The Last Neanderthal Read online

  Though Caitlin had been sent over, she was not in charge of the project. She took on a role as project manager and handled the logistics. The only conversation on the topic of my leave I had was with her, just before I left for town. Simon was flying in and I wanted to rest so that I could enjoy our visit, but my schedule felt too open-ended. I knew it would be hard for me to make decisions about the next few months with him. I sat across from Caitlin at the picnic table to go over the project timeline. She very deliberately bit her lip when we talked specifically about my schedule. She made it clear that I was in control of it.

  “Just remember that the project is under the jurisdiction of New York laws,” she said. “There is no paid maternity leave.”

  “None?” This caught me by surprise. The lack of conversation had also left me uninformed.

  “The museum made a strategic decision some time ago not to pay for maternity leave. Of course, you are allowed by law to take time off.”

  “Aren’t taking leave and getting paid inextricably linked?” I asked.

  Caitlin didn’t have an answer.

  Simon had been teaching an intensive summer course. He had another week to go, but he kindly offered to fly over one weekend, rent a car, and drive me home to have the baby. He would arrive on Friday and we would drive to London on Sunday, but the thought of leaving the site made me sick with panic. Not only was there the bleak state of my finances to consider, but the dig wasn’t nearly as far along as I’d hoped it would be. New artifacts—bone fragments, pieces of stone tools, char marks—kept coming to the surface. Our progress was painfully and necessarily slow. I had only the skull of my Neanderthal dug out to a depth that I wanted by then. The rest of her body was still to go, and, judging from my initial pass, it looked like there were more artifacts buried around her body, something by her neck and something else by the pelvis. I desperately wanted to be the one to uncover them. The pressure to finish was mounting because rumors about the site were swirling within the paleoarchaeology community. I’d had to fend off a deluge of visit requests.

  Andy dropped me off in Vallon-Pont-d’Arc at the small pied-à-terre that Caitlin had rented to allow for days off, visitors, and overflow. I got there an hour early so I could rest before Simon arrived. I didn’t want to look like my usual mess. The team also had a larger house in town, where many of them slept most nights. It was nicer than the pied-à-terre in some ways, but I felt the need for privacy. It would allow me to focus on Simon, and I didn’t want the others to see how sluggish I’d become when I let my guard down.

  When Simon arrived, I was installed on the daybed in the small main room. He came into the flat without announcing himself, eyes down and looking at his shoes. I’d usually walk to him, put a hand under his chin, and lift his eyes up to mine; it was our established greeting. This time I just sat on the daybed and looked at him. He wore a crumpled linen blazer over a striped shirt with traces of airline coffee dribbled down the front. Hands shoved into the front pockets of his jeans, he gave me a shy glance. He was not reluctant, but he always wanted to make sure that he was welcome. Though we’d been together for five years, he still held a slight formality. I’d come to understand it as a show of respect. I reached out to him to reestablish our link. He came over, shucked off his shoes, and curled up on the daybed with me.

  I laced my fingers through his. Simon was so clean. His hands belonged to someone who didn’t spend his days in the dirt. He raised my hand up to his cheek.

  “These fingernails wouldn’t look out of place on a Neanderthal,” he said. He kissed the tip of each of my chapped fingers, not flinching once. I put my palm to his chest and felt his warmth. The beat of his heart alone was enough to soothe me. I lowered my cheek and rested it there and listened to him breathe.

  It was not only Simon’s kindness that I craved, but the comfort of silence. We stayed curled up for a long while before I finally spoke. “Are you surprised?”

  “To see you sitting still?” he asked. “Yes.”

  “Am I bigger?”

  “Beautifully so.” He knew the precise kind of diplomacy that was required.

  “A lot, yes?” I asked.

  “Well…that is how pregnancy works.”

  “I’m that much bigger?”

  He sighed. “It’s more…you used to look like Rose with a belly. Now you are a belly with Rose attached.”

  “Really?”

  “Like you have been hired to carry a baby bump around.”

  “It’s heavy.”

  “I wish I could take it for you,” he said.

  I first met Simon at the dinner party of a mutual friend, Richard. He had been my lab partner in a brutal organic chemistry course years before. After asking me out one too many times, Richard and I had bonded as firm-and-fast friends. He moved to the U.S. for a while and returned to London to run a successful start-up that helped people find lost relatives. He had a new girlfriend, Nita, whom he wanted me to meet, maybe so he could get my approval, and they were throwing a party. There were two other couples invited, and Simon. Or “Single Simon,” as he referred to himself in a slightly anxious voice when he first shook my hand. It was nice to know that he felt as set up as I did.

  During dinner, one of the other couples started asking me questions about my work. They wanted to know about the digs I’d done and what I’d found. Soon the whole table joined in the conversation. At the time, I was up to my eyeballs in the review of the new science of Neanderthals. I enjoyed holding court while dispelling myths.

  “So they were not hairy?” Nita asked.

  “Not particularly. Their hair wasn’t much of an insulator; it was more for protection from the sun and elements, like ours is. Mind you, they didn’t shave, pluck, or wax.”

  “I imagine them grunting all the time,” she said.

  “No less than Richard, though it’s likely they weren’t as subtle. I talked to an expert in voice recently who thinks they probably spoke at three volumes—loud, louder, and loudest.”

  “They could talk?” Simon turned to me. “Really?”

  I told them that Neanderthals had the FoxP2 gene, which in humans was connected to the development of speech and language, though we needed to learn more about how it functioned for them. “And they had a hyoid bone,” I said, “the anchor for the muscles of the tongue. Given their squat larynx and its position in relation to their heavy frames, their voices were most likely high-pitched.”

  “I can’t blame my grunting on my Neanderthal-like qualities?” quipped Richard.

  “You can blame many of your qualities, ninety percent or more, on the substantial part of human history that our ancestors spent as hunters and gatherers. That’s what your body evolved to do.”

  “But will you ever settle down?” Nita asked me.

  The conversation stopped. Everyone looked from her to me and back again.

  “Sorry?” In that first few seconds of silence, I was sure Nita had been having some ongoing conversation with Richard and had addressed the remark to him.

  “Richard said that you worked all the time and didn’t want to settle down.” Nita tried to rescue the situation. “I don’t mean that I think you hunt for a living. I mean, it’s more about not staying in one place. Not having children…” Her voice trailed off into another uncomfortable silence that followed.

  Under normal circumstances, I would have simply steered the conversation in a different direction. By then I was a single woman well into my thirties. My days were stuffed full of questions about why I wasn’t with a man and why I didn’t have kids. But that night, I was so deep into our conversation about Neanderthals—and my focus on my work tends to be single-minded—that I didn’t realize that she’d just changed the subject. I let the silence hang in the air way too long. She and Richard had apparently talked about me. I hadn’t expected Richard or Nita to understand the demands of a nomadic life or grasp the pressure this must have put on Neanderthal child-rearing. This confused me. I didn’t immediately r
ealize that her point was a much simpler one.

  Simon was much quicker to catch on. “What about me?” I heard him say. “Am I going to have children?”

  “I don’t know.” Richard’s eyes darted from me to him with some relief. “Are you?”

  “Well, Richard, I appreciate your concern. I would really like to, but I just haven’t met the right person yet.”

  “I’m sure you will.” Richard took a big gulp of wine.

  “I worry that I’m getting on in years, that’s all,” said Simon.

  “Perfect time for dessert,” said Nita, standing and starting to collect the plates in an effort to shift the conversation.

  Simon got up to help. My first impression of him remains the most enduring: he is a flexible thinker in a world that is not, and he’s on the edge of defiant. He came over to retrieve my plate, and as he did, he turned his head toward me, crossed his eyes, and stuck out his tongue so that only I could see.

  Now, on the daybed, Simon shifted around to look at my swollen feet and immediately saw something he could do. He pressed his palm on the soles, one at a time. My skin was puffy and hot to the touch. Gently, he rubbed my sore calves. He moved upward and eased into rubbing my back and my breasts.

  We tried a few positions before sex felt possible. We were usually fairly seamless in reading each other’s needs, but this time required a fair amount of conversation, giggling, and adjustment. We ended up making it work with Simon crouched over me as I lay back with my legs to the side. It must have felt like making love to a hot-water bottle for him, but he’s never been picky. Between us, there was more laughing than pure pleasure. But this was also a form of release.

  Afterward, Simon made me the best grilled cheese sandwich I had ever eaten. And he’d thought to bring a bottle of the kind of ketchup that I loved most; this particular brand was a delicacy that could be hard to find in rural France. The moment I clapped eyes on the bottle, I admit that I started to wrestle with my conscience. When I brought the ketchup back to camp, would I tell Andy that I had it or would I follow my instinct and hoard? My usual way was to share, but I could barely predict my own actions anymore.

  As I finished eating, Simon got an uncomfortable look on his face. “I have news,” he said.

  “Good news?”

  He cleared his throat and paused. “From the university.”

  “About your courses for September?”

  “Yes.”

  There was little noise outside the flat: the angry groan of a moped in the distance, the creak of a clothesline being pulled down the cobblestoned lane, a slight breeze rattling through the trees. The stone construction of the building meant that the low, huddled windows kept it cool inside. Lavender grew in pots on the porch and the heavy smell wafted in. I usually loved the scent. In fact, the lavender was a large part of what had prompted me to approve the flat, even though it was cramped and had little storage. But just then, as I waited for Simon to speak, I regretted the lavender. The heavy stench of it pressed down on my chest and blotted out everything else. If I’d had the energy to move, I would have shut the porch door.

  “They don’t have courses for me this year,” said Simon.

  “Not one?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.”

  For the previous two years, Simon had taught as an adjunct at the London School of Economics, and that’s where he was currently teaching the intensive summer course. It was something he’d taken on after giving up his tenure-track position at Bristol. We had decided to make changes in our lives so that we could spend more time together. With my schedule, we agreed that we needed to be in the same city at least some of the time. His specialty was English, which wasn’t ideal for a lecturer at the LSE. It mostly meant taking on students who came from abroad and helping them function in a business setting. He preferred teaching more esoteric topics, anything from writing techniques used by Igbo authors who were raised in the oral tradition to the study of hyperrealism in Margaret Atwood’s speculative fiction as a tool for social critique.

  We both knew that when it came to our income, Simon teaching undesirable courses was far better than his teaching none. A heat came to my face. I turned toward the wall and experienced a sensation with a detached wonder: Was I really going to cry? I could feel small hairs rise on my neck. I clenched my hands tight. I’d weathered many things in my life, and my usual reaction to getting hit by bad news was to dust myself off and work harder. But at the moment, I could barely get out of the daybed unassisted.

  I’d always managed to make enough money to get by. I had turned down a tenure-track position, a decision Simon had supported. I wanted to be able to explore and follow my interests, not be forced to adhere to strict publishing and teaching schedules with the occasional sabbatical. I would never understand how a paleoarchaeologist could spend more time in a lab or classroom than out in the elements. Our subjects didn’t live in test tubes. I gained insight about how people might have lived some forty thousand years ago from being outside, as they were. The problem was that while a patched-together income had once been fine for us, it suddenly became hard when living in London.

  The museum grant money was generous enough, but it went into the project, not my pockets. When working on a site, I didn’t have time to take on the lucrative speaking gigs or court-witness contracts interpreting burial sites that kept some of my colleagues going. And the economics of living in London had radically changed. I had been quite comfortable for a while, but now London had been swept into the swift current of a global economy. In a quick few years, living in the city had become viable only for bankers, barristers, and foreign investors. Academic salaries and grants had stalled or, in some cases, been cut altogether. My non-tenured colleagues and I were often told by the administrators in our department that we should feel grateful that we hadn’t yet been axed. “Look at the sponsors of the business school,” they said. “Let’s try to imagine how archaeology might pay its own way.”

  While still on salary at Bristol, Simon had bought a modest two-bedroom flat in Islington as an investment. Because I made more money than him at the time he quit, I said that I’d cover the mortgage on the flat so that we could move in. It was partly to show that I could agree to a nest in London, though to be honest, I thought of it more along the lines of a base camp. It was the one place we could imagine both of us finding work and funding, and it had good access for travel. But many of our colleagues were migrating out of London in response to the economic pressures. Our mortgage was enormous by any standard. Like people in New York or Sydney or Vancouver, we lived hand to mouth no matter how much we tried to cut back and pare down. Keeping a roof over our heads took up much of my pay. We needed Simon’s income to eat.

  Now I took a deep breath, an increasingly difficult thing to do. The baby was squashing part of the space formerly used by my lungs.

  “Are you okay?” asked Simon gently.

  “Yes.” I tried to smile, but I couldn’t look at him. “I’m more worried about you. If you aren’t teaching, how will we keep you entertained?”

  He let out a nervous laugh of relief at my willingness to make light of the situation. But the tone of my voice masked the blackness that spread in my mind.

  I had an urge to run. That was how I was accustomed to burning off stress. A hard run for an hour always set me straight and helped calm the flighty feeling I often got in my chest. But with the baby, I was a huge lump. The adrenaline had nowhere to go. It only made my heart beat harder. Could Simon hear it?

  I stood up and walked stiffly around the room. “Just need a stretch.”

  Simon watched me closely. When my heart slowed enough that I thought the thumps were no longer audible, I leaned over and gave him a dry kiss on the cheek. “We’ll be fine.”

  “If I’m around the university and keep showing my face, I’ll pick something up.”

  “That’s great.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “I know.”


  A new feeling settled on me, mixing with the dense scent of lavender. My face and neck suddenly felt red and irritated. Did I have an allergy? And what was Simon’s best? Before, there hadn’t been a moment when I doubted that I could provide for us. He had said the same. But now that I couldn’t was his best enough? I hated myself for thinking this, but I couldn’t push the thought away.

  I looked around the small flat and tried not to claw off my own skin. The tiny galley kitchen was crammed into the corner. There was one closetlike bedroom in the back, and the main room had space for only a small dining-room table and the daybed. The flat was on the second floor of a former stable, above a garage that held an ancient, dusty Peugeot. I went over to shut the door to the small porch, hoping for relief.

  Simon had put his bag on one side and his running shoes on the other. To shut the double doors, I had to move both, an awkward reach down, all in the face of that ghastly lavender. My tool belt had fallen off its hook on the wall, and it dragged along the floor as I tried to wedge the doors shut. My prized trowel fell out of one of the pockets. I tried to find a place to hang the belt, but my hard hat was on one hook, and someone who had stayed in the flat the week before had left a windbreaker on the other. It was all too much. There was nowhere to put the clutter. This was the problem with France—no storage. This continent as a whole, with its narrow buildings and reluctance to bash things down and start again, was the problem. I’d made a mistake in coming here. I should have stayed in Canada or moved to the U.S. If nothing else, I’d have had a big closet. Where the risk of moving and learning new things had once felt exciting, it now overwhelmed me. And the damn lavender still stank. My breathing came hard again, my lungs fighting the baby for space. Hand to chest, I knew I had to get out.