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How old was Camille then? She was eight. Ah, the same age as Noelani.
Her youngest, Simon, worships Harry, is a lawyer like Phoebe, and somehow has become the family outlier. So young when he began college, so adaptable with intellectual heft and high emotional intelligence and the looks of a playboy—Byronic curls, soulful eyes, girls fell under his spell—Roma figured he would play the field for a long while, settle down in his forties. Instead, he is the first of her children to create his own separate family, happily married to Elena Abascal, father of her granddaughters, Lucy and Isabel. Nothing jumps out at Roma when she considers Simon in the context of Noelani, nothing ties them together, except that Simon has been on a running jag lately, putting in the miles, he says, every morning before work, either running the hills in his neighborhood, or in a foreign park across from his hotel when he’s litigating abroad. She’s never asked how many miles he runs, but given how often he’s out of town, and the way he works late into the nights, it seems unlikely he’s running seven miles at a shot.
The clock on her nightstand reads 7:20 a.m. Roma pulls open the drapes, smiles at the meditation pool, at the brightly colored desert flowers and the shrubs. Harry has his tennis this morning and then a stop at the tailor to pick up the new tuxedo he will wear tonight. He’ll be arriving back home just before the kids show up. Everyone will be hungry. She shopped yesterday, has only to put out the spread, but all that can wait. First her hour of laps in the big pool, then coffee.
In the bathroom, she stands naked, inspecting her reflected hair. Fernando did a nice job on the color this time. Last time it was much too light, bold in an odd and punkish way. Over the years she has undergone a slow but steady transformation, from boring, uncommitted brown to lighter and lighter hues, until she gave in, said to Fernando, “I might as well admit life is more fun as a blonde. Let’s do the whole head.” It wasn’t true that life was more fun as a blonde, but she was tired of fighting it, of facing daily the unfairness of her hair transmogrifying into old age long before Harry’s. She rubber-bands the honeyed chunks, brushes her teeth, then pulls on her bathing suit. She lifts her cap and goggles from their hook in her closet and shuts the door.
IN THE MAIN COURTYARD, the pool is a sapphire under the sun, shooting liquid rainbows into the house at oblique angles. How she adores submergence. She is a healer of human cracks and fissures, her days spent dealing with her patients’ struggles and agonies, the emotional and psychic often embodied in the physical. She uncovers all the states and syndromes that can spark and catch fire from infancy on, searing a being, those flames rarely sputtering out on their own. She works hard quenching the symptoms, providing parents with answers, and the toddlers, children, and teenagers with techniques to manage their frightening infernos, helping them douse the alarming heat and gain interior strength against what is burning them up. Resolutions if the sufferer and loved ones are lucky, cures if kind spirits are shining down, so that as they grow and mature their lives will be happier, sweeter, so that they will be saved from total annihilation. She gives them all of her time, but this hour belongs only to her, swimming with an uncluttered mind, feeling the expectant delight of having everyone together, remembering that however involved she will become with Noelani, she belongs by blood and love to others, and those others, by blood and love, belong to her.
How fortunate she and Harry have been that they and their children have never been afflicted with any kind of serious illness, not physical, emotional, or mental, everyone on their right paths. Closely knit all these years, enjoying being together, genuinely liking one another. Of course, there are the occasional, normal tensions and skirmishes among her children, and sometimes she wishes they didn’t force her to read their faces, would simply admit to what’s bothering them, but eventually, always, the issue is revealed, and she guides and advises them so judiciously they frequently think they have arrived at the solution on their own.
Head underwater, she holds her breath, then pushes off, stroking strongly to the other side of the long pool. One, two, three … fourteen long and solid strokes to reach the wall today before reversing course.
Half of fourteen is seven, and she’s thinking of Noelani McCadden’s toothpick legs racing her away from home, or toward something. In her session notebook, she had written: Does the actual mileage hold an unconscious significance for Noelani? Jeanine McCadden was adamant that her daughter runs exactly seven miles each morning, no more, no less, as if the girl were fitted with an internal mileage counter. Before her first meeting with Noelani, Roma had researched the number and discovered that in numerology, seven represents the seeker, the thinker, the searcher of Truth who knows nothing is exactly as it seems and is always trying to understand the reality hidden behind the illusions. Roma had realized that definition described herself as well, born on the seventh day of June. And in astrology, seven meant—
No, she is not going to break her promise, no pondering about Noelani, about any of her patients, while swimming.
She will think about … She will think about … Okay, yes, what sort of sea creature would she be? Not a shark, not a whale. Not a seal. What’s the difference between porpoises and dolphins?
Then a mental bolt to that weekend when Phoebe brought home the prophet. She heard moans coming from Phoebe’s bedroom, and had breached her daughter’s trust, carefully turning the knob, peeking through the crack, almost hoping to find Phoebe tangled naked in bed with that long-haired young philosopher whose pacific calm was threatening upheaval in Phoebe’s life, but that’s not what had been happening in there. Elijah had been at her daughter’s feet, washing them. Between his knees, filled with water and suds, was the irreplaceable silver bowl passed down to Roma from Baba Tatiana.
Roma, she says sternly, silently, no more, just swim.
FOUR (#u5ebcac6a-b004-5078-bd8f-970604c811ee)
ON CAMILLE TABOR’S THIRTEENTH birthday, when her breasts were just budding, her mother gave her a book written by a woman who had journeyed to the South Pacific to discover whether adolescence was a universally traumatic and stressful time, or whether the adolescent experience depended on one’s cultural upbringing. Camille, a voracious reader, especially liked stories set in faraway places featuring the kinds of people never seen in Palm Springs.
After she unwrapped the present, her mother said, “A little explanation. The book is a vivid account of Samoan adolescent life and was incredibly popular, although eventually Margaret Mead and her research methods came under harsh attack. She was smack in the middle of a scholarly-scientific wrangling that began in the mid-1920s and has yet to be conclusively determined, the nature-versus-nurture debate. To what extent are human personality and behavior the products of biological factors, like the genetics you’ve inherited from Daddy and his ancestors and from me and mine, or are products of cultural factors, like where you live, how you’re being raised, the school you attend, the music you listen to, the television shows you watch, the friends you have. You are now a teenager and it’s important you learn to distinguish between the two so you can make thoughtful decisions from your head, rather than automatic ones, perhaps from your heart, whose underpinnings are harder to understand.”
Her mother was a prominent child psychologist and often said to her children, “You can do anything you want if you have thought it through and are capable of articulating your reasoning. In other words, so long as you can show your work.”
What Camille had already determined was that she wanted a life that was anything but quotidian, ordinary, middling, mediocre, words she knew and never wanted used to describe the life she would have, the person she would become. At home, she wasn’t at all surrounded by the quotidian, but the fear was so deep, she was sure she’d been born with it. Who she would actually be and what she would actually do was all hazy in her head, until she devoured Coming of Age in Samoa by the redoubtable Margaret Mead.
She read that birthday book many times, but it was the first reading that set her on her path, when Camille knew she would become a social anthropologist, studying exotic tribes in exotic places, researching their rules of behavior, their interpersonal relations, their views on kinship and marriage, their motivations and ambitions, their language, customs, forms of currency, music, stories, and material creations, their taboos, ethos, moral codes, the nature of their self-governance, their notions and beliefs about the communal world in which they existed, the gods they prayed to, the visions that manifested in their dreams.
By the time she delivered her valedictory speech to her graduating class at Palm Springs High, she had stormed through all the ethnographies, memoirs, autobiographies, collected correspondence, and biographies by and about every female social anthropologist she could find. They became Camille’s personal heroines.
She entered the University of Washington, thrilled to be facing a lengthy and arduous education. She thought fortitude should be required to become an expert in the rarest field, so temporally and spatially expansive it touched on everything in the world.
At nineteen, light-years ahead of her fellow collegians who hadn’t any idea what interested them, she knew she intended to spend her life in unruly, woolly places beyond the pale, engaged in on-the-ground research, discovering, analyzing, reflecting, and publishing her own important ethnographies, adding to the understanding of humanity.
She was a natural, cruising through the intro and second-level anthropology courses, through biology, statistics, research methods, data analysis, and chose Polynesian as her first foreign language, because of Margaret Mead. She declared her major early, was admitted to the university’s highly competitive and selective Anthropology Honors Program, took the 300- and 400-level courses, accomplished her yearlong honors project in ten months, graduated first in her class with a BA.
Then on to her master’s, with its first-year core curriculum and evaluation, its second-year sequence of courses in ethnographic methods and research design, and the completion of a research competency paper.
Then on to her PhD, demonstrating her fluency in Polynesian and, by then, also in Abo, a Bantu language spoken in the Moungo department in southwestern Cameroon, and in Kilivila, spoken on the Trobriand Islands. She passed the general exam, acquired training and experience in teaching at the university level, and finally, nearing the summit of the mountain she’d been climbing all those years, the creation of her own research project, which, like her heroines’, would birth new ways of understanding one tiny world, and, through extrapolation, the great big one.
It did not affect her that her friends, colleagues, and siblings, scholarship completed, had begun making serious salaries, were renting large and lovely apartments, acquiring the trappings of burgeoning achievement, because no matter what they accomplished, their lives were known, while hers would always be of breathtaking mystery, and that was the barometer by which she measured her personal success. The university gave her a stipend for teaching. Her tiny apartment, where she’d been since her junior undergraduate year, had an aura of impermanent student lodging warmed up with walls she frequently repainted in cheery colors, and, doing her part to reduce the rampant waste of fickle people, she filled with discarded furniture that was perfectly usable, stenciling on quaint polka dots and stripes when her brain required a break. It was home with a very small h and all that she needed.
And new in her life then was Valentine Osin, her Russian-Jewish lover, the two of them burning for each other from the first moment they met at the university’s omni-anthropology cocktail party for doctoral candidates. She had never before been so spontaneously attracted to a man, and never to a man who was all heavy beard and worn denim. But there was an intensity between them she had never experienced, and never thought of denying. She’d had bad luck dating nonanthropologists, and that Valentine Osin was a physical anthropologist of the Leakey variety only further increased his mammoth appeal.
That he was Jewish was irrelevant—she didn’t believe in any of it—she was sold, instead, by his accent, trimmed away and smoothed over, but retaining the hint of otherness she preferred, and by his upbringing in a town on the outskirts of a forest, and by their deep conversations, and by their impassioned sex, his swiftness, his directness, the way he could shake her up with the slightest touch, the way he stared at her as if she were a greater achievement than his eventually winning the Charles R. Darwin Lifetime Award. They were equally matched, in restless and driven natures, the desire to live unparalleled lives.
Their insistent love was only six months old when she began thinking about where she would go for her doctoral research. Her heart had pounded and her fingers had trembled when she pulled from the pages of Coming of Age in Samoa, the list she had maintained since the age of thirteen, of tribes who dwelled in untamed places. A precious list she had amended and revised, that grew smudged and torn, that reflected changes in her handwriting, the list from which she would find a people she could call her own for a while, in a place where she would put down temporary roots.
She quickly crossed out the isolated Amazon tribes. Interaction with them, the study of them, was prohibited by non-engagement policies at last put into place, to preserve their isolation and their lands; a safeguarding with the dual purpose of resisting further exploitative encroachments into the rainforest and protecting it for the environmental health of the entire planet.
But there was serious anxiety when she began crossing out contactable tribes already claimed by others.
Then near panic, until she found the name of one virginal tribe she had scribbled in pencil: the Sentineli, a Stone Age tribe on the Andaman Islands, in an archipelago in the Bay of Bengal, between India and Myanmar.
In the anthro library, she found scant research on them, which impelled her hope. All she could learn was that they were an uncontacted people who spoke an unclassified language, who used arrows for hunting, harpoons for fishing, and untipped javelins for shooting at those who dared to encroach. They had been fending off researchers since 1880, and although they weren’t necessarily cannibals, they did often display heads on warning stakes. She imagined herself the first social anthropologist to befriend that protective hunter-gatherer tribe, the first to learn their unclassified language, to capture that language in what would become the seminal Sentineli dictionary.
She wrote up her findings, her intentions, the ethical and methodologically sound research she would perform in the Andaman Islands, but when her adviser, Dr. Jin, saw Sentineli on the cover he said, “I was hoping you wouldn’t alight on them. I don’t need to read anything else. The answer is absolutely not. The tribe has been classified not merely as uncontacted, but as uncontactable and too dangerous. The Indian government would likely refuse you a permit for those reasons. Choose another tribe, in another place.”
She had called Valentine, and he was sympathetic, but the frequent futility of his work, of physical anthropology itself, eliminated his ability to understand that this was the first time she was experiencing such futility. She’d hung up, heartbroken to find herself in the wrong era. In the 1800s and early 1900s, when her heroines were out in the field, dozens of untouched tribes in unexplored locales were up for grabs. But in the hypermodern twenty-first century, with travel to remote places standard and Google mapping uncovering the most distant rock, there was no accessible tribe left whose existence had not already been the subject of cogent boots-on-the-ground participant observation, and somehow she, who missed nothing, had missed this cardinal piece of intelligence.
When she’d worn herself out crying bitterly, she searched her shelves for one of the books written by the lambent creator of modern social anthropology. Published in 1929, the title had a patronizing hegemonic tone that nonetheless encouraged one’s prurient curiosity to see what was inside. Of course, she knew what was inside, but she sat upright on her frayed old couch and read Bronislaw Malinowski’s The Sexual Life of Savages again, first page to last, as the hot pot of coffee by her side cooled to mud.
When she finished, she thought: So she would not be the first explorer on the Trobriand Islands. So she would not be following in any of the footsteps of those women responsible for directing her life path, but rather in the man’s, in Malinowski’s, who had established the imperative of researching a tribe, not from comfortable university library chairs, but out in the field with the people one was studying, engaging in their community, eating their food, taking part in their everyday lives, and she decided that wouldn’t be so bad, not at all. (She wouldn’t have admitted to her staunchly feminist friends that there was something appealing about following a pseudo father figure.) Plus, she already spoke Kilivila.
Malinowski had done all the heavy lifting there, but she would go anyway to those seemingly very happy islands in Melanesia, where sex reigned, and if luck was with her she would add to the knowledge about them her own penetrating and revelatory findings, hopefully as groundbreaking as his.
Which is what she did: two years in the Trobriand Islands, researching every aspect of the Trobrianders’ lives and how those lives had been altered and impacted by the researchers who had come before her. Then fourteen months writing her dissertation, working at the anthro library, eating dinners and having sex with Valentine. Physically, she was in Seattle, but mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and psychically, she remained in Melanesia, carrying with her the Trobrianders’ vibrancy, their lust for life, who she was there, doing the work she relished. And then she had gone topsy-turvy, crashing hard the very afternoon she successfully defended her work. After the kudos, and the back pats, and the champagne toasts with Dr. Jin and the oral-defense examiners, she walked home through campus, seeing the late-summer colors bleeding away, the greens and golds turning pale, then transparent, and by the time she reached her apartment, her life force was gone. She was no longer the Camille she had always been.
Months passed in which her bed became her safe place, her bedroom a cave, the blinds shuttered to hide the cheeriness of the walls, the phone ringing and ringing, the messages piling up and never returned, Valentine bringing her soup, singing to her, leaving reluctantly when she did not respond to his words, to his overtures, and his patience was worn. Then in late December a knock on her door, and Dr. Jin was standing there. “So you’re here, Camille. I’ve sent you dozens of emails, left you numerous phone messages. I thought maybe you were away on a long holiday and hadn’t let me know. Then I ran into Dr. Osin and he told me what’s been going on. Dress and come to my office.”
She managed to shower, to wash her matted hair, then stared at herself in the mirror. Her eyes were cloudy and red-rimmed, and how weird that she’d forgotten their light hazel hue. She was the only one in the family without dark, darker, or darkest brown eyes, and her father used to tease her, calling her “Witch Hazel.” She’d hated that nickname as a kid, like glass shattering inside, but looking into her eyes, she finally understood what he’d been trying to teach her: that humor could coexist with seriousness, that she had needed to find the humor in herself even at that young age. She could hear him saying, “Come on, Witch Hazel, smile,” and she tried smiling at her reflection, but it was impossible. Still, with her father closer to her heart, it was a little easier to pull on dusty jeans and a wrinkled shirt and, under cover of a large orange umbrella, make her way in teeming rain to Dr. Jin’s office on campus.
“Sit,” Dr. Jin had said, handing her a fragile cup of green tea. “This happens to the most committed social anthropologists. Your world in the Trobriand Islands, kept alive through all the work on your dissertation, it’s still more real to you than this one, isn’t it?”
She had nodded.
“I know how difficult it can be to reenter one’s former life. I wish I had an instant fix for you. Sadly, there aren’t any assistant professorships available right now. I could make a few calls, to American Anthropologist, Anthropological Quarterly, Cultural Anthropology, Ethnology, Oceania, see whether they have a rare vacancy. I haven’t heard of any, but I’m happy to double-check.”
She had shaken her head slowly because it hurt to make abrupt moves in the brightness of his clean office. “Dr. Jin, I think I just need another expedition, to be back out there. Is there a new one I could join? I don’t have to lead it, just be a team member.”
It had been Dr. Jin’s turn to shake his head. “No university-funded expeditions here or anywhere for the next two years. But even if there was, based on what Val Osin tells me, months barely functioning, you wouldn’t pass the psych eval right now.
“Here’s a way you could retrench. Return to the Trobriands by diving back into your dissertation. Take yourself to the library and try turning it into a book. Not a study that, alas, few will read these days, but something for a broad audience. There are publishers who would be interested in exciting nonfiction based on the real-life adventures of a young and interesting scientist. I know a few. When you’re ready, I could reach out to them on your behalf.
“It has real potential, Camille, a young woman who investigated the sexual practices of other young women living in a very different society. It’s been a long time since Malinowski’s Savages, and other than refuted Mead, with the adolescent Samoans, never investigated by a woman.”
“I was more intrigued by other aspects I researched,” she’d said, the words falling from her mouth one by one, and Dr. Jin nodded repeatedly. “Yes, of course. And I understand. But times are different now, not much call for ethnographies. And it’s very disappointing, but sex sells. From what I’ve been told, it also greatly helps if the young and interesting scientist is actually in the book.”
A nod was the most she could muster. She placed the fragile cup of untouched green tea on his uncluttered desk and left. The rain was still teeming, but the umbrella remained rolled up tight by her side. She had no energy for any project, but an exploitive tale about the Trobrianders and sex, with herself as a character? It was exactly what she couldn’t do: replace the wildness of the Trobriand Islands with an airless library, reduce her vibrant experiences into a trite narrative, massage that extraordinary time—the raucous freedom, the exploration of others, the bonding with people so unlike herself—into something so frivolous.
When she reached home, she was soaked through, more hopeless than before.
Since that meeting with Jin, she hasn’t so much as glanced at her dissertation, seven hundred pages of text, another two hundred of graphs, statistics, citations, and sources, thick as a tombstone gathering dust on her kitchen table. In fact, she doesn’t even notice it anymore, when she drops her keys next to it, or sits down to eat a quick meal.
Although never one to ask for help, when her depression did not lift, she took herself to the university counseling office. The counselor-in-training was useless, said only, “Wow, so you lived among natives, wild. Must be great to be back in the real world,” then adjusted her necklace. Camille didn’t bother seeking out a different counselor. She had no confidence anyone else would understand her nature more clearly and felt only exhaustion thinking about repeating her story again, explaining all the reasons why that other world remained realer to her than this one—the Trobrianders’ love for one another, their ties to the earth and the sky, their belief in rituals and magic. She decided to nurture herself with long walks every day, and applauded herself when she managed to do so sometimes.
On the last day of last year, on one of those walks, she stopped at a row of free-paper kiosks and took one she’d not read before. At home on the old couch, she flipped through it and came to a picture and article about the House of Lilac Love. She recognized the pretty lilac-painted building, not far from her apartment, but would never have guessed it was a hospice. As she read about the people cared for there, she imagined them as a tribe of the dying, and a minute amount of her vanished strength made itself known, enough to pick up the phone and inquire whether any jobs were available.
It had felt odd interviewing for a job that didn’t include discussions about prior tribe contact, what the research hoped to reveal, the term of the expedition, housing accommodations, shots required for travel, but there was Patty Donaldson, the head of Lilac Love, who looked to Camille like a highly experienced team leader. She had army hair, a crew cut strictly maintained, gigantic hoops in her ears, an easy laugh. Her bulk was crammed into a well-tailored Day-Glo lime-green pantsuit, and when she shook Camille’s hand, she said, “I like to be a splash of color for everyone. Now let’s talk about you,” and then exclaimed over Camille’s background, her experience in fieldwork, expressing veneration for her accomplishments, and her certainty that someone highly trained in dedicated listening would be a great addition. With Patty’s unceasing, honest smile aimed directly at her, Camille had felt the slightest renewing of what once had been her natural optimism.
Since January, for the last seven and a half months, she has been working as an end-of-life caregiver at Lilac Love. It is a job for which she needed no formal training: she does not insert needles into veins, or clear phlegm from throats, or dispense morphine, or arrange and empty bedpans. There are compassionate nurses for all of those tasks, selfless women who sail through the place like loving spirits. Now, five or six days a week, Camille wakes early, showers, dresses in clean and pressed clothes, fills up her thermos with her special coffee blend, makes a sack lunch, and walks to the hospice, to sit by bedsides, to ask questions that encourage exhausted tongues to recount their owners’ stories, to write dictated letters to family and friends, sometimes loving letters, sometimes letters filled with angst, sometimes letters filled with vituperative hatred aimed like poison-tipped darts at their intended recipients—as sharp, surely, as those arrows the Stone Age Sentineli carried and Dr. Jin prevented her from viewing up close. She can honestly say she feels most at home in that small, vertical palace where futures are preordained.
When she has tried to explain this inexplicable shift in her focus to Valentine, his inquisition leaves her shrugging her shoulders, and he, increasingly frustrated by her curious new inability to express herself in terms he can understand, says, “Yes, yes, I know, the Trobrianders sucked all the life right out of you, but you’ve got to pull it together. And what I don’t understand is your new fascination with death.”
To Valentine, death has no immediacy; it has been reduced to the examination of skeletons, the unlocking of genes, the analyzing of migratory patterns, and dust. His pursuit of the dead shares nothing with her experiences, the way the process of death has parameters, permutations, crosses enigmatic boundaries. That they view death differently did not bother her, but his admonishment hurt, because the funny thing was, she thought she was starting to pull it together. That the desolate period of her life, ragged and ugly, the very definition of quotidian before she started at Lilac Love, was tapering off. She’s no longer in the trough of the black depression into which she sank; the blackness is fading into a pallid gray, the depression softening into a lassitude, although when she’s home by herself it reverts to inertia. It is too soon, she knows, to figure out how to resume her prior life; she still can’t imagine how she once possessed such gargantuan dreams, such energy.
But she’s awake every morning, sometimes before the alarm, interested in where she is going, and there is something so restful about being among the dying. Not those who are still denying, or angry, or bargaining, or depressed—the first four stages of Kübler-Ross’s American model for death and dying, which she has now learned all about—but those who have reached the fifth and last stage, acceptance. Those people, who have accepted their outcome, are extraordinary. They aren’t at all what she expected. She thought she’d find them huddled up to their gods, worn or new Bibles close by, and she, a disbeliever, would have nothing to say to them, would be unable to find common ground. A few do hang onto old remnants, but most have no atavistic reliance on religion, have cast away what they might have been taught in childhood, despite the crosses or Jewish stars hanging around old necks, lost beneath heavy drifts of wrinkles. Few prayers are uttered; they have left behind the realm of hope, seek no last-minute godly redemptions, no heightened revelations, are instead most interested in assessing all those years in which they put on their faces and their suits and braved the act of living. Had they lived? Truly lived? Lived enough? “No,” they say, it is never enough, but no god is going to set things right at this late date. “Don’t waste time on any of that nonsense,” they tell her repeatedly. “I won’t,” she says.
But it’s more complex than that. Her unbelieving is giving way to a belief in all the variants of the holy, those she learned from her anthropological studies, those she observed in the Trobriand Islands, those she’s apprehending in these rooms listening to the multitude of ways in which these men and women found their own higher meaning in the physical and emotional world.
Those closest to death and still sensate pay scrupulous attention to schedules being precisely maintained. Breakfast at seven, lunch at twelve, dinner at five. No matter their lack of appetites, no matter if they slumber through mealtimes, they want those trays in their rooms, visible confirmation upon awakening of their continuing existence. Sometimes that small proof of life is all it takes to bring a slight smile to their faces, though often the slight smile is rictus in nature. Those lucky to have more time ahead of them are resisting the natural inclination to retreat into insularity, are instead expanding their horizons, insisting on being bundled up and wheeled down to the kitchen to watch the cook bake a delicacy that might taste in their mouths like their own Proustian madeleine, regardless that they can barely manage a second bite. One man has hired a college student to teach him to play chess, a game he once refused to learn because his father had been a competitive player. A woman has taken up knitting, despite fingers petrified by age and rheumatoid arthritis, the most minor of her afflictions. Wherever they fall on the incline toward death, they share a surprising stoicism. The nature of the stoicism ranges, but has a common denominator: an undistinguished day is welcomed, even if in their prior lives they would have bucked against such dullness. Religion for them is now art and music, gazing through dimming eyes at reproductions in heavy books, listening with fading hearing to love songs, operas, symphonies, Neil Young, Barbra Streisand, the Rolling Stones, even Metallica; one old gentleman requires fifteen minutes a day of what he calls his “nerve-settling polka music,” which unsettles everyone else.
Most of them have become humanists, without calling themselves such, nearly evangelical in extolling its creed about the value and agency, individually and collectively, of human beings, advising her to waste no time worrying about the end. The end is irrelevant, it only matters what came before, during all those days when they lacked sufficient awareness of their own freedom and progress, when they were fully, but perhaps ungratefully, alive. She is grasping it all. And their need of her, the way they attempt to raise themselves a little higher on their pillows when she steps through their doors, has provided her with a modicum of the purpose she felt in the Trobriand Islands.
Sitting with them, talking with them, hearing all that they want to say, allowing herself to be the surrogate for those they once loved, for those who preceded them in death, for those who have disappeared, or abandoned them, or are too far away, or busy, or disinterested, to make their way to Lilac Love, to enter one of these quiet rooms, to hold a translucent hand that reveals its thinned blue veins, its age spots, its bird-fragile bones, its spasms—to give comfort and succor as once, surely, the fragile people shriveling away in their neatly made beds gave comfort and succor to them. Being present with the dying is a powerful draw. She is not out in the field, but she has a seat at the edge of eternal space. And it’s helping her.
She has submitted an application to the Peace Corps, selecting Nepal, Peru, Vanuatu, Mongolia, and Burkina Faso as places where she would be interested in serving, because imagining herself exploring the world again helps lift the heaviness; it’s what she needs to hold onto. She felt proactive executing the paperwork for this potential alternative, which could eliminate waiting two years for the next expedition. It also had the unpleasant effect of reinforcing her current unsteadiness—never before would she have doubted the security of her place on any expedition, but she was questioning herself so much that she could no longer presume her luck was not already broken. She hasn’t mentioned the Peace Corps to her family or to Valentine. She tells herself it’s because she hasn’t yet been accepted, but the truth is, even if she’s accepted, she’s been thinking she’s not ready to go, is far from full strength, needs more time at this final station before death, with its eschatological light, and the personal trinkets on bureaus like lucky charms overseeing what everyone hopes will be a painless transition to whatever is on the other side. Although they take nothing from their old religions, what remains is the contradictory notion that on the other side there might be some unearthly bliss.
In spite of her own state, being at Lilac Love is providing Camille with a palliative kind of earthbound bliss.
But there are bad nights when it is difficult to shake the belief that she is losing, has already lost substantial ground, in the race of life. Everyone else is moving forward, moving up, growing up. Actually, they’ve grown up. They have spouses and life partners. They have kids, are having kids, are actively thinking about having kids, or are already fearing they’ve left it too long, going for checkups and tests to determine sperm motility, egg viability. They have capital-H homes, with great aesthetics, and original art on the walls. They have window washers, housekeepers, nannies, personal trainers, and sometimes chefs. They have mutual funds and 401(k)s and stock portfolios, vacations booked in advance, clothes for every conceivable occasion. And yet lately, when she forces herself to go to a cocktail or dinner party, the favorite conversational topic is about giving everything up. These discussions, in which Camille does not participate, go on for hours while everyone drinks artisanal vodka and small-batch IPAs and eats complicated catered food.
Last week, at another such gathering, Camille listened again to her friends pronouncing they would pare down to the basics, live in some uninhabited place. They made suggestions to one another and promises and began drawing up plans. The flying rhetoric had set those friends aflame, but demonstrated only their ignorance.
She had pictured herself holding up a hand to end the inane conversation, saying: “Look at me. Look at Camille Tabor, your friend. I am a PhD. I have studied hard and done serious fieldwork. I have been named an up-and-comer in my profession, of which only a few make it to the top, which I am expected to reach. I have led a research expedition to the Trobriand Islands. I managed half a million dollars for that expedition. I did groundbreaking research there and wrote a massive dissertation deemed phenomenal. And to accomplish all of that, I have given up so much. It’s demanding, consuming work, and this life of mine does not lead naturally to riches. I understand, it was my choice, but trust me, I’d like the financial freedom you take for granted. You’re all pretending to pine for some nonmaterialistic, Waldenesque life, but here are the facts: none of you know what you’re talking about. None of you would do well outside of your comfort zones, without your possessions. If you were really interested in a life off the grid, you would have interrogated me about my years in the Trobriands. I’m the only one whose career ensures I will live, have already lived, the very existence you now say you want. And yet you asked me nothing about the Trobrianders, about what life there is really like. If you had, I would have told you that they have a different outlook on sex, and on families, and subscribe to a collective notion of cohabitation, rather than the isolation you all expect and prefer. And they have spirits, and commune with the natural world in a way that has nothing to do with your gardeners planting rows of organic vegetables for you to pluck and wash and show off. Gardeners you plan to bring to your Walden when you chuck everything. Instead, you asked me the flying time to the Trobriands, and what months are the high season, and if AmEx is accepted there? So stop your silly bellyaching, your insulting chatter about how your lives would be so much better if you didn’t want private schools for your children and the getaway home on one of the San Juans. Admit you like your easy and luxurious existences in this world you’ve conquered with your own drive and ambition.”
Of course, she didn’t say any of that.
She hasn’t always judged so harshly; she knows she was lucky growing up as she did, with loving parents and few worries, but in her fluctuating despair, it struck her as particularly unfair that these friends had never been halted, as she was now. And that they believed in the value of their stupid utterances, while Dr. Jin had suggested that the purely social anthropological ramifications of her work on those islands might not be of great interest. This world, with its inventions and advances, would always dominate, she understood that. But there was enormous value in exploring her preferred worlds, which offered solutions that would allow everyone, not only those topping the pyramid, to cohabit happily on this planet; solutions embedded in the concept of the greater good. Being among these people she once liked, she was outraged by their obliviousness, and the false, transitory abandonment of their avariciousness. They might think they wanted to be somewhere far away, but their gazes stopped at the gates of their affluent existences.
She had refilled her glass with the expensive vodka she only drinks at these parties, and debated whether to move back to Melanesia. If she wasn’t there under the color of official research, she would really be living there. And that meant a life trading what you don’t need for what you do—which she greatly admires—or, if you had nothing that anyone wanted, you acquired what you needed by paying for it with bundles of dried banana leaves. She’d be on a Trobriand beach for the rest of her life, wearing a grass skirt on festival days, engaging in intriguing rites and rituals, and creating her own banana-leaf wealth—which she knew she could do—but banana-leaf wealth wasn’t exchangeable for currency accepted anywhere other than on those islands. She wouldn’t be able to explore all the other tribes she wanted to meet in their distant locales or make her way home to see her parents and sister and brother and nieces. If she returned to Melanesia, she’d be as stuck there as she was here, a difference only between the literal and the metaphoric. Stuck is stuck, wherever you may be.
She’d left that cocktail party buzzed, and angry with herself. With the depression that had flattened her and twisted her out of her life. With Valentine heading to a dig in South Africa, led by a famous physical anthropologist who had found very old bones in a system of caves. She’d seen him off at SeaTac earlier that day, and he was up in the sky on his way to a cave in a valley next to a mountain next to a river in the Cradle of Humankind, drafting the first of the several emails he’s now sent her, all iterating the same thing—Camille, to be clear, we are not taking a break. I say this with love, but you are too young to be spending your days with the dying. Don’t you want us to be happy, to live a happy life together?—while she was unsteadily heading for her front door, thinking that unlike her friends, her colleagues, her older sister, she wasn’t sure about marriage or children, and those were the topics Valentine was talking about before he jetted away. Wanting her to marry him, wanting them to have children, for her to bear tiny versions of themselves. She couldn’t imagine any of it, not with her life turned so juvenile. She couldn’t see herself with a husband, a mate, a partner. Couldn’t envision herself with children who would perhaps have her witch hazel eyes, Valentine’s philosophical spirit, their shared hunger for lives filled with the rigorousness of novel experiences. If she were twenty or younger, her mother would have penetrating insights and suggestions Camille could put into effect to unravel her depression, her confusion, but she had never asked before, and at thirty-six, she’s aged beyond her mother’s vaunted professional expertise.
And yet that party was days ago, and what is she doing right now?
She’s heading home to Palm Springs, where she could get some familial, or maternal, or psychological help figuring out how to reclaim her life. She couldn’t bear if that life was now closed to her, if she never regained her strength, her tenacity.
She’s thinking about all of this as she wheels her small bag from her ground-floor room, down the sidewalk, and into the lobby of the motel in San Luis Obispo, where she spent last night. Her sleep was restless and she needs coffee, and there on the laminated table sit urns of French Roast, Decaf, Hot Water, tiny tubs of dried creamers and sweetener packets, baskets of tea bags and hot cocoa packets, a tray of lopsided Danish, a stack of napkins several inches high. The purported breakfast free with a night’s stay.
She’s alone, the kid at the front desk busy putting keycards for the rooms into their slots, and then the glass doors spring open, and a clutch of elderly women bustles in, sporting backpacks and fanny packs, sensible walking shoes and sticks. Eight of them, barefaced and wrinkled and happy, talking and laughing, pouring their coffees, dunking their tea bags, splitting Danish, debating whether the day’s expedition should be to the Santa Lucia Range, or the La Panza Mountains, or the Montaña de Oro State Park. Maybe it’s their age and their brusque warmth that reminds Camille of her heroines.
She nods and smiles and says, “Morning,” to the old happy women, and the old happy women nod and smile and say, “Morning,” to her.
She takes it as an encouraging sign, her default into researcher mode, wanting to ask them how they’ve all come together, what bonds they share, where they hail from, who the leader is, who the followers, what this trip signifies, but she doesn’t. She’d sound crazy to them, and so she refills her large Styrofoam cup, secures the lid, and pushes out through the lobby doors, into the already-warm air at seven twenty in the morning.
She unlocks her car, new when it was her college graduation present, slips the cup into its holder, the bag into the back, herself into the driver’s seat. She is about to start the second and final leg of her drive. In less than five hours she’ll be on Agapanthus Lane.
When she left Seattle at the crack of dawn yesterday, she promised herself she would use the nearly twenty highway hours wisely. Instead, she wasted the first fifteen listening to music, to talk radio, to a popular true-crime podcast she found detestable and clicked off after ten minutes. And whenever the thoughts started churning, she shooed them away. But it’s time to decide various things:
Whether or not she should end things with Val because she is no longer the person she was when they met.
Whether or not she should attempt to turn her doctoral dissertation into some kind of tell-all book, despite her abhorrence of the idea.
Whether or not she will go where the Peace Corps sends her, if they want her.
Whether she will pretend to Dr. Jin that she’s back to normal, and ask him to find out when an assistant professorship in their department might come up, or in any university’s soc. anthro department, and to make those calls to the journals, to learn if there is a rare opening, or might be one in the near future, and she could say, “In the meantime, let me be your research assistant, starting fall semester,” a better proposition than trading distant fieldwork for research of local trends in disease, overpopulation, land use, and urban dialects. She’s not interested in those areas, so why use up the little energy she has to pursue an opportunity she doesn’t want—when winning would mean a chilly office, appropriate business attire, and, likely, immediately quitting. No matter that she’s stalled now; she doesn’t want any marks against her growing reputation. If she still had her natural energy, she knows what she would do: develop a new research proposal, submit it to her university and every anthropological organization that funds exploration, and when she had the money, she’d head off once more, seeking the exotic, with a clear and stated purpose. But figuring all of that out seems impossible, mind-boggling, and utterly exhausting.
And, finally, whether she will reveal to her family the depression she has been suffering from, severe enough that she has relegated her expensive and wide-ranging education and years of diligent, imaginative, and difficult work to a back burner, to the closet, that she is spending eight hours a day tending to those on the way out, when once she was only interested in figuring out how those most uniquely alive lived.
The interstate is quiet this early, and when she sees no police cars ahead or behind, or tucked into the verges and waiting to pounce, she sets her cruise control to eighty, then checks her watch. Last night, Phoebe left a voicemail commanding Camille to call her today. “While we’re both driving to the place we seem incapable of not calling home, we can talk about things we won’t be able to talk about there, or at least not easily, or at least not without Mom sitting down next to us, caressing our hair—wait, I forgot, Mom always knows everything. Shit, I hope that’s not really true—” The message had ended with Phoebe’s laugh.
Does she want to call her pluperfect older sister, founder of her own law firm, who rents a charming apartment, though she could, on a whim, purchase an embassy-sized house in the most expensive Los Angeles neighborhoods, who, despite trouble finding a husband, knows she absolutely wants one of those and the eventual children, who has never experienced a moment of depression or doubt or indecision, who wouldn’t understand what it feels like to be dragged under the waves of one’s life? Camille’s kept everything from her family, including Phoebe, when they trade their infrequent telephonic confidences.
She stares down the long, straight highway. If she calls Phoebe at eleven, she has three and a half hours left to gather herself together, to sound like the Camille her sister thinks she knows, the Camille they all think they know.
FIVE (#ulink_9f3bdb99-8c66-5da2-8738-614f9860cc43)
BEST OF SEVEN?” HARRY calls out to Levitt.
Levitt, already wiping sweat from his forehead with his terry-clothed wrists, says, “Why do you insist on subverting protocol? It’s best of five, Harry. Best of five at the US Open. Best of five at Wimbledon. And there’s no way you and I can go seven in this heat. Best of three, like we do every Saturday. Is this your attempt to psych me out, gain the upper hand?”
“Of course I know the protocol. I’m being a caring friend, offering you a shot at taking me down, because I’m feeling extraordinarily energetic today.”
“Yeah, yeah, Harry. Just serve.”
Harry bounces the yellow ball, six, seven, eight, nine times, to unbalance Levitt, who is bent over at the waist, at the ready, those thick tree trunks of his in a wide, imposing stance.
Harry feels the sun on his face, hears the solid thump of the ball on the warm court, the happy yips of small dogs freed from their leashes. Then, like a thunderbolt to the brain, he’s thinking about King David and Queen Esther, the way they yipped happily, flicking their tails, circling around their new masters as Harry and Roma and Phoebe and Camille headed away from the great rambling house in Connecticut that was no longer their home. It belonged now to the buyers, that replacement family who was waving, the husband and wife the same ages as Harry and Roma, the little boys nearly the same ages as Phoebe and Camille, the family who took title and said yes, they would be delighted to take the Tabor family’s dachshunds as well, agreeing it wouldn’t be right to uproot the dogs from their puppyhood home, and impossible to travel thousands of miles with them, when the dogs couldn’t tolerate speed, would be carsick within minutes.
Levitt calls out from across the court, “You going to serve in this century?” Harry hears him, but he can’t respond, struck by these memories of King David and Queen Esther, dogs he gave to his girls when all four were young, by his ability to hand them over so easily to a family he knew nothing about, except that their financials were in order and they hadn’t required a mortgage. He doesn’t even recall their last name, despite seeing it on nearly every page of the purchase and sale agreement.
Why is he thinking about King David and Queen Esther, when he has not thought about them since 1987, since seeing them in the rearview mirror of the Caravan, as he and his family drove away to a new life. It is a memory he has never called up in all of these years, not even a memory he has ever had, but it is in his mind now. The girls were crying in the backseat, weren’t they? Yes, he can hear his daughters crying, tiny hands hitting the sealed windows, yelling, “Let the dogs in, let the dogs in, we can’t leave them behind.” But he had left them behind. Had let his daughters cry themselves out. Had not turned to witness the emotion on Roma’s face. She had, after all, sadly and reluctantly agreed to the dogs’ dispensation.
“Hey, you okay over there?” Levitt calls out, rising from his competitor’s crouch, loosening the grip on his racquet.
Harry’s heart is pounding, like a bomb is about to go off in there, and he leans over, head between his knees, hoping those forgotten dogs aren’t a very strange version of his life passing before his eyes, hoping he’s not about to be ejected from his existence by a heart attack this minute, hoping he didn’t put himself in the crosshairs of an evil eye last night by thinking how far he is from death.
But then it passes.
The memory is still there, but its toothy grip is easing.
