Far Afield (24 page)

America: what a paradoxical homeland! Jonathan on previous trips to Europe had tucked his passport deep into his pocket, not to protect it but to protect himself, and relied on his excellent French to screen his origins. There was no virtue, this late in the century, in being an American. Jonathan knew he’d missed the era when his citizenship might have been something other than a juggling act. Freedom was no longer a major U.S. export; even domestic production seemed to be falling off. Jonathan’s freedom at home, like that of many city dwellers, was burdensome because he saw so many who lacked it. He could feel guilty or he could feel threatened, but he could not feel easy. Like the generation before his that had sat in, marched, burned, and bombed, he and his peers were permanently disenchanted
with the government; unlike them, they had no ideal of a more perfect union.

And so, in the matter of love of one’s country, as in the matter of love in general, Jonathan was an emotional virgin. Nationality was to him akin to an arranged marriage or being saddled with difficult parents. He thought of another of Eyvindur’s pronouncements: A man does not choose his homeland. In Eyvindur’s case, an explanation for attachment; in his own, an excuse for detachment.

But the drive to love is strong. Jonathan in Sigurd’s store could—and did now, in the twilight—shut his eyes and know his visceral connection to the fine Georgian wood-frame houses (pre-Revolutionary, but still American) that fronted Brattle Street, to the joy of driving too fast down an interstate in one of his country’s homegrown oversized cars, and, most profoundly, to the comfort of feeling the entire continent at his back when he stood wind-buffeted on the rocks of Acadia, looking out to the ocean that had all the while, unknown to him, cradled these islands.

He opened his eyes. Was this Arcadia? Had he reached Paradise—a fishy, rainy, circumscribed yet charmed universe where only nature demanded obedience, where intimacy performed the function of law, where patriotism was as easy as—or equivalent to—admiring the landscape? In all its dreary, disorganized splendor, the Faroes was a place Jonathan would be proud to call his home. What good was three thousand miles of country if he didn’t feel that it was his? Wasn’t home the place where you recognize yourself? Perhaps these two hundred square miles of peat and stone were a more congenial vantage point on the world. Perhaps he’d come not from but to the land of the free.

Jonathan realized that Sigurd was watching him, waiting for his two kroner and a rejoinder to “we are free.”

“I think you’re right,” he said. Sigurd cocked his head. Had he been expecting a quarrel? Probably; he looked prepared to argue into the night for the existence of perfect
freedom in the Faroes and surprised at Jonathan’s unwillingness to stick up for his own side.

“How many people do you have there?” Sigurd asked. He was squinting, anticipatory, as if the answer would clarify why Jonathan didn’t love his country.

“Eight million.” No, that was New York City. “Five hundred million.” That was implausible. Sigurd was bug-eyed. “Lots.” Jonathan finally settled it. “We have lots and lots.”

“Soon you’ll have to move to the moon.” Sigurd laughed. “Where do they fit?”

“It’s bigger than here.” Jonathan pushed his arm against the chilly, damp air, expanding Sigurd’s store.

“I reckon so.” Sigurd nodded to himself over the size of America, then asked, “So, the Other American, you don’t know his family?”

Jonathan put two kroner on the counter; how could he hope to be a member of this world? “I don’t,” he said gently, and went off to make dinner for Wooley.

What an evening! Jonathan shivered with ire and chill under his coverlet, listening to Wooley banging drawers in the room where Daniela was supposed to have whiled away the afternoon painting.

What it boiled down to was that Wooley took what Jonathan thought of as the “masculine” approach to life and anthropology. Some people became anthropologists because they already felt themselves outside of culture: this was Jonathan’s position. Others believed themselves so versatile and appealing that they would be accepted by any culture: this was Wooley’s position. Wooley was not one to worry that he’d overstayed his welcome, eaten too much, said the wrong thing, misunderstood someone’s intention. And Jonathan had to admit that this heedlessness was useful. Wooley had steamrolled his way into life on Fugloy with his bulk, his terrible pidgin Faroese, his daring that took
him down cliffs on ropes to hunt puffins and earned him admiration from taciturn villagers (or so Wooley told it; but Jonathan believed him). Wooley would eat anything, provoking more native admiration. And Wooley blissfully enjoyed every rain-soaked, blundered-through moment of his Faroese existence; that was clear. No sulking in the kitchen for him.

Was he at all intimidatable? Jonathan had tried: Harvard, literary references, French, even—desperately—Daniela and her fictional visit. Wooley didn’t bother countering any of these, except Daniela. He claimed to be engaged to a girl in Klaksvík. Jonathan prodded. Well, they were probably going to get engaged. They were sleeping together, and in the Faroes that was considered engaged. Wouldn’t he feel badly when he left and didn’t take her? Jonathan wanted to know. Wooley shook his head. No, she’ll understand. She’s a great girl.

“Anyhow,” he added, “I might stay.”

Jonathan’s ire bubbled again at the memory of this. It was worse than if Wooley had been writing his thesis on the same topic; it was grand larceny, emotional plagiarism: How dare he be as captivated as Jonathan?

Going bush. Like many anthropological ideas, this one had been born in jungles and savannahs and gave off a tropical scent. Some old-timers called it “troppo,” an occupational hazard that began with lassitude and ended by destroying your objectivity. Stories that went, When we got there, two years later, he was living in a hut with three wives. The trouble was, anthropologists were supposed to be living in huts. The three wives were optional but not exceptional. The line between observer and participant was so fine as to defy detection much of the time. It started easily enough. When members of “your” tribe are going on a journey or planning to get married, they slaughter a chicken and read the blood for omens. They offer to read omens for you before your trip back down the river for
supplies. What harm can it do? It will certainly give you a better sense of their worldview, and it might give you a little useful information. Pretty soon you have recourse to chicken slaughter every time you have to make a decision.

Was that what was happening to both of them? Screwing around with Faroese girls (even if only in the mind), scrambling down cliff faces, eating rotten meat? Wooley had been extolling
rœst
meat after dinner.
Rœst
meat was in the first stages of corruption, with maggots crawling in it. “You pick them out, and then you boil it,” he explained. Further proof of Wooley’s effective insinuation of himself into society, for the villagers had so far protected Jonathan from knowing about this practice.

Wooley had long since stopped fussing with drawers and fallen into a hearty sleep complete with snore. Jonathan was awake, chasing his thoughts all over the map.

There was an important difference, he told himself, between thinking you could be an Amazon chieftain and thinking you could fit in with the Faroese. They had a common heritage, after all. His ancestors were northern Europeans just like theirs. The leap he’d made was more through time than culture: as life was here, so had all life north of France been two, or five, centuries ago. Perhaps racial memory explained his comfort? They were not foreigners, really. The anthropology department agreed with him on this; they had certainly beaten that point to a pulp before granting him permission to do fieldwork in what they said was “not a foreign culture.”

But he was here now. Jonathan turned over in bed, wishing he could go to sleep. He punched the pillow and began grinding through the evening with Wooley again.

Of all Jonathan’s faults and quirks, the one that gave him the most trouble was his compulsive comparative thinking. A screen of
He’s like that but I’m like this
obscured his perceptions of people. Each personality he encountered was a new yardstick by which to measure himself—and frequently
he came up short. The Faroes offered some relief from all this. Though a master at self-laceration, Jonathan was unable to pull off the feat of faulting himself for not being, say, a good fisherman, or for not being in a general sense someone who’d spent his life in a village of four hundred on a rock in the middle of the Atlantic. Here he saw clearly how much culture determines character: noisy, agitated, superpower America could never produce a calm, ocean-eyed Petur. These people lived in a comprehensible world; he’d grown up in chaos.

With Wooley, this excuse didn’t hold.

Equal opportunity. Not quite equal. Wooley seemed to come from money. He’d mentioned his father’s “companies.” Jonathan had noted the plural, and also that Wooley had said he’d gone to high school in Beverly Hills. His carefree attitude might be explained by privilege. But Jonathan knew they were both children of privilege, coddled and pushed to success. Wooley was more of a rebel than Jonathan; his father had expected him to go to work in one of the companies.

“But hey,” Wooley said, “I had a real great time at college, so I thought, You’d be fucking nuts to trade this for a boardroom.”

Jonathan found Wooley’s flat California delivery of flat California-style sentences disconcerting, because it gave the impression that he was stupid, and he was not. Stupid people were not accepted into the doctoral program in anthropology at Berkeley, nor were they given large traveling fellowships.

“What got you into anthropology?” Jonathan asked. He didn’t want to know, but there was no way to deflect the conversation from Wooley’s accomplishments.

“I was in soc”—pronounced
soash
, making Jonathan wince; he was used to the staid Harvard term
soc rel
, for social relations—“and I did a study of Chicano gangs in LA for my senior thesis. They were
bad
.” What a posturer,
thought Jonathan. “Man, they had these amazing jackets. They had like jacket art. It was fantastic. Anyhow, my professor said I ought to go into anthro. He said I had the perfect observational distance for it. I don’t know what the fuck he meant, but I did it.”

So he was a braggart, and an insensitively flagrant one. Jonathan had met plenty, though most were the sort who weave their braggadocio into conversation subtly. Still,
he
was sensitive enough to see there wasn’t much difference in the end. But here came the trouble spot. Wooley was crass, self-important, a blunderbuss of a guy, and Jonathan could only wonder why he too didn’t possess these qualities, even though he found them distasteful. Because Wooley didn’t find himself distasteful, and he seemed to be having an easier time living than Jonathan.

Possibly Wooley had doubts invisible to the naked eye—to Jonathan’s naked eye, anyhow? He didn’t think so. Jonathan believed himself to be the only person in the world with a large discrepancy between inner and outer self, and his uniqueness in misery was dear to him. It was a loophole through which he could escape from failure, loneliness—even his own incessant measuring. For at the heart of his belief was this spectacular disavowal: It wasn’t really me, you have never known me.

But what had been a comfort, a plumb line to a private reality, seemed now, at three o’clock in the morning in his chilly, foreign bed, odd and not comforting. A terrible question, which had never occurred to him before, presented itself: If his actions, words, and “self” were not the real Jonathan, then where was that Jonathan? For years he’d assumed that a finer, smarter, more capable Jonathan lurked in the wings waiting for his cue. But what was the cue? And what evidence did he have that the Other Jonathan was going to make an appearance?

Jonathan sat up in bed, transfixed by a new possibility: the Other Jonathan didn’t exist. That would certainly explain
his failure to show up. Jonathan’s eyes widened; he realized he couldn’t imagine living without this shadow self, though he knew that he did, in the sense that it was everyday Jonathan who spoke and ate and made dinner for Wooley. Nothing, not Harvard, not the Faroes, not Daniela, had ever conjured this better Jonathan, and still Jonathan had believed in him.

Oh, if there was no Jonathan-Messiah, to save him from himself! Then this was life. As it was, it would be. He would envy Wooley and disdain him, and no wise, skillful Jonathan would rise from the ashes of those base emotions to command Wooley’s respect; he would wait for Daniela to call, and she would or wouldn’t do so according to her inclination, and no magic dance performed by the delicious Other Jonathan could fix her inclination toward him. Worst of all, he would have no excuse for his incapacities and reluctances—not that he’d ever used it with anyone except himself. But it had been there, a chant that sounded, now, like something from first grade: You’ll see, you’ll see. What would they see? They would see more of what they saw. Which was? Him. Plain old everyday Jonathan.

He sank back under his eiderdown. The whole business was fundamentally embarrassing. He’d spent years deluding himself. Memories—little barbs of shame—popped into his mind: the papers whose mediocre grades he’d dismissed by dismissing the intelligence of his teachers, who after all didn’t have the wit to detect the brilliance of the Other Jonathan; the high-school debating team that didn’t include him because he was “above” such sophomoric intellectual activity; the parties where he’d been ignored by people too ignorant to notice how interesting he was. But hadn’t he thought his paper rather good, hadn’t he tried out for the debating team, and hadn’t he spent too much time at parties watching others enjoy themselves?

Two-thirty in the morning on an island far from home
was an odd time and place to get the news that he, his parents, and his elite schools had all been wrong. He was not brilliant or unusual; he—and they—had merely assumed that he was. Everybody in Cambridge assumed this of himself, but surely not everybody could be right. Despite his shock, Jonathan broke into a grin at the thought of an entire city obsessed with intellectual glamour, each citizen returning home at night to explain to his mate or his mirror why he was more insightful, better informed, or just plain smarter than everybody he’d spent the day with.