Euphoria

22

I have a biographer now, a young fellow who comes round wearing untucked shirts and thick specs. My mother makes him tea and he proceeds to ask me questions. This is the one he seems to want to get at most, the question he brings back visit after visit, sometimes saving it for last, or putting it right up front, or burying it in the middle, thinking he might trip me up. How did you come up with the Grid? I have thought a great deal about why I do not answer. Partly it is shame — though that word hardly captures the depth of it — that prevents me from responding. Another part is that our innocence, our utter ignorance of what lay ahead for Germany and the world, is now nearly impossible to comprehend. And another part still wonders: If we had not come up with the Grid, had not had that experience together, and if I had not stayed but gone back to the Kiona, would any of the rest have happened?

It was late on that third night of my stay on Lake Tam that it happened, that shift in all our stars.

We were back at the kitchen table. We’d gone through Helen’s book again, filled it with marginalia in three different hands.

‘I keep thinking there’s a way to map all of it,’ Nell said. I’d seen how her notes were filled with sketches and diagrams.

‘What do you mean?’ But I knew, of course. I’d seen it. I’d dreamt it.

‘Map the arc?’ Fen said.

‘Orientation.’ She and I said it at the same time, that one word. Orientation.

‘The idea that cultures have a strong pull in one direction, at the expense of other directions.’

I was drawing the first line as she spoke.

At the expense of other directions. I felt like her words were pulling it out of me and at the same time my axis was pulling the words out of her. I wasn’t sure if I was having my own thoughts or hers. And yet I felt the melting ice, the sense of urgency. I bisected the line. Just as I had drawn it in my dream.

Fen, somehow understanding completely, pointed to the top of the page, above the top of the vertical line. ‘Mumbanyo.’ And then to the bottom of it. ‘Anapa.’

We fell on this piece of paper, each of us with our pencils, shouting out and filling in the four points of the compass with the names of tribes and then countries. If we stopped at that moment and suggested criteria, defined each direction of the compass, I have no recollection of it. In my memory we went at it instinctively, fully agreeing that Americans were Northerners like the Mumbanyo and that Italians belonged in the South with the Anapa. To the West were the Zuni and to the East the Dobu and the other Dionysian North American tribes. We had to add Southeast for the Baining and Northeast for the Kiona. We ran out of room and had to add a page to all four sides of the initial paper, sticking them together with fig sap and then racing on to get our ideas on the page. We were all bent close together, arms overlapping, foul-breathed and two-years filthy, and I felt like I was back in England with my brothers, included in some pressing project of theirs, making a birdhouse or the backdrop to one of Martin’s elaborate plays.

In time we did work out definitions for each point of our compass. The cultures we put in the Northern vector were aggressive, possessive, forceful, successful, ambitious, egoistic. The id of the grid, Nell said. By contrast the Southern cultures were responsive, nurturing, sensitive, empathetic, war-averse. To the West were the Apollonian managers who valued unemotional efficiency, pragmatism, extroversion, while the Easterners were spiritual, introverted seekers, interested in the questions of life more than the answers.

Fen’s own temperament did not allow him to dissolve indefinitely into our collective thinking; he participated awhile then pushed us away, as if gasping for breath. When Nell tried to align one of Jung’s functions of consciousness to each quadrant, Fen slapped her pencil away from the page.

‘You don’t understand a thing about it.’

‘Explain it to me then.’

‘It’s far more complex than what you’ve got here. There are sixteen combinations of dominance.’

She flipped over to a fresh page in her notebook. ‘What are they?’

But he wouldn’t tell her.

‘You haven’t put in the Tam,’ I said, thinking to smooth over the tension.

‘Go ahead,’ Nell said to him.

He shook his head.

‘Fen. Go on.’

The omission had been deliberate.

‘What does it matter what my opinion is? Yours is the one that counts.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’m talking about’—he wrapped both fists around his pencil—’I’m talking about the charade of us doing this together when we both know what you think about the Tam is what people are going to know about the Tam.’ He turned to me. ‘She thinks she knows the Tam men. She thinks they’re vain and gossipy like Western women. She thinks she’s found this big swap of sexual roles but she doesn’t spend any time with men. She’s not making canoes and building houses with them as I am. She doesn’t give a tinker’s cuss for my notes.’

‘You have no notes! You’ve given me next to nothing.’

‘Eighteen pages in one day on cross-sexual kinship lines.’

‘Which turned out to be based on a false premise.’ She looked down at our paper and took in a steadying breath. ‘You will write your own book, Fen. You will write what you see and—’

‘And who will read that? Who will read that when there’s a book by Nell Stone on the same subject?’ He flung the pencil across the house. ‘Fucked if I do, fucked if I don’t,’ he said, slumped in his chair.

‘You are certainly fucked if you don’t do the work we’re here for. And I’m fucked, too.’ Nell slammed his pencil back on the table. ‘You put down the Tam men and I’ll put down the Tam women.’

She waited for him to go first. It took a while, an awkward silent while, but then he lifted himself and put the Tam men in the aggressive but artistic Northeast. She put the Tam women in the Northwest.

And this led to another round of mapping as we separated men from women, finding that while the male ethos usually represented the culture at large, within a culture women offset the ideal.

‘Sort of a built-in thermostat,’ Nell said.

Fen tried to resist, to continue to sulk, but he was as compelled by the idea as we were. We talked of women we knew, the way they worked against the aggressive Western male norms. The hours passed. Sometime before dawn the sky rumbled and we went outside to see if this was it, the beginning of the real rains, but it wasn’t. The heat was heavy and wet and we decided a swim before sleep might do us good.

As we were stumbling back up the path from the beach, one of us said, ‘Could it work for individuals?’

And we raced the rest of the way back, scrambled to make another grid. I still have that old page, wrinkled from the lake water that dripped from our hair.

It was easy to slot people in. We started with famous strong personalities: dreamy, spritelike Nijinsky in the East and the punishing, cane-carrying Diaghilev in the West; Hoover in the North and Edna St. Vincent Millay in the South. We added colleagues, friends, relatives. While Fen and Nell were arguing about whether someone named Leonie was Northeastern or just Eastern, I put Martin beside Helen in the East, and John next to Nell’s mother at Northwest. But Nell caught me.

‘And your mother?’ she said.

‘Northern to the bone.’

She laughed, as if she has suspected as much.

‘What are we then? Fen said. ‘We have to put ourselves on here.’

‘You’re Northern, I’m Southern and Bankson’s Southern.’

‘Oh, that’s cozy,’ Fen said.

‘Should I feel insulted?’ I said quickly, hoping to diffuse it.

‘Hardly,’ he said, pointing to the South. ‘To be Southern is to be perfect in Nell’s mind. Look who’s there with you: Boas, her grandmother, and her baby sister who died before ever speaking a word.’

‘Stop it, Fen.’

‘Sorry I’m not a sensitive little prat who can pick up on your every thought and tend to every nick and bug bite.’

‘This is not about us, Fen.’

‘The hell it isn’t.’

‘Let’s just stick to—’ Nell said, but a frantic crunch and rustle through the thatch above us drowned her out. Rats fleeing something.

‘Snake,’ Fen said.

It slipped fast down a post and was gone.

‘I hate snakes,’ I said. In fact my stomach had soured just from the sound of it.

‘So do I,’ she said.

‘Bloody Southern cowards,” Fen said.

And we were all right for a while after that.

We kept at it. The sun came up and went down again. We believed we were in the throes of a big theory. We could see our grid in chalk on university blackboards. It felt like we were putting a messy disorganized unlabeled world in order. It felt like decoding. It felt like liberation. Nell and I spoke of never having felt aligned with our culture, with its values and expectations. For long stretches of time it felt like we were crawling around in each other’s brain. We talked in the abstract about relationships, which temperaments went well together. Nell said opposites worked best, and I hastened to agree, though I didn’t believe it, and hoped she didn’t either. She said that Southerners were less possessive with their lovers, more inclined to polygamy.

‘It’s what her set calls free love,’ Fen said. ‘Multiple partners. You go in for that too, Bankson?’

‘No.’ It was the only answer I could give him under the circumstances.

‘Well then, a possessive Southerner for you,’ he said to Nell.

Later, when Fen went to the shit house, as he called it, she said, ‘Do you think it’s natural, the desire to possess another person?’

‘Natural? Weren’t you the one to warn me off that word?’ When Fen was there I was able to contain my attraction to her, but whenever he left I felt it fill the room.

She smiled, but she was serious. ‘Instinctive then, biological? Why are there so many tribes who share everything — food, shelter, land, income — but their stories always revolve around someone’s brother or best friend stealing his woman?’

‘It’s true. The Kiona’s creation myth is about a crocodile who falls in love with his brother’s wife and they run off together to create a new tribe.’

‘Have you ever felt that, the impulse to possess someone?’

‘Yes.’ But I could hardly tell her how recently. ‘Perhaps I’m not so Southern after all.’ Then, to deflect her, I told her about Sophie Soules, a French girl I was engaged to briefly the summer after Martin died, and that when I broke it off, her father had me write a letter attesting to her virginity.

‘A letter promising you had not possessed her. Was it the truth?’

She was a nosy parker. ‘Of course,’ I paused, ‘it was not true.’

She laughed. ‘Was she wine or bread to you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s from an Amy Lowell poem we all loved in college. Wine is sort of thrilling and sensual, and bread is familiar and essential.’

‘Wine, I suppose.’

‘Would it have turned to bread?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘It doesn’t always.’

‘No, I suppose not.’

She rolled a pencil beneath her palm on the table and then she looked up at me. ‘Helen and I were lovers,’ she said.

‘Ah.’ This explained a few things.

She laughed at my ‘ah’ and told me they had met during Nell’s first anthropology class with Boas. Helen, a decade older, was his graduate assistant. Their connection was instant and though Helen was married with a house in White Plains, she stayed in the city many nights a week. She had encouraged Nell to go and study the Kirakira, but wrote her angry letters accusing Nell of abandoning her. Then she surprised her by meeting the boat in Marseille with the news that she had left her husband.

‘But you had met Fen.’

‘I had met Fen. And it was awful. Before Helen, I would have said that the desire to possess others is more male than female in our culture, but I think temperament comes into it.’ She tapped the pencil on our Grid.

‘Was she bread to you?’

She shook her head slowly. ‘People are always wine to me, never bread.’

‘Maybe that’s why you don’t want to possess them.’

Fen didn’t come back for over an hour, and when he did his face was ruddy and bright, as if he’d been out in the cold. Neither of us asked him where he’d been. We continued to work on the Grid until Fen looked up and said, ‘I wonder what the baby will be.’

‘Fen.’

‘What baby?’ I said.

‘Our baby,’ he said. He leaned back, deeply satisfied by my shock.

It all felt very unpleasant to me and I couldn’t look at either of them, nor think of a single word to say.

‘You haven’t told him then, Nellie? Didn’t want him to fuss about?’

Is that how she saw me, as someone who fretted over her unnecessarily? Is that what a ‘Southern’ man signified to her? Finally I eked out some sort of congratulations, said, ‘Excuse me,’ and got out of the house.

I walked down the men’s road. A cluster of pigs were muscling each other for a scrap of food beneath one of the houses and making a racket. There was very little light in the sky, but whether it was sunrise or dusk, I wasn’t sure anymore. I had been spun around by them. I was seven hours away from my work, and had been for who knew how many days. Nell was pregnant. She and Fen had made a baby. When I was with them it was easy to convince myself that she hadn’t fully made her choice yet. She played her part in that. Her eyes burned into mine when I had an idea she liked. She followed every word I said; she referred back. When I had written down Martin’s name on the graph she’d passed her finger over the letters. I felt in some ways we’d had some sort of sex, sex of the mind, sex of ideas, sex of words, hundreds and thousands of words, while Fen slept or shat or disappeared. But his kind of sex with her produced a baby. Mine was useless.

Where the houses ended the road broke in three directions: straight to the next hamlet, left toward the water, and right to the women’s road. At this intersection up ahead, I saw two shapes against the trees, a man and a woman. They were not touching. If I hadn’t known better I would have said the man was white, not because of his skin color, which I could not see in the nearly complete darkness, but in the way he stood sloped and heavy with his weight out in front. As I got closer I could hear they were arguing, the girl in a pleading tone, and when the man saw me he started toward me, then stopped short. He turned back and said something to the girl and they moved on quickly up the women’s road. Xambun. It had been Xambun. And for those few steps he’d taken toward me, he’d thought I was Fen.

I went down to the beach. It was empty, the water unnaturally far away. The canoes were lined up, mine included, high up the beach. Fen’s pews. Had he begun interviewing Xambun without telling Nell? I paced for a while, then stood in one place too long and something crawled up the inside of my trouser leg and I shook it out. Scorpion. I stepped on it heavily and the crunch of its carapace and brittle bones was deeply satisfying. I moved quickly up the sand, back to the house. Their lamps were still lit. I put my hands on the ladder and heard their voices. I moved under the house to hear them more clearly.

‘I can see it, Nell. I can see it right in front of me and I can hear it in your voice and I can feel it under my skin. I’m not inventing anything.’

‘This is what you do. That’s why you’re a Northerner. You want to keep people under lock and key. One real conversation with someone else and—’

‘Oh,’ he began in falsetto, ‘you’re a Southerner and I’m a Southerner and he’s an asshole. I recognize this. That was me three years ago. And now I’m Helen on the fucking quai.’

‘You’re extrapolating all—’

‘That’s right. I am extrapolating, Nell. And brilliantly, like the trained scientist that I am. This whole thing is a way for the two of you to screw right in front of me.’

‘That is ridiculous and you know it.’

‘I will never be one of your castoffs, Nellie.’

‘Don’t’

‘I’m not—’

‘I mean it.’

‘Goddamn it, Nell.’

When I came in, Nell was straightening up our grid papers. She didn’t look at me.

‘There you are,’ Fen said.

‘I’m going to get some shut-eye,’ Nell said.

I ached for sleep as well, but wanted to keep him from lying down beside her for as long as possible. I poured us each a drink and took the sofa, which faced their bedroom. Nell brought a lamp with her, wrote something briefly on her bed, and blew out the light. Fen watched me watch her. It was too dark to see anything, but I knew her already, knew her breasts and the narrow of her back, the rise of her bum and the knot of her calf. I knew the break in her ankle and scars on her skin and her short round toes.

He told me about a letter he’d gotten from a friend in Northern Rhodesia. The friend had told him a story about his shoes being stolen and the village-wide hunt for them. It was a long story with the shoes ending up in the trunk of an elephant, and Fen told it badly.

‘That’s funny,’ I said.

‘It’s absurd,’ he said. But neither of us was laughing.

When he stood to go to bed, I told him I’d be gone in the morning. In fact, I thought I’d leave after they were asleep. She would be safer, I concluded, if I were not around to enrage him.

He sat back down. ‘No. No. You can’t go.’

‘Why not?’

‘I need you here. We both need you here. We need to keep going with this theory.’

‘You don’t need me for that. It’s not my area, personality typing.’

‘I can’t explain it all right now.’ He lowered his voice and glanced to her bedroom, ‘But you have to stay. I’m sorry. I’ve been …’ He dipped his head into his hands and raked his fingernails through his hair loudly. ‘I’ve been awful. I’m stretched a little thin right now. Stay just one more day. A half day. Leave tomorrow afternoon. Please.’

And stupidly, selfishly, I agreed.