“Not that I give a shit,” he said to the dashboard.
But his wife liked parties. Ellie liked people and people loved her, and it would not do for him to lurch from house to house poisoning their social life in a fairly small place. He had no desire to establish himself as the inevitable asshole spouse. As for the people they socialized with — sometimes he enjoyed them, sometimes not. But Ellie had to have her pleasures until she went back to teaching again.
Ellie’s popularity at the college, among both her colleagues and her students, was a source of great satisfaction to Brookman. He himself was not disliked. In fact he was widely admired, but not, like his wife, so affectionately regarded. He had been raised in a state orphanage in Nebraska, and his colorfully rendered recountings of early deprivations made him an exciting figure to the college’s students. His courses were always oversubscribed, and one he had given, on his own Smithsonian article about a sunken Spanish Manila galleon, illustrated with his underwater photography, had got him a regular forty-five-minute program on PBS. He had been bitterly disappointed at its cancellation after one season, though not everyone in the English and composition department had shared his distress. In any case, it helped secure him a tenured position very early on.
His popularity and attractiveness led some to suspect him of womanizing, of conducting affairs with colleagues, wives and students. The suspicions were exaggerated. He had indeed dallied with faculty wives, but Maud, with whom he had quite fallen in love, was his first and only student lover and in that regard a violation of his principles.
After the party he sat in his college-owned house, in the room he had chosen as an office — the room where the previous occupants had left their National Geographics — and listened to Chet Baker’s “Let’s Get Lost.”
His answering machine was on for calls from Ellie. There were fretful calls from Maud. Playing the messages back, he realized she had been drinking. Maud was not a cheap date; she had a hard head and could put a lot away for a girl her age. It seemed the wrong time to redefine a relationship. He failed to call her.
“Never apologize, never explain” was some vitalist supremo’s line. Sound advice if anyone could hold to it. But within himself it was all he did. His conscience, or whatever it was, kept perfect time with him, stalked him adeptly. He would never be at peace with himself.
Maud’s youth, unquietness, intelligence, passion and lack of judgment were irresistible to him. So shamelessly bold, reckless. They lured each other. She did it probably out of impatience for real life. He had no excuse but greed.
At college age Brookman was serving in the Marine Corps at a naval air station in the Mojave Desert. Immediately afterward he had worked in a cannery in Homer, Alaska, then as a crewman on a crab boat out of the same town. The pay was good, the work unbelievably hard for twentieth-century Americans. They had recruited farm boys from the Midwest who were ready to do it. The risk — most of what counted as serious accidents were fatal — was very high. A single night in the rack, with Arctic water sloshing around the berthing compartment, the pitch and toss, the port and starboard rolls, had felt to him like sure, sudden death. Brookman had panicked utterly. He had wanted not to die in cold water, not to breathe his last with his lips up against the overhead while the water rose over his head.
In his terror he went to sleep. It had happened to him before, in childhood — absolute fear succeeded by sleep. When he woke up in the rack he put on his gear, climbed up on deck into the sleet and went to work. The captain of the boat, an active member of the Alaska Independence Party, had a procedure for men demanding to quit once aboard, which was the impulse of every man jack who had never been at sea before. Quitters had to wait until an inbound boat was sighted. The captain would then sell them a drysuit. The price of the drysuit was deducted from the pay due them, and the price was high. They wore the drysuit to jump overboard into Norton Sound, and assuming they got pulled out successfully the rest of their pay — plus — went for the other skipper’s trouble. For the genuinely ill, Brookman’s captain might provide a breeches buoy. Appendicitis might eventually get you a Coast Guard helicopter. Brookman had other tough jobs, at sea and ashore, and he had done time in jail for no good reason.
The college’s midnight music station was playing Chet Baker’s version of “But Beautiful.” As he poured himself a last drink, his wife’s cat, Fafnir, came into his study and sat down on the sofa, a privilege he was not allowed when the mistress was at home. Fafnir looked at Brookman as though he’d like Chet Baker explained to him. Brookman leaned over and gently brushed him off. Fafnir seemed to like music but he was very stupid. He had to be brushed off things gently because he did not command cat-like grace and was capable of falling on his ear.
Fafnir licked his whiskers and promptly climbed back on the cushion, knowing Brookman lacked his wife’s authority and persistence. Persian cats are dumb, Brookman thought, but some possessed mystical powers, and Fafnir was one of these. He could summon the presence of distant people from far places and reflect them in his vapid blue eyes. On this evening Brookman looked into Fafnir’s eyes and saw there Ellie and his daughter, Sophia. Behind them, a snowfield stretched to the ends of the earth. In late summer the field would be gold with wheat, but now there was snow and also the biggest feedlot anywhere near White Lake, Saskatchewan. Ellie and Sophia were wearing little starched caps, looking like a couple of local Mennonites, which was essentially what they were. Sophia would be spending her days being instructed in her mother’s faith, relearning the Gothic alphabet and reciting edifying verses in High German. There they dwelled in an eternal Sabbath.
Perceiving them in the occult cat’s eyes, Brookman was suddenly overcome with terror. What if they’re dead, the plane’s wings icing, the pilots talking shop. What if Justice was on its way, striking as it will at the innocent and good? Chet Baker was singing “Moonlight in Vermont.”
Brookman had met Ellie Bezeidenhout at his first teaching job, which was in Nebraska, where he came from. He had got the job after his Bhutan book was commissioned and completed. The position was at what could only be called a teachers’ college, formerly a state normal school, which was now naturally called a university. Certainly not a normal, a term that opened vast caverns of misunderstanding. On one of his first days there he had picked up the course catalogue. The place may have been a normal, but as a university it was quite absurd. Its directory featured maniacally joyous photographs of faculty members beside their names and degrees that made them appear as a band of merry pranksters who did animal voices on a kids’ cartoon show—quack, baaa, oink.
One faculty entry stopped him:
Professor of Anthropology Dr. Elsa Bezeidenhout, Ph.D.
B.S., Nazareth College, Saskatoon, SK
M.S., University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC
Ph.D., University of California, Davis, CA
Elsa Bezeidenhout looked like a teenager. She was very blond, as — he later learned — was everyone in White Lake, SK. Her smile was wide but her face was long and her features were — how to say? — refined. He loved the “Bezeidenhout.” They’ve been married eleven years and she is firmly Ellie Brookman now. “Why don’t you use your maiden name?” he enjoys asking her. “So many women do.”
“The students can’t spell it,” she says primly. “They can’t even say it.”