We Had It So Good by Linda Grant Page A

penetrate the metropolis.
    Mister Button kept them in cheesecloth shirts, loon pants, LPs, and a monthly dinner at the Elizabeth with a bottle of Burgundy, until a don dropped his fountain pen on the floor at the lab one lunchtime when Stephen was sitting outside on the grass thinking about how to persuade Andrea to let him come up her ass. The Parker pen rolled into Stephen’s fume hood and was followed by two brown lace-up brogues until it came to rest beneath the table on which Stephen had left, propped up against a condensing coil, the torn-out pages from the library.
    â€œI have to go see the proctors,” Stephen told Ivan. “Am I in trouble?”
    â€œDo you know what they’re charging you with?”
    â€œDefacing a library book.”
    â€œOh, man.”
    â€œIs that serious?”
    â€œShit.”
    â€œIt’s just a damned book,” he said, unable to take the proceedings seriously. “I’ll pay for another.”
    He was made to dress up in subfusc. Black suit borrowed from a friend of Ivan’s—he and Ivan were nothing like the same size and shape—white shirt, white bow tie and his academic gown. He looked like a crow, standing in front of the mirror.
    â€œDo you not understand, Mr. Newman,” said the proctor, flankedby bulldogs in bowler hats, “that the Radcliffe Science Library is a copyright library? We do not offer a selection of volumes chosen for the taste and amusement of our students. We receive one copy of every book published. This is not a book which you have defaced. This is the book.”
    â€œWhat, is it the Bible or something?”
    â€œIf it were the Bible it would be the Bible.”
    â€œOh, come on. This is ridiculous.”
    Then they sent him down.
    With the loss of his student status came the loss of his Rhodes Scholarship and, like the fountain pen rolling across the floor of Dyson Perrins, the consequences went on and on, hitting no obstacles to stop their progress. A letter arrived from his father. His dad wasn’t all that good with English, his writing childlike; he had learned to read and write but not fully absorbed where you made a big and where you made a small letter or how to spell.
    DeAR Sun,
    Hope this finds you fine and in GooD HealtH. Your MOTHER sends her Loving WiSHeS. This came For YOU in the mail for the GOVERMENT. I know it IS important SO I sent this REAL quick.
    Yor Loving FatheR
    For the first time in his life he started to have vivid, sweat-soaked dreams. He dreamt of being sewn alive into an army uniform, his head shaved and, like cattle, loaded up with other shaved men and shipped out to Indochina to shoot and kill small yellowy people with conical hats, for absolutely no reason. Stephen knew he was going home to America to die, he could not see himself surviving longer than the minute or two it would take for him to descend the steps of a military troop carrier, and some sniper in the trees, taking aim and then shouting, Got one! He’d make Nguyen’s day and hisparents would erect a dust-gathering shrine to him in their best room and his body would lie in the mortuary for years while they argued about whether he should lie in the Jewish or the Catholic cemetery, but no, they’d burn him in an oven and scatter his sooty ashes in the Pacific Ocean. It would be all over for him, Stephen Newman, son of America. But nobody of his generation, he believed, was born to die, except by accident. Life was extraordinary, the only acceptable condition. Life is my birthright .
    So fuck Mister Button, who had brought him to this. Fuck Ivan, fuck Grace. But not sweet Andrea, who had told him she loved him, and would do anything for him (apart from that thing).
    Andrea with her terrible teeth and green fingernails, her little roll-up cigarettes, her clouds of red hair and large eyes, her plump thighs beneath her velvet dresses and her wet tongue. Who had no one but him in the world, apart from the