Or later, to make a living, leading tour groups of strangers and spending the whole time on automatic pilot, playing the role of the Happy Mountain Woman, earth mother, nature spirit, athlete philosopher, wild woman—which role actually seeped back into her, to an extent, as she became what she was playing at, like during her cheerleader days; inflicting a role, like spiking a volleyball right in their face; and this one felt good; a relief from the usual cynicism and distrust. Clients could very legitimately be held at a proper client distance, a professional relationship, and from there some fairly decent interactions could be had, with some nice men willing to treat her as the guide and no more. It was enough anyway, the client/guide relationship—it had a certain student/teacher or even child/parent aspect to it, depending on how the people in the roles played them. Taking care of people. So, many fairly pleasant human interactions. But the big man/woman thing; no luck. Lots of bummers, enough to disturb the whole thing. She wanted a big time-out.
Unfortunately Antarctica was not the place for that. The man-to-woman ratio was still about 70 to 30, and that made a lot of them even crazier than they were in the world. The women too sometimes went hectic with glee, women in some cases who had never had enough attention in the world and so revelled in it now, trolling around and having some hard fun, breaking hearts like gutting little fish they’d caught. She’d done a bit of that herself. Bit of revenge in it, no doubt. Other women went catatonic under the testosterone assault, or burst out laughing and said No to the whole fool lot. Others tried to keep their eyes open and their wits about them, to see if they could find a man they liked. After all, there were a lot of men there. As the Mac women said, The odds were good, but the goods were odd. So that took a little sorting out, usually—trying a few men to find the one you liked. Which could look like trolling. And this caused problems. In fact when it came to their love lives most of the women on the ice were like walking soap operas. Many went through one ice romance after another. Some did seasonal contracts, like ASL. Certainly nine out of ten ice romances ended badly.
Among them, unfortunately, her relationship with X. He was a lot of the things she liked, too—he was big, gentle, smart; as Steve had used to say, teasing her even in his last year, just her type: trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent. As Steve had been. No, not really. Anyway X had been many good things, but also overidealistic and moody, overintellectual, naive, indoorsy, inactive, unathletic, curiously passive; and even though she was sick of men’s aggressiveness, she had to admit that she did like a certain dash in a man, a certain fire and style, which X had lacked. He railed against the system all the time, and yet slouched around without doing much physical out in the world, which was her usual solution to frustration. He was just too mellow. And he was younger than Val too, four years younger, so that he often seemed like a kid to her, a sophomoric college kid, even though strictly speaking he was older than that.
So she had chafed a bit during their vacation in New Zealand. And it hadn’t helped to have him break into the I’m-being-tortured-by-a-Nazi-mountain-guide routine as they hiked up the utterly easy Bealey Spur, a routine that she had gotten so sick of that she could not even express it. Every time someone said anything to that effect, or even suggested it with a look, it made her so mad that it ruined the whole trip for her. And it happened every trip. Even walking up a green escalator into alpine mountain glory.
So they had said good-bye and she had flown back to the States, and gotten there with no plan, and just kind of wandered that whole off-season, from one climbing hole to the next. In the past she had spent her offseasons with her grandmother on the old family farm, taking care of the old woman and being taken care of by her, and that had been pleasant, a real anchor in her life; but Annie had died two years before while Val was in Antarctica, and now Val had no pattern to fall into when back in the world. It had been a strange few months. And by the time she went back down to the ice for the new season, she had lost any interest she had had in X. The on-ice/off-ice format of the McMurdo lifestyle was hard on even the good relationships, and if one was troubled, the big breaks made it very easy to end them. So when she got back to Mac Town she had had her eye out for an excuse to disengage from X, as she realized consciously only later. And a new mountaineer named Mike had served as about the perfect excuse, or so she had thought at first; she had been smitten, she had to admit it. Now it was clear that Mike had a bad case of what Val called climber’s syndrome, consisting of a self-absorption so deep that it could not be plumbed; compared to it the usual male blubber was no more than the subcutaneous layer with which everyone had to cope. Mike had been quite happy to sleep with her, of course, but in a month he had not learned a thing about her; it would probably be dangerous to ask him to recall her last name. In only two days this Wade Norton had learned a thousand times more about her. So it was bye-bye to Mike; and now X was gone from Mac Town, and she hadn’t even apologized. So it was back to trolling. Or not. In any case, yet another bad experience to add to all the rest. She had been the one to screw up this time, she had to admit it.
On the helicopter ride back to Mac Town, Wade sat next to her in one of the side compartments of the Huey, where they were alone together in their own sonic space; they were just barely able to hear each other, but could if they spoke directly in each other’s ears. Looking down at the sea ice flashing under them, they traded comments. When she thought about how nice he had been on this trip, it made her wince; to go from this smart, polite, interesting, somehow subtle, even withdrawn man, to Jack and Jim and the rest of the clients on the Amundsen! It was painful. She liked this man a lot; he had just the mellowness that she liked, but that extra dash she admired as well—a Washington operator—a sly sense of humor; paying attention to those beakers with what seemed his total interest; and then to her too, but as a guide, a person with career problems, an equal in the world; not to be instructed in Washington politics or the global situation or whatever, but just talked with, in mutual interest. Now of course leaving, and soon no doubt. It always happened that way.
“Do you have brothers and sisters?” he exclaimed in her ear, surprising her.
“No,” she said in his.
“Only child?” Sounding surprised.
He was looking down at the trash ice. “No,” she said in his ear, surprising herself. She never talked about this. “No, I had a brother. But he died.”
He nodded; looked at her briefly. Looked back down at the ice. All the way back to Mac Town he sat beside her, looking down at the ice, his arm pressed against hers, his hip against hers, his leg against hers. The pressure was saying, I’m sorry. It was saying, There’s nothing can be said about that. Which was true. This was how Steve himself had comforted her in his last year, sitting beside her with an arm over her shoulder, not saying anything. At sixteen and twelve, neither of them had been able to figure out much to say about it. Val stared down at the trash ice flowing underneath them. She liked this man who was leaving.
Back in Mac. She walked up to her room, lost in her thoughts.
She had been eleven when she first learned something was wrong. They told her that Steve was sick, that he had mononucleosis and it would take him a while to recover. He was in the hospital, and then in Houston, to go to a special hospital. That’s when they told her it was leukemia. He was gone for months, but came home for visits. In later years she didn’t remember much about those visits; but she did remember being shocked at how much thinner he was, and that he moved so slowly. All his muscles seemed stiff, including eventually his lips, so that it was hard for him to talk the same.