Love, in Theory Page 18

  We are fourteen: six married couples, the General, who has come alone, and Manuel. There are the wealthy Scottish Brewer and his wife, serious birders who seem to feel they are lowering themselves to be traveling in the company of Americans. There are the Sandersons, the very nice couple from Illinois (he was a state legislator for many years and a professor of political science; his wife, Geneen, heads up her local League). There is the Duck Man and his young wife. I call him the Duck Man because he quacks when he wants to screw (pardon my French). These are the things you learn about people on a tour such as this: all the phobias and quirks come out, as if inhibition were taking a vacation too.

  In the course of our ten-day tour, we have slogged through mud, mosquitoes, wet, and rain; where possible we have stayed in good hotels. Ours is a domesticated adventure, organized by the American Museum of Natural History. Our guides have been very knowledgeable, very good, and we’ve traveled a great deal to remote wildlife preserves for which Costa Rica is known.

  Most days I’ve made it a policy to walk at the front of the group with Manuel, where the bird watching is best, but on this, our last day, my husband, Milt, and I have remained back with the General, who lags behind, watching the path for snakes and roots. I point out liana and bromeliads for him to see, but he is too upset to notice. He’s been sullen ever since we saw the spiders copulating.

  The General was the first to spot them on the philodendron leaf, a mile or so back. He has keen eyes—he was a pilot in the war—and he enjoys holding forth on entomology. He takes pleasure in pointing out a butterfly or spider that the rest of us have missed. He seemed particularly excited by his discovery today. He pulled out his thick British pocket guide to identify the pair. Then he called me over to watch, and then the others came, and together we watched as the male courted then mounted the female. We were all quite moved by the tiny drama—the miracle of creation taking place before our eyes—right up until the moment the female turned and began to eat her mate. His tiny legs quivered, kicking air.

  It was not a surprise, of course. We all know about the birds and the bees and that spiders devour their mates. But we are aging—most of us are in our seventies, the General must be eighty, at least—and we are a little sentimental about sex.

  Only the Duck Man—who is in his forties (his wife is younger still)—seemed unperturbed. He leaned over the quivering pair on the leaf, shook his head, and said, “Dying for a fuck. Now that’s the way to go.” Then he laughed and clapped the General on the back.

  The General was quiet for a long time after that. He is recently divorced, the General is. His third, I think, though I wouldn’t dream of asking.

  II.

  FORMS OF SACRIFICE

  This trip was my idea and Milton is being patient in a way that makes it clear that it was my idea. That he is being a good sport. That he is a good and loving husband, evidence to the contrary. He is always doing things like that—making me look foolish and demanding by pretending he is neither.

  Milton would have preferred to lie on a beach somewhere in Florida or the Caribbean, but his doctor recommended moderate exercise after his bypass surgery a year ago. The heart is a muscle after all. And so, because it has always been an ambition of mine to see the Resplendent Quetzal of Costa Rica, and because he owes me now that I know the truth about him, about her, we came here.

  “It is possibly inauthentic,” Manuel says of the Temple of Quetzal by which we now stand, in a small clearing. He holds a flashlight in one hand and points it into the darkness and raps on the stone wall with his knuckles. “Possibly,” he says, “it is a fraud.”

  This temple is not mentioned in my little yellow guide book, Inside Costa Rica, a fact that does not surprise me. Costa Rica is not known for its archaeology. We have come here to look at birds, not ruins, but ruins, it seems, are everywhere. Ruin appears to be inescapable.

  The temple, Manuel explains, is likely of Olmec origin, if authentic.

  “Despite the practice of human sacrifice,” Manuel says, “the pre-Columbian peoples of this region were highly sophisticated. They were arguably no more barbarous than we.”

  Perhaps Manuel expects to shock us, his post-Columbian tour group, but James Sanderson, the dapper gentleman from Illinois, says, “It’s not so very different from the sacrament, is it? The old wafer and wine.”

  Judging by his comment, Sanderson isn’t Catholic.

  Judging by his expression, Manuel is.

  “The pope might disagree,” I say.

  “Indeed,” says Sanderson’s wife, Geneen, “he would.”

  She and I exchange a complicit smile and ascend into the cool musty interior of what might once have been a temple. Milton waits with the General on the steps. In truth, I think we have not changed that much in five hundred years. We still pluck the heart from the body. Only now we call it a procedure not a ceremony. There are no prayers. The only difference is that we haven’t a prayer.

  Manuel leads us toward the back of the low, dank room, and shows us with his flashlight the points and pot sherds they have discovered, the bones and seeds. I have heard that one can sometimes feel the presence of the past lingering in a place like this. But I feel nothing—only the cool dead still air, laid against my face like a cloth. The past haunts me these days, but not here.

  We stand in darkness, smelling age.

  A friend of Milt’s and mine, a psychologist who leads trips into the wilderness, says that when she hikes the canyons of Grand Gulch, Utah, where the Anasazi lived a thousand years ago and where their ruins still stand, she sometimes feels someone walking behind her on the path. And once, sleeping amid Anasazi ruins, she dreamed of tea cups and woke to find she was lying on pot sherds.

  Recalling this, I feel a presence close behind me, the sense of breath on my neck, a faint heat, and then hands on my waist. I jump and suck in air.

  “Quack, quack.”

  There is some laughter around us. Brief and uncomfortable.

  “I’m over here, honey,” a woman’s voice says from across the room.

  “Oops,” the Duck Man breathes into my ear. “Wrong bird.”

  “Pity it’s not duck season,” James Sanderson says.

  When I step out into the light after the others, Milton is surrounded by the group. He has his arms spread wide, like a vaudeville comedian concluding his act. He shoots his eyes right, then left, in a comic imitation of a search for danger, and says, “It’s a jungle out here.”

  Everyone else laughs.

  III.

  SURVIVALS OF THE NON-INVIDIOUS INTERESTS

  Ahead of me, Milton puffs, each step a pant. His chest canted forward, he takes slow steps. Stops. His hands braced on his hips, he tilts his chin up, his face to the jungle canopy, and squints into the uneven light and the leaves. As if this were the reason for his stopping, to look closer, when really it is merely that he is tired. Fat. But he doesn’t fool me. His heart is not strong. Better since the operation, but not strong.

  There is a purple scar across his sternum where they went in to fix his heart. It looks like a zipper into the body. I imagine opening it, separating the sides, peeling back the keloidal skin, and lifting out the heart to examine it. I once saw a peasant farmer do this in a film on PBS; the man tethered his goat to a post and, cradling the animal’s neck in his arms, his cheek pressed to the goat’s foreflank, he drew the sharp tip of his knife in a line from the goat’s clavicle to its groin, reached his hand in through the slit to hold the heart, and stopped it. I believe this footage was filmed in Greece. Though it could, I suppose, have been Turkey. What I remember is the worn-out citron of the hills. The startled goat. The beating heart. Stopped.

  Funny what you remember, what you forget.

  Milton doesn’t remember the details. He says it was all a long time ago. But I remember vividly that day in the hospital, the yellow elm leaves scattered like coins across the sidewalk outside, how I cried thinking I might lose him, and how he told me about the woman he almost
left me for. I’ve thought of leaving. Our children are settled in their own lives; they’re no reason to stay. But I do.

  Ahead of me, Milt waits, his lower lip thrust out as if in contemplation, his habitual sensual frown. His mouth was the first thing that caught my attention that day on campus fifty-two years ago, his mouth and his pink pants, his white cotton T-shirt, his canvas shoes; I took him for Italian. This was just after the war and there were many foreign scholars at the university then; American universities were like tiny European cities in those days. Milton looked exotic; he looked like a movie star; he looked like that actor in Love Affair. Charles Boyer, was it? I studied his mouth as we played chess by the lake on our first date that spring in Milwaukee. I loved that frown, his handsome suntanned face, his deliberation, how he watched me when it was my turn to move. I was winning and was about to take his queen, when he first kissed me. I used to joke that he kissed me just so that he wouldn’t have to lose.

  As we walk back to the bus, mud squashing beneath my tennis shoes, I worry about the camera that dangles from the nylon strap around my neck. There is a fungus that can get inside and fog the lens. Manuel has warned us of this, as he has warned us to watch for the fer-de-lance, but today we have seen no snakes in this Edenic forest.

  At times the branches and ropey vines above us obtain a human aspect, in the half-light filtered through the leaves, and I cannot help but see them as limbs of that other sort, dangling above us as we slog this muddied track, their dissevered arms providing an amputated audience to our travail. I used to know the names by heart, the names of the bones and the muscles, like our children’s names, which Milton, not I, mistakes; once upon a time—when I was a medical student before I married and gave it up—I could name those structures of the body as if we were on intimate terms: the long muscles that embrace the tibia, the fibula. But I am getting old. Now I have to look them up in Gray’s Anatomy. The tiny bones of the hand.

  IV.

  MODERN SURVIVALS OF PROWESS

  At two, we board our tour bus to return to the hacienda for a siesta before the final evening’s dinner and festivities. We have spent a good deal of time getting from here to there—on planes and buses—and to pass the time, to keep my mind occupied, I read about what it is we’re seeing. It’s important to me to know these things; Milton prefers to rely on intuition and impressions, to feel his way through a place, but I like to know the details. It seems all we have, sometimes.

  On the bus, we are packed in like sardines and jostle. I read aloud from the guidebook, hoping to cheer the General, who mopes across the aisle, hoping to amuse the Sandersons, and to drown out the Duck, who moans about his aching feet. Milton dozes and wakes, dozes and wakes. But I read on.

  “Snakes make up half the nation’s reptiles,” I say.

  The Sandersons murmur admiringly.

  “Tourism has replaced coffee and banana exports as Costa Rica’s primary source of foreign currency.”

  Milton opens his eyes wide with mock alarm. “Y’mean,” he says, “we’re the latest cash crop?” He is mugging for the others. Several of them laugh. Milt squeezes my knee. I move it.

  When the bus stops in Orosi, Milton leans out the window and jokes with the locals who try to sell us trinkets. They hold up woven baskets, rattle gourds. He asks if they’ll wrap it, or if he can eat it here. They do not understand, they miss the joke, but he laughs, so they laugh. The roads are dusty, sun bleached, empty. Sometimes I feel a terrible fear that they lead nowhere.

  As we drive on, trucks pass us on their way to San José, huge semis loaded with tree trunks stripped of branches, stacked six high, held in place by heavy chains. Their fronds wave like hands, hair. Manuel identifies the different species: yolillo, palmetto. “Palmitero,” he says, speaking of the local woodsmen, “cut out the hearts of palm, a delicacy.”

  The bark of the guanacaste trees we pass is covered with yellow flowers. It’s the same bright yellow of elm leaves in autumn, the yellow of the leaves I saw on the sidewalk outside the hospital the day they took out Milton’s heart. I had read up on the procedure. But some things you cannot prepare for. A man cooled to the point of death. His heart stopped. Then they warm him again, bring him back to life. But is it the same man? The same man I married forty-seven years ago? The same man who pressed my hand, looked at me, his eyes wet with fear, before they wheeled him into the operating theater. I watched from above with the medical students. “Amazing,” one young man kept saying, tapping his pen on a clipboard.

  When we reach the lodge, our group lingers in the air-conditioned bus to discuss the evening’s plans. Only the General retires directly to his room. The Duck Man lies supine across two seats, still moaning about his sunburn and his feet, while his wife murmurs consolation.

  Manuel stands in the aisle and explains the schedule: there will be a two-hour siesta before dinner and, as this is our last night, dinner will be a traditional banquet followed by a grupo folclorico.

  “Put on your dancing shoes,” Manuel says smiling, clearly pleased to have mastered cliché.

  At the mention of shoes, the Duck Man moans. “My feet are killing me,” he says. “God damn. Why did you let me get these shoes?” he says to his wife.

  “Honey, I wasn’t there,” she says.

  “Of course, you were there. You’re always there. I can’t get a goddamn minute alone.”

  The rest of us fall silent. But Manuel presses on: He tells us that the folkloric group is famous in the region, that the bus for the airport tomorrow will arrive early, so it is best if we pack tonight.

  “Goddamn corns,” the Duck Man says.

  There is a rush of questions as we try to pretend we aren’t listening to the Duck.

  “Do you want a pad?” the Duck Wife asks. “I’ll get you a pad, hon.”

  “Unnnhhh,” the Duck Man groans, as if he might die of a corn. “Unnnhhh.”

  “Oh, honey,” she says. “I’ll get you a pad, okay? You just stay put.”

  She steps out into the aisle and we stare.

  “Excuse me,” she says, then hurries off the bus. We linger in the air-conditioned bus, making small talk, making plans for the evening and the next day, loathe to leave the cooled air.

  When the Duck Wife returns a few minutes later, she is flushed. Her dress is damp and clings.

  “Hang on, honey,” she says. “Let me help you.” She is sweaty and her dress has slipped off her shoulder, revealing a beige bra strap, a fleshy, freckled, sunburned curve of shoulder. She bends over and takes hold of his shoe in the aisle. Her dress gaps. The sheen of perspiration across her chest makes her skin look swollen, puffy.

  We look, then look away.

  From the corner of my eye, I see her struggle to peel off the backing from a moleskin pad with her long shellacked nails. The Duck Man grabs it from her, strips the adhesive, and slaps the pad on.

  He gives a deep appreciative groan, a guttural moan.

  Relieved, we begin to discuss tonight’s cocktails, tomorrow’s final sunrise walk.

  The Duck Man sits up. His feet drop to the floor with a slap. He puts a palm on his wife’s plump shoulder and steps out into the aisle. He stands, leaning on her a moment, testing his feet, then he turns to us and winks.

  “See you at dinner,” he says. Then he gives his wife a firm slap on the rump. “Quack quack.”

  The Duck Wife giggles and flushes deeper pink.

  He follows her off the bus, quacking as he goes.

  V.

  THE HIGHER LEARNING AS AN EXPRESSION OF THE PECUNIARY CULTURE

  While Milt naps before dinner, I sit in the library, French doors open to the veranda, looking out onto the garden of this hacienda, and write in a little notebook I’ve bought for the trip. The library adjoins the dining room and one can relax here in the late afternoons and read or hear lectures on botany and natural history. Large Zapotec rugs in red and black spread across its floor.

  I am keeping a list of what we see. Not like the life lis
t that the Scottish Brewer keeps or the nice couple from Illinois, the Sandersons. I am not a serious birder, as they say. I make lists to keep things straight—lists of what we see and eat—to help me remember these details, to keep things in their place, past separate from present, to keep unbidden memory out.

  We have seen the plumes of smoke from Arenal. We have seen the yellow-bibbed toucan with its florid beak. We have seen the Blue Morpho, the iguanas and the basilisk, the world-weary heron, its long neck thrust forward and held, the image of patient, unrewarded hope. We have seen the Nikon and the Nikes and the bared and hairy legs, the sunglasses and embarrassed tippers.

  Nine degrees above the equator, summer and winter are not much different and it’s easy to lose track of days. The way, in age, one’s days begin to blur. One’s memories bleed like watercolor, staining the present, leaving me confused. At the kitchen counter, in the house we’ve shared for forty years in Iowa, I can be making coffee when suddenly I’ll be flooded by a memory of Milton in the hospital, confessing as if forgiveness were mine to give.

  Since Milt retired ten years ago, we have been taking classes together at the local university. Milt was a law professor before he turned to business, and learning is a thing we love. Last term we took one in Women Writing Life: Woolf, Duras, McCarthy, Nin, Hong Kingston, and Kincaid. The instructor encouraged each of us to keep a journal, and I have kept one ever since. Milt always wants to know what’s in mine, to read over my shoulder. Cheating even in autobiography.

  This semester we are taking a course in the sociology of the middle class. We are missing three lectures to come here, but it’s worth it. In class we have talked about the construction of taste as a means of distinguishing the emergent middle classes in eighteenth-century England. We have discussed the American myth of classlessness. We have debated whether the derision heaped on liberals these days is a proxy for a corporate assault on the middle class. We are the accused. We, the beleaguered, much-mocked, middle classes.