Rachel, like many women, had total faith in her ability to spot a romance, based on little more than a tender tone of voice or a lingering glance. She was convinced that Martiya van der Leun and her former professor were once lovers.
Handsome, dark-eyed, tall, a dramatic scar across his neck, the celebrated hero of numerous adventures in the African bush, Joseph Atkinson was a man of about sixty when a pretty undergraduate named Martiya van der Leun enrolled in his senior honors seminar. The seminar, entitled "Games People Play," was a semester-long examination of the role of play in human society. All human societies, Atkinson observed, from the Inuit to the French to the Pygmy, play; it was a fundamental human institution. But what do human beings consider play? It is not an easy word to define. The course considered work as a form of play, and play as a form of work; the games of children and the games of adults; games with consequences like baccarat, and games without, like tag; formal games like baseball, and informal games like hide-and-seek; games that mimicked war and games that mimicked daily life, as when children played house. Martiya wrote a long paper for Atkinson on the games children played in the Pipikoro villages of southern Sulawesi, drawing from her own experiences as a child. The notable feature of Pipikoro play, Martiya wrote, was the extreme complexity of the games played by even the youngest Pipikoro children: her catalogue of the rules of makulu ran to over thirty pages. Atkinson thought that with substantial revisions, the paper might be suitable for publication. Martiya visited him during office hours. Atkinson wrote that Martiya was small and vivacious: she had very pretty feet, and in warm weather she wore open-toed sandals; she was feminine but not womanly. She asked him about the Doyo, the tribal people he had studied in Africa. Really? The only white man? She asked him what it was like to have dengue fever, and what tribal warfare was like. She even asked him about faculty meetings.
Rachel had been brushing her teeth as I read her Atkinson's letter, and she rinsed her mouth from the tap. "God knows only a lover would be interested in a faculty meeting," she said, spitting into the sink. "She was hot for him."
"You think?"
"Absolutely."
Rachel's logic had a certain force, and I imagined the sun-splashed sexually charged afternoons in the professor's study, as the small, vivacious undergraduate with pretty feet interrogated the learned but still manly professor. Did she play idly with her hair while Atkinson described the Doyo death rituals? Were there tribal masks on the wall? Did a woven kente cloth cover the couch? When she came by his office, did she perch herself daintily on the very edge of his couch and say, "Professor Atkinson, tell me a little about your work?"
Although he published only a handful of books—The Doyo Way of Life; Water, Wind, and Rain; The Life of Ralupeda, Doyo Shaman— Atkinson's influence dominated generations of anthropologists, including Martiya's. Anthropologists talk of the "school of Atkinson" as they talk of the school of Malinowski, or Evans-Pritchard, or Lévi-Strauss; and every freshman taking Anthropology 101 learns to construct the complicated Atkinson kinship groups. Atkinson wrote a vigorous, masculine prose, which is how I came to imagine the man himself. I wasn't surprised to learn that Atkinson, even at a place so filled with strangeness as Berkeley, was well known for his carefully cultivated eccentricities, as when he showed up for the initial meeting of the survey course in cultural anthropology, a lecture attended by nearly eight hundred startled undergraduates, wearing nothing but a handsome, three-foot long embroidered penis sheath. On another occasion, campus police were summoned on reports of a tall, nearly naked man wandering near Sather Gate with a finely honed spear. The situation was not calmed when Atkinson coolly explained that he was hunting the dean of students. Atkinson's e-mails to me were typically time-stamped around four in the morning California time, and I imagined him wrapped in a tattered bathrobe that exposed his bony knees, sitting at his computer, unable to fall back to sleep. The Internet makes possible some strange friendships. Atkinson made clear to me that for reasons of literary vanity, he did not wish to see his letters published, but I was free, he said generously, to summarize their contents.
From the first, Rachel disliked Atkinson. She thought he was an egotist and arrogant, but then, I countered silently, no one without a certain egotism can spend so long in the West African jungle. I liked Atkinson's forthright prose, and I admired the way that he had defied his father in order to pursue a scholarly career: Atkinson's father, a Chicago commodities broker, sent him to London in the early 1930s to learn the tea trade; but Atkinson promptly enrolled in the celebrated doctoral program in anthropology at the London School of Economics under the legendary Bronislaw Malinowski, and reconciled with his father only after Atkinson's older brother died in combat in the South Pacific.
In his middle twenties, Atkinson went to live with the Doyo in French West Africa for five years, and emerged finally with the book that won him a professorship at Yale, where he spent almost two decades before moving to California. He wrote books about West Africans filled with hard midwestern facts. He described and described again the Doyo — how they married, how they died, how they made millet beer, and how they fought their tribal wars; famously, he himself fought in a Doyo tribal war, and emerged with a scar across his neck and upper body. Atkinson made sure the handsome silver eel-shaped wound was showing in the publicity photos on the back of all his books. Those photos, taken when Atkinson must have been in his early fifties, showed a large, well-muscled man with tight curly hair, silver at the temples, wearing an open-necked shirt. His eyes were hooded, toughening up a face that otherwise might have been delicate. His ridged arms were crossed at the chest, and his hands were large and strong. "He's not my type," Rachel said, looking at the picture. "But I can see what Martiya saw in him."
After she graduated, Tim Blair had told me and Atkinson confirmed, Martiya decided to travel. "Things were over with Atkinson," Rachel said. She twirled a strand of her long hair meditatively. "Martiya must have had the affair with Atkinson, saw that things weren't going anywhere, and left. It explains why she broke up with the bald guy in San Francisco too."
"You think?"
"She saw the writing on the wall. What do you do when you're twenty-three with a guy who's almost sixty? It was a we're-both-moving-on-but-we-care-for-each-other breakup, not an I-hate-you-how-could-you get-my-sister-pregnant breakup," she said.
Rachel's elegant hypothesis was consistent with the facts: from the road, Martiya wrote to Atkinson as she had written to Tim, long letters describing the Second-Class Waiting Room of the Udaipur train station; or the Kurdish wedding to which she had been invited. Atkinson told me that when she came back to Berkeley, Martiya asked him what he thought she should do with herself. Atkinson loved giving young people advice: he told Martiya that her curiosity and intelligence would make her a superior scholar in any number of disciplines, but in his opinion, kiddo, she was a natural anthropologist. Martiya followed her professor's counsel and enrolled in the Ph.D. program in the Department of Anthropology, where Martiya asked Atkinson to supervise her doctoral thesis.
"Well, naturally," Rachel said. "She wasn't stupid."
Martiya had originally intended to write her doctoral thesis on the Pipikoro. She knew the language, she argued, and her childhood intimacy with the people would allow her to present the culture vividly. But Sulawesi was politically unstable in the early 1970s, which made grants hard to come by. Joseph Atkinson, too, was opposed to her plans: the Pipikoro were not an unknown people in scholarly circles; her own father's research there had been significant. He proposed instead that she study the Dyalo of northern Thailand. No ethnographic portrait of the Dyalo existed. A detailed description of their way of life would prove a valuable contribution to the literature and a good place to start a career. Atkinson told her: "Listen, don't be a martyr. Thailand is a great place to do research. The food is good. The climate's swell. There are lots of flowers and butterflies. Nobody's going to try to eat you." Martiya won a research fellowship to study the Dyalo, largely on the strength of his letter of recommendation.