Hannah is an anti-historian. That started when she couldn’t master history in school; she who aced elementary and junior high classes without doing any homework couldn’t pull a B on a history quiz. She read and reread fiction at the rate of four to six books a week, but she couldn’t get through a page of history text. She had an astounding memory for details, with a special knack for numbers like phone, license plate and Social Security, but she couldn’t remember when Watterloo happened, or the date the Constitution was signed.  She just didn’t “get” history.

So she went around it. She did the minimum necessary to complete required courses, and avoided the field whenever she had a choice. She found that avoidance didn’t limit her. She had a fine life without a history aptitude. Over time, Hannah embraced the conclusion that history wasn’t important. If it were, she reasoned, then she would feel the lack of it in her own life; since she felt no lack, there must be no lack.

She found an analogy to support that conclusion. Her own history had been so happy that she remembered its unhappiness. She had been such a sun-and-moon to her first-generation New York Jewish parents that she remembers feeling irritated about their restrictions on her privacy and power. Hannah maintains that childhood is a hideous and barbaric experience and isn’t surprised that no one outgrows it. By contrast, her friends came from such dysfunctional backgrounds that they all romanticized or anesthetized their childhoods. James, for example, with his phenomenal memory for minutia, can’t recall details about his youth. Or Nora, her oldest friend, now tells stories about her early Christmases that Hannah, who was there, knows to be embellished to the point of fabrication.

Hannah figures that personal histories are just microcosmic cultural histories. And she knows that her fellows aren’t remembering their personal histories with accuracy. She analogizes that cultural history isn’t accurate either. She doesn’t disagree that those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it. Instead, she thinks we’re all doomed to repeat it because we can’t learn it, at least not the way it’s taught.

“The optimist thinks we live in the best of all possible worlds,” Hannah recollects as she slides out of her warm bed, “and the pessimist fears he’s correct,” as she shuffles toward the bathroom. “But they both miss the point.” She continues her musing as she uses the toilet and brushes her teeth. “It’s like they assume every turn our culture has made has been the right one. The turn just has to work well enough – it isn’t necessarily the best turn…” She puts her head forward to wash her face, but the sudden pressure in her left sinus cavity causes her to stand straight again. “O-o-o-o-h,” she moans involuntarily. She cups her left cheek in her hand and watches her movement in the mirror. The fever and chills of the last three days have subsided, but the cough persists, the congestion comes and goes, and now she has this sinus pain. She looks at her own pale face in the mirror. Her 49-year old skin is more papery than normal and her shoulder-length auburn waves, usually the pride of her modest looks, hang in limp sweaty snarls against her skull. She takes 400 mg of ibuprofen. Then she takes herself and her misanthropy back to bed.

She props her pillows against the headboard and tries to read. But it’s nearly 9 a.m. and except for the soon-to-subside sinus pain, she feels fairly well. She thinks she’ll get up. She spent most of the last three days in bed. She was feverish enough then to want to drowse there, between down pillows and down comforter, gowned, robed, and socked, with the bedroom TV tuned to the History Channel or the Discovery station. She was ill enough to appreciate James’s experiments in tenderness. She was able to accept her illness with some grace, because late December is the least busy time in the calendar of a civil litigator. She has a trial starting the second week of January, and she wants to work on preparations for it, but there isn’t a better time to stay home. She looks again at the papers she has to review: five years’ worth of corporate minutes and board resolutions that apparently no one ever read before, or the disputants wouldn’t be litigating about issues on which the record says they had always enjoyed unanimity. She looks again at that universal font, toner-printed and photocopied on twenty pound rag bond, embellished with all-cap paragraph openers and embroidered with compound prepositions, and she sets the papers aside. They’re history. They’re inaccurate. They bore her. No sooner does she decide to take a shower, before she has even removed the comforter from her lap, than the cats dart from the bed toward the front door, signaling Buck’s arrival. Hannah would rather talk to Buck than stand in the shower, so she pulls on her sweats and moccasins, and heads for the yard.

“Well hello,” Buck greets her with some surprise. “And who ran you over?” Buck usually makes his weekly gardening stop at around 7 a.m., but the Christmas/New Year holidays have thrown his schedule off. He’s crowding several clients together so he can take some long weekends, and he’s arriving at Hannah’s and James’s place two hours later than usual. He didn’t think she would be there.

“Hi, Starbuck,” Hannah says with a sleepy grin. Buck’s real name is Jay, but he picked up the nickname Starbuck in college, and it was shortened to Buck years ago. He doesn’t much like Starbuck now, because hearing it folks assume he’s named for the Seattle coffee magnates. It’s true Buck loves coffee, but he prefers Peets over Starbucks, and Royal over Peets. His nickname comes from his favorite character in his favorite book. Buck doesn’t look or act like an intellectual, but he reads Moby Dick at least once a year. He also rereads the works of Joseph Conrad, and William Faulkner. He says he likes a book he has to pay attention to; it makes him block out the bleak realities of his life.

Buck also doesn’t look or act gay, but he is. He’s an unkempt, unfastidious, husbandly gay man, who continually surprises Hannah with his attraction to rednecks, his fantasies about big white convicts, his bottoming desires. He’s a remarkable contrast to James, who won’t dirty his fingernails in their garden, can’t repair a home appliance to save his life, balks at tending the fireplace or barbecue, wears close-fitting particular clothes, enunciates with finicky precision, and (at least lately) is quite vigorously heterosexual.