so it’s good they’d found time for that earlier impromptu party. It’s that kind of region, the north: wearing down men on one hand and machines on the other but always leaving enough breathing room for dreams to survive, and of course Wellman tried again the next year to no greater avail.
Oscar shook his head and laughed at himself for once again remembering that bittersweet scene with actual fireworks, a false image he couldn’t shake however often he returned to that page, as real in his memory as the Arctic’s own illusory islands always waiting on the horizon, driving sailors onward and into madness at times.
He read those pages for who knows the how many-nth time, lingering on favorite passages he knew by heart but loved to see set in the heavy black print of an earlier age, an age with more confidence than his own. He meditated and daydreamed over Fleischman’s photos, especially the left behind huts of the 1882 Austrian expedition on Isle of Jan Mayen. He wondered, he had always wondered, what state they were in by his time. It was so hard to tell from the grainy old photo and Fleischman had snapped it from such a distance. Oscar had always meant to visit the National Geographic archives across town, to see the original image up close for himself or at least to know it was there. He’d always wanted to know how the huts had held up in those twenty-four years of abandon and after. Were they still there? How long could they stand on their own, a steadfast afterthought, their obsolete purpose long since served? Maybe they’d been occupied by later travelers or even natives, as labs or houses or shelters for animals getting out of the wind. Someone, he thought, should go back and find out, should follow up for the magazine and the many readers he could only assume were left wondering as he himself was.
After two then three yawns crept up on him, Oscar slipped the magazine back into its space, leading with a fingertip to separate the neighboring spines so he wouldn’t bend any edges. How could anyone not be amazed at the Arctic and what men had done there? The winters and frostbite endured and the ingenuous inventions survival required. Work they could do on their own, on the ground, not the adjustments of scientists in their shirtsleeves thousands of miles away, safe at home. Even Julia, who had been always been willing to listen even if she gave him a pitying look that was, frankly, a little bit sexy and had often worked out that way, seemed to lose interest these days when he pointed out passages in his magazines, when he gave her the most amazing details about expeditions and icepacks and the illusions of land that appeared over vast Arctic seas to make sailors think they’d arrived when they were still as adrift as they’d been all along.
And she laughed when To The Moon! drove Oscar out of the room.
“But it’s so stupid!” he’d said the night before as she watched reruns intended to warm up the audience for a new season.
“Of course it’s stupid!” she countered. “It’s a story! If it was complicated, it wouldn’t be a way to relax. If they were really in danger, what fun would that be to watch? If it was all life and death we’d have to worry instead of enjoy it and I get enough of that at work, thanks.”
He almost asked what was so life and death about registering tire tread patterns, but wasn’t optimistic about the way that might go.
“But you used to hate this sort of thing,” Oscar said. “We never watched shows like this.”
“I didn’t hate them. I just didn’t want to listen to you complain about them and ruin the show. Oscar, I’m tired. I had a long day. I just want to watch something dumb. It doesn’t make me a bad person. Just because you’re obsessed with one thing doesn’t mean you can’t take an interest in others.”
“But it’s always the same. It’s practically scripted. Where’s the surprise?”
“Where’s the surprise in reading the same magazines over and over? Or in watching another PBS show about the North Pole? You’ve seen them all. They aren’t going to change.”
That one left him speechless so she went on. “And besides, everyone watches this show. It’s fun to have that in common, to laugh about it together. And to know you have it common. You can take it for granted, like if you just mention the show people know what you’re talking about and it calls up a whole bunch of other things to talk about even if you don’t know the person you’re talking to all that well. I mean, sure, you could do that with politics or something instead but that’s so exhausting. And who wants to fight with a stranger just because they ran out of things to talk about? That’s why they call it popular culture, you know—everyone likes it.” She turned back to the TV and said, “Everyone except you, I suppose,” before turning it up.
He’d tried many times to explain that the Arctic was popular, that Nanook of the North was the first great blockbuster and spontaneous parades erupted in the streets of great cities when explorers came home, but… well, saying so felt a bit too much like one more party where no one else in the room had read Farthest North. He’d been to enough of those for one lifetime already and he suspected Julia had, too, which was why most of the time he didn’t mind when she went out alone and why she seldom asked if he wanted to come.
Oscar didn’t like to think of himself as out of touch. He preferred thinking he’d stayed in touch longer, his attention a long polar day instead of the brief flash of sun a TV show or movie or space flight might earn. He wasn’t so willing as most people to talk about nothing, to spend his time keeping up on things that might not in time matter, when there were already much better things to be learning and talking and knowing about. When there were already centuries of Arctic lore to discuss. But it was hard to get into all that without telling the truth about BIP, which wouldn’t much help his case, anyway.
He stood with a hand splayed on his magazines wondering where Julia was and what she was doing with her karate friends; he pictured them out fighting crime, all those mild-mannered bureaucrats by day bringing the District to justice at night, and he smiled. Then he brushed his teeth, had a pee, and went off to bed after a quick check-in at the Pole, which had already faded to black as had the sky outside his own apartment; only a narrow spotlight from above the camera lit a swathe of snow as the streetlights did for the sidewalk below.
Hours later Oscar was awoken by his wife climbing into their bed and opened his eyes to her back curved before him, covered only by the ribbed white tanktop she preferred on hot nights and her hair pulled into a high ponytail off her neck. In the half-light, shadows that might have been bruises lay on her shoulder and upper arm, and a dark quarter-sized smear on the back of her shirt looked like blood. Oscar wondered again what her karate class had gotten up to or if it was all a trick of the light.
He set out to stroke her, to lay his hand on her side or run fingers down her spine, wrap a hand around her shoulder, perhaps, but the white tundra of bedsheet between them, the fabric mounded into a scale model mountain range, proved daunting. He remembered the night before and so many nights before that when he’d touched her, stroked an arm or a thigh or reached around Julia’s back and under the edge of her shirt, wanting to touch her and know she was there, hoping something might come of it, only for her to roll further over or scrunch herself into a shape that left so little skin exposed for him to touch. They’d go months sometimes without sex or anything like it, months without touching each other in bed, her body closed off to him however warm she’d been over dinner, over drinks on the porch, even on the couch a few minutes before. Some nights the result was an argument after dark, more or less the same one every time.
Him saying she’d changed and her saying of course she had, they were older, their lives busier, insisting the question to ask wasn’t why she had changed but why he had not.
And Oscar insisting sex wasn’t the point but the effort was, her being willing to rise above being tired, to muster some last reserve at the end of the day for his sake. To show him he mattered that much. Once he made the mistake of insisting that Peary’s last push at the Pole, when his team finally reached it, wasn’t only about wanting to but about honor and debt and what partners owe to each other, and she’d stormed from the room to sleep on the couch, mutters of “P goddamn F,” trailing behind her and Oscar left alone in the bed, wide awake, knowing he’d gone too far but with no route of return that didn’t lead through the living room where his wife