with them, hearing all that they want to say, allowing herself to be the surrogate for those they once loved, for those who preceded them in death, for those who have disappeared, or abandoned them, or are too far away, or busy, or disinterested, to make their way to Lilac Love, to enter one of these quiet rooms, to hold a translucent hand that reveals its thinned blue veins, its age spots, its bird-fragile bones, its spasms—to give comfort and succor as once, surely, the fragile people shriveling away in their neatly made beds gave comfort and succor to them. Being present with the dying is a powerful draw. She is not out in the field, but she has a seat at the edge of eternal space. And it’s helping her.
She has submitted an application to the Peace Corps, selecting Nepal, Peru, Vanuatu, Mongolia, and Burkina Faso as places where she would be interested in serving, because imagining herself exploring the world again helps lift the heaviness; it’s what she needs to hold onto. She felt proactive executing the paperwork for this potential alternative, which could eliminate waiting two years for the next expedition. It also had the unpleasant effect of reinforcing her current unsteadiness—never before would she have doubted the security of her place on any expedition, but she was questioning herself so much that she could no longer presume her luck was not already broken. She hasn’t mentioned the Peace Corps to her family or to Valentine. She tells herself it’s because she hasn’t yet been accepted, but the truth is, even if she’s accepted, she’s been thinking she’s not ready to go, is far from full strength, needs more time at this final station before death, with its eschatological light, and the personal trinkets on bureaus like lucky charms overseeing what everyone hopes will be a painless transition to whatever is on the other side. Although they take nothing from their old religions, what remains is the contradictory notion that on the other side there might be some unearthly bliss.
In spite of her own state, being at Lilac Love is providing Camille with a palliative kind of earthbound bliss.
But there are bad nights when it is difficult to shake the belief that she is losing, has already lost substantial ground, in the race of life. Everyone else is moving forward, moving up, growing up. Actually, they’ve grown up. They have spouses and life partners. They have kids, are having kids, are actively thinking about having kids, or are already fearing they’ve left it too long, going for checkups and tests to determine sperm motility, egg viability. They have capital-H homes, with great aesthetics, and original art on the walls. They have window washers, housekeepers, nannies, personal trainers, and sometimes chefs. They have mutual funds and 401(k)s and stock portfolios, vacations booked in advance, clothes for every conceivable occasion. And yet lately, when she forces herself to go to a cocktail or dinner party, the favorite conversational topic is about giving everything up. These discussions, in which Camille does not participate, go on for hours while everyone drinks artisanal vodka and small-batch IPAs and eats complicated catered food.
Last week, at another such gathering, Camille listened again to her friends pronouncing they would pare down to the basics, live in some uninhabited place. They made suggestions to one another and promises and began drawing up plans. The flying rhetoric had set those friends aflame, but demonstrated only their ignorance.
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