Happy Family (8 page)

M
onday morning is the cruelest time for undergraduates, especially when they're sitting in the dark, and she suddenly knows she's lost them. Cheri Matzner stands in front of a projector while the ancient fertility idols and horned goddesses shown in the slides flow over her like a traveling tattoo. She can practically hear her students' heads dropping onto their desks. She can't wait to be free of these baby birds with their mouths and laptops open, partially because it's her last semester teaching and partially because her dine-and-drive breakfast of fried dough and coffee is repeating itself in new and unusual ways. Where did she put all those antacids she just bought? Not in her pockets where she needs them. Cheri always said that forgetfulness was for amateurs and the elderly; if she lost track of something, it was on purpose. She'd blame it on the hamster wheel of fertility treatments she's been stuck on for the past year but this is an off-month. A break from hormones, injections, and, thanks to the threadbare state of her marriage, sex.

The filled lecture hall confirms her worst fear: she's become an academic, someone who tells people the answer is in books; worse still, in books written in dead languages. She's a long way from who she was when she came to the University of Chicago six years ago as the rebel in Ancient Near Eastern Studies, that radical professor with the tattoos, piercings, and past career as a cop with the NYPD. Blame it on the looming brass glow of tenure or on the erosion from all the loathsome paperwork and departmental service hours, but any idealistic notion she had of shaking up the dusty status quo of academe through teaching undergrads is long gone. But Cheri doesn't like to lose at anything.

“Who's been to a prostitute?” she asks, flicking on the lights. “Has anyone been to a prostitute, used an escort service, Internet hookup? Anyone?” The students look at each other quizzically, wondering if Cheri is serious. Some shift in their seats. “I won't tell your significant other—it's a purely sociological question.” A guy with facial hair like Jesus finally says:

“In Vegas for a cousin's wedding there were hookers.”

“Okay, weddings, good. Anyone else?”

“A kid I knew in junior high got a blow job at his bar mitzvah. His big sister's friend came up to him and, you know, did it. She was in high school so it was a big deal.”

“Did you all line up and watch?” a neighboring girl snaps.

“We were horny boys, what do you think?”

“The point is,” Cheri says, “in both the wedding and the bar mitzvah, there's a ritual. Let's take Riley's example. A bar mitzvah marks a passage into manhood. The initiate receives a sexual favor from his big sister's friend. What do we think of this ritual? Yes, Rachael?”

“The girl was degrading herself; she was probably doing it as a dare, not because she wanted to. It shows how women are brought up thinking they have to worship the phallus and they get nothing in return.”

“Why is everything about degrading women?” Riley says. “The girl was the one with the power. She was older, she approached him—she had the control.”

“Oh, please,” a girl wearing a beanie says. “The girl was a slut.”

“Okay, in about a minute, we've called this girl powerful…a victim…and a slut.” Cheri writes the words on the chalkboard. “Who knows what she would have been called in ancient Sumer?”

Rachael raises her hand. “A sacred prostitute?”

“A priestess. In the third millennium Riley's friend would have gone to the temple where a
qadishtu
—sacred woman—would initiate him sexually. Sexuality wasn't disconnected from religion. It's not until the sixth century that the priestess is thought of as a sacred prostitute and then, as the role of the goddess diminished, a harlot.”

“Finally, we're back to prostitutes…”

“Riley, since you're eager—define
prostitute
. As we know it today.”

“A prostitute has sex for money and it's illegal, except, I think, in Vegas. Although there are other ways to prostitute yourself, for power or grades, for example.”

“Let's say, ‘to offer sexual intercourse for money.' From a Judeo-Christian perspective, the holy woman becomes a prostitute, the powerful woman a slut. When we use the word
virtue
—the virtue of a woman—it's immediately linked to virginity. But imposing one concept of virtue on another isn't what we're supposed to do in a democratic society—that would be like having a national religion, right? So how we define words is affected by the prevailing point of view.” She calls on a reedy kid who has had his hand up for a while.

“It comes down to what's moral. That's not something that shifts based on the times. I'm Catholic and I believe there is something wrong with prostitution. Back then
and
now.”

“Mesopotamian families didn't have the structure and assumed relationships of Western society. You need to put your judgments and personal beliefs aside—”

“But it's not a personal belief—the Old Testament makes it very clear that being a prostitute is forbidden. A prostitute is someone's daughter. That's about family structure and values.” Cheri feels increasingly dyspeptic—is it the kid, the lack of antacids, both?

“As I was saying, this class is not about a literal or religious interpretation of the Bible. If you're interested in that, take a course in the divinity school.” Cheri moves behind her lectern to get the class back on track. “In the Abraham cycle—the original dysfunctional family story—we have polygamy, concubines, surrogacy. All legal in Mesopotamian law. Hagar was like the sacred prostitute, performing a vital function. In a tribal culture it was a numbers game; the more wives and concubines a man had, the more chances for children. The bigger the tribe, the greater chance of survival and nation building. Your next paper will be on Abraham's sons Isaac and Ishmael. Examine their two paths. Do you stay at home and inherit your father's kingdom, where his shadow looms long, like Isaac did? Or, like Ishmael, do you heed the call, either by circumstance or by choice, and leave home and become, like your father, a builder of your own nation?”

She can't make a clean exit. A few students lurk around the lectern after class, trying to get her attention. There's gifted but unlikable Rachael who wants to talk about Cheri's book, which linked the advent of writing to the decline of the goddess. The Catholic kid, hugging his backpack like someone who never lends his books, and Riley. “My office hours are posted,” she says, walking past Rachael and the backpack kid, but she can't shrug off Riley. “I'm serious about applying to the Near Eastern language program for grad school. I was thinking—”

“Based on how you do this semester, I'll consider writing you a recommendation. Now can I walk in peace?”

“Thanks, but that's not what I wanted to ask you. I heard you're going on leave to work with Professor Samuelson on that new Mesopotamian find? I want to apply to be your research assistant.”

Cheri is surprised undergraduates have heard about Samuelson's project. She certainly hasn't been able to pin down the details. First, there's Bush's “axis of evil” rhetoric and accusations of WMDs, all of which make it impossible for Western archaeologists to collaborate with their counterparts in the museum in Baghdad. But there's also the black hole of McCall Samuelson himself, Cheri's department chair and head of the Oriental Institute. Samuelson has yet to specify for Cheri—a mere mortal scholar—any details of her job description and critical path until they are able to get into Iraq. “Not now,” she barks, and heads up the stairs to her office.

“They say it's a cache of cuneiform tablets, that it could be as important as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Is it true, they could trace back to the Old Testament?” Riley tags after her. “No job would be too small. I'll be your temple prostitute. Not funny?”

In a few seconds she's alone at her desk, popping an antacid. Her office is anarchy. Scholarly books commingle with beach reads stacked randomly in teetering towers. There's a poster for
Rock 'n' Roll High School
signed by the Ramones; one shelf is home to the upper portion of a llama's skull and an aqua hookah worthy of Alice's caterpillar. Her coat is buzzing. She has several messages, most from Cici. Oh, for the freedom of the cell-free days when everyone wasn't available 24/7. Ever since Sol died, five years ago, her mother war-dials her if she doesn't answer right away. Then there's a message from her editor in New York, chirping, “How's that next book coming?” Her first book, an extended version of her doctoral dissertation,
The Rise and Fall of the Goddess: Dicks, Chicks, and Mythological Cliques,
reached what her publisher called the “upper mainstream,” a segment of the population Cheri knew well from Montclair—urbane professionals who thought being open-minded was listening to NPR in their luxury vehicles on their commute to work. How ironic that the people she fled from turned out to be her most receptive audience. In academic circles, her colleagues had denounced it as “populist,” likely because it didn't have enough obscure, dense footnotes, and resented its success. Cheri sits back in her chair as the last message begins to play. It's from McCall Samuelson's secretary, saying he has to cancel the meeting that was scheduled for this afternoon. Again.

It's gray and dreary outside. Hyde Park looks particularly New England-y today, its brick homes and tree branches dusted with weekend snow. Cheri has just enough time to try to track down Samuelson before heading back to the land where twins are made in petri dishes. At thirty-nine, any time off from fertility treatments counts in dog years. Her life has been co-opted by the microscopic of egg and sperm for so long now that she's forgotten what it's like
not
to think about it. She's burned out on more than baby birds, and her career has suffered because of it. She needs to get her head back in the game and would love nothing more than to be in the thrall of something bigger. Piecing together the puzzle of humanity's ancient past is what drew her to Mesopotamian studies in the first place. Teaching was never Cheri's passion. It was research and translation that thrilled and sustained her. Nothing compared to holding a clay tablet in her hands, knowing she would be the first person to read it in thousands of years. Translating known languages was a cakewalk compared to the linguistic detective work of deciphering cuneiform. She's always dreamed of being first in on a new discovery, having her translation become the benchmark for every subsequent generation of scholars. Now that she's part of Samuelson's team translating tablets rumored to be of biblical importance, this kind of lasting contribution is within her grasp. But first, she has to break out of the fog of infertility and pin down Samuelson about her job description.

Cheri walks past a row of Thai restaurants on Fifty-Fifth Street, heading toward the lake. She's heard Samuelson has been meeting with someone from the British Museum but she was supposed to be his primary—and only U.S.—cuneiformist. Her husband's words return to her: “You can't trust someone with two last names. Pace yourself; if you get caught up in every perceived slight, you'll run out of energy for the real heartache.”

From their accidental discovery in 1991 by a Sunni villager digging a ditch near the ancient city of Ur, the Tell Muqayyar tablets have been a tangled web of happenstance and politics. The clay tablets—most in fragments—were no sooner found than separated and dispersed on the black market. Over the years, some were confiscated and returned to Iraq's national museum; others landed in the British Museum. They would have moldered in basements, along with thousands of other undeciphered tablet fragments, were it not for a plot twist. A cuneiform scholar from the British Museum stumbled onto one of the illegal fragments in a London antiquities shop and noted that its seal impression corresponded with a stone cylinder seal on documents he'd recently cataloged. Now it was a tale of two institutes, each with broken pieces of related texts and its own ideas about how to assemble and translate them. Neither could proceed without the other's fragments, so a third party was needed to mediate. Last year, when it looked like Iraq was opening back up, McCall Samuelson, as the United States' most experienced Mesopotamian archaeologist, was tapped to lead an international team of scholars in reconstructing and interpreting the tablets. Rumors swirled that the ancient documents could trace back to Abraham. Proving that the original biblical patriarch was a real historical figure was, indeed, the holy grail of archaeology.

Cuneiform scholarship was a small and rarefied field and one that was not immune to the petty politics and social climbing that was the blood sport of academe. Many of her colleagues were vying for a spot on Samuelson's team, and while Cheri knew Peter Martins—the scholar who had found the fragment at the London antique shop—and knew he'd put in a good word for her, it was both a relief and a triumph when she was named last month to his team. Involvement in a project of such prestige qualified her for the leave of absence she was desperate to take. It also stopped the clock on her tenure review while pretty much guaranteeing she'd receive it upon her return.

Her ears sting from the lake-locked chill and she needs nicotine. She turns her back to the wind, cups her hand, and lights up. Delicious. She tells herself she'll quit when she's pregnant and heads toward a green canvas awning that says
The Woodlawn Tap.
It's an old journalist's hangout, a dump known for its grilled cheese sandwiches and collection of reference books. She steps inside, walks around the horseshoe-shaped room, and spots Samuelson in his usual back booth, reading the
Tribune
and the
Wall Street Journal
in tandem. His back stiffens and he pretends not to see her. A man who functions from the neck up, he has the incongruence of the hands and thick frame of a butcher.