You only get one childhood, one chance at formation, and Stacey would carry those lessons with her long after she’d ruled their conclusions bogus. Such lessons came conjoined at the heart, Siamese twins, to the dizzying sensation that settles in when a person of faith comes to understand that, after all this, it’s logical that only darkness awaits.
She pulled out her phone. Before she could think too much about it, she wrote: Hey. Back in The Cane thinking of you. Let me know what you’re up to.
And hit Send.
In Croatia, Stacey met a scientist giving a lecture at the University of Zagreb. She was finally reading Gaia at the time, when she saw a flyer on campus advertising a lecture on ocean heat by a professor of thermal and fluid sciences from Berlin. Hilde was in her midforties, with bags under her eyes to mark those years, but she was still striking, as tall as Stacey, with blond hair pulled back into a tight bun and sharp, V-shaped eyebrows. She wore neon-pink Nike running shoes during her lecture. Scientists in her field were gathering new data on ocean temperature using the “Argo float system” and now, she said, the trick would be to reconcile this data with the measurements taken previously by the inferior bathythermographs. When she looked up from her notes, her eyes kept finding Stacey. She needed only to wait for a few minutes following the talk before Hilde approached her. Stacey spent the next four nights in Hilde’s hotel room.
“You are quite the conquest for me,” she said in her lightly accented English. The sexuality of the German accent never got enough credit in Stacey’s opinion. “An American coed is the hardest kind of cunt to eat, but also the sweetest. My father once said that.”
Stacey burst out laughing. “What did you just say?”
Grinning, Hilde explained, “We are a very bohemian family.” Propped on her elbows in bed, Stacey was staring at her and got caught. “What is it?” Hilde asked.
“Nothing,” said Stacey. “You remind me of someone I knew once.”
Hilde had wanted to be a dancer until she tore her meniscus, lost too much time, and had to give it up for ocean science. She bought Stacey expensive meals and cocktails, and they saw Zagreb together. She stank of cigarettes always, and to this day Stacey could not smell cigarette smoke without thinking of her. Beyond her sexual prowess, Hilde was impressive in every way—traveled, intelligent, fascinating. There was no subject she didn’t seem to understand in its minutiae, from the architectural design of Zagreb’s opera house, the HNK, to the Greek debt crisis. They were three of the best days of Stacey’s travels in Europe. For the first time since Lisa Han, she was astonished again: by food, by her orgasm, by the hard spring wind, by the pleasure of painting her toes an azure blue.
“What were you doing at a lecture on ocean heat?” Hilde asked her at a café. “I saw you in the front row and pegged you for an American but also for a student.”
Stacey showed Hilde the book she was reading. She did not mention the photograph she’d found still stuck in the pages: Bethany Kline, carrying Lisa in utero the day before she was born. She’d held the photograph for a moment, wanting to shred it and let the pieces fall in the wastebasket, but something stopped her. Instead, she went to the library where she pulled a book from the shelves at random and stuck the photo in its pages. The picture wouldn’t be gone but neither would it be with her.
“But you in no way want to be a scientist?” Hilde asked.
“No. I think if I go back to school, it’ll be for literature.”
“Why literature?”
“I don’t know. Probably because it interests me the same way ocean temperature interests you. The story. I once read this book about how literature was this vast conversation that mocked all the borders we normally think of: state boundaries, our own life spans, continents, millennia. That’s why I like this so much.” She tapped Gaia, sitting on the table between their cups of espresso. “It has this idea in it about how incomprehensible and ancient…” She searched. “… We, this, us, it is.”
Hilde pursed her lips around a cigarette, the lines around her mouth deepening momentarily.
“Our birthright, then?” said Hilde. “Generations of imaginative, creative, scientific labor—this journey we’re on, looking outward and inward. To our own psyche, our own subatomic structures, the heavens, all that?”
“Sure,” said Stacey. “I don’t know. I had a weird childhood. It took me a long time to consider any of this. I’m basically just a dilettante trying to sound impressive.” And she laughed nervously.
Hilde took a long pull of her cigarette, releasing the smoke from the side of her mouth. “You do that a lot you know.”
“Do what?”
“These self-denigrating comments. Especially as it relates to you being from your—how did you say? ‘Bumblefuck’ town? You should break yourself of that habit. You’re here. You’re curious about the world. You read widely. It doesn’t matter where you come from. Neither does it really matter where you go. It’s all the sex and sandwiches in between.”
Stacey could feel her face turning as pink as Hilde’s Nikes, one of which she twirled in small circles beneath the table. Hilde reached out and thumped Gaia with the two sturdy, sexy fingers that held the cigarette. “In this book, this man Lovelock talks about his job in London during the Second World War where he checked the quality of the air in the shelters belowground. Have you read this part yet?”
“I have, yes.”
“So you understand the metaphor? Finding that vandals kept stealing the bolts holding the tunnel together in order to sell for scrap?”
“Yeah, of course. He was afraid the tunnel would collapse. Just because it hadn’t yet, the thieves kept stealing the bolts. Figuring everything would be okay.”
“That’s right.” She’d smoked her cigarette down to the filter and waggled the smoldering butt in the air before her face. “It’s not that I disagree with you that literature can mock our human life spans, but I question whether there’s any use left for what we call art or literature or culture—however you want to phrase it.”