The autumn sun streamed through the café window, cutting a path of light across the booth. Outside, in the brick courtyard, a giant saguaro cactus with two arms—one bent up in a right angle, the other down—framed my view of the street, with its late morning trickle of students walking and biking to campus. I looked at Steve, my PhD advisor, and forced a smile. He avoided my eyes and glanced around the shop, empty now except for a couple of undergraduates hunched over laptops at a nearby table. One customer was at the register, her backpack emblazoned with a golden bobcat, the university mascot. I gripped my mug with both hands and blew on the lukewarm coffee. He turned to me, and in a tone edged with impatience, said, "What's up?"​​​

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He reminded me of a befuddled British admiral rather than a renowned American anthropologist. Six foot two, with broad shoulders and thick gray hair and mustache, he had a distinguished, even upstanding, air. He seemed to float through our department's hallways in a cloud of theoretical musing, only half seeing anyone passing by. But then, unlike so many faculty who regarded graduate students as something akin to indentured servants—hardly worth a hello nod—he would squirm with discomfort if a student stood in a meeting while he sat, ultimately popping up and dragging a chair over, whether they wanted it or not. He insisted on opening doors for me. Chivalrous.

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When I'd started in the PhD program at age thirty-four, three years ago now, I'd asked Steve if he had grandchildren. "No," he said, surprised, but with a good-natured smile. "But I want to someday."

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It was too late by the time I learned that he'd been only forty-eight then, just fourteen years my senior.

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I'd been the one to suggest we meet here, a short walk from the four-story brick anthropology building, with its adjoining museum full of Navajo rugs, flint spearheads, and African masks. For this conversation, I'd wanted to avoid his cramped office with its hierarchical furniture arrangement, where he loomed over me from behind his desk. A casual coffee, I thought, would help me to remember that there was—or at least might be—a self-confident woman residing somewhere in my five-foot-three frame.

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Trying to sound upbeat, I said, "I've submitted the three grant proposals—Fulbright, Wenner-Gren, and Social Science Research Council. I guess I'll hear sometime in the spring."

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"Great," he said. He'd written the reference letters for my applications, so he was well aware of the process.

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"I thought we could discuss your funding. What amounts were you thinking?"

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At the end of next semester, I would leave for two years to conduct dissertation fieldwork in Borneo, a vast island in Southeast Asia straddling the equator. In-depth immersion in another culture was the hallmark of an anthropology PhD, and I'd decided to study a hunter-gatherer tribe, the Punan, who lived in Borneo's deep mountainous rainforest. There would be no electricity, no internet, and no roads—only rivers to navigate in and out. Tropical disease, flash floods, crocodiles, isolation. I knew I would be pushed to a physical and psychological extreme. But when Steve had suggested I work with the Punan, it had grabbed my imagination. There were few hunter-gatherer cultures left in the world, and with rapid global deforestation, how could I pass up what might be the last moment in history to study a disappearing way of life?

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He'd promised we would collaborate. He studied cultures in Bali, a small island just south of Borneo, and usually spent half the year there. It was the perfect setup. From time to time, he would fly over and trek into my field site to provide intellectual guidance. I, in turn, would travel to Bali to discuss my findings with him—and for moral support. When he was in Tucson, his Balinese colleagues, academic researchers themselves, would come to help me. "You won't be alone. It will be a team effort," he'd assured me.

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He'd also promised to "throw money" at me from his National Science Foundation grants. "I'm Mr. Moneybags," he'd said. It was true. Few anthropologists boasted the amounts of research funding that he did.

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At first, I'd been concerned that I might feel beholden to adapt my research to his ideas, but he'd reassured me. "It's data you'd collect anyway. It's free money."

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Since that conversation, over a year ago now, my project plans had grown in proportion to the resources he'd continued to offer—research assistants, equipment. But lately things had gotten awkward between us—to say the least—when Steve, a married man, had thrown himself at me across the invisible faculty-student divide last semester. I still considered him upstanding, if a bit misguided, but I thought it would be wise to start to nail him down on the specifics of his support, if only to avoid any further confusion.

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He looked out the window, seeming to watch a cactus wren that had alighted on the saguaro's right arm. Turning back to me, he said, "It would be better if you got your own funding."

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"Yes, of course," I said, confused.

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He paused. "I can't fund you."

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I stared at him in disbelief. Steve wouldn't do this. He's not that kind of a man. But his cold eyes told me he would, and he was. I knew it wasn't just the money. He was taking away the whole glittering promise—the Balinese colleagues, the research assistants, the team effort, his on-the-ground intellectual guidance. I would be going to the Borneo rainforest alone.

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The bench beneath me dissolved, and I started to fall. I didn't feel my thirty-seven years, but like a young girl, grasping for something to hold onto.