
I knew where she lived. I knew where she worked. I hadn’t talked to her in seven years, but that was because I held on to the hope that she would come back to me first. When I went into the city I made a habit of passing through those blocks that housed her residence and her job, walking from one end to the other in the hope I’d see her from a distance, but that was all I did. I didn’t call her. I clung to my hope instead, hope built on a shaky foundation of science.
With love, the scientific literature on the subject reveals that the human brain works according to a series of dependable cycles, ebbs and flows as natural as the current. We were seven months into our first love phase, and Angela Bertram’s endorphins ran out before mine did. I clung, she pulled away. I clung harder, and she walked out on my ass. I wasn’t bitter, this was actually my preferred understanding of events. Another way to look at it is that she grew up poor, and staying in a grad student’s little stinking hovel invoked a future life of pretty much the same. The fact that she left me for a lawyer fits into this theory too well — evolution had hardwired women to be attracted by ambitious, successful providers, as it had predisposed men to physically fit women capable of bearing healthy young. So I gave her this. It was not Angela Bertram’s fault, it was evolutionary reality. She already had my heart, I didn’t have much choice. I didn’t fight her abandonment, because you can’t fight science. Fighting science just makes you pathetic, like spitting in the wind or breathing underwater. The best thing to do is let the wind abate, float to the top. And then breathe.
Science is a glorious thing. Angela divorced after seven years, a number predicted by her endorphin cycle. Even though I heard for years that the marriage was in trouble I stayed away because research shows that the vast majority of relationships that begin as extramarital affairs end within a year after the partner has left her or his spouse, and my love for her was undying. Angela Bertram had been separated completely from the bastard for almost two months. I’d heard something about infidelity, but made sure not to torture myself with specifics. I’d stayed away because rebound relationships initiated in the first three months after the conclusion of a long-term relationship had a dismal success rate. I had been planning on contacting her in three weeks, on the exact date of the third month of her final separation, before fate had changed the calendar. If I was a religious man, I would have seen the hand of God. Instead, I saw the wonders of the scientific method and the fruits of self-discipline. There had been other women in my life, there was sex and sometimes romance and much flirtation. But no love. No one had gotten to my heart because my chest was hollow. Whatever was once there, Angela Bertram now possessed it.
She came out of the subway, and she blinked and looked around for a few seconds, orienting herself. Her sense of direction was poor, her eyesight worse. Angela refused to get glasses because she was a little vain and was afraid of falling into a downward spiral of myopia, that the lightest prescription would soon lead to lenses thicker than the Hubble Telescope. She found the street sign, found the direction, and walked toward the restaurant, where I sat by the window. The look when she reached me at the table, the hug that started with the arms and pushed in with the full body behind it, it was everything I’d been waiting for. Always let them be the last to contact you when you split, even when they dump you and say they don’t love you anymore, so that you both know that you are the one who never called them back.
“You look great. You look the same. Like you haven’t changed one bit,” Angela told me, still holding my hand as she took her seat. Another victory on my part. Seven years without increasing your body mass index is a great accomplishment. Especially for a man soon to hit forty. It was the great age, when poor lifestyle choices and bad genes started to show dramatically on the human form. For her, I’d kept myself encased in amber, mind and body. From this position, though, up close, I could see all the ways Angela Bertram had changed over the years of name hyphenation. Her once braided hair was now untwined and ironed. The darkness of her skin banished the thought of wrinkles, though. It still shone like the skin of an orca. Accented now by diamonds that covered most of her earlobes.
“Don’t you ever wish you could go back, make different decisions?” she asked after entrées, a sadness there I planned to rub away. “The divorce has taught me, I’m creative. Even if I’m not doing art anymore, I need to be a creative person. I needed a partner who’s a creative, adventurous person. How did I think I could be content with someone whose idea of life was just raking in the cash from corporate acquisition contracts?”
I knew she’d never be happy in that life. I knew that when we were together. What I didn’t know was how terrified she was of growing old in the same poverty she’d been raised in. This I figured out later. This I deciphered from “I love you, but I can’t live like this. I’m going with David …” And then she probably finished the sentence — maybe she was going with David to the store or on a Caribbean cruise or to the chapel to be wed that very day — but I’ve long since deleted the rest from my memory banks.
“You always knew that. You always knew me.” Angela laughed. And I laughed back because I did and I didn’t hate her for it. She had fear. I had fear. Our demons had just been working at cross-purposes.
“I do know you. That’s why when I heard about this, I knew I had to let you in,” I said and pushed Booker Jaynes’s folder across the table. I’d already sent her the scans, but I felt like the actual papers might serve as a talisman.
“Well, I’m at a crossroads. The marriage, the job even — I can’t work with him anymore. Infidelity will do that,” she said, and I gave a little shrug. Not enough to show my awareness of the irony in her statement. Bitterness was the enemy.
“Well, I’ll have to look further, but I’m intrigued, that I can say now. I know I wouldn’t have a problem getting a second lawyer to join as well.” She smiled, took a sip of the white I’d picked for the occasion. A pinot — a refined version of the rotgut I used to lug for her up to my fourth-floor walk-up. It worked. We made it all the way to dessert, talking about the lost days we once had together. She listened to my Pym ravings. She was fascinated. We kept talking in front of the bistro as the lights went off inside the place.
“Look, Chris, I could use a capital investment like this right now. Hell, I need adventure too. But, I’ll tell you, if I do this, if I do the crazy thing of coming all the way down to Antarctica, it won’t be about me,” Angela admitted to me, walking to her subway. “There’s someone I know who this would be even more important to. Someone who this would be a dream come true for. A special guy who needs this. Someone very important to me.”
I didn’t go for the kiss. At the gate, I shook her hand and received another hug for my restraint. Excusing myself before I burst, I floated back home. Technically I took the train, but I felt like I could have glided on the tracks and made it there just the same. No present worry, not a thought that wasn’t future or past. All my patience, my self-control, then victory. I promised myself I wouldn’t contact her again until we were below the equator. I wasn’t going to crowd her, scare her off. Give her any reason to second-guess the odyssey. I turned her over to Booker Jaynes, and I would just see her down there. See her on the ice. Wait for the opportunity to be cooped up with Angela Bertram on an utterly isolated Antarctic base. Let the inevitable take place.
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