Falling From Grace Read Online Free PDF Page B

tenure-track professorship. Ten years since I’d last felt a warm body next to mine.
    I longed to slide a finger through the brown mop of hair Paul seldom combed, but I didn’t dare, his behaviour toward me invited nothing more than friendship. Last fall, he invited a new girlfriend, Tessa, along on one of our research trips. A perfect match for him, up for anything, amiable, polite. She loved to climb. Tessa didn’t bat an eye when she met me. I couldn’t stand her. The nights were torture. Paul moved their tent a discrete distance away, but not far enough. When I couldn’t stand the grunts and moans, the sighs and murmurs any longer, I sat by the creek where the sound of flowing water drowned out their lovemaking. Paul always apologized in the morning. “Did we make too much noise, Faye?” he’d ask with all sincerity. I finally admitted to hearing them. On our next trip into the field, Paul strung two climber’s hammocks close together high up in the trees on the edge of the camp. He and Tessa ascended at dusk and didn’t descend until well after sunrise the next day. It was quiet, but I spent a sleepless night imagining what it must be like to make love in the canopy. I caved to Grace’s pressure and signed up for an internet dating service for persons of short stature. In a week I had my first email from Bryan, a geologist from Saskatchewan. His most recent message had gone on far too long about his dog. Not promising. I rolled onto my back, burrowed into my sleeping bag, and listened to the rain on the fly until the sound lulled me to sleep.
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    The rain continued through the morning. No climbing possible. Paul delivered oatmeal, powdered milk, and tea to Mary in the tent about nine. Rainbow, dressed in a green garbage bag with holes torn out for her head and arms, and a wide-brimmed rain hat of Paul’s, crouched by the edge of the stream and searched the pools for water walkers and frogs. After a frustrating hour spent adjusting the ropes supporting the kitchen shelter, I drove twenty minutes along the road to a spot where I had discovered I could get half-decent cell phone reception. The one tolerable use for a clear-cut. I organized my portable office—laptop wired to the cell phone—and turned on the system. It was a decent day for reception. A decent day meant rain. I sent a pointed message to Roger. Are you cutting in the upper valley? My inbox held three new messages: one from the biology department with a list of questions about my fall courses, one from Grace reminding me to send Patrick a birthday card, and one from Bryan with a lengthy description of an extremely rare rock he’d discovered. I’m thinking of coming out that way and was hoping we could meet . I resisted telling him the possibility was rarer than his rock; instead I thanked him for the photos of his dog, Mercy, attached to a previous email. At least Mercy was a living, breathing being. I’m not much of a one for dogs myself. I wrote . They can’t climb trees, although our neurotic border collie of my childhood used to run up the trunk of the apple tree in the yard and hang by its jaw from the lowest limb. I went on to say that we were discovering rare things too, dozens, possibly hundreds of new species unique to the canopy. We used to think temperate rainforests contained less biodiversity than tropical rainforest. No longer true. Bugs rule!
    I signed the email F.P., then paused, deleted the impersonal initials, and typed simply, Faye.
    The rain quit on my way back to camp where I found lunch ready, Paul eager to get to work, the sun filtering through the ragged fingers of mist rising off the soggy earth. We ate lunch in the sunshine, and Mary hung Cedar’s clean diaper on a tarp line to dry along with Rainbow’s wet socks. We cleaned up, organized our climbing gear and some snacks, and strung our food bags from a limb too high for bears. Rainbow