lying in bed all day reading and leaving my sublet only for groceries.
One night, a friend passing through the city convinced me to meet her for dinner with the promise of a journalistic scoop. She told me that the US had allocated millions to protect the Congo rainforest and that corporate conservation organizations, the majority of which had failed to get a foothold there during both Mobutu’s dictatorship and the war, had, in the decade since, been jockeying for the areas of highest biodiversity, often doing harm to local social structures and wasting as many resources competing with each other as they used for conservation.
The timing was fortuitous, since I was living off credit cards. The next day, I e-mailed a pitch to Mother Jones—“Big Conservation’s Scramble for Africa”—and a week later, I flew to Aspen, Colorado, for a conference that was bringing together organizations and donors to discuss the Congo’s future.
The lodge where I’d booked a room—the cheapest I could find—had an unpainted wood exterior and interior that gave it a look less rustic than outmoded. A stout woman with a yellow perm checked me in and then put a placemat-sized map in front of me.
“You can walk along the river here,” she told me, sliding her finger along a blue line. “It’s a nice trail, though sometimes people run into mountain lions on it. But if you’re looking for cougars, I would suggest these three bars near the lifts.”
“Pardon me,” I said. “I’m not sure I understand.”
“Come on. You’re a handsome young man who’s checked in alone, and most of the guys who come here try out the cougar bars. Aspen has some of the richest cougars in the country—the ex-trophy wives of millionaires and billionaires.” She made a vague motion to her face and chest. “Which means the best doctors and the hottest cougars.”
I thanked her, and after a light dinner at a nearby restaurant, I went for a jog along the fragrant hedges of high-summer Aspen. On all sides, summits curtailed the night sky, cradling the few, vivid stars. The purity and thinness of the mountain air made the insides of my lungs feel pleasantly scraped. There was a slight altitude-induced tightness at the back of my neck, and a stinging each time I took a breath, but though I was tired, when I returned to my bed, I couldn’t sleep.
I got up and dressed without the light, since I hoped the dark might lull me back to bed, but my brain glowed with the thought of a previously unimagined romantic connection after so many months without even going on a date—and then I was unplugging my phone and stepping out.
The bar was an elegant fusion of oaken frontier virtue and classic speakeasy leather, though the only thing smoky about the place was its lack of visibility. The designer must have specialized in lighting for a certain kind of face. The ambience was dusky and smoothing, like a social media filter for everything after midlife.
There were no mirrors. Draped and veiled in fashionable shadows, the women were each other’s mirrors. And yet the eye needs a fraction of a second to judge an artificial smile. Real ones fluctuate, hesitate, an entire language in how they linger. These were fairy tale smiles, waiting beneath ice.
At the table nearest me, a woman’s pale-violet gown cleaved to precise curves, and she turned, advertising a countenance as smooth as a plaque.
Another woman, this one my age and with blond dreads like hawsers, sat across from her.
“Looking for someone?” she asked.
“I’m in town for a conference. I thought I’d have a drink before bed.”
She slapped the seat next to her. “Join us. I’m here for it too.”
The older woman moved her lips faintly, some disappointment showing in her eyes, and then stood and crossed the bar.
“She’s saying hi to a friend,” the dreadlocked woman told me. “Oh, I’m Terra.”
“Terra Sylvan-Gaia?”
“Shit. My reputation precedes me.”
“I’ve read about your work,” I said but refrained from adding that I’d expected someone closer to Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey’s generation. It was too soon to discuss my research, so I made small talk, asking how much time she’d spent in Aspen.
“A fair bit. My aunt lives here. I’ve been catching up with her.” She lifted her jaw in the direction of the woman who’d left the table.
Terra must have read something in my expression, since she added, “Cougars run in the family, but that’s because beauty and money do, though never enough. It’s hard to give up any sort of power, and since beautiful women are weak on shelf life and those in my family are smart enough to know it, we’re strong on prenuptials.”
I felt slightly taken aback, uninformed and parochial in comparison to her matter-of-fact assessment of the scene around us: the young men arriving alone in jeans and tight T-shirts, flaunting gym-fit biceps, and soon downing the single malt whiskeys that their straight-backed dames ordered with a regal lift of a finger.
I did my best to hide my discomfort, since Terra was one of the people I hoped to interview. I’d learned about her from articles—though not when she’d confectioned her name or who she’d been before—and I was uncertain as to her allegiance with the big organizations that were carving the Congo into fiefdoms. I knew only that she lived among a rare gorilla species, a largely forgotten cousin to the famed mountain gorilla, in the war-torn east.
As we got to talking about her work and its ever-elusive funding, she made it instantly clear—“off the record,” she said, when I told her I was a journalist—that she was no friend to the big organizations. She was here in a last-ditch effort to win over a certain former four-star general and possible future presidential candidate who would be in attendance, since he was a major donor and adviser to nature foundations.
She then began talking about working overseas and the ravages of being eternally single.
“Men like the idea of me,” she said.
“I know exactly what you mean, but with women.”
She studied my face for a moment.
“You don’t seem like a journalist to me.”
“Why’s that?”
“Too thoughtful. There’s too much emotion under the surface. You’re a cogitator if I’ve ever seen one—a Pisces, I bet …”
I hated astrology and mystical quackery, and was considering how to respond when she asked, “What drives you?”
“I guess … I guess it’s a manic sense of responsibility, the idea that—”
“I knew it,” she said. “We’re the casualties of a generation of bleeding heart liberal parents.”
She wasn’t wrong, and I told her how my mother had raised me to be aware of every injustice (racism, imperialism, the war on drugs, the death penalty, nuclear armament, the abuses of crony capitalism).
“Are you on medication?” she asked.
“No, but I do microdose with lithium,” I confessed, “though that’s a mineral. Really, it should be in all multivitamins.”
“Is
