After the meeting, Julia was inspired. “Let’s go back to the room and get to work.”
“I don’t think I have anything to work on yet,” Carmen said, falling a little bit behind Julia’s energized stride.
“I was hoping you would run lines with me,” Julia said.
Some bodies like change better than others. The rest of Bee’s group was sacked out over the three rows of the old Suburban, one of several large and battered vehicles owned by the Consortium for Classical Archaeology. Bee sat straight as a palm, studying the countryside between Izmir and Priene. Now they were close enough to the coast that you could see the Aegean out the right-hand windows.
“Ephesus is a few kilometers to the left,” said Bob Something, a graduate student, who was driving the car. “We’ll spend at least a day there this summer.”
Bridget squinted eastward, remembering the pictures of Ephesus from her archaeology class. The sun had indeed arrived along with her.
“Also Aphrodisias, Miletus, and Halicarnassus. These are some of the best ruins you’ll ever see.”
She was glad she was awake, because otherwise Bob would have had no one to tell this to and she wouldn’t have heard it.
“What about Troy?” she asked, beginning to feel a little breathless. Here she was in this incredible place, farther from home than she’d ever been. There was as much history here in this soil as anywhere on earth.
“Troy is north, up near the Dardanelles. It’s fascinating to read about, but there isn’t as much to look at. Nobody from our group is making that trip, as far as I know.” He had a faded orange alligator shirt and a round face. She thought he must have recently shaved a beard, because his chin and lower cheeks were pale and the rest of his face was pink.
“I read the Iliad in school last semester,” Bridget said. “Most of it.” In addition to her ancient archaeology class, she’d taken Greek literature in translation. She hadn’t realized it at the time, but looking back, she considered it by far her most engrossing academic experience. You couldn’t always know what would matter to you.
When they pulled into the site, Bridget was surprised at how small and basic it was. Two very large tents, several smaller ones, and beyond them, the dusty, roped-off shapes of the excavation. It sat on a high hill overlooking a river plain and, just beyond that, the Aegean.
She left her bags in one of the tents, which had canvas walls over a wooden platform. It held only four cots and some open shelving, but it seemed quite romantic to her. She was nothing if not a veteran of rustic summer venues.
The new arrivals groggily gathered for a welcome meeting, and Bridget exercised the bad habit of looking around and deciding who was the best-looking guy in the room. It was a habit that predated her being a girl with a boyfriend, and she hadn’t entirely managed to eradicate it.
In this case, the room was actually a large, open-sided tent, which would serve as their meeting room, lecture room, and cafeteria. The best view was of the Aegean, but there were a few good faces, too.
“This is a comparatively remote site, folks. The plumbing is rudimentary. We have four latrines and two showers. That’s all. Make friends with your sweat this summer,” said Alison Somebody, associate director, in her not very welcoming welcome. She had a kind of boot-camp mentality, Bridget decided. She was excited about privation.
Well, Bridget could get excited about privation too.
“We’ve got a generator to serve the field laboratory, but the sleeping areas are not wired. I hope nobody brought a hair dryer.”
Bridget laughed, but a couple of women looked uneasy.
It was a small and fairly new dig, Bridget gathered. About thirty people altogether, a mix of university and scientist types and a few civilian volunteers. It was hard to tell, amid all the T-shirts and cargo pants and work shirts and Birken-stocks, the professors from the graduate students, from the college students, from the regular citizens. Most of them were American or Canadian; a few were Turkish.
“There are three parts to this site, and all of us spend some time in each of them. If you are a student and you want credit, you must attend lectures Tuesdays from three to five. We’ll take a total of four trips to other sites. The schedule’s on the board. All trips are mandatory for credit. That’s the school part. That’s it. Otherwise, this is a job and we work as a team. Questions so far?”
Why were organizational types so joyless? Bridget wondered. Who wouldn’t want to see the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus?
It was lucky, in a way, that Brown University was situated in a relatively urban setting and not in a tent, because it was difficult to concentrate with the sea winking at you like that. She began to tune Alison out in favor of her habit. There was one good-looking guy who she guessed was also a college student. He had black curly hair and very dark eyes. He was Middle Eastern, she thought. Maybe Turkish, but she heard him speaking English.
Another one was sort of good-looking. He looked old enough to be a graduate student. He had reddish hair and so much sunscreen on his face it cast a blue tint. That was maybe not so sexy.
“You’re Bridget, right?” Alison asked, startling her from her habit.
“Yes.”
“You’re in mortuary.”
“Okay.”
“What does mortuary mean?” Bridget asked a tall girl named Karina Itabashi on their way to the field lab.
“It means dead people.”
“Oh.”
After lunch Bridget settled in for her first lecture and discovered an interesting thing: The best-looking guy was neither the possible Turk nor the sunscreen-slathered redhead. The best-looking guy was the one standing in front of her, lecturing about artifacts.
“Okay, folks.” The best-looking guy had been holding an object behind his back, and now he presented it to them. “Is this object in my hand a technofact, a sociofact, or an ideofact?” The best-looking guy was looking directly at her, wanting her to answer his question.
“It’s a tomato,” she said.
To his credit he laughed rather than throwing the tomato at her. “You have a point, uh…?”
“Bridget.”
“Bridget. Any other ideas?” Various hands went up.
She’d thought he was a graduate student when she’d first seen him eating a sandwich under an olive tree earlier that day. He didn’t look like he could be thirty. But he’d introduced himself as Professor Peter Haven, so unless he lied, he was one. He taught at Indiana University. She tried to picture Indiana on the map.
At sunset that night after dinner in the big tent, a bunch of people gathered on an embankment on the hilltop to watch the sun go down. Several six-packs of beer were on the ground. Bridget sat next to Karina, who had a beer in her hand.
“Do you want one?” she asked Bridget, gesturing to the supply.
Bridget hesitated, and Karina seemed to read her expression. “There’s no drinking age here, as far as I know.”
Bridget leaned over and took one. She’d been to enough parties over the last year that she’d formed a solid acquaintanceship with beer, if not an actual friendship.
On Karina’s other side, Bridget recognized one of the directors, and she was struck here, as she had been at dinner, by the mixing of the team. The group wasn’t hierarchical, the way school was. Age-wise, it wasn’t nearly as homogeneous. If anything, people assembled more according to the area of the site where they worked than according to age or professional status. She realized how accustomed she was to looking out for authority figures, but here she wasn’t finding any.
“Where are you digging?” she asked a woman who sat down next to her. She recognized her as Maxine from her cabin.
“I’m not. I’m a conservator. I’m working on pottery in the lab. What about you?”
“Mortuary. For starters, at least.”
“Ooh. How’s your stomach?”
“Good, I think.”
She saw Peter Haven at the other end of the group. He was also drinking and
laughing over something. He had a nice way about him.
The sun was down. The moon was up. Maxine lifted her beer bottle and Bridget tapped it with hers. “To mortuary,” Maxine said.
“To pottery,” Bridget added, never having drunk beer with a conservator before. It was good to be an adult. Even the beer tasted better here.
If Leo had looked at her as planned, Lena wouldn’t have had to think about him several times that night, or tried to figure out his last name so she could Google him.