You have to lose them. You understand that you have to lose them as you maniacally zoom through the stoplights, peeling left and right all over DC, but the paparazzi are good, they must take, like, driving lessons or something, and someone’s even called the police, because sirens: in the distance, you hear them coming and they are coming for you, and holy hell, could this look worse?
This is it, you are thinking, this is fucking it, you are fucking fucked, and so it goes for several minutes until, by god, a miracle:
When you turn onto Constitution Ave., enter the goddamn President of the United States and his motorcade.
You are not usually a fan of the president, a fifty-nine-year-old Democrat from Ohio who, in a recent cabinet meeting, personally praised Nancy Fucking Beavers for her tenacity over some minor family-leave legislation, which she somehow got passed as some bullshit thing called a “citizen advocate”—but man oh man, are you a fan now: the president’s collection of black Chevy Tahoes is crawling down Constitution like a parade of great beetles, and the white trucks of the paparazzi are, like, totally blocked by security, they are stopped right away by the cops on the street, but you? The cops wave you right by! And how remarkably easy is it for you to drive past them—in a gutsy move, you give them a wave—disappearing into the president’s fleet, and just like that, you’re invisible, you have managed to confuse everyone. It’s like no one can tell whose Tahoe is whose, and you have absolutely zero compunction about pretending for one blissful moment that you are the president, which you do, because there are people outside, people on the sidewalk, cheering and jeering, and in their hands they hold the requisite colorful signage, and it’s all protesting the usual fare, none of it you read—but just as you break, hanging an unexpected sharp right onto the 9th Street Expressway, which will carry you around the Smithsonian, into a tunnel that goes under the Mall, you observe a little girl in pigtails sitting on the shoulders of her father.
She can’t be more than five. High in the air, she holds a crude drawing she’s made with her Crayolas, and though it’s maybe obvious to no one but you, it’s clearly an aardvark, a gigantic aardvark with a gigantic black swastika scrawled onto its belly—and this is the last thing you see before disappearing below ground, toward 395, and when you emerge from the darkness you are once more headed for the 14th Street Bridge, and when you at last cross it, the bridge over the Potomac, you do it alone.
You are unmoored, unencumbered. You cannot recall a time in your life when you’ve felt more relaxed, more at ease, and you even laugh a little bit as you reach for your Ray-Bans in the glove compartment and put them on only to, out of both habit and pleasure, catch a glimpse of yourself in the rearview.
There is no giant stuffed beast taking up the back of the Tahoe.
The aardvark is gone. And just like that, your easy feeling at once gives way to worry and doom. The relief that you expected to feel getting rid of the aardvark: it isn’t there because you didn’t do it. Someone, somehow, has, like, totally gotten to her, which means they were, like, inside your car, inside your house—and you feel pretty freaked out about this, if truth be told, like someone has vacuumed your insides. Without the aardvark, the Tahoe, it feels super huge, super empty, and you realize that you sort of miss her, the way she looked at you all sad and coy, like the way Greg Tampico always looked at you—
It’s hard to explain. No one had ever looked at you like that before, likely will never again, but whatever happened to her, you can’t go back now; you have no choice but to continue speeding toward Greg Tampico’s funeral with nothing but a new faint light shining into the black cave of your heart: that this could all be some kind of joke. Or some accident.
You don’t know whether Greg Tampico is dead or alive, whether Vicky actually saw Greg Tampico disguising himself in freaking corpus, or whether it was someone else putting on those big fake glasses, that beard, but if so, it is someone the likes of whom you cannot, or refuse to, imagine.
* * *
The question of the immortality of animal souls is something Rebecca Ostlet has long considered. She rejects the Cartesian view of animals as insentient machines, and she dismisses Aristotle’s position as arrogant: “As nature makes nothing purposeless or in vain,” he said, “all animals must have been made by nature for the sake of men,” and Rebecca, rather disgusted even by Darwin, who regularly differentiated between “man” and the “lower animals,” is impressed by no man who believes he is superior to the beasts, and Goethe too, she feels, was wrong: an animal is not “an end in itself” but a sensitive, knowing, godly creature and therefore, just like man, animals must sail, she believes, with immortal souls, and the impression was made early upon her after reading Agnes Grey, Anne Brontë’s first novel, published in 1847, the year twenty-eight-year-old Rebecca Green was born.
She was appalled by a single phrase spoken by the cruel Mrs. Bloomfield: “the creatures were all created for our convenience,” Bloomfield said, and Rebecca found the word “convenience” so abhorrent in that application that the young woman promptly discontinued her study of medicine at the University of Edinburgh, where she had entered in 1871, just two years after the first seven women gained entry, and, despite initial protests from the male faculty, was eventually granted permission to transfer her coursework to botany.
Rebecca had taken one course, however, from Sir Richard Ostlet, which she enjoyed. The course was called “Practical Mammalogy,” in which Sir Richard regularly championed the existence of the souls of beasts, often quoting Liebniz’s “A New System of Nature” from way back in 1695, which argued that animals are self-organized, they are not “matter which comes to be organized,” and Hieronymus Rorarius, a Hungarian papal diplomat who wrote even earlier, in 1547, that “brutes frequently make better use of their reason than men,” and Rebecca found herself so fascinated by the man Ostlet, who advocated as such for animals, who traveled the world to study mammals in their natural habitats, that she entered his dark office one bright morning and delivered, in a flat, pragmatic tone, a brief treaty explaining why Rebecca Green and Sir Richard Ostlet should marry.
Richard’s eyes had widened as she spoke, they grew dazzlingly bulbous, but the young woman was not deterred; in fact, she was amused when he coughed and apologized, said that his eyes always bulged like that, and he agreed that marrying made good sense—that is, if she could put up with his bad eyes, and with what would most certainly become his eventual blindness.
“I do not mind one bit,” Rebecca said.
They married the following spring. For the occasion, Rebecca wore a blue long-sleeved muslin, a little orange hat with a cluster of matching orange pelargonium from the Palm House in Kew Gardens adorning one side, and that evening, Richard, in preparation for a months-long journey to the Galapagos, showed her their new flat, which he purchased for her as a wedding gift, on Gloucester Walk in London, and, expecting that she would be lonely without him for these many months, Ostlet also presented his new wife with three wriggling, rust-colored puppies, each one a female purebred Irish setter with smooth, long-haired ears, conical heads, and Rebecca, in honor of Agnes Grey, named them Anne, Charlotte, and Emily—and so it is with the Brontës in tow that Rebecca Ostlet’s carriage drops her off at 24 Victoria Terrace in Royal Leamington Spa to View the aardvark, her husband’s final work.
The dogs, fully grown, spill out of the carriage in a trail of excited fire.
Rebecca dismounts, takes one glance at the two long lines which have formed at Titus Downing’s taxidermy shop, and instantly observes that while there appear to be men of every British stripe, she is the only woman, at least from where she stands, in attendance.
At first, this hardly fazes Rebecca Ostlet. As a woman in science, she’s used to it, and she nods to Gentlemen and Lowlifes alike when they tip their hats, yet it is only when the theater troupe spies her in her new cuirass bodice, masculine jacket, and necktie—it’s the latest fashion in London, a dress which is extremely tight fitting, lon
g-waisted and long-boned with the worst kind of corset all the way down to the hips, a drawn-back polonaise that ruches in peacock, over her rear—that she learns the reason, what has kept the women away: the drunk boys see Lady Ostlet in her new garb and whinny their pig heads. Long rabbity ears flap their cheeks.
Their papier-mâché claws air-dance as she walks closer, and when she stops to watch them, they pretend to hump one another as they blow into a popular John William Hobbs tune, a little chorus that is meant to be sung softly, gently, so as to create irony, but the boys eschew irony for vulgarity and belt it out loud at Rebecca in a surprisingly taut six-part harmony:
Phyllis is my only joy,
Faithless as the winds and seas;
Sometimes forward, sometimes coy,
Yet she never fails to please,
Yet she never fails to please.
The Brontës, confused by the dancing aardvarks, start barking and move, long-legged, round the troupe, whining at their humping with glistening eyes, waffing the boys’ legs with their feather-tails, but Rebecca Ostlet barely registers the boys as she walks through them, ignoring the way they rub their floppy snouts on her bustle and train, oinking Phyllis! Phyllis! like idiot pigs as she lifts it.
She steps one of her small woman-feet onto Titus Downing’s stoop, under the buck heads, then the other, and enters the taxidermy shop.
The man himself is in absentia. Rebecca genially skims Downing’s stuffed geese and stuffed pheasants, his ducks and dogs, all his stuffed fish and stuffed rabbits, a collection of foxes, and is particularly taken with a shiny taupe vixen with an elegant, upturned snout that stands in the center of Downing’s shopwindow.
The tods have been arranged so they appear to protect her, and the arrangement, Rebecca thinks, is absurd. The vixen, known for her cunning, is perfectly capable of taking care of herself and her brood, she needs not the protection of the rather skittish-looking tods—pray, the way Downing has them arranged, it rather looks like an ambush, she thinks—and while the shop fills and refills with Gentlemen all quickly moving past the other taxidermied creatures to make for the aardvark, Rebecca Ostlet, alone with the vixen, puts her hand on its soft head, admiring the look on its face, the eyes half-slanted and competent, as though she has been recently nursing.
Rebecca can count on one hand the number of times she and Richard actually completed the act of love.
“I am so much older, darling,” he would explain when they lay together, or it was difficult for him to quiet his mind from his work, he would say, and he understood if she was disappointed in him, and had to confess that he did not know what she needed but explained that he, for one, needed rather little, which is why the grief she experienced when she learned of his death was compounded.
For although Richard had left her a sizeable income, more than enough to last for a lifetime, it was appearing likely that she, closing fast in on thirty, would not have a child. And how many wasted, lonely months had she spent on Gloucester Walk, walking her dogs in either Holland or Hyde, waiting for Richard to return from his trips, and each time he returned, she could usually get just one night out of him before he fell back into diffidence, self-pity, and it was a peculiar, melancholic side of him that she did not expect when they married, as around everyone and everything else, the man was so abundantly cheerful, so giving, and it was less than a year into her new marriage that Rebecca realized her mistake.
As she lingers alone in Downing’s shop amidst the woodsy scent of sweet cedar oils, of wet skin, fur and feathers, of salt of tartar, of palm wine, of chalky plasters, earth-and-water clays, of any number of preservative soaps and astringents, powders and lime, it is the recognition of the rosemary pine-musk of camphor, the familiar stink which always emanated from Richard, that at last gives Rebecca Ostlet the courage she needs to turn away from the vixen.
It is two o’clock. The sun pours relentless into Titus Downing’s shop, casting onto the face of the aardvark a wide and clean arm of new light.
The face, she finds, whiskered all the way down the snout, is soft, its mien kindly looking, so similar to what she often sees in the Brontës after they’ve eaten their dinner. The aardvark’s hide gleams yellow-pink at the top, brown at the bottom, and whispers of dark fur launch out from the back of the thick legs—plantigrade at the front, digitigrade at the back—in sharp contrast to the ears, so broad, so thin that the sunlight shines through them, instantly reminding Rebecca Ostlet of the peach-colored inner fold of a tremendous conch that Richard brought home for her from the Galapagos, and suddenly standing among the Gentlemen all silently Viewing the aardvark, Rebecca feels, for a moment, a brand-new kind of reverence. Her own gender washes out of her. She is not a woman among men but a human among humans, and imagines the Gentlemen feel the same way: it is a kind of collective prayer for this ridiculous creature with the ears of a rabbit, the snout of a pig, and with that one hoof-claw raised, it absolutely does look awake, alive, as though it might walk straight off its mount!
More, there is something familiar about the creature that Rebecca Ostlet has observed: something in the flat space of its forehead, she thinks, which is low and roomy, or perhaps in the way Downing has positioned the eyelids so they appear to hammock the eyes, and the kindness in the expression, she thinks, is a shock, it almost looks human, which is strikingly odd against the rolling, furry back arched up to bear the weight of its incredulous belly, so round—yet when she lifts one hand to stroke it, as she has done with the vixen, a Gentleman moos:
“Madam, I wouldn’t do that.”
Twelve dark-suited men encircle the aardvark. Their hands are in their pockets. They have Viewed her not reverently but soberly, without generosity or even amusement.
“Don’t touch it,” the man says. “It’s indecent.”
“Vulgar,” says another.
A third Gentleman nods. “Quite right, John. Quite right.”
In turns, the aardvark is called by each man “obscene.” It is “an abomination,” like something discovered in some cave of some unholy world, but the men in their suits are not scientists, Rebecca remembers, they are just rich—they cannot love what they do not understand, and they only understand money—and as it is such a very hot day, outfitted as they are in formal wool suits, the men’s cheeks flush, they grow testy, any mild discomfort, they believe, is a slight against their god-given status, so within the aardvark, they cannot see beauty; in fact, she seems to be mocking them as long beads of sweat slide down their temples, and Downing really might have thought to provide refreshments, Rebecca thinks, for his guests, for the people who have all come to stand in line in the hot sun to gaze upon an Orycteropus afer in early August in Leamington Spa. But there is nothing.
Outside, the young boys snort in their snouts while inside the grown men sweat and scowl. They feel bored, cheated, and the sun is now positively baking the room, and the Brontës, shaking their fur coats as though wishing to toss them from their bodies, begin idiotically barking at the door leading up to Downing’s flat.
It is not long before everyone starts filing out.
The Gentlemen walk perhaps a bit too quickly away from Downing’s shop, and when the others in line, from the Priests to the Sweepers, see the Gentlemen flee, when they see the men’s faces, all pink and downcast, they, one by one, decide it’s not worth it, it’s too hot out, and away they go; the lines hugging the shop splinter, peel off, until only four people remain: Rebecca Ostlet, noted prosthetic specialist Harold Skinner, Walter Potter, and a corpulent German man with tiny hands, pouchy cheeks, and a wispy, mal-grown Imperial mustache that looks vaguely pubic.
“I’m Potter,” Walter Potter says, offering a hand to Harold Skinner. “At last we meet.”
“I’m Skinner,” says Harold Skinner. “Not Downing. If you would like to buy the aardvark, I’m here to take bids.”
Walter Potter regards Harold Skinner with surprise. “Downing’s not here?” he asks.
Skinner affirms that, no, he is n
ot.
Walter Potter leans over the aardvark, inspecting Downing’s craft, and Rebecca watches his hands move artfully over the pelage, feeling for seams, but Downing has worked the seams with a size 25 waxed needle, no bigger than a quilting pin, and Walter Potter, himself sporting a truly regal set of ginger-blond muttonchops, loudly breathes in and out over his mustache as he whispers, “It’s beautiful,” and handles the aardvark’s kangaroo tail like it’s a great, caught fish. The legs are like trunks. “It is truly nature,” he says, and moves his face to the face of the aardvark, at which point he stands up, startled.
He asks Rebecca and Skinner if they know what Downing did with the eyes.
In the sunlight of Titus Downing’s taxidermy shop, Richard Ostlet’s blue irises bulge.
“The eyeball can only be preserved in animals locally sourced,” Potter says, and goes on to inquire how Downing preserved the eyes from a creature from Africa. Was it immersion in Mueller’s Fluid for three whole weeks? Or maybe some kind of humectant, made from isopropyl alcohol? Or were the eyes frozen solid in ice and salt until sliced into lateral halves, then placed into a chloral solution before being placed into a glycerin solution? Does anyone know?
Rebecca Ostlet looks closer. Wild mammals, far as she knows, have brown eyes, and only human beings—or perhaps the rare dog or goat she has seen—have blue eyes, and blue eyes do not occur in the wild, she recalls from one of Richard’s lectures as she realizes, with horror, what the pale, ghoulish taxidermist has done.
“Are you all right, madam,” Walter Potter asks, and he and Harold Skinner each take hold of one of Lady Ostlet’s arms.
She sits herself down in a chair.
Enter the Aardvark Page 11