Fieldwork: A Novel by Mischa Berlinski Page A

the Pacific, near a grove of gnarled cypress trees, and spread a blanket out on the golden grass. "Do you see that itty-bitty little island over there?" Martiya asked, pointing far, far off in the distance, to the other side of the Pacific.
    "Yep."
    "No, not the big one. The really itty-bitty one."
    "Oh, the little one. I was looking at the big one."
    "No, the big one's Java. You see all those lights? That's Jakarta. The little one is Sulawesi. That's where I was born."
    "Oh, I was looking at Borneo."
    "You're looking towards Japan. That's Borneo
there
."
    They were together a little over two years. After graduation, Piers van der Leun gave his daughter a small sum of money, to use as she wished. She announced her intention to travel around the world, and explained to Tim her intention to travel alone. "I thought it was crazy, this little girl wanting to go around the world by herself. But she was insistent. Piers asked me to talk to her, to change her mind. She told me not to wait for her. She was a powerfully determined girl. I never really knew why it was over. I guess now when I look back on it, I was too boring for her—she couldn't imagine ever living in a house like this one." He waved his hand in a broad arc which encompassed the bay windows and the hardwood floor covered in an old Persian carpet, the coved ceiling, and the family photos. Thirty years after the fact, Tim Blair was still explaining to himself why his college girlfriend left him. Through the windows I could see the bay, covered in whitecaps stirred up by a winter breeze.
    "Tim Blair—too boring," I wrote in my notebook.
    "I got postcards and letters from her all year long, even though we'd broken up," Tim said. "I got letters from the craziest places—from eastern Turkey and Afghanistan and the far northeast provinces of India. I didn't write her back, because I never knew where she was going to be, so it was a kind of one-way conversation. All that year, I was dying for her just to write that she loved me and missed me, but she never did: she would just write these long letters about the people that she saw and the places she went, and how fucking
interesting
it was. I didn't give a shit. Then the letters started to peter out, and I stopped missing her so much.
    "I went to grad school on the East Coast, and, once, I came back to Berkeley for a conference—this was, oh, about two, three years later. I gave her a call, and we went out for coffee. She was enrolled in the Ph.D. program in the Department of Anthropology, and she was all excited because she had been awarded a grant to study some tribe in the north of Thailand. God, I can't believe she was still in Thailand."
    Tim pointed to a picture on the wall. It was hidden by a bookcase, and I had to stand up to see it clearly. It was a portrait of himself thirty years earlier. There was a strapping young man in a T-shirt. He had shoulder-length curly hair. He had a goofy smile and was standing in a flower-filled pasture. Martiya, he said, had taken that picture.
    "What does she look like now?" he asked me. "I mean, before she …"
    "I didn't meet her." I told him what Josh O'Connor had told me.
    "She had beautiful lips."
    I paused a second. I looked down at my notes. There was something I wanted to clarify. "For
Nixon
?" I said. "Really?"
    "Twice."
    Tim heard from Martiya one more time. About fifteen years ago, he said, she wrote to him. The letter was postmarked Thailand. Memories of their time together made up the bulk of the letter. The tone was tender, even affectionate. She was living in a tribal village in northern Thailand: her research had been fruitful. She had been productive. She had to tell someone, she said: she had met a man and was madly in love. Her current happiness, Martiya told Tim, reminded her of their time together, and having no one with whom she might share these memories, she had decided to write to Tim himself. She hoped that he was equally happy.
    Josh O'Connor had told me