Euphoria

by Lily King

  ‘Have you ever felt that, the impulse to possess someone?’

  ‘Yes.’ But I could hardly tell her how recently. ‘Perhaps I’m not so Southern after all.’ Then, to deflect her, I told her about Sophie Soules, a French girl I was engaged to briefly the summer after Martin died, and that when I broke it off, her father had me write a letter attesting to her virginity.

  ‘A letter promising you had not possessed her. Was it the truth?’

  She was a nosy parker. ‘Of course,’ I paused, ‘it was not true.’

  She laughed. ‘Was she wine or bread to you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s from an Amy Lowell poem we all loved in college. Wine is sort of thrilling and sensual, and bread is familiar and essential.’

  ‘Wine, I suppose.’

  ‘Would it have turned to bread?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It doesn’t always.’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’

  She rolled a pencil beneath her palm on the table and then she looked up at me. ‘Helen and I were lovers,’ she said.

  ‘Ah.’ This explained a few things.

  She laughed at my ‘ah’ and told me they had met during Nell’s first anthropology class with Boas. Helen, a decade older, was his graduate assistant. Their connection was instant and though Helen was married with a house in White Plains, she stayed in the city many nights a week. She had encouraged Nell to go and study the Kirakira, but wrote her angry letters accusing Nell of abandoning her. Then she surprised her by meeting the boat in Marseille with the news that she had left her husband.

  ‘But you had met Fen.’

  ‘I had met Fen. And it was awful. Before Helen, I would have said that the desire to possess others is more male than female in our culture, but I think temperament comes into it.’ She tapped the pencil on our Grid.

  ‘Was she bread to you?’

  She shook her head slowly. ‘People are always wine to me, never bread.’

  ‘Maybe that’s why you don’t want to possess them.’

  Fen didn’t come back for over an hour, and when he did his face was ruddy and bright, as if he’d been out in the cold. Neither of us asked him where he’d been. We continued to work on the Grid until Fen looked up and said, ‘I wonder what the baby will be.’

  ‘Fen.’

  ‘What baby?’ I said.

  ‘Our baby,’ he said. He leaned back, deeply satisfied by my shock.

  It all felt very unpleasant to me and I couldn’t look at either of them, nor think of a single word to say.

  ‘You haven’t told him then, Nellie? Didn’t want him to fuss about?’

  Is that how she saw me, as someone who fretted over her unnecessarily? Is that what a ‘Southern’ man signified to her? Finally I eked out some sort of congratulations, said, ‘Excuse me,’ and got out of the house.

  I walked down the men’s road. A cluster of pigs were muscling each other for a scrap of food beneath one of the houses and making a racket. There was very little light in the sky, but whether it was sunrise or dusk, I wasn’t sure anymore. I had been spun around by them. I was seven hours away from my work, and had been for who knew how many days. Nell was pregnant. She and Fen had made a baby. When I was with them it was easy to convince myself that she hadn’t fully made her choice yet. She played her part in that. Her eyes burned into mine when I had an idea she liked. She followed every word I said; she referred back. When I had written down Martin’s name on the graph she’d passed her finger over the letters. I felt in some ways we’d had some sort of sex, sex of the mind, sex of ideas, sex of words, hundreds and thousands of words, while Fen slept or shat or disappeared. But his kind of sex with her produced a baby. Mine was useless.

  Where the houses ended the road broke in three directions: straight to the next hamlet, left toward the water, and right to the women’s road. At this intersection up ahead, I saw two shapes against the trees, a man and a woman. They were not touching. If I hadn’t known better I would have said the man was white, not because of his skin color, which I could not see in the nearly complete darkness, but in the way he stood sloped and heavy with his weight out in front. As I got closer I could hear they were arguing, the girl in a pleading tone, and when the man saw me he started toward me, then stopped short. He turned back and said something to the girl and they moved on quickly up the women’s road. Xambun. It had been Xambun. And for those few steps he’d taken toward me, he’d thought I was Fen.

  I went down to the beach. It was empty, the water unnaturally far away. The canoes were lined up, mine included, high up the beach. Fen’s pews. Had he begun interviewing Xambun without telling Nell? I paced for a while, then stood in one place too long and something crawled up the inside of my trouser leg and I shook it out. Scorpion. I stepped on it heavily and the crunch of its carapace and brittle bones was deeply satisfying. I moved quickly up the sand, back to the house. Their lamps were still lit. I put my hands on the ladder and heard their voices. I moved under the house to hear them more clearly.

  ‘I can see it, Nell. I can see it right in front of me and I can hear it in your voice and I can feel it under my skin. I’m not inventing anything.’

  ‘This is what you do. That’s why you’re a Northerner. You want to keep people under lock and key. One real conversation with someone else and—’

  ‘Oh,’ he began in falsetto, ‘you’re a Southerner and I’m a Southerner and he’s an asshole. I recognize this. That was me three years ago. And now I’m Helen on the fucking quai.’

  ‘You’re extrapolating all—’

  ‘That’s right. I am extrapolating, Nell. And brilliantly, like the trained scientist that I am. This whole thing is a way for the two of you to screw right in front of me.’

  ‘That is ridiculous and you know it.’

  ‘I will never be one of your castoffs, Nellie.’

  ‘Don’t’

  ‘I’m not—’

  ‘I mean it.’

  ‘Goddamn it, Nell.’

  When I came in, Nell was straightening up our grid papers. She didn’t look at me.

  ‘There you are,’ Fen said.

  ‘I’m going to get some shut-eye,’ Nell said.

  I ached for sleep as well, but wanted to keep him from lying down beside her for as long as possible. I poured us each a drink and took the sofa, which faced their bedroom. Nell brought a lamp with her, wrote something briefly on her bed, and blew out the light. Fen watched me watch her. It was too dark to see anything, but I knew her already, knew her breasts and the narrow of her back, the rise of her bum and the knot of her calf. I knew the break in her ankle and scars on her skin and her short round toes.

  He told me about a letter he’d gotten from a friend in Northern Rhodesia. The friend had told him a story about his shoes being stolen and the village-wide hunt for them. It was a long story with the shoes ending up in the trunk of an elephant, and Fen told it badly.

  ‘That’s funny,’ I said.

  ‘It’s absurd,’ he said. But neither of us was laughing.

  When he stood to go to bed, I told him I’d be gone in the morning. In fact, I thought I’d leave after they were asleep. She would be safer, I concluded, if I were not around to enrage him.

  He sat back down. ‘No. No. You can’t go.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I need you here. We both need you here. We need to keep going with this theory.’

  ‘You don’t need me for that. It’s not my area, personality typing.’

  ‘I can’t explain it all right now.’ He lowered his voice and glanced to her bedroom, ‘But you have to stay. I’m sorry. I’ve been …’ He dipped his head into his hands and raked his fingernails through his hair loudly. ‘I’ve been awful. I’m stretched a little thin right now. Stay just one more day. A half day. Leave tomorrow afternoon. Please.’

  And stupidly, selfishly, I agreed.

  23

  3/21 Brain ablaze. Feel like we are unearthing somet
hing and finding ourselves, knowing ourselves, stripping off layers of our upbringing like old paint. Can’t write about it fully yet. Don’t understand it. I only know that when F leaves and B and I talk I feel like I am saying—and hearing—the first wholly honest words of my life.

  24

  I awoke to sobbing. Nell. In pain. I got up off my mat and pushed through the netting. I found her sitting on the floor at the front of the house, a girl shaking and howling in her arms. It was the girl from the night before, the one arguing with Xambun. Nell smiled at me in my underwear, but the girl kept up her crying. I retreated to my room. The girl saved enough breath for a few words and Nell cooed something back to her. Tatem mo shilai, it sounded like. He will come back. After a long while they stood and Nell wiped the girl’s face and led her out and down the ladder. I had got on my trousers and shirt by the time she returned.

  ‘There’s been a good deal of drama this morning.’ She said something to Bani, whom I hadn’t seen behind the kitchen screen.

  ‘Tell me.’ I came through the netting and sat at the table with her. She was wearing the pale green shirt again, now streaked with the girl’s tears.

  Bani brought out coffee. I thanked him and he smiled and said something to Nell.

  ‘He says you speak like his Kiona cousins.’ Then she slid a piece of paper toward me.

  Bankson—

  I know you wanted to get back, but what’s another few days in paradise, right? It’s now or never. Don’t be miffed I didn’t invite you along. Someone needs to stay with Nell and you’re clearly the Southern man for the job.

  ‘He’s taken your canoe,’ she said. ‘That was Umi, Xambun’s girl. He’s broken it off with her, told her he was going to go away soon. Move to Australia. And now he’s gone with Fen. This whole time—all those times Fen kept leaving the house—he was scheming with Xambun. Not even interviewing him, just plotting to get that goddamn flute.’

  I thought of the way he kept disappearing, the way his moods shifted, the way his attention slipped in and out. The way Xambun had moved toward me the night before, expectantly, then shrunk back when he saw I wasn’t Fen.

  ‘I’m such a dope not to have seen this coming,’ she said. ‘He’s been lying to me for weeks.’

  What had he told me? That he knew the route, that it would change the next moon. That he would go in upriver of the village. No one would hear him. No one would know. I’d underestimated him entirely. I’d thought his inertia was permanent, that he luxuriated in his sense of missed opportunity and bad luck.

  ‘He’s promised Xambun money, I’m sure,’ she said. ‘Money to move to Australia.’

  Without an engine it would take more than a day to catch up to them. Maybe I could find a pinnace to take me to the Mumbanyo. I stood. ‘I’ll get some men. We’ll find a way to stop them.’

  ‘At this point you’ll only give them away, make it worse.’

  I remained in place, indecisive, weak.

  ‘Stay here. Please.’

  They were hours ahead of me. This was the only time I would have with her alone. I sat back down.

  ‘Are you worried for his safety?’ I said.

  ‘He took his gun. I’m more worried for theirs.’

  ‘Won’t they follow him back up here?’

  ‘If they see him, they might. But there are other tribes I think they’d suspect first. The Mumbanyo have a lot of enemies.’ She crushed the note in her hand. ‘Damn him.’

  Five or six heads of children appeared at the bottom of the doorway, halfway up the steps, ready to climb up the rest at the slightest invitation.

  She looked at them longingly. They were what made sense to her.

  ‘Let’s get back to work,’ I said.

  She waved the children in.

  I spent the rest of the morning observing the observer. She was back in her element, cross-legged on the floor with a circle of children fanned out around her and three more squished in her lap. They played a clapping game in which you keep a rhythm and have to shout out in turn some sort of response. She was able to keep the beat against her thigh with her left hand while taking notes with her right and shout out an answer in Tam when it was her turn. When the littlest girl called out her answer everyone collapsed on the ground with laughter. Nell didn’t understand, and once an older boy had gotten control of himself he explained it and Nell let out a big laugh and they all collapsed again.

  After a while she moved on to another group, and then another. Somehow they all knew they had to wait their turn for her attention—there was no interrupting her when she was with another group. Bani brought in snacks throughout the morning so the energy remained high. I watched all this from my chair at the table until, after a conversation with an old man, Nell called me over and asked if I’d heard of something called a bolunta. I hadn’t. She said it sounded a bit like a Wai. And this man, Chanta, had seen it once. His mother was Pinlau.

  I’d never heard of the Pinlau or of any tribe with anything like the Wai.

  ‘He was a young boy when he saw it.’

  ‘How old?’

  Nell asked him. He shook his head. She asked again. ‘Five or six, he thinks.’

  I tried to calculate how long ago that would have been. He was exceptionally old for the region, his face shrunken, his features collapsing to the center, and his left earlobe nearly horizontal on a large growth coming out of the top of his jawbone. Hairless, toothless, a thumb and one finger on each hand, he had to be over ninety. He understood immediately that although Nell was speaking, the questions were mine, and he looked at me directly when answering, his eyes clear, free of the glaucoma which blued the eyes of so many natives, even children.

  ‘It was a ceremony?’

  ‘Yes.’

  How often was it practiced?’ I asked.

  ‘I saw very little,’ Nell translated. She hadn’t asked him my question. She had asked him what he’d seen. I smiled at this and she shrugged. She asked again.

  He didn’t know. Nell reminded him that he couldn’t say that. She had put a taboo on that response.

  ‘I remember little.’

  ‘What were these little things you saw?’

  ‘I saw my mother’s skirt.’

  ‘Who was wearing your mother’s skirt?’

  At this Chanta looked ashamed. ‘Tell him it is common,’ I said. ‘Tell him it is very common for the Kiona.’

  She did, and Chanta looked back and forth between us with his clear eyes, unsure if we were making a joke. ‘Tell him this is true. Tell him I have lived with Kiona for two years.’

  Chanta’s incredulity only seemed to grow. He seemed to be retreating.

  Nell chose her words carefully. She spoke for many sentences, pointing to me as she might a blackboard in a lecture hall. Using a careful grave tone, nearly worshipful.

  ‘I saw my uncle and my father in courting clothes,’ he said.

  ‘Can you describe them?’

  ‘Cowrie necklaces, mother-of-pearl collar, waistbands, leaf skirts. The things girls used to wear. In those days.’

  ‘And what were they doing in these clothes, your uncle and father?’

  ‘They were walking around in a circle.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘They kept walking.’

  ‘And what did the people watching do?’

  ‘They laughed.’

  ‘They thought it was funny?’

  ‘Very funny.’

  ‘And then?’

  He started to say something and stopped. We urged him on.

  ‘And then my mother came out of the bushes. And my aunt and my girl cousins.’

  ‘And what were they wearing?’

  ‘Bones through their noses, paint, mud.’

  ‘Where were they painted?’

  ‘Their face and chests and backs.’

  ‘They were dressed as men?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘As warriors?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Were they wearing
anything else?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What else did they do?’

  ‘I didn’t see the rest.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I left.’

  ‘Why?’

  Silence. The water in his eyes trembled. This was clearly an upsetting memory. I thought we should stop.

  ‘What were the women wearing?’ Nell asked again.

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘What were the women wearing?’

  ‘I have already said.’

  ‘Have you?’

  Silence.

  ‘Did something upset you then?’

  ‘Penis gourds,’ he whispered. ‘They were wearing penis gourds. I ran away. I was a silly boy. I did not understand. I ran away.’

  ‘This is what the Kiona women wear, too,’ I told him. ‘It can be unsettling.’

  ‘The Kiona?’ Chanta looked at me with relief. And then he laughed, a great bark of a laugh.

  ‘What is funny?’

  ‘I was a silly boy.’ And then he was overcome with laughter. ‘My mother wore a penis gourd,’ he squeaked, and his face crumpled even further until he was just a pair of wet eyes and a smooth wedge of black upper gums. He seemed to be emptying his body of a great deal of tension.

  Nell was laughing with him and I wasn’t sure what had just happened: who had asked the questions, whose questions were asked, how we got that story out of him when he did not want to tell it, when he had kept it as a secret all his life. Bolunta. They want to tell their stories, she had said once, they just don’t always know how. I’d had years of school, and years in the field, but my real education, this method of persistence I would draw on for the rest of my career, happened right then with Nell.

  After lunch she gathered a few things in a bag.

  ‘You’re off on your rounds now?’

  ‘I’ll keep it short today. I won’t go to the other hamlets, just the women’s houses here.’

  ‘Don’t change your plans for me. I’ll go and find Kanup. Follow him around a bit.’

  ‘I’m sorry Fen has done this. Made off with your canoe. Kept you stuck here.’

  ‘I’m not stuck. I could pay someone to get me back if I wanted to go.’ I flushed at my honesty.

  She smiled. She was beautiful standing there in a ripped shirt over wide cotton trousers, a bilum bag slung over her shoulder. ‘Take cigarettes with you,’ she said, and left.