The Yale Review | Jen Silverman: “Antarctica”

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Fiction

Antarctica

Jen Silverman

Photo by Cherry Laithang on Unsplash

“One summer, many decades ago”—the poet said—“I had an affair with two scientists, a father and son, at an Antarctic science station. Across six months of polar darkness, I fell first for the father, then for the son.”

We were at dinner—an artists’ colony in the Northeast, sitting at a long farmhouse table. All around us voices buzzed, but my eyes were fixed on the poet. She was in her late fifties, small and sharp-featured, a silver curtain of hair forever falling into her eyes. She spoke quietly, for my ears alone, with an accent I couldn’t place. I hadn’t yet dared to ask her where she was from.

“The affair was complicated,” the poet told me, reaching casually for the bread. “But not solely for the reasons one might think. The unrelenting darkness affected everything.”

“You were depressed?”

“Depressed,” the poet repeated thoughtfully. She wore long beaded earrings, and when she moved they swayed hypnotizingly. “No, we all lost our minds completely, but I wouldn’t say we were depressed. We were elated, we were completely mad.”

I said that I didn’t exactly understand, as losing your mind in the Antarctic darkness sounded depressing to me. I couldn’t imagine wanting to have sex with one person in that condition, let alone two.

“The thing about being anywhere new,” the poet said, “is that you begin to think of yourself as a different person—yes?—with different liberties and allowances. In a foreign country, for example, you may begin to wear more jewelry, you may style your hair differently, you drink a half-carafe of wine before 11:00 a.m.”

I said yes, though my fiancé often drank a half-carafe of wine before 11:00 a.m., and didn’t need to go on vacation to do it.

“When we first arrived in Antarctica, it was the end of the polar summer and there was still a sense of—how do I say this? Of etiquette. There were still certain boundaries that could not be crossed, certain ways in which we couldn’t betray our social contracts, even at the end of the earth. Do you know what I mean?”

“I think so,” I said.

“When it went dark,” she said, “there were no boundaries.”

The artists’ colony was in the deep woods. A large gathering hall stood at the center of a clearing, and sprinkled nearby were a handful of simple cabins in which we worked and slept. In the fall, I was told, hunters occasionally tried to hunt on the land; an eminent composer had once felt a bullet clip his fur hat as he strode through the trees.

A few months before my arrival at the colony, I got engaged to a geologist. He was an ambitious alcoholic and I was neither ambitious nor an alcoholic, and the fact that our asynchronies were a problem was only now becoming clear to us both. Just before I left, he had received a job offer from UCLA, and for the first time in our relationship a sudden and profound dread had gripped me. I realized that I’d been waiting for the moment in which the messy, chaotic preamble would end and our real lives would begin—it had not occurred to me that this was our real life.

The poet and I sat side by side each night at dinner, we shared nightcaps on the overstuffed leather couches facing the fireplace, but never once did she ask me about the thin gold band on my left hand. She wore gold bands on all her fingers, thin ones and thick ones, and her hands caught the light as she moved.

The point of the essay had begun to escape me; its theme was either the mothlike fragility of humans or the humanoid qualities of moths.

I knew that I should think about my engagement, the pending move to California, the question of what our married life would require of me. I tried to picture desert heat and tawny sunlight, the river of cars on the freeway. When I could not make myself do that, I tried to think about the piece I had come here to write—an essay that braided nebulous personal narrative with the detailed research I had done on an endangered species of moth. The point of the essay had begun to escape me; its theme was either the mothlike fragility of humans or the humanoid qualities of moths. The whole thing was starting to seem embarrassing.

And so most days, alone in my cabin, I found myself thinking about the poet instead. She was not traditionally beautiful, but she had captured my attention completely: her large dark eyes, her long eyelashes, her blunt and efficient hands, which could chop wood as well as they could arrange a line of words. She wore delicate silk shirts half-tucked into thrift-store jeans; her cologne was so subtle you had to lean in close for that soft amber note.

Brushing my hair in the morning, I began to let it fall in my eyes the way hers did. I copied the gestures I had seen her use—the way she smiled with just half her mouth, the way she flicked the loose joints of her wrists from time to time. I did not own any silk shirts but I...