Cooper smiled. Put it in your work. This had always been her father’s standing advice. Maybe this was the standing advice all exasperated relatives or spouses gave to agitated artists. My first date ever stood me up, Dad. Put it in your work. I made a really bad decision having to do with a vending-machine salesman/artisanal tobacconist/urban shaman last night. Put it in your work. And it was true, Cooper thought. You could put it in your work, and you did, but then the work itself became nothing more than a hall of mirrors, reflecting back all the crappy things that had happened, or which you had made happen, in your life. That was why she’d stopped painting when David was sick. Who needed a mirror when the only thing reflected was loss after loss? She dropped her hand into her pocket, her fingers searching for the vial. She found it and ran her thumb over the serrated edges of its childproof cap.
“Cooper?” Birdie said. She withdrew her hand quickly and looked up. The artists were watching her expectantly. Next to her, Denise scribbled something in her notebook. Out of the corner of her eye, Cooper saw Thousand-yard stare—already? written in the margin.
“Sorry,” she said. “So, I’m a painter, though since I got here, I’m not sure anymore.” There were a couple of appreciative chuckles. “Actually, I probably shouldn’t even call myself an artist. A professor once told me that you can’t be cynical and artistic, that these traits are diametrically opposed. He said I was cynical. And I guess I am.” Hard, actually—“hardened by premature success” were her professor’s exact words. Artists had to be porous, he’d said, like sponges, capable of soaking things up and releasing them. If you were a stone, you could do nothing but take up space. And while a sponge could become a stone, a stone could never become a sponge. “So I’m finding the polar landscape challenging to capture because I don’t want to do dead-explorer stuff or glaciers, and I definitely don’t want to go the route of putting incongruous, unexpected man-made stuff on the ice, like I’ve seen in other polar art. That feels sort of didactic.”
“I actually think that sounds interesting,” the literary novelist said. “Like painting a Walmart on the polar cap to make a point?”
“Too obvious,” Cooper said.
The literary novelist looked at his nails. “I didn’t realize visual artists were interested in subtlety.”
As the conversation continued around her, Cooper began wishing that someone would appear and point the way—with a radish, a compass, a finger, it didn’t matter. She just wanted someone to tell her how to move forward.
*
After the meeting ended, Cooper stepped out of the gym, and saw a commotion near the door of a construction office at the other end of the trailer. A knot of people, including Pearl, were doing a little dance. Cooper noticed Sal standing with them. “I’ll come to the recital but I’m not taking the class,” she heard him say.
“What’s happening?” Cooper called down to him.
He seemed surprised to see her, but quickly assumed a look of nonchalance. “Hey, it’s Frida Kahlo,” he said, walking toward her. “Make yourself useful and paint me something I won’t want to drop-kick to Vostok.”
“Something with tater tots?” Cooper replied.
“Oh, if you got into tot art and you were any good, I’d marry you.”
“Why are the girls all excited?”
“Dave’s in from McMurdo.”
“Dave?”
“Dave’s dance class? The most popular rec class in the history of the Program?” He noted Cooper’s skepticism. “It’s kind of a big deal. Starts Thursday, if you’re interested.”
“Nothing could induce me to go to Dave’s dance class.”
“Fingy, when you can’t walk your dog, mow your lawn, get a coffee at the place where you know the guy who makes it, you will begin to find dance class with Dave appealing. And if Dave doesn’t show up for the dance class, you’ll go apeshit. You have the expectation that he will be there and he better well keep his fucking commitments, because Dave’s dance class is all you’ll have to hold on to down here once those doors close for the winter.”
All this bluster, but he was grinning. “And now I have to keep my own commitment to show up at the Smoke Bar and get wasted before the Halloween party. Adios.” He turned and began walking away.
“Where’s the Smoke Bar?”
“Winter-overs only,” Sal called over his shoulder.
“Come on.”
He stopped walking. “All right, Fingy. Follow me.”
Smoke Bar was located on the second floor of the galley trailer. Cooper had heard about the Smoke Bar, but had never been able to suss out its exact location. All the summer workers and most of the scientists congregated at the other bar, 90 South, which was the Se?or Frog’s of Antarctica. Smoke Bar was Chumley’s—back when you had to be somebody to get in. Gaining entry to the Smoke Bar was, Cooper understood, a privilege.
When they reached the top of the metal stairs, Sal blocked the door and turned to look at Cooper. “You’re about to enter a very delicate ecosystem, so when we get in, go sit with Tucker, who will be drinking vodka neat at the table under the dart board. I’ll introduce you to the Beakers when it makes sense. They get excited and weird around ladies, seeing as they’re in such short supply here. I have to manage their expectations.” Cooper knew Sal was bullshitting, but she didn’t mind. He pushed the door open with his shoulder and let Cooper enter.
As she walked in, The Smithereens’ “A Girl Like You” was playing at max volume. Cooper took in the foosball table, a disco ball, and the stripper pole. Twinkling fairy lights hung from the ceiling, along with at least twenty purple Crown Royal sacks, below which ashy clouds of cigarette smoke created a small weather system. The bar itself was a piece of plywood on crates, behind which a man in a George W. Bush mask was dispensing drinks from a series of mini-fridges lined up against the wall. Everyone bought their own liquor at the station store, or shipped their own booze down to Pole before the season started. Cooper had settled for the cheap New Zealand beer that came in cases on every flight in, but her supply was down at 90 South with the rest of the Fingys’.
Cooper spotted Tucker at a table with some galley workers and assorted Wastees—the people who handled garbage and sewage—and she and Sal silently parted ways.
“I know a guy whose credit card was stolen,” a guy without a chair was telling the table. “The thief ordered a really expensive cell phone and also sent him a Lobstergram. Guy cancels the card, and Lobstergram didn’t want the lobster back. The guy was allergic to shellfish so he gave it to a friend.” This raised no response, and no one offered him a chair.
“Anyway,” a tall man with Cher-like hair and a sparse, preadolescent-style mustache said. “As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted: you play the Antarctica card off the ice, you’re laid ninety-nine times out of a hundred.”
“Doesn’t work for women,” a dark-haired woman said, her feet on his lap. Cooper recognized her as Pearl’s boss, Bonnie, the head cook.
“Why?” her cloak-wearing companion asked.
“No man sitting at a bar is gonna get his dick hard if a woman tells him she’s just back from the ice chip, except maybe another Polie. And in that case, it’s just a reflex.”
Tucker took Cooper’s arm and simultaneously pulled out a chair from another table. “Congratulations on gaining entry,” he whispered. Then to the group, he said: “This is my friend, Cooper.” Cooper cringed. The first thing she’d understood when she’d arrived was that introductions were for the desperate; the fewer you required, the stronger you appeared. Pole was a place where people simply became known.