Euphoria

by Lily King

‘You can’t expect someone to stop noticing people the minute the ring goes on,’ Tillie said. ‘I don’t. But your husband certainly does.’

He would be compensating for his wrinkled clothing and his odd profession with a hard masculine glare.

She felt sleep, the old heavy kind, the kind of her childhood, come for her.

My heart whapped in my throat and all I could think was how to keep them, how to keep them. I felt my loneliness bulge out of me like a goiter, and I wasn’t sure how to hide it from them.

My mother did not like this letter or its suggestion that John was ‘home’ when his body was blown to bits over a Belgian farm, but I took comfort in it. There was little comfort after John’s death, and I chose to take it where I could find it.

My father was a great reader and a lover of the arts; he took us to the British Museum and the Tate and he read Blake and Tennyson to us in the evenings when we were children. But he did not believe ordinary citizens created art. True art was anomalous; it was a rare mutation. It didn’t happen simply because one willed it so. He thought it an utter and exasperating waste of an ordinary man’s time. Science on the other hand, science needed an army of educated men.

Anthropology at that time was in transition, moving from the study of men dead and gone to the study of living people, and slowly letting go of the rigid belief that the natural and inevitable culmination of every society is the Western model.

phantasmagoria

‘It would be nice to do a job that wasn’t a big invisible knot to untangle, wouldn’t it?’

neophyte

She told me I sounded as skeptical as my father. She said no one had more than one perspective, not even in his so-called hard sciences. We’re always, in everything we do in this world, she said, limited by subjectivity.

For me, other people are the point, but other people can disappear.

They were here but they belonged to each other and they would go off again and leave me behind.

Do you always have to harken back to those first weeks when just the way he walked across a room made you want to take off all your clothes?

I want too much. I always have.

Fen didn’t want to study the natives; he wanted to be a native.

I’ve always been able to see the savageness beneath the veneer of society. It’s not so very far beneath the surface, no matter where you go.

He said surely it is more civilized to kill one man every few months, hold up his head for all to behold, say his name, and return home for a feast than to slaughter nameless millions. We were standing very still in the water then and I would have liked to hold him.

She watched me unbutton it without moving. I liked that. I didn’t want her to reach in and find me underenthusiastic. But as I opened up the shirt and touched her nipples with the tips of my thumbs and felt the weight of her breasts in my palms, my body made the shift to this woman, this body, and I felt my determined erection with relief.

I believed if I could do that twenty more times I might be able to flush Nell Stone entirely out of my system.

She was squinting. I knew she had terrible eyesight, but I’d never wondered where her specs were, or once thought to offer her Martin’s glasses.

I know I am a strange bird, fatigued by frenzy, visions, and public fornication. I know as an anthropologist I am supposed to live for these opportunities to see the symbolism of the culture played out.

I couldn’t help questioning the research. When only one person is the expert on a particular people, do we learn more about the people or the anthropologist when we read the analysis? As usual, I found myself more interested in that intersection than anything else.

I went off to my mat in their study feeling a bit like the family pet who’d been put outside for the night.

‘She was always writing a book, but after a while, I began to assume she’d never finish it. I thought I’d moved past her in that way. And now—this makes mine look like a child’s scrapbook of souvenirs from a trip to Cincinnati. She’s done some head-splitting thinking here. While I’ve been collecting pretty little stones, she’s built a whole cathedral.’

When Fen was there I was able to contain my attraction to her, but whenever he left I felt it fill the room.

I felt in some ways we’d had some sort of sex, sex of the mind, sex of ideas, sex of words, hundreds and thousands of words,

I’d underestimated him entirely. I’d thought his inertia was permanent, that he luxuriated in his sense of missed opportunity and bad luck.

I try not to return to these moments very often, for I end up lacerating my young self for not simply kissing the girl. I thought we had time. Despite everything, I believed somehow there was time. Love’s first mistake. Perhaps love’s only mistake.

‘I wanted that time with you,’ I said. ‘I wanted it more than I’ve wanted anything in my life.’ These last words surprised me. The truth of them made me start to shake. When she didn’t respond, I said, ‘I can’t regret that. It was perfect.’

Strange how you can pick out in a crowd, from a distance of eighty yards and two and a half years, the one familiar shape, the slant of white hair, the hands covering the mouth.