My Last Continent: A Novel(10)

“I must have missed it.” He doesn’t look at me as he speaks. I watch his fingers on my arm, and I am reminded of the night before, when only Thom and I were here, and Thom had helped me wash my hair. The feel of his hands on my scalp, on my neck, had run through my entire body, tightening into a coil of desire that never fully vanished. But nothing has ever happened between Thom and me, other than unconsummated rituals: As we approach the end of our stays, we begin doing things for each other—he’ll braid my long hair; I’ll rub his feet—because after a while touch becomes necessary.

I pull away. I regard the stranger in my tent: his dark hair, streaked with silver; his sad, heavy eyes; his ringless hands, still outstretched.

“What’s the matter?” he asks.

“Nothing.”

“I was just trying to help.” The tent’s small lamp casts deep shadows under his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I know you don’t want me here.”

Something in his voice softens the knot in my chest. I sigh. “I’m just not a people person, that’s all.”

For the first time, he smiles, barely. “I can see why you come here. Talk about getting away from it all.”

“At least I leave when I’m supposed to,” I say, offering a tiny smile of my own.

He glances down at Thom’s clothing, pulled tight across his body. “So when do I have to leave?” he asks.

“They’ll be here in the morning.”

Then he says, “How’s he doing? The guy who fell?”

It takes me a moment to realize what he’s talking about. “I don’t know,” I confess. “I forgot to ask.”

He leans forward, then whispers, “I know something about him.”

“What’s that?”

“He was messing around with that blond woman,” he says. “The one who was right there when it happened. I saw you talking to her.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw them. They had a rendezvous every night, on the deck, after his wife went to bed. The blonde was traveling with her sister. They even ate lunch together once, the four of them. The wife had no idea.”

“Do you think they planned it?” I ask. “Or did they just meet on the boat?”

“I don’t know.”

I look away, disappointed. “She seemed too young. For him.”

“You didn’t see her hands,” he says. “My wife taught me that. You always know a woman’s age by her hands. She may have had the face of a thirty-five-year-old, but she had the hands of a sixty-year-old.”

“If you’re married, why are you traveling alone?”

He pauses. “Long story.”

“Well, we’ve got all night,” I say.

“She decided not to come,” he says.

“Why?”

“She left, a month ago. She’s living with someone else.”

“Oh.” I don’t know what more to say. Dennis is quiet, and I make another trip to the supply tent, returning with a six-pack of beer. His tired eyes brighten a bit.

He drinks before speaking again. “She was seeing him for a long time,” he says, “but I think it was this trip that set her off. She didn’t want to spend three weeks on a boat with me. Or without him.”

“I’m sorry.” A moment later, I ask, “Do you have kids?”

He nods. “Twin girls, in college. They don’t call home much. I don’t know if she’s told them or not.”

“Why did you decide to come anyway?”

“This trip was for our anniversary.” He turns his head and gives me a cheerless half smile. “Pathetic, isn’t it?”

I roll my beer can between my hands. “How did you lose the ring?”

“The ring?” He looks startled. “It fell off during the landing, I guess.”

“It was thirty degrees today. Weren’t you wearing gloves?”

“I guess I wasn’t.”

I look at him, knowing there is more to the story and that neither of us wants to acknowledge it. And then he lowers his gaze to my arm. “How does it feel?” he asks.

“It’s okay.”

“Let me work on it some more.” He begins to rub my arm again. This time he slips his fingers inside the long sleeve of my shirt, and the sudden heat on my skin seems to heighten my other senses: I hear the murmur of the penguins, feel the wind rippling the tent. At the same time, it’s all drowned out by the feel of his hands.

I lean back and pull him with me until his head hovers just above mine. The lines sculpting his face look deeper in the tent’s shadowy light, and his lazy eyelids lift as if to see me more clearly. He blinks, slowly, languidly, as I imagine he might touch me, and in the next moment he does.

I hear a pair of gentoos reunite outside, their rattling voices rising above the night’s ambient sound. Inside, Dennis and I move under and around our clothing, our own voices muted, whispered, breathless, and in the sudden humid heat of the tent we’ve recognized each other in the same way, by instinct, and, as with the birds, it’s all we know.



DURING THE ANTARCTIC night, tens of thousands of male emperors huddle together through months of total darkness, in temperatures reaching seventy degrees below zero, as they incubate their eggs. By the time the females return to the colony, four months after they left, the males have lost half their body weight and are near starvation. Yet they wait. It’s what they’re programmed to do.