Matters of Honor by Louis Begley

Mario Delgado. You must be one of Archie’s roommates, the one who isn’t from Poland. Mario’s accent was as elegant as his navy-blue blazer, and quite unlike the intonations of Archie’s other Latino friends.
    I told him that I wouldn’t have guessed he was from Argentina. The provincial stupidity of my remark was clear to me as soon as I had made it. I mumbled an apology.
    Don’t worry, he replied, nobody can place me, and everyone asks. It comes from my having been sent to school in England, but a couple of years too late. Come, you should have a drink.
    He led me to the table that served as a bar and deftly left me. I saw Henry and Archie still near the door in a group of people shouting so as to be heard over the noise. I didn’t want to shoulder my way in. Instead, I went back to my post at the window. On the way I examined first the contents of the bookcases, which proved unremarkable, and then the posters pinned to the walls advertising Dubonnet, the casino in Biarritz, French movies, and, inevitably, the Moulin Rouge. At the same time, I took inventory of the guests. The girls were all very tall. Perhaps that was the criterion that determined who was invited. Some I recognized, probably because I had stared at them in the library. The others might have been imported for this important weekend from Wellesley, Smith, Vassar, or Sarah Lawrence, or even more distant sources of supply. Among the men, foreigners seemed to be in the majority. They wore tweed jackets or blazers too beautiful, like Mario’s, not to be noticed. Americans, all manifestly upperclassmen, sported neckties of the three or four best final clubs. Blond and serene, they were to a man products of the boarding schools that acted as principal feeders for Harvard College, a species not unfamiliar to me, except that its representatives assembled at Mario’s were, on the scale of perfection, right at the high end. I glanced again at Archie and Henry. Their group was all foreigners, and therefore rugby players. It was impossible not to notice that both my roommates were out of place in this setting; to put it more brutally, they looked odd. This was so not only by reason of how they were dressed, or, in Henry’s case, also his haircut, which was too short, exposing white skin over his ears. It was more their facial expressions. They had neither the clubmen’s blandness and satisfaction with the place they occupied by divine right nor the foreigners’ good-natured bonhomie. There was something too keen and too eager to please about Archie; Henry was nervous and uncomfortable, and couldn’t hide it.
    A good half hour had passed since Mario propelled me toward my martini, and I hadn’t exchanged a word with anyone else. I wondered how much longer I could decently continue this way without asking for another drink or taking some other action to make myself a less conspicuous wallflower. I also wondered whether Margot would really appear and, if she did, how Archie was going to manage the introduction. I didn’t think he had actually met her; more likely he had only observed her and found out her name. I had just decided I would give her another fifteen minutes and was making my way to the bar when Margot entered the room on the arm of my cousin George. To meet him this way for the first time since coming to Cambridge wasn’t exactly what I would have wished, but it solved the problem I had been pondering: I would say hello to him, and the rest would follow. I checked on my roommates. They hadn’t moved; standing with their backs to the door, neither could have seen Margot.
    Fresh martini in hand, I threaded my way toward George. It took him a moment to see me. As soon as he did, he exclaimed with a look of pleasant surprise—I hoped it was in some part genuine—over the remarkable coincidence of finding me at this party given by people he didn’t know and introduced me to Margot as his cousin. She mumbled some greeting, not particularly