guess we don’t give a hoot about the wildlife.” It surprised him, how quickly he was flirting.
“Speak for yourself,” she said. “I’m just taking a break from the sun.”
Over dinner, Sandra told him that she was from Eugene. Friends of her parents who were moving had paid her to drive their second car to Montreal. She had decided to “see a bit of the way-up-north” on her trip home, a relay of bus and train. “What would ever bring me here again?”
Kit told her he would be driving even farther north. He had a list of artists’ cooperatives, craft galleries, places to see the art he waswriting about. They hadn’t finished their main course when Sandra said, “Need a navigator? Hire me on spec. Free, I mean. You can boot me out anywhere.”
“Deal,” he said, then realized she wasn’t joking. He also realized that she had mistaken him for a genuine adventurer. He wished it were true.
Tall and wide-boned, her limbs long, her feet large, Sandra made the rental car seem even more compact. Her knees nearly met the dashboard, and her voluminous hair clung to the fabric lining the roof. Within a week, they were sharing not just a car, and then a room, but a bed. How strange it felt to become lovers in a place where the sun shone through most of the night. “Do you think too long a period of nightlessness,” mused Sandra, “could drive you insane, the way they say sleeplessness can?”
He objected, though of course he was flattered, when she called him “an academic Kerouac.” He did like driving through the wilderness, through the brief, bright flowering of the tundra. The monotony of these spaces did not put him off, nor the hardscrabble roads, but when it came to striking up a conversation with the artists he met, asking them to talk about their work, he turned shy and formal. He learned little beyond what he needed to know.
Kit had no clue how to ask the startling question that would yield the unexpected revelation. He would never have made a good collector of folklore. He didn’t have that investigative edge, what an anthro professor in college dubbed “intercultural moxie.” Art history, he claimed, was where you belong if, despite a yearning for “the other,” you lack the requisite shamelessness for probing into things like the sex lives of strangers. True to such predictions, that’s where Kit ended up. Or thought he ended up.
If he’d had a “real” father from the very beginning, Kit sometimes wonders—though casually, not as part of some existential crisis—would he have been discouraged from pursuing such an impractical, vaguely effeminate path? Would such a path never even have occurred to him? Would he have hung out more often in locker rooms, developed ambitions for scoring goals, winning contests, closing deals, finding work where adrenaline mattered?
He doesn’t even ski anymore. He could have blamed this on the job he landed—though blame of any kind was moot, back then, inthe face of his good fortune. Emerging from the perpetual gridlock of too many smart young scholars, he landed a tenure-track position not just anywhere but at a college within view of the Manhattan skyline. From their house in suburban New Jersey, you can drive for a weekend to Vermont, even the baby mountains of the Berkshires; but life became too homebound once the twins arrived—even before the twins arrived, when he and Sandra found themselves tethered to the cycling of hormones, natural and then induced.
Not long ago, they would remind each other how lucky they were. Sandra still misses the latter-day hippies of Eugene, where her father owns a nursery. (Until a few years ago, when he finally understood how settled they were, he hoped that she would come home to run the business once he retired.) But she found a part-time job at a fancy nursery in Saddle River. After giving up on trying to get pregnant the “normal” way—she began to bracket the word with her fingers, in fond imitation of
“Speak for yourself,” she said. “I’m just taking a break from the sun.”
Over dinner, Sandra told him that she was from Eugene. Friends of her parents who were moving had paid her to drive their second car to Montreal. She had decided to “see a bit of the way-up-north” on her trip home, a relay of bus and train. “What would ever bring me here again?”
Kit told her he would be driving even farther north. He had a list of artists’ cooperatives, craft galleries, places to see the art he waswriting about. They hadn’t finished their main course when Sandra said, “Need a navigator? Hire me on spec. Free, I mean. You can boot me out anywhere.”
“Deal,” he said, then realized she wasn’t joking. He also realized that she had mistaken him for a genuine adventurer. He wished it were true.
Tall and wide-boned, her limbs long, her feet large, Sandra made the rental car seem even more compact. Her knees nearly met the dashboard, and her voluminous hair clung to the fabric lining the roof. Within a week, they were sharing not just a car, and then a room, but a bed. How strange it felt to become lovers in a place where the sun shone through most of the night. “Do you think too long a period of nightlessness,” mused Sandra, “could drive you insane, the way they say sleeplessness can?”
He objected, though of course he was flattered, when she called him “an academic Kerouac.” He did like driving through the wilderness, through the brief, bright flowering of the tundra. The monotony of these spaces did not put him off, nor the hardscrabble roads, but when it came to striking up a conversation with the artists he met, asking them to talk about their work, he turned shy and formal. He learned little beyond what he needed to know.
Kit had no clue how to ask the startling question that would yield the unexpected revelation. He would never have made a good collector of folklore. He didn’t have that investigative edge, what an anthro professor in college dubbed “intercultural moxie.” Art history, he claimed, was where you belong if, despite a yearning for “the other,” you lack the requisite shamelessness for probing into things like the sex lives of strangers. True to such predictions, that’s where Kit ended up. Or thought he ended up.
If he’d had a “real” father from the very beginning, Kit sometimes wonders—though casually, not as part of some existential crisis—would he have been discouraged from pursuing such an impractical, vaguely effeminate path? Would such a path never even have occurred to him? Would he have hung out more often in locker rooms, developed ambitions for scoring goals, winning contests, closing deals, finding work where adrenaline mattered?
He doesn’t even ski anymore. He could have blamed this on the job he landed—though blame of any kind was moot, back then, inthe face of his good fortune. Emerging from the perpetual gridlock of too many smart young scholars, he landed a tenure-track position not just anywhere but at a college within view of the Manhattan skyline. From their house in suburban New Jersey, you can drive for a weekend to Vermont, even the baby mountains of the Berkshires; but life became too homebound once the twins arrived—even before the twins arrived, when he and Sandra found themselves tethered to the cycling of hormones, natural and then induced.
Not long ago, they would remind each other how lucky they were. Sandra still misses the latter-day hippies of Eugene, where her father owns a nursery. (Until a few years ago, when he finally understood how settled they were, he hoped that she would come home to run the business once he retired.) But she found a part-time job at a fancy nursery in Saddle River. After giving up on trying to get pregnant the “normal” way—she began to bracket the word with her fingers, in fond imitation of
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