Chapter Six #2
Instead, Kate encouraged Miles to “reach out in the community” to find friends of his own.
This was a common theme in their marriage.
That she had yet to be successful did not dissuade her, nor did Miles’s insistence that he was fine, truly, he had no shortage of human interaction.
And this was true, for he had the remarkable ability to be the person whom the nicotine-stained woman in the grocery line told about her grandchildren, or the X-ray tech regaled about his days on the bantamweight circuit, or the campus shuttle driver lectured on his political beliefs.
Back in California, it was almost impossible for Miles to go to the campus coffee shop without finding himself drawn into conversation with one of the many campus eccentrics, either professors or former professors or people who thought they were professors, settling for the day with stacks of dirty papers and a ragged coffee cup they brought out to make it seem as if they’d bought something to drink.
And he liked them, that was the thing. In the beginning, Kate had remarked on this capacity: to play ball with just about anybody, to elevate the sorriest soul into the ranks of the folkloric, even the heroic. To fall in with anyone, anywhere.
But this didn’t really count as friendship, Kate said, and she had persisted in her mission, even invoking science.
In this case science meant none other than her dear friend Miranda, who, before founding her “Laboratory of Vermont,” had launched her career by studying male loneliness.
Indeed, the first time Miles had laid eyes on Associate Professor Miranda Kim was on her TED Talk, where, dressed in a blue blazer, hair bobbed stylishly, eyes radiating sincerity and sympathy, she paced the stage, while the video cut to her admiring audience, among whom was a famous actress, a great beauty, a vigorous nodder.
Miranda’s thesis was, according to a common Milesian protest, a prime example of the false pretensions of “so-called social science,” which claimed wise insight into commonsensical observations made more eloquently by literature, gussying them up in the kind of statistics that made the speaking circuit salivate.
According to her extensive research, using the “validated” “Kim-Brooks Isolation Index,” she had “discovered” that over time, whereas women found their friendships broaden and deepen, men’s dwindling interactions with others tended mostly to involve shared interests, such that they knew almost nothing about friends with whom they claimed to be close.
Indeed, among her subjects, she had discovered a significant subset (27 percent) who had a KBI of 43 or higher: introverts who, she said, “kept introverting.” The social organ, she liked to say, was not the only one that shriveled with age.
Though Miles in fact had come to like the real Miranda very much, he had originally held a very different opinion about TED Talk Miranda, with her TED Talk headpiece and TED Talk posture and knowing TED Talk smile.
First off, he was doing fine in the other organ department, thank you; he and Kate were doing fine, and if their three-times-in-a-row days were more a fond memory than a regular practice, that was hardly a topic to give a TED Talk on.
But the “shriveled organ of friendship” charge was a different story.
Case in point: the English Department party.
While Kate and her chair had been shedding tears of laughter over some shared intimacy, he’d been stuck in a circle of men who likely knew more about each other’s mowers than their marriages.
Definitely knew more. He wasn’t certain when it had begun to happen, but, looking back, he sensed a moment, sometime in his late twenties, when he had begun to find old friends, good friends, slowly receding, while new acquaintances already had rich, full lives.
Lives that, Kate learned only from the wives, were rich and full in work and family, but not in other friends.
Bless Kate, but back in California, more than once, meeting another woman and learning that both were married to introverts, she’d conspired to get their husbands together.
But I’m not an introvert, thought Miles.
In any case, she was at it again.
—
Kate had met Paloma through Miranda’s friend Farnaz, who, by a twist of fate, had been Kate’s chair Eleanor’s wife Vy’s roommate as an undergraduate, six nodes in the great web of female friendship, which Miles had come to understand held much of the world together.
They had gotten together for a coffee, which had turned into a long walk, during which they discussed their husbands, finding much in common.
Paloma’s husband, Andrei, was also a marooned academic, an arguably even more marooned academic, a postdoc in biochemistry, for whom the college, upon recruiting his wife, had found an adjunct position teaching first-year writing.
But career frustration wasn’t the only thing he and Miles had in common!
He also had a romantic view of country life, which he had eventually embraced, quitting academia and turning his attention to the land.
Andrei, said Kate, had an orchard and a meadow.
Andrei was Russian, or at least Russian by birth.
It was not a stretch to say that he was the closest Miles would get to a Russian peasant.
If they didn’t hit it off as friends, then, at the very least, he’d gain a better understanding of country people and country life.
—
At first Miles resisted the idea of being set up with a lapsed biochemist who had turned away from other humans, but then a week came when Kate had college dinners three nights in a row, and he began to find a kind of loneliness growing within him, which wasn’t helped even after an hour petting Man’s Best Friend.
So he swallowed his pride and texted the number Kate had gotten from Paloma.
He felt he needed an explanation for why he was reaching out to this unfamiliar person, and tried something witty about how their meddlesome wives thought they might get along, but then erased it and wrote that he was writing a chapter about folkloric representation of farmers (“peasants” felt vaguely pejorative in this context) and his wife said Andrei’s wife said that Andrei might be able to help him…
Immediately, Andrei texted, Sure! Come by!, and Miles answered, Great! When? And Andrei: Anytime, I’m always here. If I’m not at the house come find me in the orchard.
Miles felt a little thrill to read this: Look at me!
—he wished to say—writing to a real country person with real apple trees.
He gave it a day, so he didn’t seem too eager, and the next morning spent more time than he wished to admit trying to decide whether he should wear dirty athletic clothing or his jeans, which were brand-new.
He chose the jeans, then went outside and crawled around on the lawn a little bit to break them in.
Then he drove Olive to school, and took the road to Andrei’s house.
It was a glorious October day. Hay bales dotted the fields, and wild apple trees along the road hung heavy with their fruit.
The house was an old Colonial Miles had driven past dozens of times, lacquered with a thick coat of brick-red paint, behind which he could see an orchard rising to a meadow.
He parked at the house and rang the bell, which was answered by a very pretty woman in a neat blouse printed with flowers, her hair heaped upon her head and held in place by what seemed to be a pair of knitting needles.
She was warm and welcoming, saying that she would offer him a coffee but she had just stepped away from a Zoom meeting, that Andrei was out in the fields—she waved her hands as if indicating the Universe—and that Miles should go and find him.
She was so delighted that he came, she said; this really was exciting.
Then someone said something into her earbud, and she smiled at Miles and backed inside the house, waving and smiling again, like a parent who cannot help but linger after dropping off a child at a dance.
This, apparently, was Paloma.
Miles went back along the walkway to where a second path wound around the house, ending at a small patio that looked up onto an orchard of some twenty or thirty trees.
It was gloriously beautiful. Goldenrod and Joe Pye weed flanked neatly mowed paths that ran between the apples, wind ruffled the branches, and fruits of many shades of green and red and yellow hung from the branches.
He found that he was smiling. The troubles of the world seemed distant; he was a guest of the land, of these kind and welcoming people who had left their far-off homes and settled in the same benignant valley where he had come to stay, if briefly.
For a moment, he waited, taking it in, expecting another greeting from a hale farmer, as handsome as his wife was lovely.
But no one appeared, and so he began to walk in the vague direction Paloma had indicated.
As he approached the trees, he saw that each one was guarded by a metal fencing—two fences, actually, one tall, one smaller, closer to the trunk.
Red glistening plastic balls in the shape of apples hung from some of the trees, many of which were painted white on their trunks, some of which were also wrapped in what looked like window screens.
A familiar, cidery tang rose from scattered rotting apples, and here and there were buckets filled with a mysterious green and pungent broth.
He walked. “Andrei?” he called from time to time, but softly, since he didn’t know this man, and it felt like he was calling for Giuseppe.
At last, at the very top row, a little out of breath, he stopped to look down, to take in the view, of the home, the trees, the valley, and that was when he saw the pair of legs emerging from thick cover beneath a tree.