Fascination Stories

> Springtime in Oxford is vulgar, anyway, but something about this particular spring in Oxford is having me on. Really, these cherry trees are absurd. One wonders if just quite so many flowers are necessary. It is almost as if the cherry trees on the Woodstock Road are trying to prove something--some sort of floral brag, swanking to the other, less advanced vegetation. Very Oxford in a way. Could I work this observation into the novel? "Only in Oxford do the cherry trees try too hard." Good opening for the Oxford sequence? > My meeting with my new supervisor was not a success. Dr. Alexander Cardman. "Call me Alex," he invited almost immediately. He referred to me as Edward without permission. "How old are you?" he asked. "Thirty-one. How old are you?" "Thirty-three. And you've been writing this thesis for...'" "For, oh, six years. Seven. Seven and a bit. I left Oxford for three to teach. Then came back." "Teach? Where was that?" "Abbey Meade. It's a prep school in Wiltshire." "Ah." I could hear the sneer forming in his brain. "And you came back--" "To finish my thesis." "I see..." I was disliking him quite intensely by now. He looked as if he had gel in his hair. The small, trimmed goatee was rebarbative, and the faint west country burr in his voice struck me as an affectation. > Summertown. The Banbury Road. I push through the front gate of "See Breezes" [sic] to meet my new student, Gianluca di Something-or-other. He is blind, so the language school has told me, and he needs to be walked to my flat. Not every day, I hope. A cheery plump woman opens the door and leads me through to a living room, where Gianluca sits. He is a tall boy--eighteen or nineteen, I would say--with thick blond hair and a weak-chinned, sad face. His eyes are open, and as I introduce myself and shake his hand they seem to stare directly at me, disconcertingly, with only a faint glaucous, bloodshot hue to them. We walk back to my flat on the Woodstock Road. His right hand rests gently in the crook of my left elbow, his left carries a briefcase and a folded white cane. We don't speak, as he had said, in good English, that he needed to concentrate and count. We stroll through Summertown's shops and halt the traffic at the beeping pedestrian crossing. Along Moreton Road to Woodstock Road and then a hundred yards or so to the house. "Ring this doorbell," I say guiding his hand to the gleaming brass knob, "and I'll come down to get you." In the hall Gianluca stops and sniffs the air. "What is this place?" he says. "A dentist's," I say, as breezily as I can muster. "I live on the top floor." > Felicia has gone to Malaysia for a week to try to sell Internet stocks in the Pacific Rim market, or something. Perhaps it's bonds, or fluctuations in other stock markets, that she's selling; or she might even be selling other people's hunches about fluctuations in stock markets in the next decade. I don't even try to understand. She has given me the key to her house so I can feed her tropical fish while she's away. When she left at dawn she kissed me good-bye, told me she loved me, and said, ominously, apropos of nothing, that she thought I would make a wonderful father. I suppose it's as close as she'll ever get to issuing an ultimatum. > "There is," I read, "as every schoolboy knows in this scientific age, a very close chemical relation between coal and diamonds--" "Please," says Gianluca, "there is a preface by Conrad, no?" "YeBoyd, William is the author of 'Fascination Stories', published 2005 under ISBN 9781400043200 and ISBN 1400043204.