant, he wondered whether Susan was prone to sorrow. “Anguish,” he thought to himself. “No way.”As Daniel at last reached the front door of the café, there were two wooden planters full of lavender, flanking the double doors. The smell was a pleasant contrast to his own light sweat, lingering cigarette odor, and the exhaust of the rush-hour traffic. He walked inside, finding it unusually warm – obviously not air-conditioned, an annoyance to Americans in a city where the summer humidity had not quite subsided.Surveying the room, Daniel looked straight past the shock of red hair in front of his face, and then he did a double-take. It was Susan, in the light of day, pushing her hair out of her face with her right hand and fanning herself with her left. She turned and instantly blushed. “Blast!” she thought, grimacing, before composing herself with a smile. “Hello again, Mr. Perrin.” Before Daniel could reply, the hostess asked, “Table for two?” Susan looked to Daniel, who instinctively nodded in the affirmative.Daniel and Susan were seated at a little round table in traditional rattan chairs with green and cream-colored nylon weaving, next to an open window on the far side of the dining room, away from the street. The air was fresh, accompanied by the scent of more herbs planted in boxes on the shady side of the building. Mint, thyme, and oregano. Susan ordered a pot of Assam, and Daniel a café au lait. The hostess left them each with a handsome menu printed in an art deco font, featuring omelettes au lard, parmentier, and chasseur; classic quiche Lorraine, brioches, croissants, pains au chocolat, chuassons aux pommes, and clafoutis with late-season peaches. There were also lunch items, including an unconventional salad of mixed greens and fruit with a creamy chili flake dressing, and a croque monsieur, which Daniel had eaten in abundance on his first trip to France with his father as a fourteen-year-old. Daniel let the menu distract him from starting the conversation.“Lovely,” Susan began. “Daniel, you’re on your way to graduate studies in French literature. You must feel right at home here.”“Well, I like it so far, yes.” Daniel replied, “But I’ve actually only been to France twice. I had intended to move there, but England worked out instead. Have you been there?”“Oh yes, we have a home there as a matter of fact. My parents, I mean. A little bungalow in Normandy. Nothing impressive really, and too far from the sea to be a proper holiday home. Our Catholic friends come to visit Mont Saint Michel. It’s quite close by.”Daniel’s eyes opened wide. “You own a house in France? That’s incredible.”“Oh, not really,” Susan replied, suddenly realizing that talking about second properties was precisely the kind of bourgeois discourse she was hoping to avoid with the Americans, and especially Daniel, now that she guessed he pretended to an anti-establishment attitude. “We’re quite middle class,” she explained, “and some of our British neighbors there are quite working class, really. One man is a retired tattoo artist! Anyway, my French is probably much worse than yours. I did it for A-Levels but actually haven’t spoken it too much. A lot of educated British people know French, of course, but they wouldn’t dare try to use it.”Daniel looked down nervously at the menu again. Susan moved the conversation away from herself. “Well Daniel, I should think it is quite an honor for you to represent your country like this, isn’t it?”“My country? Well, I suppose so. My parents are very patriotic. Especially my father. I’ve lived in several different places in the United States, so in some ways I don’t feel like I’m from anywhere specific to be proud of. But that’s normal in America. I’ve begun to wonder whether my language studies and my dreams of living abroad have ruined my appreciation for my own country. You know, during the attacks, I was as horrified as anyone. And quite frankly, I was bloodthirsty after the fact. But I’m not sure I was gaining a lot of affection for my country. I just kept thinking of those people who had to jump off the towers. And I had nightmares about being on one of the planes that was highjacked and flown into a building. The firemen coming out of the rubble. All that stuff.”“It was horrifying, Daniel. If affected all of us awfully.”“Of course,” Daniel replied. “The headline in Le Monde was Nous sommes tous Américains. But what’s the nous, the we? I mean, a month before the attacks, I was at a Radiohead concert at Liberty State Park in Jersey City, with the Twin Towers looming behind the stage on the other side of the Hudson. At one point Thom Yorke pointed up at the buildings and sang, ‘Come on if you think you can take us on.’ I cheered along with everyone else. Those buildings obviously represented things he thought were evil. And I guess I agreed with him.”“Evil?” Susan was surprised at his use of such a serious word, a theological word. “Daniel, I understand your passion, but your country has done so much good for the world. Don’t you know that’s what your scholarship is about? It’s a gesture of gratitude from Britain to America for World War II and the rebuilding of Europe. It’s all about Churchill’s prophecy.” Susan puffed her cheeks out and attempted an old-fashioned posh accent. “In God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”“Yeah, I know. My father certainly taught me to think like that. Both my grandfathers were in the war. But I wonder where it’s all going. You know, a few months ago, in one of my classes we watched a movie called Germany Year 90 Nine Zero. It’s by Jean-Luc Godard. I love his old movies. Breathless is his masterpiece, and it’s very pro-American to me really. Not so much his films after that one. I mean, they’re good too. But anyway, this one is really confusing and not that great, but I was bowled over by one line near the beginning, where a guy in a Mercedes is talking on a car phone and he says, ‘Now the Cold War is over, being American is pointless.’ Then he runs over a sign that says Karl Marx Straße, or it says something about Karl Marx anyway. I forget.”“Daniel, don’t you think you’re overthinking this a bit? Of course there’s a point to being American. Europeans don’t like to admit it, but they are generally rather envious of Americans, really. You’ve said it yourself. The man in that film criticizing America is enjoying technology and luxury that makes him seem very American to my ears.”“Yes, you’re probably right,” Daniel said quietly. He realized, once again, he was in the presence of a beautiful woman and was in danger of turning her off with a rant like Alvy Singer to Allison Portchnik in Annie Hall. “Hang on,” he thought. “She works for the British government. This is ok.”“One of the poets I’ve studied,” Daniel continued, “Joachim Du Bellay. He was the founder of a group called the Pléïade. You know, like the stars, the Pleiades. They lived in the sixteenth century.”“I think we read something by Ronsard at school,” Susan said. “He was one of them, wasn’t he?”“Right. He was the biggest name. Ronsard was the greatest French poet before Victor Hugo. But it was Du Bellay who was sort of the leader and wrote the manifesto for the movement. It’s about language and poetry and antiquity. It’s about being Christian, and having a Christian society. Being men, being French, being European. But it’s really about what it means to be human. The Reformation had really thrown everything into chaos, and suddenly people in northern Europe were aware of the fact that their heritage was more a dead relic than a living organism. Du Bellay went to Rome and was shocked to walk among the ruins. It seems weird to us now, you know, but it took centuries for people to realize that the Roman Empire was really gone. And that’s why I think it’s important that these poets wrote about mythology and nature and food and religion, but they were most famous for their love poetry. They were trying to figure out what to love and how to love. We’re so much more confused now than they ever were. And we don’t have much love poetry.”Daniel realized he was wound up now. Screw it. Keep going.“We were talking about patriotism before. Love of country. I used to have a poster on my dorm room wall of John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, and I thought maybe I was supposed to love my country in a different way from my father and my family. Like, the idea of America was lovable, but not the reality. Never the reality. The reality was all evil, from the Indian wars to slavery to the oppression of women. But then I got to thinking, how can I love an idea? The politicians say the terrorists hated our freedom, but they didn’t attack our freedom, did they? They attacked people, buildings, real things. Now I’m just so confused, because I think my biggest problem is there’s only reality or nothing, and I feel like I’m unconsciously choosing nothing. Really, I just don’t know what to love.”Silence hung in the air between them, and Daniel wished he had his drink already or a cigarette to puff on to ease the awkwardness. Instead, he asked Susan, “What do you love?”At this moment the waitress returned with the Assam and café au lait, and she asked the pair what they would like for breakfast. Susan never ate much early in the morning, but she figured it was expected of her now to order something. This had clearly become an impromptu breakfast date. She chose the pain au chocolat. Daniel was famished from his walking, but he always had trouble eating and talking seriously at the same time. He had to focus on one or the other. He played it safe with just a croissant.Susan contemplated her reply to Daniel’s question.Susan’s college was women-only, but she certainly knew young men at the university who were prone to romantic ramblings like Daniel’s. She liked it. And in fact, she was regularly disappointed with the sensitive chaps who did this sort of thing, because they normally turned out to be gay, or else they fancied extremely uninteresting and unattractive girls who were content to sit and listen a lot and drink red wine and eat a box of After Eights on the sofa and have sex. For no particular religious or moral reason that she could articulate, Susan strongly disapproved of promiscuity, so much so that the suspicions of her coworkers were correct. She was a virgin, by no real fault of her own.Susan’s father came from a family of recusant Catholics who boasted various martyrs in their bloodline, and they had preserved and handed down tales of secret hiding places for Jesuits and illegal Masses in country estates. He half-joked that what his ancestors had kept alive for twenty generations, he had all but killed off in one. Her mother was unbaptized but loosely identified as Church of England, and as a concession to the slim possibility of the truth of the Christian claims, the Anguish’s had their only offspring Christened in the Catholic Church. They neither prepared her nor presented her for any other sacraments, but they sent her to a prestigious Catholic school, for academic reasons. If their daughter happened to absorb some old-fashioned religion along the way towards a place at Oxford, so be it. As far as Susan knew, nothing holy had stuck to her.“What do I love?” she asked back. “I’ve never worried about answering questions like that one, Daniel. I am alive. I believe I have a purpose in this world. I love my family. I suppose I must say it. I do love my country, although love of country in Britain is not like the flag-waving you have here. My country is who I am. British in every direction as far back as anyone can say. But it’s not something we’re proud of exactly. Or it wouldn’t be welcome if we were, except on certain rare occasions. Actually, I sometimes think my parents wish the queen had died when I was a child so they could have made a patriotic memory. You know, standing on Pall Mall with a packed lunch and a good excuse to enjoy our heritage for a brief while. That’s morbid, I know. Her Majesty seems nowhere near death, thank God.”“Ah, there! God,” Daniel interjected. “What do you mean by that?”“I don’t know,” Susan answered. “I believe in God, I think. Maybe that’s your answer. God is love, right?”“That’s where I’m mixed up,” Daniel confessed. “I can’t avoid thinking about what you’ve said, only backwards. Like, these days, love is God, not God is love.”He paused for about five beats, debating whether to ask what he really wanted to know. Then he went for it. “Have you ever been in love, Susan?”Susan reddened. “Another big question,” she replied, “and a rather personal one this time, Daniel.” She hoped he would take back the conversation, but he cocked his head to the side and waited patiently for her reply. She continued, “Well, I had….”This time she paused, considering for a moment whether to proceed with her Harrier pilot story. It was not quite a total fabrication. She had known a handsome man in the Royal Air Force. Maybe she loved him. Did he ever think of her? In any case, it came to nothing.Her mind wandered further. There had been no boys at the Thornton School, which she attended from her first year through Sixth Form. At Oxford, she had had dates here and there with young men, who ranged from well-meaning and hopeless to total predators. At work there had been Michael, ten years her senior, a handsome, kind, and slightly aloof man she had worked with briefly in the same department. She thought there was something was building there. But then, he suddenly moved back to his native Hampshire, got married to the daughter of a family friend, and was standing for parliament in a safe Tory seat.Susan had a group of girlfriends in London, mostly leftovers from St. Hilda’s. She would see different combinations of them once or twice a month for lunch. They often encouraged her to come out with them in the evenings and meet men. Not just to “pull,” mind you, but to put herself in more situations that could lead to something lasting. Commuting to and from Buckinghamshire, however, did not lend itself well to night life in the capital. She supposed if she was in London, she could at least be in group settings from time to time with decent people. But why settle for a sad flat in Acton or Peckham or even Bayswater, when she could live in a proper home in a lush setting?Suddenly a flash of anger overwhelmed her. Why did she have to justify herself? Why should it be odd that she was content with her life as long as she wasn’t made to feel something was missing? Of course she wanted more, eventually. Having grown up an only child, the result of a careful plan, she daydreamed occasionally of being the matriarch of a large, messy collection of little humans. She had told no one, but her work for the government was now of no long-term interest to her. The problem was, most real men she encountered seemed…well…just not good enough.“You had…?” Daniel prodded her.“No, what I was going to say is, I love a lot of things, Daniel. I love music, for example. I’ve played the flute since I was a little girl. I was in the Wind Orchestra at Oxford. Actually, we have a little orchestra at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office too.“You have a band at work?” Daniel asked, surprised. “Like Brassed Off but for bureaucrats?”“Well, I don’t know about that, but it’s not uncommon in Britain to have musical ensembles or choirs or clubs or hobby groups and things like that with colleagues.”“See, I love that! That is love to me. Your society is set up to encourage your passions and interests. It’s humane.”“Perhaps,” Susan replied. “But I have dodged your question, haven’t I? Have I ever been in love?” Now she sat pensively as her heart beat hard out of her chest. “No, Daniel. No. I have not been in love.” She blushed brighter than ever, feeling exposed but also relieved. No young Englishman – not even one of those wispy-faced Romantics from her philosophy tutorials – would dare ask a woman seven years older than him whether she had ever been in love.The waitress returned with the croissant and pain au chocolat, and Susan realized she had let the Assam steep the entire time they had been talking. She poured a little milk into her teacup, followed by the piping hot tea. Daniel gulped down his coffee quickly and asked the passing waitress for a second cup. For his part, Daniel had mistaken being in love several times, and he had broken at least three hearts that he knew of between his two high school girlfriends, and one more at college named Mara. She was a particularly hard situation. Daniel knew he was not in love with her, and he would have to end it. Finding out about England was as good an excuse as any. But he remained in the same friend group after the fact, and with his flesh being weak, he pushed his way back into a relationship with her, even using the L-word disingenuously: Love. When it was about to be over for a second time, Daniel wished he had some real way to unburden his conscience of shame; but instead, he wallowed in his poor judgment before breaking it off with Mara in a more selfish display than the first time. He cried. How dare he?But like Susan, Daniel had not yet been completely intimate with anyone, although he had certainly “done stuff,” as Americans of his generation said. In the case of Daniel’s first two girlfriends, he toed the line of his Christian upbringing, in a tradition that was passing through a brief moment where theological liberalism and personal restraint intersected. It was just before the moral economy of Daniel’s little society came off the gold standard of “no sex until marriage.” Likewise, drug use was universally frowned upon. “Just say no,” was accompanied by the wink of the president saying, “I didn’t inhale.” People had sex and did drugs in many of the movies and tv shows Daniel loved, but throughout his teen years, he maintained a strict sensus fidelium that no one particularly expected of him, nor he of others.With Mara, however, Daniel was ready to cross the line on physical intimacy. “This is absurd,” he thought. “Doing stuff is no different than going all the way.” But Mara held her own line. She was a secular Jew, and she felt no compunction about sexual morality apart from a personal conviction of “only when it’s someone I really love.” She and Daniel had a common interest in cinema, and they often lay cuddled up on the couch in the lounge of her dorm suite watching movies, in which famous actors and actresses were going “all the way.” In fact, Mara did really love Daniel, but she knew he didn’t reciprocate. Her real conviction on sex, therefore, was “only someone who loves me as much as I love him.”“Good for her,” Daniel thought now, partly absolving himself for messing her about.Susan resumed talking. “Have you ever seen the interview just before Charles and Diana were married, where the presenter asked if they were in love?”“No, I don’t think so,” Daniel replied.“Well, Charles famously answered something like, ‘whatever in love means,’ and Diana was visibly embarrassed and everyone thought it was odd of him. But everyone thought him a bit odd anyway, and what should a future king say to such an impertinent question, people said. But of course, we now realize he knew exactly what ‘in love’ meant, because he was in love with Camilla and not Diana. He married the poor thing anyway, and he resented her and ignored her, and now she’s dead.”“Yes, I remember when she died,” Daniel interjected. “They interrupted Saturday Night Live to announce it. My mother was devastated. She loved Diana. Loves all the royal stuff.”“Really? That’s interesting,” Susan replied. “What do you make of the ‘royal stuff’?”“Oh, I think it’s great too.” He prepared to let loose a quote he had memorized – something he frequently did that some people found charming and others show-off-y and strange. Sitting with a British woman, he hoped it would be the former. “Where men are forbidden to honor a king they honor millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.”“That’s clever,” Daniel. “What is that?”“It’s C.S. Lewis. I read him a lot my freshman year. Actually, it’s why I chose Magdalen College. He was there for years and years.”“Yes, of course. Well, Lewis was right, I reckon. But Charles may be hard to honor. It may be love that does him in, like Edward VIII. You know, surely there must be some via media with all this sort of thing. Take my parents, for example. I think they would find a question like “are you in love?” rather embarrassing to answer, but they would finally say yes. I have never seen much public display of affection between them, but they are the whole of each other’s lives. They hardly even do the shopping alone. They have worked together for years at their small business, a saddlery and horseback supplies company. They take day excursions and birdwatch and drink milky cups of tea in the evening whilst watching gardening or cooking programmes or Morse or Miss Marple. It’s beautiful.”Daniel asked, “Is that what you want too, Susan?”Caught flat-footed again by Daniel’s directness, Susan stuttered. “W…Well, yes. I think so.”“Don’t you want a bit more passion?”Daniel surprised himself by his forwardness. Perhaps it was the coffee or the adrenaline or the novelty of the circumstances, but he felt the tingle.Susan felt it too. She confessed, “I don’t want to be Princess Diana or my parents. Certainly I want passion. Yes.”At that moment the waitress set down Daniel’s second café au lait, and Susan, who realized she had worked up a noticeable sweat, looked up at the clock on the wall on the far side of the room, above the entryway. “Blimey! I have to get back,” she exclaimed as she slid the chair back from the table, opening her handbag to find a twenty-dollar bill, which she threw down on the table.”“No, let me,” said Daniel.“Of course not. I’m here to support you. I must dash.”Daniel took a quick sip of his second cup of coffee, jumped up, grabbed his satchel, and followed Susan out the door. The two walked in step back to the Palomar, where they entered the lobby side by side, right into the staring eyes of thirty-nine American students pinned with the Union Jack and Stars and Stripes, ready to depart. Get full access to Andrew Petiprin at andrewpetiprin.substack.com/subscribe

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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Part IChapter 1As the tower of Magdalen College, Oxford came into Daniel Perrin’s sight for the first time, he was daydreaming of Susan, whose name would have been a little old-fashioned for a woman of her generation, except she had a slight schoolmarm quality that had not yet found its purpose in childrearing. Susan’s parents had had respectable professional hopes for their only offspring, whom they raised in a small, prosperous Buckinghamshire village ten miles north of High Wycombe. Susan did A-Level English, French, Mathematics, and music – the last against her headmistress’ expressed wishes. After three years and a First-Class Honours degree in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, one stop past Magdalen over the bridge, Susan went home again, passed the civil service exam and began driving the M1 to the A4 to Constitution Hill every morning, passing through the security checkpoint at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office well before sunrise in the grey and golden months alike. As age twenty-two quickly became twenty-nine, her colleagues pitied her on the rare occasions when her simmering insecurity bubbled up and she fibbed about an ex-boyfriend in the RAF. “A Harrier pilot, you know.” She pretended to be officious, but no one feared her. In fact, everyone liked her. She was indispensable.Daniel was a romantic American who had imagined since adolescence standing on cobblestones in the Old World. He had wrongly assumed he would have to settle for the old-enough bricks of a city like Pittsburgh, which contrasted with the hermetically-sealed, air-conditioned silos of the southwest Florida suburbs where he had grown up. Daniel’s father Roger was a formidable failure whose fondness for cigarettes had transformed into a full-blown love affair after his second divorce and early retirement from the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office. His smoking needs had caused him to self-select out of any professional opportunities requiring more than a few minutes’ time indoors, in the iron grip of newfangled anti-tobacco laws. “They actually think they can purify the whole world,” he told Daniel often, as the words rolled out of his mouth on billows of smoke, which he didn’t bother to exhale with any force.Working retail was Roger’s best option, and he got a job selling suits at J.C. Penney, where he took longer and more frequent breaks than his co-workers, who did not complain. He carried a pistol in an ankle holster in violation of the store’s employee handbook, which he was prepared to argue was in conflict with state law. The world being as it was, the store manager knew about Roger’s firearm and never addressed the matter, feeling a little safer with an old lawman roaming his sales floor. Roger regaled the stock boys with violent stories from the beat, and he had various explanations for the slight limp that took him off the police force and made him into a mall salesman. “I do what I want, boys. And it’s never the wrong thing. Never.”Roger spoke fluent French from adolescent years in Paris as a military brat, or, technically, a NATO brat. He implicitly projected to Daniel, his firstborn, a cosmopolitanism he assumed his progeny could never hope to attain. Despite Roger’s blue collar first career as a cop and subsistence-level second life in retail, he was proud to explain how he had turned his back on an elite intellectual life, crashing out of a Ph.D. program at the University of Maryland in 1977. “The political science department was full of Soviet sympathizers, son. Academia is no place for a man like me.”As a firstborn, Daniel took his father’s manly genius as challenge. Roger never dissuaded his son from the intellectual life. On the contrary. “The commies have temporarily receded into the woodwork, Daniel” – it was always Daniel, never Danny or Dan – “get in there and shake things up.” Daniel majored in French and spent lonely evenings in his dorm room dropping into AOL chatrooms full of aspiring European backpackers, whom he half-heartedly asked to let him tag along to Prague or Warsaw. He would often ask if people had read Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, and he began to imagine meeting his soul mate on a train somewhere like Ethan Hawke did in Before Sunrise. But unlike Ethan Hawke, Daniel wouldn’t let his dream girl loose with some cockamamie plan to meet up again in a year. Then again, maybe meeting a girl could wait, and he would find out if there was a place for him with a super-secret intelligence service within the CIA like in Mission: Impossible.More seriously, Daniel treated life as a college student like a job, and his discipline was almost monkish. There was no shaking things up. He carried eighteen credits per term, and he rewarded himself for each day’s reading with VHS tapes of Woody Allen movies and solitary walks with cigarettes, which he felt the need to conceal from his father. Daniel knew Roger would not disapprove of the smoking. Rather, he was likely to judge his proficiency at it. Unlike his old man, Daniel loved to exhale with a great thrust, pushing the smoke out as a jet stream. Daniel stood just shy of six feet tall, which was a good three inches shorter than Roger, who was privately happy that his son had not exceeded him in stature. For his part, Daniel took it as a consolation that his nose was smaller than his father’s, and his eyes blue instead of green. Just before his college graduation, Daniel had shaved off his hopeless, sandy-colored goatee which matched his hair, parted neatly to the side since he was a little boy. He thought he might finally make a change to his style when he saw how the men looked in England. For all that Daniel disdained attention-seeking in others, he was, like Roger, prone to vanity.Daniel’s grades in college were nearly perfect, although he impressed no one in particular. He was surprised, therefore, to be called into the dean’s office and told to apply for two prestigious scholarships. Both awards paid for a graduate degree in the U.K. – one at Oxford, and the other one at Oxford or at any other British university. As it seemed like a pipe dream anyway, and France was where he was surely headed – destined, even – he thought he would make an experiment of refusing to apply for the Oxford-only one and agreeing to apply for the anywhere-one, but he would use it to choose Oxford. He pretended he liked the man whose name bore the second scholarship, Marshall, whereas the first one, Rhodes, was evil.When he was called for an interview at the British Embassy in Washington, he told one of the inquisitors, a thirty-something Indian-American scientist who was an alumna of the scholarship program, how he had just driven historic Route 40 through the Pennsylvania town where the scholarship’s namesake was born, and he admired the man deeply for what he did for Europe after World War II. The interviewer’s polite smile was betrayed by eyes that said, “this guy is a little odd. Not a lot odd.” Daniel thought, “That was dumb of me,” but the British ambassador was delighted. He examined Daniel’s transcript and when he noticed it contained various courses related to the Middle Ages, he asked him about Vlad the Impaler. Daniel panicked out of ignorance and changed the subject, volunteering the opening lines of Beowulf, then Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, both of which happened to be fresh in his mind but would soon leave his brain and never return. The fortieth of the forty scholarship awards, along with its accompanying automatic university entry, was offered to a young woman from California who decided to forgo Blighty and head straight to a prestigious American medical school. As the first alternate, Daniel was chosen instead. Susan, whose office was tasked with formally extending Her Majesty’s congratulations, left a scripted message on the answering machine Daniel shared with his roommate Erik, who was on his way off campus for good after spending his entire junior year trading music files with strangers on Napster. “Dude, some lady called. You got the England thing.”Just like that it would be England for Daniel. Roger would retain control of France.Before England came Washington, which Daniel reached belatedly because the airports had all been shut down three weeks prior. Consequently, Daniel had to fly from Tampa to Baltimore and then take a long taxi ride to meet the rest of his scholarship class for orientation. Each scholar was sent a pin with half Stars-and-Stripes and half Union Jack, and each was asked to wear it in his lapel or on her blouse or in some other prominent place on the business casual attire required as a “representative of your country, and a welcome guest in ours,” as the letter explained. Daniel reluctantly complied. His cab driver, Yusuf, said it was ok to smoke, so Daniel worked his way through half a pack of Kamel Reds all the way to Dupont Circle, where about a dozen students were having drinks in the bar of the Palomar Hotel and practicing to become masters of the shrinking universe which their grades and extracurriculars had almost qualified them to rule. Daniel decided he hated them all.Susan didn’t hate them all, but she resented the young women, elites seven years her junior, whom she perceived as marginally smarter and demonstrably prettier, or at least more put together than she was. Like them, she had never learned to cook. Unlike them, she had a small gap in her front teeth that was not unusual even among attractive people in Britain, but which would never have gone uncorrected in middle-class America. Susan was ginger, with a slim but not toned body. She applied makeup carefully but unadventurously, and she was imprecise and infrequent at shaving her legs.In an attempt to spruce herself up for her American debut, she had bought a new bra from a chain lingerie shop in the international terminal at Dulles Airport. She would soon experience its suffocating fit underneath the little black dress from Marks and Spencer that she always wore to semi-fancy dos. When Daniel entered the lobby of the Palomar, he was immediately met by a tall, smiling young man with thick, short dark hair, wearing penny loafers, khakis, and a blue and white Bengal stripe button-down. “Perino!” he exclaimed! “Daniel Perino, I’m Jonah Green. Join us for a drink! We heard you guys coming from the south would have more trouble getting here. I wonder if they’ll ever reopen Reagan. Or at least rename it,” he laughed. “It’s Perrin,” Daniel corrected him, noticing a subtle scar on his neck from a tracheotomy at some point in the past. Jonah was a Princeton man from a New York Jewish family that had settled in West Palm Beach before he was born. He did not raise the issue with Daniel of their common shallow roots in the Florida sand. Jonah had been interning on Capitol Hill that summer, and he made no secret of his intentions to find a way back there as quickly as he could with more credentials. To wit, he had strategically decided to do a master’s degree in the new Women’s Studies department at University College, London.Daniel propped up his suitcase and satchel against the wall next to the men’s room door before making his way to one of the two high, round tables, which had been pushed together to accommodate a group of five, now six. As Daniel maneuvered himself into the tall seat, a young man with thinning red hair and a babyface was holding court about cinema in between cigarillo puffs. His name was Sullivan Gallier of the great Louisiana Gallier family; but Sully had barely known his father, who disappeared into alcoholism and died under mysterious circumstances in Las Vegas. His mother heard little from her son’s wealthy relations, and she taught middle-school English for twenty years at the Academy of the Holy Name in uptown New Orleans. Sully was a lonely prodigy, graduating from high school at fifteen and Loyola University at eighteen. He was now on his way to Edinburgh, which he repeatedly promoted to his countrymen as one of the world’s most poetic cities. “I don’t buy it! The late 90’s were no golden age of cinema,” Sully declared. “Or if they were, a golden age is something we ought to be running away from, not praising. American Psycho, Fight Club, The Big Lebowski, they’re all so goddamn right wing. The Matrix is too of course, although I suspect we may realize it has a very different meaning someday. I can’t put my figure on it. But Beau Travail – now that’s a movie. It’s time we turn the gaze on men, I say. It’s a scandal that twenty-two out of forty of us here on this scholarship scheme are men. A scandal!” “The movies are all so irrelevant, really,” replied Jonah. “Except for these clever documentaries,” he added. “What a genius that Michael Moore is. Genius! He makes us laugh for two hours and sends us back to the parking lot ready to repeal the Second Amendment. Now there’s an example of art accomplishing something useful. Like Upton Sinclair!” As a lull formed between the pronouncements of Sully and Jonah, Daniel began to wind up a half-hearted defense of the movies Sully had criticized. All he could muster was a mumbling, “Well, I don’t know…I think,” when the din of a fire alarm suddenly drowned him out. America was on edge, and cities like Washington particularly so. None of the well-formed young people like Daniel would yet concede the possibility of a widespread terrorist threat from any particular group of people. But even being on the right side of the matters of the day, awful things could happen to anybody. As the siren continued to blare, the hotel restaurant emptied and guests began pouring down the stairs from their suites to the lobby and out through the front doors. A stampede had begun. Jonah, Sully, and the rest of the party at the high-top tables jumped up and darted fifteen feet to the exit. Daniel stood up more slowly in defiance of his panicky peers, and he began to walk leisurely to the door. Suddenly remembering his bags by the men’s room, he turned around quickly, walking straight into an oncoming redhead in a bathrobe, who knocked him through the door and off his feet. Daniel lay prostrate on the sidewalk. Susan was on top of him. Get full access to Andrew Petiprin at andrewpetiprin.substack.com/subscribe