by Boyle, T. C.
After a while he says, “Must be an accident.”
She’s dressed all in black—pressed cotton slacks, patent-leather heels and V-necked top accented by a modest silver bracelet and necklace, nothing showy, nothing anybody could object to—and her notes are tucked inside the manila folder atop the laptop balanced on her knees. It took her a long while that afternoon to decide on what to wear, trying to strike a balance between the formal and the casual, the ecologist dragged in from the field and turned out with just the right degree of chic to be persuasive and sympathetic rather than intimidating, and she spent the better part of an hour combing out her hair and applying her makeup. Too much eyeliner and she’d look like a slut. Too little and they wouldn’t be able to see the shape of her eyes and the way the light gathered in them and made people stop to stare at her on the street, because looking good, or at least stylish and interesting, was part of the job description. Who wanted to sit there in a stiff-backed chair and have some dowdy forest-service type rattle off statistics about the decline of this species or that? She was there to be looked at, as well as listened to, and she had no problem with that. If she could use her looks to advance her cause, then so much the better.
But damn them, damn them for making this so hard on her. And she should never have had that tea—the caffeine has her heart pounding in her ears and her nerves stripped raw, just as if she’d opened up her skin and taken a vegetable peeler to them. “I wish I was out on the islands,” she says, turning abruptly to him. “Recruiting invertebrates. Banding birds. Anything. I’m fed up with this crap.”
He’s looking straight ahead, his face dense with the reflection of the pickup’s brake lights. “You are the spokesperson, after all.”
“Director of information services.”
“Same difference. But what I mean is, spokespeople have to speak. It’s what you do, it’s what you’re good at.” He pauses, fingers tapping at the wheel, working through his variations. “And why is it ‘spokespeople’—shouldn’t it be speakspeople? Or speakpeople. There they go, the president’s speakpeople, all ready to start speaking.” He turns to her, serious suddenly. “They’d be lost without you and you know it.”
“Dave LaJoy,” she pronounces carefully. “Anise Reed.”
He waves a hand in dismissal. “Okay, okay—there are crazies everywhere. Especially when you—”
“When I what?”
“I don’t know—do something controversial. Or defend it, I mean. Explain it. Explanations always leave you open to attack, as if you’re apologizing after the fact. Or before the fact, I mean.”
She can feel a flare of anger coming up in her. “I’m not apologizing. We’ve got nothing to apologize for. We’re scientists. We do the studies. Not like these PETA nuts that come out to shout you down because they’ve got nothing better to do—and they’re ignorant, baseline stupid, that’s all. They don’t have the faintest idea of what they’re talking about. Not a clue. If they would only—”
“So educate them.”
She throws it back at him, bitter now, bitter and outraged. “Educate them. Good luck. These people don’t want facts, they don’t want to know about island biogeography or the impact of invasive species or ecosystem collapse or anything else. All they want is to stick their noses in. And shout. They love to shout.”
“I know,” he says, “I know,” and they’re moving now, the string of brake lights easing off all down the line, the tires gripping the road, rolling forward, the exit rushing at them. “I’m on your side, remember? Just keep your cool, that’s all. Be nice. But firm. And professional. That’s what you are, right—professional?”
The freeway releases them onto city streets, cars parked along the curb, storefronts giving back the glare of the headlights, trees broadcasting their shadows. People are coming out of restaurants, flicking remotes at their cars, standing in groups on the sidewalk for no discernible reason, going to meetings. A bus lurches out ahead of them and settles into its lane, shuddering like a ship at sea. They pass a storefront offering kung fu lessons and she has a fleeting glimpse of robes, faces, synchronized gestures. It’s quarter to seven. They will be there, barring further surprises, with five minutes to spare, and in a way that’s better than arriving half an hour early and having to sit in the back room staring at the ten-foot mounted grizzly and fret and pace and watch the clock portion off the seconds. She raises her hands to push the hair away from her face, then drops them to the folder in her lap. The rain, which has been threatening all through the afternoon, chooses that moment to dash at the windshield and sizzle on the dark tongue of pavement before them. “Yeah,” she says finally, long after it matters, “that’s what I am. Professional.”
She’s surprised at the number of cars in the parking lot. Every spot seems to be taken, at least the ones close in, and people are circling in predatory mode, the rain heavier now, sheeting across the blacktop and giving back the sheen of the headlights in a polished waxen glow. “Looks like you attracted quite a crowd,” he says, leaning over the wheel on both forearms to peer out into the night while waiting for the car ahead of them, a black BMW, its left rear blinker pulsing frantically, to make up its mind: left, right or straight ahead? The delay is maddening. The kind of thing that drives her over the line, indecision, inattentiveness, the laziness of people who won’t drive to the end of the lot for fear they might have to walk an extra twenty feet, who sit back with a bag of potato chips in one hand and a Cherry Coke in the other and wonder why all of America is fat and getting fatter. She actually leans forward to reach across the console for the horn—What is with these people?—before snatching her hand back. She can’t afford to be rude. Not here. Not tonight. How devastating would it be for the speaker, the guest of honor, to get caught up in some petty embroilment in the parking lot?
She says: “There must be something else going on.”
“Uh-uh. Not that I saw in the paper anyway.” The car ahead of them creeps forward, the frantic winking eye of the blinker dying out on the left only to reanimate itself on the right. Then the brake lights flare and the car stops. Again. Beyond it, she can see the illuminated forms of couples hurrying across the pavement, bowed beneath the weight of their umbrellas, and that’s when it comes to her that she’s forgotten her own.
“Tim? Did you bring an umbrella?”
He gives her one of his astonished looks, eyebrows rocketing, eyes blown open, lips scrambling for an expression, at once a parody of and homage to his favorite late-night TV host. He can be very funny, Tim, nothing sacred to him, no occasion too solemn or pressing for a gag. But this isn’t the time. Or place.
“You didn’t then?”
He shakes his head, still mugging, as if this were all a big joke, as if he could even begin to soothe her at this point. “No. Sorry. Uh-uh. You want me to swing around and drop you at the door? Or I’ll carry you. Want me to carry you?”
“No,” she snaps, thinking of ruined hair and smeared makeup, thinking of standing up there at the microphone looking as if she’s just fallen off a boat. “No, I do not want you to carry me. Didn’t you know it was going to rain? Didn’t you think?”
Before she’d taken him to Scottsdale to meet her mother the first time, after they’d been seeing each other for a month, she’d given him a full accounting of her mother’s character, habits and predilections, and while it was for the most part a loving portrait, it was unsparing too. Her mother was a shopper. An inveterate shopper. A shopaholic. There was nothing she didn’t collect, from ceramic stringheads to Zuni turquoise, Fiesta ware, porcelain dolls, antique dustpans and Victorian furniture so dense and dark it squeezed all the light out of every room in the house. In the face of a dying planet and the exhaustion of resources, this would be shame enough for any daughter to bear, but for an ecologist who’d devoted her adult life to educating the public, it was crippling and inexplicable. And hurtful, deeply hurtful. She felt bad about it on so many levels, about mentioning it even, as if she were bet
raying her mother and her mother’s love. And what was the first thing Tim said to her mother? “I can appreciate the hoarding urge,” he told her, sinking into the couch in the living room with the gimlet she had just handed him, “whether it’s environmentally correct or not. My mother—you’ll meet her, she lives in upstate New York, but she comes out to visit maybe twice a year—my mother used to be like that. And then I told her, ‘Look, going antiquing for women is like fishing for guys, I understand that. But in this age of conserving resources, most of us practice catch and release.’ You know, you get the thrill of stalking the trout, flicking out the fly, pulling this mysterious beautiful thing out of the water, one in a million, precious as gold, and then you let it go. Same thing with my mother nowadays, because she’s totally reformed—she goes to the store, finds a precious whatever it is, bargains like a fanatic, like she’ll die if she pays a nickel more, then counts out the money, watches the guy wrap it up, and hands it right back to him. You know what I’m saying? Catch and release.”
He doesn’t respond. But he’s begun inching forward, flicking his brights on and off by way of suggesting to the people in the BMW that their behavior stands in need of correcting. “Why don’t they just park in the middle of the fucking street? Come on,” he mutters, coaching them, “come on.” Whoever they are—shadowy forms emerging suddenly in sharp relief, the back of a man’s head and a woman beside him, in profile, her hair massed like an unraveling turban—they’ve begun to get the idea. There’s a quick sharp movement of the man’s shoulders, the wheel swinging right, and the car rolls grudgingly out of the way.
That’s when the feeling comes over her—what is it, dread, mortification, hate?—and she doesn’t want to know, doesn’t want to look, staring rigidly ahead, as if she’s been frozen in place, as Tim pulls even with them, right there, right in the operatic glare of the headlights of the next car in line. She can feel his eyes sweeping sourly over them, the engine of the Prius gurgling softly, the windshield wipers beating time and the faintest whisper of a voice leaking from the radio as he eases past, but she doesn’t turn her head. She’s shut them out, negated them, hide-and-seek, but not before the sticker on the side window leaps out at her, vermilion letters on an electric yellow background superimposed over the figure of a cartoon rodent’s anthropomorphized face. FPA, it reads, and beneath it, in characters that seem to bleed away from the banner: For the Protection of Animals.
But then she feels the car accelerate and they’re parting the curtain of rain, or at least the visible portion of it, wheeling down the long double line of parked cars and back up again on the far side. Before she can protest he’s pulling up in front of the entrance, on the wide strip of macadam reserved for Pedestrians Only, skidding to a stop within inches of the snaking line of slickered, umbrella-wielding people waiting to purchase tickets in the rain, already leaning forward to reach across her for the door. “Go ahead,” he says, the seat belt tugging at his shoulder and the smell of him—of his aftershave and shampoo and the hot fungal odor of the hair under his arms and between his legs, her leman’s smell, her mate’s—rising to her, primal and comforting and confusing all at once. For a moment she doesn’t know what to do. “I’ll park back there someplace at the end of the lot,” he tells her, making a vague gesture at the expanding arena of shadow behind them, “and catch up with you later.” The door swings open. She unfastens her seat belt, tucks her folder and laptop under one arm, and emerges to the breeze and the blown rain and the taste of it on her lips, sweet and rank all at once. He’s watching her. Grinning. “Break a leg,” he says.
Before she can respond—and what would she say anyway, I’ll try?—here’s Frieda Kleinschmidt, the museum’s director, stalking up to her with a bright pink parasol, the lights along the walkway fuzzed with mist, people looming out of the shadows to hunch under the parapet, furl umbrellas and stamp and blow and brush the rain from sleeves, shoulders, hats. Tall, narrow-shouldered, her face clenched round the shine of her steel-framed glasses and the alarm in her magnified eyes, Frieda stands there rigid, staring at the Prius skewed across the pavement where no car has ever dared go before it. She shoots an anxious glance at Tim—No, he’s not a terrorist, Alma wants to tell her, only my boyfriend—and then says, “You picked quite a night for it. Who would have thought?” She pumps the umbrella in evidence, then lowers it again to Alma’s height. “I mean, it was clear an hour ago. Wasn’t it? I thought it was anyway. Last I looked.”
Alma murmurs something in response, and then they’re striding across the courtyard, past the entrance to the auditorium and up to the door of the room where the unlucky grizzly (Ursus arctos californicus, declared extinct 1924) stands guard. “But all these cars—this isn’t all for me, is it?”
“I don’t know who else,” Frieda throws over her shoulder, bending from the waist to manipulate a clutch of keys and let her into the cold too-bright room, brisk now, hugging her arms to her and revolving around the floor on the spongy soles of her running shoes as if she’s about to dash off into the night. She’s anxious, Alma can see that, anxious because of the size of the crowd and the subject matter and what happened in Ventura last week. “But you have everything you need, right? There’s water out there on the podium—and we’ll start a little late, I think, maybe ten minutes or so, just to let everyone get settled, what with the rain—”
“Yes,” Alma murmurs, “that’s fine. “I’ll just need to plug my laptop into the projector. And the microphone—”
“I did the sound check myself. You’ll take questions afterward?”
The grizzly, formerly on display but exiled to this back room for crimes unspecified, looms over them with its plasticized eyes and arrested teeth, snarling mutely down the ages. There are other artifacts here too—a great stiff comb of baleen propped up in the corner, cast-off mammoth bones aligned neatly on an oak desk and looking unsettlingly like the refuse at the bottom of a Colonel Sanders bucket enlarged to implausibility, Chumash arrowheads and shards of pottery in a dusty glass display case skewed away from the far wall at a forty-five-degree angle, museum clutter awaiting the donors’ dollars to rescue it from eternal storage. “Yes. I mean, that’s what they’re here for. Most of them, I guess.”
Frieda gives her a look. “If any of them get, well—I don’t know, contentious—don’t be afraid to cut them off, and I do have Bill Braithwaite at the door, just in case . . .”
This is the point at which she’s supposed to say, Don’t worry, I can handle it—I’ve done it a thousand times. But she says nothing.
Erect, her glasses shining and her pigeon-colored eyes in retreat, Frieda claps her hands together and spins halfway round with a faint squeak of rubber or plastic or whatever it is they’re making running shoes from these days. “Well, I guess I’ll leave you to your thoughts then. I’ll come get you in”—she raises her wrist to squint at a flat gold watch on a band no wider than a shoelace—“say, seven and a half minutes?”
It’s warm in the auditorium, very warm, all those people—standing room only, which means three hundred at least—bundled tightly together, post-prandial, variously digesting their dinners, processing proteins and starches and sugars, generating heat. And it’s humid, the rain beating remorselessly at the roof and percolating through the downspouts with a peristaltic tick and gurgle. And, of course, since it’s November, the museum’s central air has been long shut down for the season. Sitting there in the middle of the front row while Frieda reads through a list of announcements—upcoming events, classes, fund-raisers, opportunities to get in on museum-sponsored field trips, films and slide shows—she can feel the sweat rising from her pores, collecting at the nape of her neck beneath the thermal blanket of her hair, trailing down her spine to where the blouse has begun to stick to the small of her back. When she slipped in stage left and took her seat, she caught a glimpse of the crowd, surprised all over again by the turnout, especially on a rainy night, but she didn’t look closely enough to individuate anyone, not e
ven Tim, who must have been part of the contingent, mostly male, milling around in the rear without hope of finding seats. If she was nervous a few moments ago, in the green room with Frieda—and the grizzly—she’s over it now. In fact, all she can think of—hope for—is that Frieda’s introduction will be short and to the point so she can get up there and get this over with.
But Frieda is not short and to the point. After a shaky start, Frieda is coming into her own, riding high on the heady business of insinuating a single human voice through the wires of a foam-jacketed microphone and the distant speakers they feed in order to hold the attention of three hundred people without lapsing or slipping up or making a fool of yourself. The introduction—Alma Boyd Takesue, B.S. in biology from the University of Hawaii, M.S. and Ph.D. in environmental studies from UC Berkeley, three years in the field studying the brown tree snake on Guam and all the rest, right on down to a recitation of the titles of her papers in scientific journals, all of them, all the journals and all the titles—manages to be both uninspired and interminable, and by the time Frieda finally announces her and stands back to shield her eyes against the spotlight and extend a blind hand of welcome, the audience is restless. The applause patters dutifully as Alma rises from her seat and then cuts off abruptly, even before she finds herself up there under the glare of the spotlight, struggling to adjust the microphone the taller woman has left poised well above the crown of her head.
“Hello,” she hears herself say, the amplification hurling her voice out into the void and then bringing it back to inhabit every crevice in a throbbing overwrought vibrato. “I want to thank you all for coming, especially on such a”—and here she pauses, searching for the right word, the one that will soften things, lighten them up, and what kind of night is it anyway?—“dismal night.” Yes, dismal. There is a collective rustling, as if the entire audience were balanced on a taut continuous sheet of paper, and then she’s bending to her computer, and the first image—of Anacapa at twilight, Arch Rock glowing iconically and the sea so multifaceted and calm it might have been painted in oils around it—infuses the big screen behind her. “This is Anacapa,” she says redundantly, “one of the islands that comprise the Channel Islands National Park, the islands often referred to as the Galápagos of North America.”