Antarctica (23 page)

Which caused Wade to look at her a bit oddly, no
doubt nonplussed. But how different it had been up in the cramped Scott tent, sitting around the hissing stove talking about geology and politics, and the Antarctica below the ice and the f-stops. To those men she had been just a person, and so she had been able to relax and be just a person; which was such a relief that it made her much more pleasant and therefore more attractive, she was sure. Which was what they deserved for being so normal themselves. That was something she liked very much about Wade; he had been no more interested in her than any of the beakers he was meeting, no more and no less; and growing more interested in her the more he knew about her, and the more they talked about things in general. Which was how she liked it; indeed how she demanded it. No doubt about it, she was pretty demanding and intolerant when it came to men’s behavior toward her; she knew that; it had been that way for a long time. And was only getting worse.

Because beauty was a curse. It’s always getting worse, because beauty is a curse … in four-part harmony. She didn’t recall the Beach Boys singing that one, but the girls on the beach (who are all within reach) could have told Brian, if he had been able to listen from within his own layer of toxic blubber. Beauty is a curse. Of course it brought attention to you, that was not the issue. Val’s good looks had brought her attention all her life; but by now she hated it. She did not like attention. That was why she had taken off into the mountains every weekend of high school, and then permanently the moment high school had ended and she had been released from four years’ solitary in the prisonhouse of the American dream.

And it was silly anyway, silly at best. She was not
that
good-looking when it came right down to it, no
fashion model—her face as she saw it in the mirror was utterly plain, and filled with irritations. Men were wrong about that, as they were about so much else. It was just that she was tall, and blond, and big, and athletic, with what in the end was fundamentally a friendly face—regular, pleasant, somewhat cheerleaderesque, she had to admit. And that was enough to have men lying to her her whole life long. They got in traffic accidents driving past her. One time one had braked his Toyota pickup to a screeching halt in a parking lot and stuck his head out the window and yelled at her “Will you marry me!” at the top of his lungs. This incident in particular had made her laugh, as it had at least had the virtue of straightforward honesty; but later it had come to stand in her mind as the purest image of what that particular kind of attention from men had really been. It didn’t matter what she was like, that had nothing to do with it; her looks alone were enough to justify men slamming on the brakes and spontaneously pitching their whole self at her. And what was she supposed to say to that? What was she supposed to do with all these strangers hitting on her, crashing in crying me me me, be mine, love always, will you marry me? It was so obvious they were coming on for the wrong reasons. And so from the very start they revealed themselves to Val as people with bad principles, fools, jerks, pathetos, sometimes as insecure as she was about the worth of their characters, sometimes idiotically certain that they were the greatest thing around, but either way worthless to her, their attentions useless, stupid, irritating, sometimes dangerous, often maddening. They made her mad.

And of course the ones who had laid her and left her, as they said, had made her frightened and uncertain as well as mad. Some of those guys she had really loved, or
thought she had; they hadn’t come on in the usual idiot way, and she had thought they were different; and still it hadn’t worked out. How could that be, if she was so attractive? Was she too much of a bitch to live with? Or too boring? She didn’t think so. But then again she had always had trouble articulating her thoughts; somehow what she said aloud was always a platitude approximating the original thought, which had been far more interesting. She had never learned the trick of catching those hard thoughts on the fly, and indeed when she had caught them and expressed them properly, those were often the times that got her into biggest trouble, convincing people (men) that she was mean, or just weird. So it was either vanilla or bile, or staying silent. Or going climbing, free solo, the best way.

Or later, to make a living, leading tour groups of strangers and spending the whole time on automatic pilot, playing the role of the Happy Mountain Woman, earth mother, nature spirit, athlete philosopher, wild woman—which role actually seeped back into her, to an extent, as she became what she was playing at, like during her cheerleader days; inflicting a role, like spiking a volleyball right in their face; and this one felt good; a relief from the usual cynicism and distrust. Clients could very legitimately be held at a proper client distance, a professional relationship, and from there some fairly decent interactions could be had, with some nice men willing to treat her as the guide and no more. It was enough anyway, the client/guide relationship—it had a certain student/teacher or even child/parent aspect to it, depending on how the people in the roles played them. Taking care of people. So, many fairly pleasant human interactions. But the big man/woman thing; no luck. Lots of bummers, enough to disturb the whole thing. She wanted a big time-out.

Unfortunately Antarctica was not the place for that. The man-to-woman ratio was still about 70 to 30, and that made a lot of them even crazier than they were in the world. The women too sometimes went hectic with glee, women in some cases who had never had enough attention in the world and so revelled in it now, trolling around and having some hard fun, breaking hearts like gutting little fish they’d caught. She’d done a bit of that herself. Bit of revenge in it, no doubt. Other women went catatonic under the testosterone assault, or burst out laughing and said No to the whole fool lot. Others tried to keep their eyes open and their wits about them, to see if they could find a man they liked. After all, there were a lot of men there. As the Mac women said, The odds were good, but the goods were odd. So that took a little sorting out, usually—trying a few men to find the one you liked. Which could look like trolling. And this caused problems. In fact when it came to their love lives most of the women on the ice were like walking soap operas. Many went through one ice romance after another. Some did seasonal contracts, like ASL. Certainly nine out of ten ice romances ended badly.

Among them, unfortunately, her relationship with X. He was a lot of the things she liked, too—he was big, gentle, smart; as Steve had used to say, teasing her even in his last year, just her type: trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent. As Steve had been. No, not really. Anyway X had been many good things, but also overidealistic and moody, overintellectual, naive, indoorsy, inactive, unathletic, curiously passive; and even though she was sick of men’s aggressiveness, she had to admit that she did like a certain dash in a man, a certain fire and style, which X had lacked. He railed against the system all the time, and yet slouched
around without doing much physical out in the world, which was her usual solution to frustration. He was just too mellow. And he was younger than Val too, four years younger, so that he often seemed like a kid to her, a sophomoric college kid, even though strictly speaking he was older than that.

So she had chafed a bit during their vacation in New Zealand. And it hadn’t helped to have him break into the I’m-being-tortured-by-a-Nazi-mountain-guide routine as they hiked up the utterly easy Bealey Spur, a routine that she had gotten so sick of that she could not even express it. Every time someone said anything to that effect, or even suggested it with a look, it made her so mad that it ruined the whole trip for her. And it happened every trip. Even walking up a green escalator into alpine mountain glory.

So they had said good-bye and she had flown back to the States, and gotten there with no plan, and just kind of wandered that whole off-season, from one climbing hole to the next. In the past she had spent her offseasons with her grandmother on the old family farm, taking care of the old woman and being taken care of by her, and that had been pleasant, a real anchor in her life; but Annie had died two years before while Val was in Antarctica, and now Val had no pattern to fall into when back in the world. It had been a strange few months. And by the time she went back down to the ice for the new season, she had lost any interest she had had in X. The on-ice/off-ice format of the McMurdo lifestyle was hard on even the good relationships, and if one was troubled, the big breaks made it very easy to end them. So when she got back to Mac Town she had had her eye out for an excuse to disengage from X, as she realized consciously only later. And a new mountaineer named Mike had served as about the perfect
excuse, or so she had thought at first; she had been smitten, she had to admit it. Now it was clear that Mike had a bad case of what Val called climber’s syndrome, consisting of a self-absorption so deep that it could not be plumbed; compared to it the usual male blubber was no more than the subcutaneous layer with which everyone had to cope. Mike had been quite happy to sleep with her, of course, but in a month he had not learned a thing about her; it would probably be dangerous to ask him to recall her last name. In only two days this Wade Norton had learned a thousand times more about her. So it was bye-bye to Mike; and now X was gone from Mac Town, and she hadn’t even apologized. So it was back to trolling. Or not. In any case, yet another bad experience to add to all the rest. She had been the one to screw up this time, she had to admit it.

On the helicopter ride back to Mac Town, Wade sat next to her in one of the side compartments of the Huey, where they were alone together in their own sonic space; they were just barely able to hear each other, but could if they spoke directly in each other’s ears. Looking down at the sea ice flashing under them, they traded comments. When she thought about how nice he had been on this trip, it made her wince; to go from this smart, polite, interesting, somehow subtle, even withdrawn man, to Jack and Jim and the rest of the clients on the Amundsen! It was painful. She liked this man a lot; he had just the mellowness that she liked, but that extra dash she admired as well—a Washington operator—a sly sense of humor; paying attention to those beakers with what seemed his total interest; and then to her too, but as a guide, a person with career problems, an equal in the world; not to be instructed in
Washington politics or the global situation or whatever, but just talked with, in mutual interest. Now of course leaving, and soon no doubt. It always happened that way.

“Do you have brothers and sisters?” he exclaimed in her ear, surprising her.

“No,” she said in his.

“Only child?” Sounding surprised.

He was looking down at the trash ice. “No,” she said in his ear, surprising herself. She never talked about this. “No, I had a brother. But he died.”

He nodded; looked at her briefly. Looked back down at the ice. All the way back to Mac Town he sat beside her, looking down at the ice, his arm pressed against hers, his hip against hers, his leg against hers. The pressure was saying, I’m sorry. It was saying, There’s nothing can be said about that. Which was true. This was how Steve himself had comforted her in his last year, sitting beside her with an arm over her shoulder, not saying anything. At sixteen and twelve, neither of them had been able to figure out much to say about it. Val stared down at the trash ice flowing underneath them. She liked this man who was leaving.

Back in Mac. She walked up to her room, lost in her thoughts.

She had been eleven when she first learned something was wrong. They told her that Steve was sick, that he had mononucleosis and it would take him a while to recover. He was in the hospital, and then in Houston, to go to a special hospital. That’s when they told her it was leukemia. He was gone for months, but came home for visits. In later years she didn’t remember much about those visits; but she did remember being shocked
at how much thinner he was, and that he moved so slowly. All his muscles seemed stiff, including eventually his lips, so that it was hard for him to talk the same.

Most of their time together in that period they played a board game he had liked when they were younger. She couldn’t recall the details of the rules, but the board was a map of the world, and the game had to do with weather, and your piece was on a clear square that was a quadrant of the world map, and if you rolled a twelve the clear square had to be shifted to another quadrant of the map. Something like that. They had played it for hours, in near silence. Val had the impression that Steve had grown up very rapidly in Houston, and was a kind of grown-up now because of what was happening to him. He looked at her as from a great distance away. Once he rolled boxcars twice in a row, then three times; four times; five times. Moving the quadrant around the world every time. Then six times in a row, double sixes every time. They had stared at each other across the board, then looked down at the dice again, acutely uncomfortable, aware together that something very strange was happening. “Guess I’m going on a trip,” he said, and Val had interrupted his turn and picked up the dice and rolled them herself.

That little memory was all she had, for hours and hours of time—that and a few more fragments, like him walking slowly down the hall, bowlegged, to put the game away. Or when he left for Houston for the last time, and said to her, “See you later,” and she had said “See you later.”

Then horsing around in history class and Mr. Sanders coming in near the end of the period and taking her outside, very serious, to tell her her brother had died, he was very sorry, she had to go home. She remembered
looking down from the second-story balcony at the parking lot, the scatter of teachers’ cars, the tennis courts in their line off to the left.

So her brother Steve had died. He had been bigger than her, and stronger than her, and more full of life; he had taught her to love the outdoors, and had taken her along when a lot of older brothers wouldn’t have. He had been trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, etc. Her hero.