And we were all right for a while after that.
We kept at it. The sun came up and went down again. We believed we were in the throes of a big theory. We could see our grid in chalk on university blackboards. It felt like we were putting a messy disorganized unlabeled world in order. It felt like decoding. It felt like liberation. Nell and I spoke of never having felt aligned with our culture, with its values and expectations. For long stretches of time it felt like we were crawling around in each other’s brain. We talked in the abstract about relationships, which temperaments went well together. Nell said opposites worked best, and I hastened to agree, though I didn’t believe it, and hoped she didn’t either. She said that Southerners were less possessive with their lovers, more inclined to polygamy.
‘It’s what her set calls free love,’ Fen said. ‘Multiple partners. You go in for that too, Bankson?’
‘No.’ It was the only answer I could give him under the circumstances.
‘Well then, a possessive Southerner for you,’ he said to Nell.
Later, when Fen went to the shit house, as he called it, she said, ‘Do you think it’s natural, the desire to possess another person?’
‘Natural? Weren’t you the one to warn me off that word?’ When Fen was there I was able to contain my attraction to her, but whenever he left I felt it fill the room.
She smiled, but she was serious. ‘Instinctive then, biological? Why are there so many tribes who share everything—food, shelter, land, income—but their stories always revolve around someone’s brother or best friend stealing his woman?’
‘It’s true. The Kiona’s creation myth is about a crocodile who falls in love with his brother’s wife and they run off together to create a new tribe.’
‘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?’