My apology was so fiberless that even I winced. Where was the new Hank Hannah, the guy who was trying to redress old wrongs and be a better person?
“Have you been drinking again?” she asked. “Because I know about drinking and apologies. First he gets drunk, then there is a thousand ‘sorry’s, and after is sex. Then he gets drunk again.”
“Please,” I said, “I’m not like that.”
She planted a hand on her hip and flipped her wild hair back to address me. That fist on her hip clearly meant business, but she hadn’t walked away this time, and I felt good about that. “I will thank you,” she said, “to direct me toward the nearest taxi stand or place of public transport.”
How a zing went through me when she got bossy!
“There’s no such thing,” I told her. “You’ll have to call for a ride, but why do that? Please, let me drive you. A courtesy from one professional to another.”
She shook her head. “The telephone,” she said.
I led her off the stage and down into the fancy new agri-business lobby, her rolling carry-on clanging down the steps. That suitcase looked so battered, so airline-tagged, that it might have spent a lifetime traveling the world with Julie as she abandoned men all over the globe.
But where the old coin-operated pay phone had been, there was now a new one, with no slots for change. Instead, it required some fancy type of calling card, probably common in places like Boston or France. When I lifted the receiver to speak to an operator, there was only a computerized voice. Julie stared out the window while I diddled with the buttons. Then that fist went back on her hip.
The look she was giving me was wicked. God, when she clenched her teeth…
“The less you have to lose,” my father always said, “the more you stand to gain.”
So I turned to her. “Just tell me this,” I said. “What the heck made you walk up to me in the first place?”
Instead of answering me, Julie nodded out the window to the arched façade above us. “Do you know these words?” she asked, pointing to the Santayana quote—“Those Who Cannot Remember the Past Are Condemned to Repeat It.”
“This is a popular saying where I am from,” she said. “In Russian, this word ‘past’ is feminine, so they translate it as ‘He who forgets the past must dance with her at the harvest.’”
I thought about the past being feminine. Of course it was. Even without the idea of being condemned, the Russian quote was more foreboding, more sinister, for making destiny a feminine engine.
I asked her, “Was that some sort of coded answer to my question?”
“I was just thinking,” she lamented, “how always in Russia the sayings come down to sex.”
Why did she keep bringing up sex?
“My office is this way,” I said.
Outside, the light off the snow was blinding; it made mirrors of the sharp, clear ice sheeting the marble entrance and penetrated the cloudy slush at our feet, making it look frozen from pulpy lemonade. Across the quad, new snow had erased in one night all traces that Eggers had ever lived there. Downhill, ice on the river was complaining under the sun. It chattered and creaked, and when a chunk snapped free, the newly exposed water steamed in the glare.
I suddenly recalled that the University of Northwestern North Dakota was in the town of Croix, also located on the Missouri, near the borders of Montana and Canada. This river was something Julie might look at from her office on campus. Suddenly, the Missouri was a ribbon that connected the two of us. If she were to write a message, and cast it upon the water in a bottle, it would float seven hundred miles, all the way to me. Well, all the way to the dam, at least.
“Isn’t the river wonderful?” I asked.
Julie’s suitcase bobbed behind us as we made for the anthro building, her breath, then my breath, alternating white before us. She looked over her shoulder, regarding it. “The river is bitchy with ice,” she said. “It will soon crack free, and then — is anything more beautiful than open water in winter?”
Inside the anthro building, Julie’s attention was immediately drawn to the flame-orange biohazard signs on the Hall of Man.
“I’m doing some important work in there,” I said.
Half aloud, she muttered the words “Hall of Man,” not without a little bitterness, as if she saw all of the Dakotas or Russia — all the world, even — as an outdated, hazardous Hall of Man.
Upstairs, mine was the only office that stood open, Junior spilling into the hallway, and it looked to me like someone else’s mess, as if this heap were so many years of someone else’s life.
“Don’t mind this crap,” I said, slogging through the papers, trying not to slip on the slick covers of iceberg surveys. Entering the shambles of my own office, I saw it as another professor would, had one ever come in here. Julie would be the first in years. Flint chips littered the floor, along with crates of anonymous bone casts, and the shelves were stacked with Tupperware containers of dirt, each masking-taped shut with excavation information. The hoary chair where Eggers always sat was sheened with grease, and either it was my glasses, or a small cloud of fruit flies had taken up residence. Then there were the plants.
Looking back, it’s easy to see how little things lock into place. I’m not a man who believes in Destiny. Sure, I would soon be called upon to act in ways that bordered on heroic, and it’s true that superhuman tasks awaited. Yet not too much should be made of Fate. Would Determination really determine me to be its hand and sword? Would Destiny leave the inheritance of humanity in the hands of one so petty? No, life, such of it as there is, is spittled with moments that feel absolutely inevitable only because they are completely surprising, as when a student finds a spear point and instead of putting it in a museum decides to use it, or when an ordinary man invites a beautiful botanist into an office full of tropical exotics left to him by his stepmother.
Julie followed me into the office, and I turned to her, ready to help drag that suitcase over Junior. I also needed to explain that there was only one cab driver in town, that his name was Bill Hasper, and that he was likely to speak the word of the Lord — starting with his alcohol troubles, tracing his entire third marriage, and ending with his minor successes at the lottery — all the way to the airport if she dared summon him. When I turned, however, I saw she’d let go of the suitcase. Already she was reaching for the mustardy fronds of a fanlike plant and the drooping stalks of a red-veined something-or-other.
Already that V of skin was prickling red.
She turned to me, trying to catch her breath.
“My word,” she said, “I had no idea.”
She approached the skinny plant on my desk, touching its spiky ends.
“A Brophilia porsophoa,” she said. “Rare cousin to the Redendosa familia. These specimens are sensational. How do you keep them in this climate?”
I couldn’t exactly tell Julie that every once in a while I whacked off all the hangy parts, including the brown, fuzzy chutes the bush by the window kept sending up, and the rotty white cones its neighbor was always opening.
I told her what Janis was always saying:
“The secret, Dr. Nivitski, is love.”
Julie’s breathing was hoarse, labored. Her hand found my arm — completely without her knowledge, it seemed — and she looked into my eyes. “How is it you have gathered them here?”
“There was no more room at home,” I said. “So I had to bring the overflow here.”
Of course, this wasn’t the answer to what she was asking, but it had the desired effect: her eyes widened, her throat grew flush, the rims of her nostrils flared — though that may have been her sinuses, I suppose. At some point, passion and allergies are indistinguishable.