Fram. Steve Himmer

moral dilemmas. It’s not like that. No one’s life is. That’s what we watch TV for. I’m just tired, okay? That’s all there is to it. Some days you’re just tired and it doesn’t have to mean anything. Now shut up and let me sleep.”

      More often the argument ended with Julia yawning, clamping down on her anger and telling Oscar not to get so insulted, not to take it so personally, that the last thing she wanted at the end of a long day was more expectation—she came home to get away from demands for a few hours and to put her body aside.

      “Your body sits at a desk all day, same as mine,” Oscar said, or some variation on that. “How can it be so much more tired?” And she would ignore him or tell him to sleep and roll herself farther away toward the edge of the bed. Or they would fight until neither of them got a night’s sleep at all.

      But after going through all of that too many times, enough times to realize nothing would change and this particular latitude couldn’t be reached, after too many hours spent angry and ashamed on his side of the bed knowing Julia was angry on hers, each of them pretending to be asleep or to think the other one was, after playing and replaying too many worst case scenarios in his head—separation, divorce, disruption of his entire life for the sake of what, of sex, of demanding something his wife didn’t want, of feeling cruel and ashamed and weak for it—Oscar had taken to leaving the bed to let Julia sleep and to burn his desire off elsewhere without even trying, without risking a touch before removing himself.

      The twin beds of old movies began to make sense, that deep empty distance made literal instead of his imagined icefield of unoccupied sheets stretching toward the lonely north of a long marriage and a lost expedition.

      He spent many nights, half the dark hours of each week, up late among his magazines. Returning to favorite moments at the Pole or at home—often quite close to his home, in fact, nearby in DC, at the magazine’s own offices or the Smithsonian—in accounts of explorers making preparations for expeditions or captains of government and industry praising expeditions returned, praising the steadfastness and stoicism that brought men to the Arctic or, perhaps, to the couch.

      He read about hardships, of months and years spent in the company of only men—whatever rumors of half-Inuit offspring may have followed Flaherty and Henson and even Peary home from the ice—and of sacrifices made for the team: frostbite endured, new depths of energy plumbed, new reserves of strength and willpower summoned to drag oneself and one’s partners the long way to the Pole, and he soothed himself to think he had some kinship with them on those frustrated nights. And when he awoke in his chair the mornings after and Julia emerged from their bedroom a little while later as if he’d simply left their bed a short time before her, they said good morning and nothing else larger than small talk. They carried on as if the night before had been washed away or had been long enough to forget how it started as nights could be so often up north.