I stopped with my hand on the doorknob and turned.
“Sit down.”
I slipped into the chair again, wondering how many points this had set me back in Custer’s mind.
“You’ll be on an unusual assignment this first quarter,” he continued.
“Indeed, you’re always pining away about going on location.”
I leaned forward in the chair. Were they starting some new field class during the fall semester? My mind raced through the possible sites:
Kenya, Sudan, the Isles of Scilly. Would I be heading the group, or working with someone else?
“Now, I’m afraid the associate professorship isn’t going to be a possibility this term,” Custer said. “Instead, we’ve recommended you for a sabbatical.”
I tightened my fingers around the armrests of the chair. I hadn’tappliedfor a sabbatical. “If you’ll excuse me, Archibald, I have to say in my own defense that for the past three years—”
“You’ve been exemplary. Yes, I know. We all do. But sometimes”—
he winced here—”sometimes that just isn’t enough.”
Tell me about it, I thought.
“We’ve chosen you to reopen the oldUCLAsite at Olduvai Gorge.
Get it ready for a freshman field expedition,” Custer said, sitting back in his chair.
I set my jaw. They wanted me to be a gofer—to set up for a class I wasn’t worthy enough to teach. It was a job any graduate student could do. It was not what I had worked so hard for, what I had written my dissertation for. It was not what I had planned as a step up on the steady climb of my career. “Surely I’m not the best-trained person for this job,”
I hedged.
Custer shrugged. “You’re the only faculty member who hasn’t been . . . scheduled . . . for classes next semester,” he said.
I listened to the words he spoke, but clearly heard the truth. He was telling me I was the only one who was expendable.
LESSTHANTHIRTY-SIXHOURSLATER, IWASINTANZANIA,SITTINGunder the cool linen shade of a makeshift awning on the tiny piece of Olduvai Gorge thatUCLAhad requisitioned for its field classes. I was still angry at being banished, but I hadn’t argued with Custer. It would have been a mistake. After all, I’d have to come back in ten weeks and beg for a teaching assignment.
I’d tried to convince myself that this little sojourn would be better than I expected. After all, Olduvai Gorge had been Louis Leakey’s first site in East Africa. Maybe I’d hit it big too: discover the missing link, or something else that would set my colleagues on their collective ears and change the current outlook on human evolution. The odds were against it, but I was still young and there were millions of years of history left to unearth.
However, the scouting I’d done in the morning had convinced me that like the other anthropologists who scoured the site for decades after Leakey’s discoveries, I wasn’t going to turn up anything new. I had no idea how I was going to keep myself busy for ten weeks. Setting up the site for the field class meant pinpointing the spots where an excavation would be likely to yield fossils, but it seemed the class could dig in the basement of Fowler Hall and have just as much luck as they would here.
As the sun climbed higher, I walked casually across the site, rummaging in my big straw bag for the book I’d begun to read on the plane. I glanced up, making sure that I was alone before I pulled it out.
Ridiculous. My heart was pounding, as if I were about to be discovered with a gram of cocaine. It was only a dime-store romance novel, my one vice. I didn’t smoke, I rarely drank, I’d never done drugs, but I was completely addicted to those stupid books on whose covers an overripe woman lounged in the arms of a drifter. I was so embarrassed that I wrapped them in brown parcel paper, like I used to do with textbooks in elementary school. I would read them on public buses and on the benches outside atUCLA, pretending they were anthropological treatises or Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction.
I couldn’t help myself. I knew the psychological explanation for this had something to do with what was lacking in my own life, but I told myself it didn’t matter. I had started a few years ago after my roommate, Ophelia, had posed for a book cover in the arms of some glorious man.
I had read that first paperback, and then I couldn’t stop. There was solace in knowing that never in any tribe or any ancient race had people existed like this. It made me feel, well, more normal.
But that didn’t keep me from hoping, I suppose. Still, if a romance novel was going to spring to life, it would be with someone like Ophelia in its title role. She was beautiful and statuesque and sexy—not simple and practical, like me. It would have been nice to be the kind of woman for whom wars were started, but I was not holding my breath. To date, no knight was wearing my colors, no adventurers had come to find me across time and distance. Then again, I lived by choice in L.A., where beautiful women were the norm, not the exception. On the other hand, in these books there was no plastic surgery, no concealing cosmetics, no step aerobics classes. I thought of Helen of Troy, of Petrarch’s Laura, and I wondered if they really had looked so different from me.
“Excuse me,” a voice said. “Your tent is in my viewfinder.”
I started at the unfamiliar sound and instinctively buried the paperback in the soft red sand. My head snapped up to see two men, their faces silhouetted against the high sun. “Pardon me?” I said, coming to my feet.
The men were clearly not natives; their foreheads were sunburnt and peeling and they hadn’t the good sense to be wearing hats. “My viewfinder,” the taller man said. “You’re going to have to move.”
I bristled. “I’m afraid you’re wrong,” I said. “This site belongs to the University of California.”
