“Oh we’ll manage the real route,” the tall client said confidently.
“Uh huh,” Val said, with an encouraging smile at him. Wade remembered the three rules of mountain guiding and winced inside. Happy chance that he had met her not as a trekking client, but in some slightly different capacity! Although Distinguished Visitor, ouch; but still, better than this. He watched her continue to converse cheerfully with the group, and it occurred to him that in a couple of hours their helo would arrive and take them back to McMurdo, and that might very well be the last he ever saw of Valerie Kenning. And then he winced in earnest.
Val sat in the trekkers’ dining tent, doing her best to conceal her irritation with the men who were going to be joining her Amundsen trip. Or man, to be specific; the other one, Jim McFeriss, was your typical sidekick and enabler; it was the main talker, Jack Michaels, who was going to be the real bummer. The way he looked at her, the way he talked to the others, complacent and assured and oh so certain he was the star of the movie: Val hated that manner with a fine passion. She had become so sick of the stink of bad testosterone that even the slightest whiff of it made her want to heave. And so she sat in one of the ultralight but unstable camp chairs at the end of the camp table, and became more bright and cheery than ever, an old technique she had picked up in high school when dealing with tremendous amounts of anger, anger often mysterious in origin but sometimes perfectly clear; and as it was inappropriate to scream at people, she had found that she could satisfy her need to lash out at them simply by lying to them so grossly, with the happy cheerleader routine. Hiding her real self and bearing down on people with a very aggressive happy face had always worked strangely well, in several different ways.
So now she was fine among this group of trekkers, though they looked to be a pretty lame bunch, as Karl’s private glance confirmed. And the prospect of leading a reproduction of Amundsen’s difficult direttìssima, with this Jack and Jim among other no doubt problematical clients, was in fact pretty dismal. There Jack sat, ostensibly telling a couple of his comrades from this trip about kayaking down the Dudh Khosi—oh no, now it was climbing the Matterhorn—and by their looks they had heard it before, and also they could see as well as Val could that he was not really telling the story to them but to her, looking left at them then right at her, pulling her into his audience. Men like him were seals, encased in a thick blubber of their own self-regard. Interested in her, however; looking at her, charming her, impressing her with his wilderness adventure credentials, which sounded extensive. They always did. Evaluating her as well; deciding that she was a simple cheerleader jock, a straightforward proposition, not as well-informed as he, but interested in learning more about the big wide world of which he had seen so much.
All so much crap. And all because of the way she looked. If she had been short and plain and unobtrusive, the wattage of his attention would have been so much lower that she might have had a chance to see something of him; as it was the dazzle had reduced her pupils to pinpoints, and she stared out at a chiaroscuro shadow tent, inflicting the cheerleader routine on its occupants full force, until soon they would be pinned to the floor by it and admitting that they too wished they all could be California girls, in four-part harmony.
Which caused Wade to look at her a bit oddly, no doubt nonplussed. But how different it had been up in the cramped Scott tent, sitting around the hissing stove talking about geology and politics, and the Antarctica below the ice and the f-stops. To those men she had been just a person, and so she had been able to relax and be just a person; which was such a relief that it made her much more pleasant and therefore more attractive, she was sure. Which was what they deserved for being so normal themselves. That was something she liked very much about Wade; he had been no more interested in her than any of the beakers he was meeting, no more and no less; and growing more interested in her the more he knew about her, and the more they talked about things in general. Which was how she liked it; indeed how she demanded it. No doubt about it, she was pretty demanding and intolerant when it came to men’s behavior toward her; she knew that; it had been that way for a long time. And was only getting worse.
Because beauty was a curse. It’s always getting worse, because beauty is a curse … in four-part harmony. She didn’t recall the Beach Boys singing that one, but the girls on the beach (who are all within reach) could have told Brian, if he had been able to listen from within his own layer of toxic blubber. Beauty is a curse. Of course it brought attention to you, that was not the issue. Val’s good looks had brought her attention all her life; but by now she hated it. She did not like attention. That was why she had taken off into the mountains every weekend of high school, and then permanently the moment high school had ended and she had been released from four years’ solitary in the prisonhouse of the American dream.
And it was silly anyway, silly at best. She was not that good-looking when it came right down to it, no fashion model—her face as she saw it in the mirror was utterly plain, and filled with irritations. Men were wrong about that, as they were about so much else. It was just that she was tall, and blond, and big, and athletic, with what in the end was fundamentally a friendly face—regular, pleasant, somewhat cheerleaderesque, she had to admit. And that was enough to have men lying to her her whole life long. They got in traffic accidents driving past her. One time one had braked his Toyota pickup to a screeching halt in a parking lot and stuck his head out the window and yelled at her “Will you marry me!” at the top of his lungs. This incident in particular had made her laugh, as it had at least had the virtue of straightforward honesty; but later it had come to stand in her mind as the purest image of what that particular kind of attention from men had really been. It didn’t matter what she was like, that had nothing to do with it; her looks alone were enough to justify men slamming on the brakes and spontaneously pitching their whole self at her. And what was she supposed to say to that? What was she supposed to do with all these strangers hitting on her, crashing in crying me me me, be mine, love always, will you marry me? It was so obvious they were coming on for the wrong reasons. And so from the very start they revealed themselves to Val as people with bad principles, fools, jerks, pathetos, sometimes as insecure as she was about the worth of their characters, sometimes idiotically certain that they were the greatest thing around, but either way worthless to her, their attentions useless, stupid, irritating, sometimes dangerous, often maddening. They made her mad.
And of course the ones who had laid her and left her, as they said, had made her frightened and uncertain as well as mad. Some of those guys she had really loved, or thought she had; they hadn’t come on in the usual idiot way, and she had thought they were different; and still it hadn’t worked out. How could that be, if she was so attractive? Was she too much of a bitch to live with? Or too boring? She didn’t think so. But then again she had always had trouble articulating her thoughts; somehow what she said aloud was always a platitude approximating the original thought, which had been far more interesting. She had never learned the trick of catching those hard thoughts on the fly, and indeed when she had caught them and expressed them properly, those were often the times that got her into biggest trouble, convincing people (men) that she was mean, or just weird. So it was either vanilla or bile, or staying silent. Or going climbing, free solo, the best way.