“No, it’s totally cool. How did she die?”
He laughed, his usual short bark. “Asks the American girl. You all fly your sorrows like flags, don’t you? And expect everyone else to do the same. Perhaps you’re right. Keeping it all packed away hasn’t done me much good. Well, since you ask, she was bitten by a fer-de-lance.”
“What’s that?”
“A snake.Bothrops atrox. The deadliest reptile in the American tropics. We were in Colombia desperately collecting from a stand of forest scheduled to be clear-cut, a lovely little valley full of the usual richness, and of course since the edge of the cut was advancing, the place was full of refugee creatures, including snakes. We were working too hard at it, exhausted, becoming a trifle careless, which is something one must never do down there, but it was so vital, there might have been dozens, hundreds of species that lived nowhere else and the swine were going to extinguish them to make furniture and to let some peasants grow a few pathetic crops before the soil was exhausted. One evening, far too late, she ran off to check her traps one last time. She failed to return, and I took a torch and went to look for her, and found her lying on a trail a few hundred yards from our camp. It was perfectly clear what had happened. We’d both seen it before. The ants and beetles were already on her. I haven’t been back to the forest since.”
“Oh, that’s awful,” Jenny said.
“Yes. She had hair much like yours, that red-gold color, although she wore it short.” He curled a loop of her hair around his finger. She thought he was going to kiss her then and wondered what it would be like to be kissed by an old guy, but instead he closed his eyes for a moment and a shudder passed through his long frame. Then he cleared his throat and clambered to his feet and was regular Professor Cooksey again. As if nothing important had happened, he began to fuss with the insects, placing the tiny things carefully back into their vial. “We’ll have to publish, of course, and it’s up to the international nomenclature people to confirm it, but I don’t expect much of a problem. Now, as for the name-I proposeP. jenniferi. How does that sound?”
“You meanme?”
“Of course you! They’re your fig wasps. You have achieved immortality, my dear. Your name will live forever, or at least until the last dying twitches of our scientific civilization, and graduate students yet unborn will bear your name on their lips. What do you think of that?”
“Holy shit,” said Jennifer.
“A grand sentiment and calls for champagne,” said Cooksey. “Let’s go see what Rupert has in his extensive cellars, shall we?”
Houses in Florida didn’t have cellars, Jenny knew that much, but she waited to see what would happen next on this strange and wonderful day. Cooksey returned shortly with two large bottles and a childlike grin on his face. He had brought a pair of Rupert’s fancy crystal glasses, too, that got brought out only for important dinners. Jenny had seen champagne served in movies but had never consumed any. Before she came to the property, her experience of wine had been limited to the cheap fortified swill homeless people used to keep away the cold. Since then, she’d had the opportunity to taste real wine, mainly that left over from Rupert’s rich-people parties, swiped from the kitchen by Kevin, but that experience had been flavored by Kevin’s pleasure in getting away with something. Kevin discussed wine mainly by mocking the pretensions associated with drinking the good stuff, reading the labels to her with his version of some rich guy’s elevated accent. Jenny went along with this, but she liked what the wine did in her mouth. It produced tastes she had not known were possible, sensations she did not have words for. It was one of the things that gave her the notion that regular people had a physical life that tramps like her were missing, and in this it was like listening to conversations among people who used words she didn’t understand.
She imagined it was like when the fish swam around her, how she must seem to them, something utterly alien living a life in a different medium, a higher kind of life. These thoughts swam around in her mind at times and made her vaguely discontented, but she did not have any substantial ideas upon which they could settle and become articulate. Kevin divided the world into “rich shitheads in the power structure” and “the people,” and she supposed she was in the latter class, but she also thought it couldn’t be as simple as that, when she thought about it at all, which was hardly ever. Still, she remained open to physical pleasure-fishpond, flowers, Château Margaux-and understood at some basic level that in this she was different from both Kevin and the dull or bitter Iowa farmwives who had raised her on behalf of the state.
The champagne tasted like a kind of flavored air, hardly a drink at all. Cooksey was pouring it down his throat like water in the desert, however, and keeping her glass full as well. He put a CD into the stereo in his bedroom, and the music drifted out. It wasn’t bad, she thought, not like what he usually played, which didn’t have any words at all, or else kind of screechy singing in Spanish or some language she couldn’t understand. This was a woman singing in English, with just a piano playing, and you could understand the words like you could in country songs, and there weren’t any curse words in it.
“Cleo Laine,” said Cooksey, although she hadn’t asked, and then he filled his glass again and began to talk. Delicious wine, and comparisons with other brands; champagne on other occasions; exploding champagne at his sister’s wedding; his home near Cambridge, the countryside, the flora and fauna thereof; his mother’s kindness and wit; his father taking him bird and bug watching in Norfolk as a boy; the fens, their similarity to the Everglades, the differences, his affection for low, flat, damp country, the oddness of his spending so much of his life in rain forest; tales of jungle adventure, narrow escapes, strange customs of the natives, stranger customs of fellow biologists; the awesome beauty of the great trees, laden with vines, decked with flowers, coated with scurrying, flying, crawling life. With Portia by his side; not a lot about her directly, but she was in nearly every jungle story, the touchstone of experience, nothing quite real until shared with her.
“Did you ever go to where Moie comes from?” she asked.
He paused before replying. “In a manner of speaking. I’ve been close to there, to the Puxto, and I knew someone who knew the region very well indeed. Why, we’re quite empty. Piggy us!”
Another bottle popped. Now he drew her out, her miserable life, but somehow not miserable told here drinking this wine: the missing father, the teenaged mother dead in a car wreck; no kin, so off to the mercies of the state; the discovery of the epilepsy, so no adopting families for her, the failure in school, the early stupid sex, the abortion, the flight into homeless drifting. She found herself talking easily about things she had not told anyone, even Kevin: the rape, or rapes, if you counted guys she knew already: the scary guys who got her to mule dope for them; arrest and jail.
It was back and forth: he said something, she said something, he took what she said and considered it and added something, an idea, a joke, an anecdote about a similar experience. She was conscious of wanting to say things that she didn’t have the language for, and self-conscious about her speech in a way she’d never been. Why did she saylike every other word, oryou know? Cooksey didn’t. He spoke more like a book, and with that voice of his it was like being on television, but in real life. She voiced this, and he laughed. “Yes, we’re having a civilized conversation, oiled by champagne. Why Madame makes the wine.” At her puzzled look he picked up the bottle and showed her the label.