“What are you thinking about?” she asked from beneath the sheets.
“Happiness.”
Afterward, Lydia slipped out of the bed for the bathroom and sooner than expected reemerged in a black dress—“Zip me”—and he tried to match her in his casual navy blue suit with brown shoes.
They walked three blocks toward the restaurant and decided, thanks to her new shoes that chafed her heels, to flag down a cab. Lydia spoke the French she had learned during her doctorate as a research and credit requirement. Her accent was imperfect and her phrases dated. The Quebecois were charmed that an American would even try.
The restaurant was larger than Marcus had expected. It was a converted industrial space. The ceilings were vaulted and the ash pillars were concrete and square. Interspersed were rich fabrics of bold and geometric design that contrasted with the polished steel surfaces. The bartender was a beautiful brunette in a sleeveless black dress that plunged to her sternum. Her face said she was uninterested in her own beauty.
They both ordered the lamb shank.
Lydia selected a Brunello di Montalcino and ordered carpaccio with rocket, parmigiano, and capers for a starter. When it arrived she picked off the capers and used his lemon.
The bread was baked in the kitchen. It was hot on arrival. They ripped the crust and steam rose between them.
Marcus is remembering Montreal from Saranac Lake. The other men have retreated down the coastline a few hundred yards and have started a fire. It is the only one nearby. Marcus watches the smoke rise and the orange light flicker off the still lake. He is focusing on the point where the smoke dissipates and becomes part of the vast nothingness beyond; dissolution but also a unification with the infinite. The boy-men by the fire are scorching marshmallows for s’mores and roasting hot dogs that bounce precariously from the tips of twigs. They are enacting a ritual from childhood that has specific rules and expected outcomes. They are also defying the traditional social order—civilization itself—by making the savory and the sweet simultaneously. Rebellion too is part of the American frontier experience.
Marcus sits against a tree in the darkness. The clouds are matte black to the west. Someone is getting wet somewhere. Maybe someone he knows.
The woods here in the Adirondacks are not unlike home—that place where Sigrid used to follow him around, everywhere, when friends came to his house and they’d all run off into the woods, or go for a swim, or cross-country ski or go sledding. He liked having her around more than he admitted. That stopped when their mother’s cancer came. Sigrid was too young to understand. Five years old. He was almost eleven when it started. It irked him that she didn’t feel what he did. That feeling—that distance—only grew.
“She isn’t very sad,” he’d said to his father on one especially bad morning for his mother.
“No. Not really.”
Sigrid was having a conversation with a stuffed camel. She looked perfectly normal and he wondered which of them was broken.
“That’s because she doesn’t know what love is yet,” he’d said.
His father pressed him closer but neither had more to say.
Astrid was dead in a year. That battle was lost. He had not said the right things. He wanted to say the right things with Lydia. He wanted it at the beginning of their friendship so badly, he was willing to steal the exam and cheat on the test. After their first kiss—more a declaration of intent than an act of passion—Marcus started to obsess. He wanted to understand and be deserving of this smart and pretty and vivacious and driven woman, this woman who read books on Saturday nights. Who liked hiking in the woods. Who could talk for hours about history and ideas. Who was passionate about justice but also forgiving in character. A woman—he soon learned—who knew how to turn a cloth napkin into a chicken and make it sing and dance to if you want my body and you think I’m sexy . . .
The day after the kiss Marcus collected all her publications from the library and set about the task of understanding this part of her mind. With the crooning chicken still fresh in his memory, he was surprised to find her analysis of the American experience to be powerfully pessimistic. Most of the work was targeted to academics in peer-reviewed journals, and he tried to make sense of the citations and scholastic shorthand but he wasn’t able to place the debate and so couldn’t fully understand it. What he did find as a guide to Lydia’s mind was an interview conducted by a student journalist for the school paper. Lydia had had a piece accepted in Daedalus, the journal published by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Barack Obama’s showing in the polls was getting stronger, and the journalist—a nineteen-year-old junior named Darren Farley—wanted to understand why Lydia’s central thesis in the Daedalus article seemed to run counter to the optimistic and popular mood.
DARREN FARLEY: Professor Jones, your central thesis is that America is not so much ignoring racism as much as it’s inherently incapable of addressing it. How can a country be inherently incapable of something?
LYDIA JONES: I don’t recall using that phrase, inherently incapable, but I did say that the primary structuring ideas of American identity—the ones that sustain us as a culture through time—orient us away from dealing with racism, not toward dealing with it. That’s not quite the same thing, because it leaves open the possibility for learning, but for regular people it will feel the same.
DF: Which ones orient us away from it? I
