She had pictured herself holding up a hand to end the inane conversation, saying: “Look at me. Look at Camille Tabor, your friend. I am a PhD. I have studied hard and done serious fieldwork. I have been named an up-and-comer in my profession, of which only a few make it to the top, which I am expected to reach. I have led a research expedition to the Trobriand Islands. I managed half a million dollars for that expedition. I did groundbreaking research there and wrote a massive dissertation deemed phenomenal. And to accomplish all of that, I have given up so much. It’s demanding, consuming work, and this life of mine does not lead naturally to riches. I understand, it was my choice, but trust me, I’d like the financial freedom you take for granted. You’re all pretending to pine for some nonmaterialistic, Waldenesque life, but here are the facts: none of you know what you’re talking about. None of you would do well outside of your comfort zones, without your possessions. If you were really interested in a life off the grid, you would have interrogated me about my years in the Trobriands. I’m the only one whose career ensures I will live, have already lived, the very existence you now say you want. And yet you asked me nothing about the Trobrianders, about what life there is really like. If you had, I would have told you that they have a different outlook on sex, and on families, and subscribe to a collective notion of cohabitation, rather than the isolation you all expect and prefer. And they have spirits, and commune with the natural world in a way that has nothing to do with your gardeners planting rows of organic vegetables for you to pluck and wash and show off. Gardeners you plan to bring to your Walden when you chuck everything. Instead, you asked me the flying time to the Trobriands, and what months are the high season, and if AmEx is accepted there? So stop your silly bellyaching, your insulting chatter about how your lives would be so much better if you didn’t want private schools for your children and the getaway home on one of the San Juans. Admit you like your easy and luxurious existences in this world you’ve conquered with your own drive and ambition.”
Of course, she didn’t say any of that.
She hasn’t always judged so harshly; she knows she was lucky growing up as she did, with loving parents and few worries, but in her fluctuating despair, it struck her as particularly unfair that these friends had never been halted, as she was now. And that they believed in the value of their stupid utterances, while Dr. Jin had suggested that the purely social anthropological ramifications of her work on those islands might not be of great interest. This world, with its inventions and advances, would always dominate, she understood that. But there was enormous value in exploring her preferred worlds, which offered solutions that would allow everyone, not only those topping the pyramid, to cohabit happily on this planet; solutions embedded in the concept of the greater good. Being among these people she once liked, she was outraged by their obliviousness, and the false, transitory abandonment of their avariciousness. They might think they wanted to be somewhere far away, but their gazes stopped at the gates of their affluent existences.
She had refilled her glass with the expensive vodka she only drinks at these parties, and debated whether to move back to Melanesia. If she wasn’t there under the color of official research, she would really be living there. And that meant a life trading what you don’t need for what you do—which she greatly admires—or, if you had nothing that anyone wanted, you acquired what you needed by paying for it with bundles of dried banana leaves. She’d be on a Trobriand beach for the rest of her life, wearing a grass skirt on festival days, engaging in intriguing rites and rituals, and creating her own banana-leaf wealth—which she knew she could do—but banana-leaf wealth wasn’t exchangeable for currency accepted anywhere other than on those islands. She wouldn’t be able to explore all the other tribes she wanted to meet in their distant locales or make her way home to see her parents and sister and brother and nieces. If she returned to Melanesia, she’d be as stuck there as she was here, a difference only between the literal and the metaphoric. Stuck is stuck, wherever you may be.
She’d left that cocktail party buzzed, and angry with herself. With the depression that had flattened her and twisted her out of her life. With Valentine heading to a dig in South Africa, led by a famous physical anthropologist who had found very old bones in a system of caves. She’d seen him off at SeaTac earlier that day, and he was up in the sky on his way to a cave in a valley next to a mountain next to a river in the Cradle of Humankind, drafting the first of the several emails he’s now sent her, all iterating the same thing—Camille, to be clear, we are not taking a break. I say this with love, but you are too young to be spending your days with the dying. Don’t you want us to be happy, to live a happy life together?—while she was unsteadily heading for her front door, thinking that unlike her friends, her colleagues, her older sister, she wasn’t sure about marriage or children, and those were the topics Valentine was talking about before he jetted away. Wanting her to marry him, wanting them to have children, for her to bear tiny versions of themselves. She couldn’t imagine any of it, not with her life turned so juvenile. She couldn’t see herself with a husband, a mate, a partner. Couldn’t envision herself with children who would perhaps have her witch hazel eyes, Valentine’s philosophical spirit, their shared hunger for lives filled with the rigorousness of novel experiences. If she were twenty or younger, her mother would have penetrating insights and suggestions Camille could put into effect to unravel her depression, her confusion, but she had never asked before, and at thirty-six, she’s aged beyond her mother’s vaunted professional expertise.
And yet that party was days ago, and what is she doing right now?
She’s heading home to Palm Springs, where she could get some familial, or maternal, or psychological help figuring out how to reclaim her life. She couldn’t bear if that life was now closed to her, if she never regained her strength, her tenacity.
She’s thinking about all of this as she wheels her small bag from her ground-floor room, down the sidewalk, and into the lobby of the motel in San Luis Obispo, where she spent last night. Her sleep was restless and she needs coffee, and there on the laminated table sit urns of French Roast, Decaf, Hot Water, tiny tubs of dried creamers and sweetener packets, baskets of tea bags and hot cocoa packets, a tray of lopsided Danish, a stack of napkins several inches high. The purported breakfast free with a night’s stay.
She’s alone, the kid at the front desk busy putting keycards for the rooms into their slots, and then the glass doors spring open, and a clutch of elderly women bustles in, sporting backpacks and fanny packs, sensible walking shoes and sticks. Eight of them, barefaced and wrinkled and happy, talking and laughing, pouring their coffees, dunking their tea bags, splitting Danish, debating whether the day’s expedition should be to the Santa Lucia Range, or the La Panza Mountains, or the Montaña de Oro State Park. Maybe it’s their age and their brusque warmth that reminds Camille of her heroines.
She nods and smiles and says, “Morning,” to the old happy women, and the old happy women nod and smile and say, “Morning,” to her.
She takes it as an encouraging sign, her default into researcher mode, wanting to ask them how they’ve all come together, what bonds they share, where they hail from, who the leader is, who the followers, what this trip signifies, but she doesn’t. She’d sound crazy to them, and so she refills her large Styrofoam cup, secures the lid, and pushes out through the lobby doors, into the already-warm air at seven twenty in the morning.
She unlocks her car, new when it was her college graduation present, slips the cup into its holder, the bag into the back, herself into the driver’s seat. She is about to start the second and final leg of her drive. In less than five hours she’ll be on Agapanthus Lane.
When she left Seattle at the crack of dawn yesterday, she promised herself she would use the nearly twenty highway hours wisely. Instead, she wasted the first fifteen listening to music, to talk radio, to a popular true-crime podcast she found detestable and clicked off after ten minutes. And whenever the thoughts started churning, she shooed them away. But it’s time to decide various things:
Whether or not she should end things with Val because she is
