Fresh Complaint by Jeffrey Eugenides

Author:Jeffrey Eugenides
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

2013

THE ORACULAR VULVA

Skulls make better pillows than you’d think. Dr. Peter Luce (the famous sexologist) rests his cheek on the varnished parietal of a Dawat ancestor, he’s not sure whose. The skull tips back and forth, jawbone to chin, as Luce himself is gently rocked by the boy on the next skull over, rubbing his feet against Luce’s back. The pandanus mat feels scratchy against his bare legs.

It’s the middle of the night, the time when, for some reason, all the yammering jungle creatures shut up for a minute. Luce’s specialty isn’t zoology. He’s paid scant attention to the local fauna since coming here. He hasn’t told anybody on the team, but he’s phobic about snakes and so hasn’t wandered too far from the village. When the others go off to hunt boar or chop sago, Luce stays in to brood on his situation. (Specifically, his ruined career, but there are other complaints.) Only one brave, drunken night, going to pee, did he venture away from the longhouses to stand in the dense vegetation for roughly thirty-five seconds before getting creeped out and hurrying back. He doesn’t know what goes on in the jungle and he doesn’t care. All he knows is that every night at sundown the monkeys and birds start screaming and then, about 1 p.m. New York time—to which his luminous wristwatch is still faithfully set—they stop. It gets perfectly quiet. So quiet that Luce wakes up. Or sort of wakes up. His eyes are open now, at least he thinks they are. Not that it makes any difference. This is the jungle during the new moon. The darkness is total. Luce holds his hands in front of his face, palm to nose, unable to see it. He shifts his cheek on the skull, causing the boy to stop rubbing momentarily and let out a soft, submissive cry.

Wetly, like a vapor—he’s definitely awake now—the jungle invades his nostrils. He’s never smelled anything like it before. It’s like mud and feces mixed with armpit and worm, though that doesn’t quite cover it. There’s also the scent of wild pig, the cheesy whiff of six-foot orchids, and the corpse breath of carnivorous flytraps. All around the village, from the swampy ground up to the tops of trees, animals are eating each other and digesting with open, burping mouths.

Evolution has no consistent game plan. While famous for remaining true to certain elegant forms (Dr. Luce likes to point out, for instance, the structural similarity between mussels and the female genitalia), it can also, on a whim, improvise. That’s what evolution is: a scattershot of possibilities, proceeding not by successive improvements but just by changes, some good, some bad, none thought out beforehand. The marketplace—that is, the world—decides. So that here, on the Casuarina Coast, the flowers have evolved traits that Luce, a Connecticut boy, doesn’t associate with flowers, though botany isn’t his specialty either. He thought flowers were supposed to smell nice. To attract bees. Here it’s something different. The few lurid blooms he’s unwisely stuck his snout into have smelled pretty much like death.

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