In time we did work out definitions for each point of our compass. The cultures we put in the Northern vector were aggressive, possessive, forceful, successful, ambitious, egoistic. The id of the grid, Nell said. By contrast the Southern cultures were responsive, nurturing, sensitive, empathetic, war-averse. To the West were the Apollonian managers who valued unemotional efficiency, pragmatism, extroversion, while the Easterners were spiritual, introverted seekers, interested in the questions of life more than the answers.
Fen’s own temperament did not allow him to dissolve indefinitely into our collective thinking; he participated awhile then pushed us away, as if gasping for breath. When Nell tried to align one of Jung’s functions of consciousness to each quadrant, Fen slapped her pencil away from the page.
‘You don’t understand a thing about it.’
‘Explain it to me then.’
‘It’s far more complex than what you’ve got here. There are sixteen combinations of dominance.’
She flipped over to a fresh page in her notebook. ‘What are they?’
But he wouldn’t tell her.
‘You haven’t put in the Tam,’ I said, thinking to smooth over the tension.
‘Go ahead,’ Nell said to him.
He shook his head.
‘Fen. Go on.’
The omission had been deliberate.
‘What does it matter what my opinion is? Yours is the one that counts.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I’m talking about’—he wrapped both fists around his pencil—’I’m talking about the charade of us doing this together when we both know what you think about the Tam is what people are going to know about the Tam.’ He turned to me. ‘She thinks she knows the Tam men. She thinks they’re vain and gossipy like Western women. She thinks she’s found this big swap of sexual roles but she doesn’t spend any time with men. She’s not making canoes and building houses with them as I am. She doesn’t give a tinker’s cuss for my notes.’
‘You have no notes! You’ve given me next to nothing.’
‘Eighteen pages in one day on cross-sexual kinship lines.’
‘Which turned out to be based on a false premise.’ She looked down at our paper and took in a steadying breath. ‘You will write your own book, Fen. You will write what you see and—’
‘And who will read that? Who will read that when there’s a book by Nell Stone on the same subject?’ He flung the pencil across the house. ‘Fucked if I do, fucked if I don’t,’ he said, slumped in his chair.
‘You are certainly fucked if you don’t do the work we’re here for. And I’m fucked, too.’ Nell slammed his pencil back on the table. ‘You put down the Tam men and I’ll put down the Tam women.’
She waited for him to go first. It took a while, an awkward silent while, but then he lifted himself and put the Tam men in the aggressive but artistic Northeast. She put the Tam women in the Northwest.
And this led to another round of mapping as we separated men from women, finding that while the male ethos usually represented the culture at large, within a culture women offset the ideal.
‘Sort of a built-in thermostat,’ Nell said.
Fen tried to resist, to continue to sulk, but he was as compelled by the idea as we were. We talked of women we knew, the way they worked against the aggressive Western male norms. The hours passed. Sometime before dawn the sky rumbled and we went outside to see if this was it, the beginning of the real rains, but it wasn’t. The heat was heavy and wet and we decided a swim before sleep might do us good.
As we were stumbling back up the path from the beach, one of us said, ‘Could it work for individuals?’
And we raced the rest of the way back, scrambled to make another grid. I still have that old page, wrinkled from the lake water that dripped from our hair.
It was easy to slot people in. We started with famous strong personalities: dreamy, spritelike Nijinsky in the East and the punishing, cane-carrying Diaghilev in the West; Hoover in the North and Edna St. Vincent Millay in the South. We added colleagues, friends, relatives. While Fen and Nell were arguing about whether someone named Leonie was Northeastern or just Eastern, I put Martin beside Helen in the East, and John next to Nell’s mother at Northwest. But Nell caught me.
‘And your mother?’ she said.
‘Northern to the bone.’
She laughed, as if she has suspected as much.
‘What are we then? Fen said. ‘We have to put ourselves on here.’
‘You’re Northern, I’m Southern and Bankson’s Southern.’
‘Oh, that’s cozy,’ Fen said.
‘Should I feel insulted?’ I said quickly, hoping to diffuse it.
‘Hardly,’ he said, pointing to the South. ‘To be Southern is to be perfect in Nell’s mind. Look who’s there with you: Boas, her grandmother, and her baby sister who died before ever speaking a word.’
‘Stop it, Fen.’
‘Sorry I’m not a sensitive little prat who can pick up on your every thought and tend to every nick and bug bite.’
‘This is not about us, Fen.’
‘The hell it isn’t.’
‘Let’s just stick to—’ Nell said, but a frantic crunch and rustle through the thatch above us drowned her out. Rats fleeing something.
‘Snake,’ Fen said.
It slipped fast down a post and was gone.
‘I hate snakes,’ I said. In fact my stomach had soured just from the sound of it.
‘So do I,’ she said.
‘Bloody Southern cowards,” Fen said.