Andrea Barrett - Voyage of the Narwhal

“I need to stay put,” Copernicus continued. “I need to work. It’s wonderful that you’re going, though. And not just because of what you’re doing for Tom. It will help the book.”

“Will it?” Erasmus asked. He’d almost grown resigned to the idea that he couldn’t finish it before he left. Alexandra’s drawings were nearly complete, strong and accurate; the paintings were like windows onto the world he’d once glimpsed and he’d be happy with whatever number Copernicus finished. But the text itself was missing something. As he thought this Alexandra, so quiet while they talked, rose and slipped out the back door and into the sheltering trees.

“People live there, along with the plants and animals,” Copernicus said. “If you could bring their way of life into the narrative…”

Erasmus wrote the firm in New London, letting the captain know he’d need only two berths; while he waited for his sailing date he packed and made lists and mused over Copernicus’s advice. Carl Linnaeus, their father had said, proposed a separate species of man, possessed of a tail and inhabiting the antarctic regions. Erasmus had seen for himself that no one, tailless or otherwise, lived near the South Pole. Beyond the north wind live the Hyperboreans. Those he’d seen, but hadn’t seen clearly. He felt, still, that he’d been right to leave himself out of the story; he was a minor character after all. Not just in Zeke’s story, but in the stories of Ned and Annie and Tom, even Copernicus and Alexandra — he was only the wave that rocked the boat. Yet he’d omitted from his book not just himself, but the Esquimaux.

Observing people wasn’t his business; even on the Exploring Expedition, the work of the linguists and anthropologists had made him uneasy. Instead he’d cultivated a kind of reserve. He had not, like Zeke, invaded an Esquimaux tribe; he hadn’t, as had his dear Dr. Boerhaave, tried to record their way of life before it vanished. Thinking himself virtuous, he’d averted his eyes and studied the plants and animals instead.

But perhaps he’d simply been afraid? As if, by not passing judgment on the people he saw, he’d hoped to avoid having anyone pass judgment on him. The best thing might be never to visit such places — but he had visited, the damage was done; and he had to visit again. When he returned Tom to his family, he might watch everyone. Women, patiently scraping and chewing skins. Men with feet encased in bears’ paws, bent over a seal’s breathing hole; children swooping nets through clouds of dovekies. He might talk to them. Would they talk to him?

ON APRIL 26, late at night, Alexandra walked into his room. Twenty-two buttons down the front of her gray dress; she unfastened the first six, as simply as if she were shedding her dress for her painter’s smock. Erasmus undid the rest. The first sight of her bare shoulders struck him like his first sight of the ice — how could he have forgotten that? He ran his thumb along her collarbones. Never would he forget this. He was leaving soon; she might be staying here or going somewhere new; she hadn’t revealed her plans. Perhaps, as she’d told her family, she might be a teacher. Against her thighs, under her hands, with her tongue touching the base of his neck, Erasmus felt his life pulsing and streaming. Up north, when he was lonely, he could unfold this night against the sky. He wound Alexandra’s hair around his palm and pulled it like a curtain over his eyes. Alexandra thought with surprise: Oh, it was this. This pleasure that bound Lavinia to Zeke, no matter what.

Later that night Erasmus gave Alexandra the little slab of screw-studded leather, which he’d carried all the way from Boothia and failed to share with his first friend. He opened his hand, he released it. She rested the sole on her bare stomach, with the metal points touching her weightlessly. How delicious, the contrast between the cool metal and his warm hand.

“It’s for you,” he said. “Something to remember me by.”

She walked the points up her skin. She’d meant to enter this room weeks ago, as she’d also meant to make, separately, another request. Two different things, one not necessarily linked to the other. But she’d waited too long and now everything was happening at once. If she waited longer, though, she’d lose it all. “Take me with you,” she said. “Instead of Copernicus.”

Erasmus was silent. Once she’d pried him out of his desolation by pretending to need his company at the Academy of Sciences. Not for months had he understood what she’d done. “I’m so glad you’re here,” he said finally. “This — us together like this — I’ve wanted this for a long time. But you don’t have to feel bound by it. I promise I’ll be back. And if you happen to still be free then…”

She sat up impatiently and pressed the scrap of leather back into his hand. “I want to go,” she said. “Don’t you understand? It’s what I’ve always wanted. When you were gone I read Parry’s journals out loud to Lavinia, all the time wishing I could be where you were. And since you returned and we started work on this book… I want to see. I want to travel, I want to see everything.”

A strand of her hair wound down her neck, across her left breast, unfurling over her ribs. Lovely, lovely. He gazed at her, then down at the graying hair on his own chest. “ Look at me ”she said. “I didn’t come here to try to trick you into taking me, or shame you, or anything else. I wanted this, to touch you like this — but that’s something different from wanting to go north.”

She bent her knee, placing his hand above it on the inside of her thigh. “Any terms,” she said. “You choose the terms. If you don’t want us to be… to be together like this, we don’t have to. I’ll go as your assistant, your friend. Anything.”

IN THE ROOM they shared for those last few weeks, Alexandra moved one hand along the curve of Erasmus’s ribs. Next door, she heard Tom rustling in his bed. All the time they’d wasted— they might have made their way to each other months ago, but only when Tom had cracked a channel in Erasmus’s heart could she sail in. Of course she would take care of Tom, she owed him everything. They would marry, they’d agreed, before the ship sailed.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked.

“How slow I am,” he said.

Outside their door Copernicus painted. An extra painting, not one they’d planned — but the story Erasmus had told him months ago, about the underwater world he’d glimpsed when he fell through the ice, had suddenly seized him. He was anxious to finish, so he could begin painting the mountains around him. But for the moment he focused purely on the layer of ice, white on top then darkening to green and gray, lit by rays of sun pouring through a giant crack.

“How slow to make crucial decisions,” Erasmus said. “To sense what’s going on around me. I think how long it took me to understand Zeke, how I almost missed being friends with Dr. Boerhaave, how Ned had to force me to lead the men from the Narwhal. ”

The bottom of the ice was covered by a rich field of algae, on which infant fish and small crustaceans grazed. Three belugas, glowing and pale, occupied the lower left corner; a walrus, hanging vertically with its flippers swaying, was just about to surface. There were schools of capelin and swarms of jellyfish; murres he’d caught flying through the water. Copernicus pushed the stepladder to the right, so he could work on the narwhal whose tapered horn skimmed the walrus’s flippers.

“How I was too late to save Annie,” Erasmus said.

“Zeke moves quickly,” Alexandra said. “Do you want to be like him?” She touched his chest.