She liked him there, with the sun behind him. She’d let him stay.
“I’ve named him Hector,” she said, coaxing the skull from the dirt.
“Who?”
“Him.” She pointed to the hole that would have been his nose.
“That’s a heroic name. Why do you think it’s a he?”
She wasn’t sure if he was asking her or quizzing her. “By the size. We found a part of a female skull yesterday.”
He nodded. “And what did you name her?”
“Clytemnestra.”
“I like it.”
“Thanks. I’m keeping an eye out for the last few bits of her. Her skeleton is almost complete.”
“Oh, so that’s Clytemnestra. I heard about her in the lab.”
Bridget nodded. “The biology guys are excited about her.”
Once almost all the dirt was processed, she gingerly lifted Hector’s skull. She began to brush out the grooves as she’d been taught.
“It doesn’t get to you, does it?”
She shrugged. “Not really.”
“Something will eventually. It seems so far back, I know, but something always gets through.”
“But there isn’t much tragedy in a death that took place three thousand years ago, is there?” Bridget mused aloud. “Old Hector would be long dead no matter what great or awful things happened in his lifetime.”
Peter smiled at her. “It puts mortality in perspective, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah. Why do we worry so much about everything when we’re just going to end up here?” she asked. She felt quite cheery considering she was standing in a burial site holding a large section of a human skull.
He laughed at her, but he seemed appreciative. He sat down at the edge of the trench to consider. She had the odd perception that he had fine ears. He seemed to hear the full extent of what she said and meant, no matter how loudly or quietly she spoke. When you shared a context, it made hearing easier.
“No question a recent death feels more tragic,” he reasoned. “I guess because we’re still experiencing the world that the dead person is missing. We are still around to miss them.”
Did he have such a tragedy in his life? she wondered. Could he tell that she did?
She pushed her hair back. She realized she’d drawn a streak of dirt across her forehead. “Our moral connection to people expires after a certain amount of time. Don’t you think? Otherwise how could we dig up their graves?”
“You are exactly right, Bridget. I couldn’t agree more. But how long a time? Two hundred years? Two thousand? How do you calculate the moment when a person’s death becomes scientific rather than emotional?”
She knew he was asking the question rhetorically, but she actually wanted to answer it. “I’d say you calculate it by the death of the last person whose life overlapped with theirs. The point when they lose the power to help or hurt a living soul.”
He smiled at her certainty. “That’s your hypothesis?”
“That’s my hypothesis.”
“But don’t you think the power to help or hurt can extend far beyond a person’s natural life?” he asked.
“I don’t,” she proclaimed, almost reflexively. Sometimes she felt the magnet of certainty more than truth.
“Then you, my friend, have a thing or two to learn from the Greeks.”
Lenny,
I enclose the Pants with a little bit of ancient dirt and a picture of me with my new boyfriend, Hector. He’s not so lively, you may say. But he’s got the wisdom of the ages.
A whole lot of love from yer pal Bee (and a toothy kiss from yer pal-in-law, Hector)
Carmen did run lines with Julia. She ran them for hours on end for two straight days. Julia wanted to try a range of parts before she settled on her audition strategy.
Carmen was relieved when Julia went to the office to photocopy more pages so Carmen could at least have a break and check her e-mail. She had a list of unread messages from Bee and Lena and her mom and her step-brother, Paul.
When Julia got back, she immediately noticed a picture Carmen had printed out and left on her desk.
“Hey, who’s this?” Julia asked. She picked up the paper and studied it.
It was a picture of Bee in Turkey holding a human skull and pretending to kiss it. Bee had sent it over the Internet, and it had made Carmen laugh so much she’d printed it out.
“That’s my friend Bridget,” Carmen said.
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
Carmen knew it was strange of her that she didn’t talk about her friends more to Julia. She mentioned them in passing once in a while, but she never expressed what they really meant to her. She wasn’t sure why. It was as though she had put them and Julia into two different compartments. They didn’t mix. She didn’t want them to mix.
“She’s your friend?” Julia looked vaguely doubtful, like perhaps Carmen had clipped the picture from a magazine and was just pretending.
Maybe that was why, Carmen thought.
“She’s amazing-looking. Check out those legs,” Julia said.
“She’s a jock.”
“She’s pretty. Where does she go to school?”
It was funny. Carmen didn’t think of Bee as pretty, exactly. Bee didn’t have the patience for it. “Brown,” she said.
“I thought about going there. Williams is a lot more intellectual, though.”
This from a girl who read not only Us Weekly each week, but Star and OK! as well. Carmen shrugged.
“Her hair looks kind of fake. She should use a darker shade.”
“What?”
“Does she color it herself?”
“Bridget? She doesn’t color her hair at all. That’s her hair.”
“That’s her real hair?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“That’s what she tells you, anyway,” Julia said, half jokingly, but Carmen didn’t find it funny.
She looked at Julia, wondering what was up. Was she honestly competing with a girl she’d never met?
“Hey, let’s go pick up something quick for dinner and bring it back here,” Julia suggested later, after another hour of lines. “I want to keep studying.”
“You can stay here,” Carmen offered. “I’ll go get it.” She was frankly glad to get away from lines, glad to be outside. The grounds of the place were beautiful, especially in the evening light. There were miniature weeping trees along the paths and huge annual gardens around the main buildings.
In her appreciation of the flowers, she lost track of the cafeteria, known by the apprentices as the canteen. She walked until she got to a pretty hillside overlooking the valley. It was lush and so sweet in this light.
Carmen stood there looking at it for a long time. She was already lost—she couldn’t really get more lost, could she? When you belonged nowhere, you sort of belonged everywhere, she mused.
She wondered how long it had been since she’d used her senses to perceive beauty. It was like she had been frozen for all these months and was only now beginning to thaw.
She realized that another person from the campus was nearby, appreciating the same view. It was a woman she had not yet seen or met.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” the woman said.
Carmen sighed. “It really is.”
They fell into step together along the path. “Are you part of the theater program?” the woman asked. She was wide hipped and somewhat graceless. She wasn’t an actress, Carmen decided, and felt a sense of camaraderie.
Carmen nodded.
“What are you trying out for?”
Carmen pushed a stray hair behind her ear. “Nothing. I’m doing sets, hopefully.”
“You’re not going to try out for anything?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not an actress.”
“How do you know? Have you tried?”
“I guess not. No.” Though my father c
laims I’m dramatic, she added silently.
“You should try it. It’s really the strength of this program.”
“You think so?”
“Absolutely.”
“Huh.” Carmen spent two seconds pretending to consider this so she wouldn’t seem rude. “Hey, would you point me in the direction of the canteen? I got off track and I have no idea where I’m going.”
“Sure,” the woman said. She pointed to the left when the path split.
“Thank you,” Carmen said, looking over her shoulder.
“What’s your name?” the woman asked.
“Carmen.”
“I’m Judy. Good to meet you, Carmen. You try out, okay?”
Carmen couldn’t say okay if she didn’t mean it. “How ’bout I’ll think about it?”
“That’s all I can ask,” the woman said.
Later, when Carmen was trying to fall asleep and all the lines and lines and lines were scrabbling around in her head, she did think about it. She mainly thought of why she would not do it.
Lena walked around with that overstimulated feeling.
She didn’t like it very much. She forgot to eat and she wore eye makeup to painting class. She forced herself to look at Leo only once every pose and to keep to herself during breaks. She hoped, she silently begged for him to notice her. She racked her brain to find ways to hedge these hopes, to keep them safe.
She looked at her painting in a new way. At first she was so disgusted by it, she could barely look at all. But then she settled down. She tried to relax and see better and deeper than she had before. She felt like a track runner who was pushing herself to break a five-minute mile only to have somebody tell her it could be done in four. If it could be done, then she had to reframe her sense of possibilities. She had to at least try.
She thought about Leo. She asked around a little, casually, she hoped, and learned that he was in his third year, that he didn’t live on campus and was rarely seen at campus events. His mystique only grew.
The next Saturday the Traveling Pants arrived from Bee. Lena wore them for courage and struck out from the safety of her dorm room. Not for the courage to talk to Leo; the courage to visit his painting again.
She was so intent on her agenda, so eager and yet so furtive, she almost felt like she had gone into the empty studio to steal something. She walked straight past her painting in favor of his. She stood in front of it, as she had been secretly longing to do all week. For every session he worked on it, she found herself wishing she could watch, to see exactly what he did. How could she now retrace a whole week’s worth of work?
She needed to think about her own painting with as much vigor, she knew, but for now she was living in the world of possibilities.
If she could have crawled inside the paint, she would have, so desperate was she to understand what he did, how he did it.
“You learn a lot in art school by looking around,” Annik had said to her on the phone a few nights ago.
How true this was. She found herself only wanting to hear what Robert the instructor said when he was talking to Leo.
The beauty of Leo’s work waned as she took it apart, dissected it. And then she’d lose her focus for one second and it snuck up on her again. Finally she stopped trying so hard and let her eyes fuzz a bit as she just admired it.
It wasn’t that she hadn’t seen transcendent paintings before; she had. She’d stared at paintings that were far more accomplished than this. She’d been to the National Gallery hundreds of times. She’d been to the Met and other great museums, big and small.
But Leo was painting exactly the same subject she was—in the same studio, at the same angle (though in mirror image), by the same light. He was an art student, not a master. This was apples to apples: They were handling the same forms and dimples and hairs and shadows. It made her able to appreciate what he was doing in a thrilling though humbling way.
She just looked at it. The lines of the shoulders. The elbows. For some reason she thought of her grandfather. Emotions Lena usually stowed down deep came to hover at the surface. She felt a flush in her cheeks and the wateriest of tears flood her eyes. She thought of Kostos next, and she thought of the fact that she hadn’t really thought of him in a few days.
Was Carmen right? Was she really capable of forgetting him? Was that what she should be striving for?
She wasn’t sure she wanted to be striving for that. How disorienting it felt. She wasn’t sure she wanted to be the forgetting type, even if she could be. If she forgot Kostos, she feared she’d forget most of herself along with him. Who was she without him?
“What do you think?”
Lena was so deep down in her brain she felt she had to travel miles to get back to the sound and the light. In quick succession she realized that Leo was standing a few feet away from her, that he was talking to her, that she was standing in front of his painting for no reason she was prepared to explain, and that she had tears running down her face.
Instantly her hands went to her face and she wiped them off. She pressed wet fingers to her thighs and remembered she was wearing the Traveling Pants. Well. These weren’t the first tears to dry on the Traveling Pants.
He looked at her and she scrambled to think of what was supposed to happen. He was looking at her Pants. Should she try to explain them? But he had said something, hadn’t he? He had asked a question. Did that mean she was supposed to answer it? So manic was the fluttering of her thoughts she feared it was audible.
“It’s okay if you don’t like it,” he said, wanting to help her out.
“No! I do like it!” she nearly shouted at him.
“I’m having problems with the head.” He reached out with his thumb, and to Lena’s horror, actually smudged a patch of wet paint that composed Nora’s jawbone.
“No!” she burst out. Why was she shouting at him? She made herself be quiet. She realized she didn’t want him to look at her quite this hard.
“Sorry,” she hurried to say. “I just—I like that part. I don’t think you should smudge it.” She wondered if she was more connected to his painting than he was.
“Oh. Okay.” He thought she was crazy. She wished he would go back to not looking at her at all.
She tried to calm down. She wasn’t going to be cool, so she could at least be honest. “I really love your painting. I think it’s beautiful,” she said at a normal volume.
He looked at her in a different way now, trying to gauge her tone, surprised by her sincerity. “Well, thank you.”
“The thing is, though…looking at it makes me realize I have no idea what I’m doing.” Who could have known that Lena would actually talk to Leo? And that when she did, she would be so disarmed she’d be truthful?
He laughed. “Looking at it makes me realize I have no idea what I’m doing.”
She laughed too, but miserably. “Shut up,” she said.
Had she just told him to shut up?
“It’s true, though,” he said. “I look at it in a certain way and I only see what’s wrong with it. Isn’t that what we all do?”
“Yeah, but most of us are right,” she said ruefully.
Was she actually having a conversation with Leo right now?
He laughed again. He had a nice laugh.
“I’m Leo,” he said. “Where are you set up?”
She pointed to the easel directly across the room from his, trying not to feel too crushed by the fact that he really hadn’t noticed her at all. “Lena,” she said in a slightly defeated voice.
“Are you a year-rounder or here for the summer?”
“All year,” she said crampily. “I only finished my first, though.”
He nodded.
The fact of this conversation settled upon her at last. Here was Leo. In an otherwise empty studio. Did he have a girlfriend? Did he have a boyfriend? Did he make time in his life for such frivolity?
She realized he wanted to work on his painting. She suddenly felt so self-conscious she co
uldn’t carry on. She made an excuse and fled.
When she got home, she twisted and turned in her unmade bed for a while, and then she called Carmen.
“Guess what?”
“What?”
“I think I have a crush.”
Carma,
Here are the Pants and a little sketch I made of Leo. From memory, not from life. (And no, I’m not thinking of him day and night. God.)
Funny hair, huh?
He did not realize I was in his class. I think I’m making a big impression around here.
Love you,
Len
At seven-thirty the light waned and Peter still sat with Bridget at the edge of the trench. She knew he felt he had to stay because he was supervising, and also to show her he appreciated her work ethic. She only hoped he was enjoying it as much as she was.
“Hey, Bridget?” he said at last.
“Yeah?”
“Can we go get some dinner?”
“Oh, fine, fine.” She pretended impatience. “Let me finish recording.”
“We’ll drop the stuff by the lab on the way.”
They fell into step companionably. She tried wiping her face and made it even dirtier.
“Would you call me Bee?”
“Bee?”
“Yeah, as in bumble.”
“Okay.”
“That’s what my friends call me. You can call me Bridget if you want, but I may think you are slightly mad at me.”
He smiled at her. “Bee, then.”
They washed up hurriedly by the outdoor pump, but dinner had been cleared from the big tent by the time they got there.
“It’s my fault,” she said.
“It is,” he agreed in his agreeable way.
The Turkish ladies who provided most of the food service kindly found some leftover bread and hummus and salad for them. One of the ladies brought over an unlabeled bottle full of strong red wine. It was a tricky business drinking wine after working in the sun all day. Bee mixed hers with water.
Was this awkward? she wondered.
It wasn’t awkward exactly. It was good, slanty fun. He was handsome and he was nice and she was drawn to him for these and probably other reasons.
Would it be less awkward if he weren’t so handsome and nice? Would it be less fun?