“Of course I do. But what I want these days doesn’t seem to matter very much. I’m in a kinda strange place in my life right now. Just kinda, you know, drifting.”
Ericka touched David’s shoulder.
“We’re all drifting. Things are so unsettled these days. In four months we’ll be entering a new millennium. I can’t even get my brain around that.”
“Call me in the year 10,000 and I’ll give you something to try to get your brain around.”
“I’ll bet we’re more alike than you think. We’re both looking for something. Maybe we’re looking for the same thing.”
“Could be,” said David. He reached over and pulled Ericka’s face toward his, and then gave her a long kiss. “I really want to get into your — I really want to make love to you, Ericka. I wish there was someplace we could go.”
Ericka thought for a moment. “We could go over to the showers. Do you have your flashlight? I could go into my tent and get mine, but Soumeya will try to talk me out of going.”
David got up. “I’ll get mine.”
“We’ll have to do it standing up. Those floors are icky.”
“Standing up is fine with me.”
“Of course, you know we’re not supposed to leave the campsite. We’re not even supposed to leave our tents once the fire dies down.”
“Would you rather we not? I’m okay with that.”
“I want you.”
“I want you too.”
The darkness around them was thick, almost palpable. Although David shone the beam of his flashlight on the ground in front of them, Ericka still took special care in where she put her feet. One of the female crewmembers had met up with a large snake of unknown hazard when she went to take her shower earlier that afternoon.
The two reached the dark cinderblock building that housed the sinks and showers. Within seconds David was pushing Ericka up against the wall and kissing her with unusual force. Ericka welcomed the sloppy animalism in his advance. She writhed and clawed in response. She groaned with matched volume. They ripped their clothes off and tossed them into one of the nearby sinks. David was inside her half a minute later.
“Whatever our differences,” said Ericka in that next bliss-filled post-coital moment, “I love you too much to let you go.”
Earlier, in the midst of fucking, David had said, “I love you, baby. Oh God, I love you, baby.” But now, spent and sleepy, he said, “Uh huh. Oh yeah.”
It wasn’t a lion that visited Ericka and David in the showers that tenebrous African night. It was a pack of hungry and prowling spotted hyenas.
Ericka was quite familiar with spotted hyenas. One of her students had delivered a paper on them when she had made the assignment in May (a rather self-serving assignment, to be sure) that each of her advanced biology students should take an African mammal (preferably one of the southern African mammals their teacher was likely to see on her late summer safari) and write a paper on it.
The gregarious spotted hyenas have long been regarded as maneaters. Some paleontologists have conjectured that predatory attacks by cave hyenas in Siberia delayed the migration of humans across the Bering Strait into what is now Alaska, perhaps for hundreds of years. Some of these facts flashed through Ericka’s head as David began shouting at the hyenas gathering in the doorway, chatter-laughing and bearing their canines.
Ericka picked up the flashlight set upon the side of the sink and began waving it. David grabbed up his pants and started flapping them at the animals, who continued to laugh — as was their hyenine wont — at the negligible defensive actions of the naked humans.
“Where is a lion when you need him?” David tossed to Ericka.
Ericka registered his display of manly pluck, even as terror continued to grip her. The two worked through loud shouts and the air-flaying of their disrobed clothing to push the three or four hyenas (in the darkness there seemed to be even more) out of the shower house. There was no door to shut, so the danger would not be averted altogether until the doglike creatures gave up on human prey for the night and trotted off to find their supper elsewhere.
Or unless David and Ericka were rescued. The latter occurred a couple of minutes later. Jack Darrigan and two of the guides, having heard the commotion, showed up and successfully chased the four-legged predators away. There wasn’t time for Ericka and David to dress before the three men stepped into the shower house.
“The same thing happened with a couple of last month’s White Campers,” said Jacob. “I forgot to tell of the spotted hyenas.”
Jacob was staring at Ericka’s pubic jungle. In his defense, it was impossible not to.
Over breakfast that morning there was only one topic under discussion. Ericka and David laughed off their encounter with death and both accepted without complaint the good-natured ribbing of those who knew exactly why the two had found themselves in such a predicament. Ruth, the oldest of the group and the most devout, was the least judgmentaclass="underline" “The Lord protects those who love so deeply.”
Did Ericka and David love each other so deeply? Was their love, like their naked rendezvous with the man-eating spotted hyenas, something that could jolt them from the doldrums of their fairly vacuous, monotonous lives? Africa, in all its glory, had shown Ericka that there was life — wild, unpredictable, impetuous life — outside of the Greenwich high school where she taught, outside the narrow confines of her stultifying daily routine, outside the small circle of somnolent, adventure-deprived family and friends who kept her dully circumscribed.
Was Africa just a temporary flash of light — an isolated, fugitive moment of emancipating sensuality? Or was it a foretaste of all that could be?
Ericka and David dated long-distance for four months after returning to the States — long enough to greet the new millennium (as the consensus of opinion on century beginnings and endings at the time dictated) together, David pistoning on top and Ericka thrashing below, her eyes pinned to the digits of her clock radio, hoping for perfect millennial-coital synchronicity.
They were off by two and four minutes, respectively.
The next week they parted.
The break-up was amicable. David was a good lover, a most generous lover, but he was not any of those other things that Ericka had sought in a mate. But it came down to one thing more important than anything else: Ericka wanted to return to Africa. She wanted to join another Habitat build, either in Botswana or in some other country. And she wanted David to come with her.
But he had done Africa, and that was that.
She couldn’t help thinking, couldn’t help imagining whom she might meet on that next trip. Would he take her as David had? And then would they stay together, grow old together? Ericka Prager desperately wanted someone to grow old with.
She had built houses in Africa. Now she wanted to put mortar between the cement blocks — the “bricks”—of her own life.
200 °CONVERGENT IN CONNECTICUT
“I don’t know what happened to little Catherine Gallagher. I have always nurtured the wish that she should have a very long and happy life.”
Catherine Uhlmyer Gallagher Connelly had been about the business of living a very long (although not uniformly happy) life when Ericka Prager first visited her at her Wilton, Connecticut, nursing home in early January. By Catherine’s 107th birthday two months later, the two had become friends. In fact, by early April, Ericka had made friends with several of the other nursing home residents, including a woman named Eunice Ludden — mother of the famed Ludden Sisters singing group — who confessed to Ericka that she wasn’t an official resident of the facility but was working undercover to investigate patient abuse; and Karen Bailey Kelly, the daughter of famed Boston novelist Dennis Bailey. (Karen had her own connection to sororal singing groups, having written a biography of the Brox Sisters in 1953.)