Antarctica

I knew that I should think about my engagement, the pending move to California, the question of what our married life would require of me. I tried to picture desert heat and tawny sunlight, the river of cars on the freeway. When I could not make myself do that, I tried to think about the piece I had come here to write—an essay that braided nebulous personal narrative with the detailed research I had done on an endangered species of moth. The point of the essay had begun to escape me; its theme was either the mothlike fragility of humans or the humanoid qualities of moths. The whole thing was starting to seem embarrassing.

And so most days, alone in my cabin, I found myself thinking about the poet instead. She was not traditionally beautiful, but she had captured my attention completely: her large dark eyes, her long eyelashes, her blunt and efficient hands, which could chop wood as well as they could arrange a line of words. She wore delicate silk shirts half-tucked into thrift-store jeans; her cologne was so subtle you had to lean in close for that soft amber note.

Brushing my hair in the morning, I began to let it fall in my eyes the way hers did. I copied the gestures I had seen her use—the way she smiled with just half her mouth, the way she flicked the loose joints of her wrists from time to time. I did not own any silk shirts but I half-tucked my flannel ones. And I thought about what she had said at dinner: The thing about being anywhere new is that you begin to think of yourself as a different person.

“The father came first”—the poet said—“He was a salty old pirate, a Danish oceanographer who, when he talked about the arrival and departure of various currents, might as well have been describing beloved relatives. But his enthusiasm was not what sparked my passion for him—it was his reserve.

“I was traveling with several other writers—all of us were researching Antarctica and would spend the winter with the scientists—and right away the father took me out into the field. It was the end of Antarctic summer, when the light had not yet fled. It was like nothing I had ever seen: the stretch of the sky, the burn of the white light coming off the ice.

“As we stood there, we saw that a nearby penguin had become disoriented and was walking steadily inland, in the opposite direction of its flock, away from the safety of the sea. This sometimes happens; a kind of madness will take hold of the birds, a madness or a malfunction of their internal compass. Once a bird loses its sense of direction, it has lost everything. Inland Antarctica is inhospitable, an ice desert where these confused birds stagger into endless whiteout and are swallowed up. The official policy for humans is one of strict nonintervention—at no point do you try to redirect a bird. I’ve heard of people secretly breaking this policy, trying to steer a penguin back toward the sea. But there’s no point—it always turns around again.

“That day, we stood like pillars, the father and I, and the mad penguin passed so close I could smell its shit-yellow down. I tried to look into its eyes, but it didn’t see me. As the bird passed, some instinct took over, and I took two dashing steps after it. A hand came down on my upper arm like an iron band, pulling me back. It was the father. I couldn’t see his eyes through his polar sunglasses, but his mouth was kind even as he said, coolly: ‘You must not.’

“We stood and watched the penguin go. It moved like a sleepwalker, urgent and stumbling. I felt tears come to my eyes. Only when it had vanished from sight did the father release my arm. ‘It is a tragedy, of course,’ he said. ‘But in a way, I envy them.’

“‘The penguins?’

“‘Yes. I envy their certainty.’ Then he smiled, and it was the smile that kindled my desire—a low buzz in my belly. ‘To see anything summoned like that, one can’t help but think of God.’

“We hadn’t yet exchanged many words, but this was not the kind of conversation I expected of a scientist, a man whose life was devoted to data.

“‘A calling,’ he said. He gazed in the direction the bird had gone. ‘To have been chosen, and to respond to the call with everything in you.’

“‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

“He gestured at the dazzling mirror of ice that extended around us, the raw white sky, the ends of the earth to which we had both felt ourselves pulled.

“‘I think you do,’ he said.

“A few days later, we slept together for the first time.”

My fiancé and I first met at a bar in Albany. He was outrageous and luminous when he was drunk, and after a fifth of vodka I felt uncharacteristically optimistic. Between the two of us we killed twenty-four hours and decided to meet back up to massacre the next several days. Those days turned into months, then a year. If you want to call it a bender, you might, though I’d never been on one before so I just thought of it as a series of lifestyle choices unfolding before me.

Whenever I am with anyone who is solidly planted in their lives, I begin to realize the weakness of my own roots. I pick up lovers’ habits: the catchphrases they use, the clothing they wear and the way they wear it, their culinary tastes. In the heady orbit of the geologist, I drank. Now, away from him, I did not entirely understand who I had so recently been, or what that person wanted.

The poet’s certainty mesmerized me. She could occupy many points in time, moving back and forth between them as she told me how she had felt and who she had been. When she entered a room, you could feel her presence without even turning your head.

One afternoon, while I was hunched over a book of photography in the colony’s little library, I felt her behind me, leaning over the back of my chair. She glanced at the book, then at me, taking me in, assessing.

“What?” I asked, pleased by her attention, but nervous.

“Your hair,” she said. “May I?”

Without waiting for an answer, she gathered my hair in her hands, moved it deftly into a pile on top of my head. “You have the right facial shape for short hair.”

“Do you think so?” I’d never worn it short.

“Yes,” she said. “If I had a jaw like that, I’d cut it all off.”

Then she closed her fingers around my hair and gave it a gentle tug. “You’re hiding behind all this anyway. Cut it off and face the world.”

Her tone was light, but I was never sure when she was joking.

I did it, of course. In the mirror in my cabin, with a pair of desk scissors. I looked like a bedraggled baby owl. I shivered in the cold, eyes pinned uncertainly to my reflection, and decided that I was beautiful.

“Sleeping with the father was thrilling,” the poet said. “And our beds were little bunks, like in dorms or at sleepaway camp.”

“You all slept in the same room?”

The poet shook her head, amused. “We all had our own bedrooms, I don’t want you to imagine some kind of science station orgy. They were little capsule rooms—the beds were shelves built into the walls. At night the wind screamed past the windows, or sometimes there was deadly calm, and you could hear the ice creaking and groaning like steel girders under stress. It was elemental, and so of course the sex was elemental.”

“Aggressive?” I asked, tentatively.

But she made an impatient gesture—that wasn’t what she meant.

“Like a thing that is purely itself . . . how do I explain? There is no moment when you question its sincerity, it can only ever be what it is. But also, he was generous. I hadn’t expected this because I had heard that he was so demanding in the lab, you know, ordering everyone here and there. But in bed, he was generous. And he enjoyed odd games.”

I wanted to know what kind of games, but wasn’t sure if I should ask. The poet smiled, like she was reading my mind. She leaned in.

“Most men—older men—they want you to be a naughty schoolgirl or a babysitter. Well, in his games, we were many kinds of pairs, but strange ones. Zookeeper and bear, for example.”

“And bear?” I asked.

“Well, the species of animal did not matter, it could be any animal, but zookeeper and zoo-kept. You know: ‘Now I come into your enclosure, you are pacing the cage, your nostrils flare.’ This kind of thing. ‘Now I brush out your fur and slowly you begin to trust me.’ It was new to me, this kind of play, but of course it was exciting.”

I considered all the things you might do as a bear that you would never do as a human.

“Oh,” the poet said. “And then he also liked to be—what do you call it? Conjoined twins.”

I didn’t know how to respond, so I didn’t.

“Within the warmth of the womb we begin to make love. Sometimes he would tie our wrists together, sometimes our feet.”

My mouth was dry. I looked away. I had always considered myself to be sexually bold, someone who said yes often and to most things. But I had never been a bear or a conjoined twin.

When the poet fell quiet, I felt called upon to offer a question. There was so much I wanted to ask—how it had felt, what kind of props were required, what they had said before and after. How did you look at a man over dinner if you and he had role-played a romance between fetuses? But I was wary of seeming prudish or naive. I selected the most casual question that came to mind:

“Did the others know you were sleeping together?”

“We tried to keep it a secret,” the poet said.

“Because they might have judged you?”

“No one would have cared. But there is nothing more erotic than a secret. We enjoyed sneaking around late at night, slipping in and out of each other’s little rooms.”

“So the son didn’t know either?”

“Ah.” The poet smiled. “The son knew everything his father did, because he was always trying to beat him. He was the sort of son who is locked in deadly competition with his father. That was why he approached me in the first place. You can never really know a man like that. He has space for one central relationship in his life, and that space is already taken.”

“Did he talk to you about his father?”

“All the time. He had many complaints—incidents from childhood, small slights and disagreements, grudges that he cherished.”

“Did he ask about your affair?”

“No, no. He made sure never to mention that. But of course he would keep track of when I visited his father—when we made love—and often he would want to have sex right afterward. He would come to my room in a rush, as if on an urgent mission. Or, if I was headed to meet his father, he would try to waylay me, ask me into his little cabin for a drink. What he liked best was to send me to his father with his own sweat still drying on me.”

I needed to cough but I didn’t want to cough. The muscles of my diaphragm spasmed.

“The son was aggressive,” the poet said, resigned. “He made love as if it was a punishment for us all. But there can be something thrilling in that as well, of course.”

“Of course,” I said, as if I knew.

My fiancé called from California and we talked about logistics. The place he’d found in Westwood; how its lease would overlap with the lease in New York, but only slightly; the question of whether to drive or fly. He mentioned several beautiful wedding venues that we could look at after we’d gotten settled—one by the ocean, the other up in the hills. We talked about these details as if all the big things were decided and only the small ones remained. He gave me openings to introduce my reservations and I didn’t take them; the openings were too narrow and my reservations were too large. He sounded easy and relaxed, and I resented how simple it all seemed to him, until I realized he had been drinking. He wasn’t drunk, not yet, but all the edges had been sanded off.

“I miss you,” he said at the end of the call. “Are you having a good time there?”

“Yes,” I said, although my admission felt absurdly simple. Something seismic was happening, something that far outstripped the scale of a good time.

“Making friends?”

“I met a poet.”

“Who is he?” I thought a note of jealousy had entered his voice, but I couldn’t be sure.

“She,” I said. “She’s—I don’t know, Scandinavian. Or maybe Eastern European.”

“Oh,” he said, and his voice was easy, untroubled again. “That’s nice.”

He had underestimated her, and it made me angry. Was I angry? Something was running through my veins, molten. If it was not anger, it was far more combustible.

In the evenings after dinner, the artists gathered around the fire to talk aimlessly. One evening our companions gradually drifted away until only the poet and I remained. She was telling me about the Platonic essence of objects—“the object’s object-hood,” she was saying—but I had stopped listening. My eyes were on the slope of her cheek, the purplish pockets under her eyes where the skin sagged a little, as if she hadn’t been sleeping. She sat in lotus position on the deep leather couch, her hands resting on either knee. I loved the way her posture always seemed both poised and effortless. When she paused to draw a breath, I reached out and covered her left hand with my right one. It was clumsy and adolescent. I hadn’t planned it.

She looked down at our two hands as if she were trying to understand a new taxonomy of object. Then she turned her head like a bird and looked me in the face. It wasn’t the right moment, but I felt compelled to explain myself, so I leaned in to kiss her.

“Oh no,” she said gently, retrieving her hand. “That’s not my thing anymore.”

It was not what I had expected her to say, even in rejection. “What isn’t?”

“Sex,” she said. “I’m much more interested in power these days.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s much subtler. But also more tangible. A sexual dynamic lasts a night. A power dynamic can extend for generations.”

I blinked at her. “I think I’m in love with you.”

She didn’t smile with her mouth, but I got the impression of a smile nonetheless.

“That’s very nice,” she said. “But—if I may?—what you’re saying is that you feel greatly influenced by me. And, for me, anyway, that’s far more exciting.”

I wasn’t sure what to do. She was talking about a philosophy of being—I just wanted her to touch me.

“Do you already have somebody?” I asked.

Now she did smile, but her voice was without condescension when she inquired. “What is it you want to happen?”

“Right now?”

“Between us.”

“It’s not obvious?”

“The most interesting version of things is rarely the obvious one, so I always prefer to ask.”

Now I felt the burden of being interesting, but I was too desperate to know how. “I want to kiss you.”

“And then?”

“I mean . . . the goal was that you’d kiss me back.”

“And then?”

“We’d go back to your cabin. Or mine.”

“And have sex?”

“Well . . .” I hesitated. “I didn’t really think that far ahead.”

“What kind of sex would we have?”

She looked right at me, entirely unfazed. I began to say that it would depend on her as well, but she cut me off.

“This is your fantasy,” she said. “You tell me what happens.”

The fire had died down, and I couldn’t make out her face. She seemed placidly interested, which both irritated me and turned me on. I felt that she was inviting me to impress her, but also that the invitation was a compliment of sorts; it implied that she believed I could.

So I began to speak.

I spoke for a long time. I said things out loud that I had never before heard myself think. Sometimes I tripped over my words, but I was detailed and deliberate, as she had been detailed and deliberate for the previous three weeks. I tried not to reference her stories directly, but the shadows of images she had given me fell across my own. I tried not to think about what to say before I said it, as if I were an oracle receiving a transmission from a faraway place, delivering the message faithfully.

When I finished, I could feel the nerves in my fingertips branching and snapping with electricity, the pulse jumping in my neck. There were still six inches of space between us on the leather couch—at no point had we touched. My body sang as if it had achieved something athletic and triumphant.

When the poet realized I was done speaking, she nodded and got up. I made an aborted gesture to rise as well—was I supposed to follow her? Was she agreeing to what I had described? If not everything, then enough of it, or some of it? But she was already speaking:

“See what I mean?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“What just happened between us will stay with you a lot longer than if we were going back to your cabin right now. Do you know why that is?”

I shook my head again.

“What just happened is all about you. In a good way. Rarely do we get such insights into ourselves. If we’d had sex, it would have been fifty percent about me—at least. Maybe a lot more, since you seem like a giver. I think when you’re in bed with people, it’s probably much more about them than about you. Am I right?”

I froze, unsure how to answer the question.

“Yes,” she said gently. “It was certainly much better this way.”

I woke to a storm brewing, with the promise of landfall by night. The temperature had dropped bitterly and the trees were already dusted with snow. When I met the poet on the path, halfway between her cabin and mine, she said nothing about the night before and neither did I. We walked without talking, and as we passed in and out of cell reception our phones lit up with winter weather warnings.

She was not a morning person, but she seemed more subdued than usual. We sat silently, drinking our coffee, and phrases lifted out of the murmur of conversation around us: blizzard conditions, whiteout. The staff dropped by our table to let us know that they would leave a lunch and dinner basket for us at our cabins; we shouldn’t plan to make our way back to the main hall that night.

When they left, the poet set her cup down and said abruptly, “I’m supposed to leave today.”

“Today?” I said stupidly. “Already?”

She nodded. She wasn’t looking at me—she was looking out the large windows at the pine trees. Snow was whispering down again.

“I didn’t know your residency was already over.”

“It’s hard to get away for longer,” she said.

“But you can’t leave in the storm,” I protested.

Her eyes skated over to my face and she took me in for a moment, one of her penetrating, unsettling looks. “My ride is already almost here,” she said. “We can outrun the snow if we leave right away.”

I tried to imagine an emissary from the outside world, come to spirit her away. The only face that I could picture was the one I had imagined for the Danish oceanographer: weathered and calm.

“Who’s your ride?” I asked casually.

She ignored the question. “Walk me back to my cabin.”

Outside, the sky was as hard and glossy as tank metal. A new sharpness had entered the air. Normally our silences were as easy as our speech, but she was pensive and listless, and I found myself tongue-tied. Why hadn’t she mentioned her departure earlier? She might have said it in passing—I’m leaving next week. Or last night by the fire, when whatever had happened or not happened was underway.

“Well,” she said when we reached her cabin. “It was very nice to meet you.” Her mouth was set in a forlorn line.

“It was nice to meet you too,” I said, taken aback by this sudden formality.

She turned and trudged up the small path toward her wide porch, wood stacked by the door. She seemed smaller than she really was, her shoulders hunched inward.

“Wait,” I called after her. “Whatever happened with the father and the son? How did it end?”

The sky over the woods was already darkening, the trees tossing. She hesitated on the lip of her porch, considering the question for so long that I thought she wasn’t going to answer. Then she smiled—a smile that I did not understand and could not interpret, as if she had suddenly changed her mind, as if she were giving me a gift that she had not expected herself to give.

“I left when the light returned,” she said. “I don’t know where they are now—still somewhere out there, I guess.”

I was almost back at my cabin when I turned around. For weeks I had imagined the poet like a Teflon god, striding over Antarctica, impervious to frostbite or shame. Seeing her pensive and sad filled me with bewilderment. What had she chosen not to tell me? What was it that I needed her to say? The storm was imminent, but I had to talk to her before she was gone.

As soon as I reached her cabin, I saw the tire tracks in the thin blanket of snow. I must have missed her by minutes. I knocked on the door, just in case, but nobody answered. I turned the knob and pushed inside.

With the lights off and the windows covered in snow, the room was dark. I smelled woodsmoke and traces of cologne, but all her belongings were gone. She had stripped the bed, and I found myself gathering the sheets in my arms, inhaling their scent; then I was curled up in them, pulling them all around me. The smell of her cologne was stronger here, and I could make out the distinct note of her shampoo, the smell of her skin, her sweat. The sheets made a dark, warm cocoon. I closed my eyes.

I woke to the sounds of someone moving around the cabin; for a moment I thought that the poet had returned, and I tried to sit up in the tangle of sheets. But when I finally emerged into the glare of overhead lights, it was the housekeeper facing me, one hand on her heart.

We apologized at the same time.

“I didn’t know anybody was in here,” she said.

“I left something,” I stammered. “I lent her something. She said she’d leave it for me.”

Mustering my dignity, I stood and started to fold the sheets, but the housekeeper gestured for me to leave them. I turned toward the door.

“Is this what you’re looking for?”

She was holding out a battered paperback novel. The cover was badly creased but shiny blue, one of those cheap romances you buy in an airport. The title read: Lawless in Love. I was a little surprised that the poet would read something so lurid, but I shoved it into my jacket pocket. My cheeks burned as I said, “Oh yes, that’s it.”

“Roads are getting bad,” the housekeeper said as I pulled on my snow boots, her voice effortfully cheerful. “She shouldn’t have left with that long drive ahead of her. Half the kitchen staff already went home early. I told them the same thing I told her and her husband: don’t risk your life to keep a schedule.”

“Her husband?”

“Him and the two little boys.” The housekeeper smiled. “Sweet family. I said they should just stay the night, but—” She shrugged. “I think they were ready to get home.”

My brain was numb and rushing. I heard myself say, “I didn’t know she had kids.”

“Two sons is a lot of work,” the housekeeper said. “I have one, and he’s kept me busy for sixteen years.”

She laughed as I let myself out.

The story of the battered paperback was a simple one, and once I began reading the synopsis I recognized it right away: a young woman moves to a rural outpost in the American West, where she meets a father and son. Within days of her arrival, she’s begun affairs with both. The son is a grim brute; the father likes to play strange games in bed.

I was angry, of course. I felt stupid, humiliated. I had believed in her stories, no matter how improbable they were. Their improbability had been a comfort to me. I had opened up to her, told her things that I’d never told anyone else. Now it turned out that she had shown me nothing about herself at all.

The storm arrived like a hand brushing over the world, wiping it out. With my nose to the window, each snowflake creating a screen of visible static, I imagined that I was at a science station in Antarctica, the rest of the planet a whisper at the back of the mind. I roamed my cabin like a trapped animal. I wanted to hurt her. I had no way to contact her—we hadn’t even exchanged numbers. Maybe this had also been part of her plan, to make a fool out of me and then vanish. How was I supposed to describe what she had taken from me, what we had done? It was nothing and yet it was not at all nothing.

I pressed my forehead against the glass again and stood there for a long time until the cold was like a spike through my skull and my anger drained away. What was it she had said, the night we had something far more complicated than sex? Rarely do we get such insights into ourselves. Maybe she hadn’t taken anything from me at all.

“I can’t do it,” I said.

My fiancé had called when he heard about the storm.

“What are you talking about?” he asked. He was outside somewhere—I could hear birds, a motorcycle. I pictured him at some outdoor café, drenched in sunlight, several beers in. “What can’t you do?”

The wind picked up, cutting around the sides of my cabin, and I raised my voice to be heard. “I can’t move to California.”

“What?” His voice was all surprise. “But we’ve planned this, we’ve been planning this—”

I took a deep breath. My ribs ached.

“We already decided!” he said, shock giving way to anger. “You want a long-distance marriage?”

And there it was. “I can’t marry you,” I said.

There was silence, except for the demented sounds of birds. And then he asked, “Have you met someone?”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He said my name, just once, in a voice that I had never heard and did not recognize. And then I hung up, and all I could hear was sleet hitting the windows all around me.

When I stepped outside, I was immediately blinded by the snow. I walked for a time, then stood for a time. I didn’t know where I was going, and it didn’t concern me. I was cold, but not afraid. Slowly, the vibrating thing in me stilled, until the storm was the only source of urgency. As the wind subsided and the familiar outlines of the world emerged, I found that somehow I had landed several feet from my cabin.

The glass windows and the cedar siding were completely covered. A drift had engulfed my front door. The wind stirred the trees sharply, died down, stirred again. It was snowing still, but lightly now. Maybe the storm was over, or maybe this was the eye, with more destruction yet to come; I found I couldn’t guess which.