Night of the Jaguar (21 page)

She watched him as the laughter poured out, tears squirted from his eyes, and his knees wobbled. “Oh God Oh Christ,” he expostulated at intervals, and after a while she started laughing, too, just to join in and for happiness and delight that her own dumb remark (because, although she had known a girl named Chrysler once, obviously a high-class guy like
Cooksey wouldn’t have married a girl named after a car) could have caused such a gush of exhilaration.

Cooksey was still in the paroxysm, eyes tight shut and completely out of control now (Oh Christ Oh God); he bounced off the microscope table and would have collapsed on the floor had she not caught him in her arms. She sank down with him under the table, cradling his upper body. He smelled of tobacco and guy. Jennifer’s laughter slowed, then stopped, because what was coming out of Cooksey wasn’t laughter, or not entirely laughter anymore.

After some time and a few long whooping breaths, he opened his eyes and looked at her. His cheeks were slick with tears. “Oh, God,” he said. “How utterly disgraceful. Please forgive me.”

“It’s cool. I guess it was pretty funny to you. And, like, not just funny.”

“No. It was a sort of private joke and it just…I suppose it rather unleashed some…things. It’s hard to explain. I imagine one had to be there.” He made no move to rise but continued, “We were at a conference in Bellagio; it’s a lovely place in Italy, with a palace they use as a conference center. And one of the participants was a young woman named Maserati. I think she actually might have been related to the famous automobile dynasty, but in any case, she was quite pretty in an Italian way, and she appeared to set her cap for me, I can’t imagine why, and of course I was flattered. I’m such a fool at that sort of thing. There’s a good deal of naughtiness that goes on at such affairs, and Portia and I hadn’t been together all that long. Well, Portia was mad with jealousy and being Portia she made no bones about how she felt and we had a row, and in the midst of it, all I could think of to say was ‘How could anyone who has a Portia desire a Maserati,’ and it just stopped her cold, and then I said ‘and she probably leaks oil as well,’ and we both went absolutely mad with laughter. I imagine it was the tension breaking, because it was a very poor sort of joke. Anyway, every time we saw the wretched woman after that, we were positively weak with it, spurting wine through our noses and so on.”

A long sigh and a brief silence ensued. “I suppose I’ve been half dead myself since she died. And then when you said that, it just took me over. I hope I didn’t frighten you with that display.”

“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 propose
P. jenniferi.
How does that sound?”

“You mean
me
?”

“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 say
like
every other word, or
you 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.

“Veeve Clipot?”

He pronounced it correctly and added, “It means the Widow Clicquot. Interesting you read the
q
as a
p
. Do you always do that?”

Embarrassed, she admitted, “Yeah, I don’t read all that good.”

“And no wonder. You’re dyslexic.” He explained what that was and added, “You’re in good company. Sir Richard Branson is, and any number of other billionaires. Plus Cher, I believe. And my mother, who was a quite well-known anthropologist. It’s a bit of a bother but by no means the end of the world. No one’s ever told you this before?”

“No. They just thought I was, like, retarded.”

“Retarded? Odd word. Well, you were, I suppose. But now you’re apparently advancing once more. I’ll help you if you like. More wine?”

She held out her glass, speechless, thinking of Cher.

He lifted his glass and held the golden contents up to the fading light from the window. “I always imagine brain cells winking out under the influence of this, like tiny bubbles. Charming. Now, intelligence is rather more complex than people imagine. With us, it’s the ability to manipulate abstract symbols. That’s what we prize above all else, nearly to the exclusion of all else, with the result that we often put in charge of our civilization people who have absolutely no concrete intelligence at all, who are in fact entirely cut off from real life—economists and such. The greatest virtue of real science, in contrast, is that it constantly throws nature into your face, messy, solid, and complex nature, which often makes a nonsense of all one’s airy-fairy abstractions.
Obviously, real education would draw out the particular intelligence of every individual, but we don’t do that. We think we need abstract symbol manipulators, and so we try to produce them en masse, and fail, and toss the failures into the dustbin. Like you, for example. And of course there are modes of intelligence, broadly defined, of which our culture knows absolutely nothing. My mum was always going on about that, the truly remarkable range of what different peoples choose to do with their brains. I wonder what she would have made of Moie.”

“Oh, Moie!” she said. “God, I wonder what happened to him. Do you think he’s okay?”

“Perfectly fine, I should think. Aren’t you, Moie?” As he said this, he looked over his shoulder into the shadows in the corner of the room by the door. She followed his glance and saw the Indian squatting there. The sight startled her, and she spilled some of her champagne.

“Jesus! Where did
he
come from? I didn’t even hear the door open.”

“No. Moie is only seen when he wants to be. One example of his particular mode of intelligence, perhaps.” In Quechua, Cooksey said, “I’m happy to see you. How are you getting on in your tree?”

“Well. It’s a good tree, although no one has spoken to it in a long time. And are you well, and her?”

“We are both exceedingly fine. Would you care for some champagne?” He dangled the bottle, and Moie stood and came closer. “What is this?” he asked, sniffing it.

“It’s similar to pisco, but with water added to it, and also air.”

“Then thank you, but I must not. Jaguar is back in the sky tonight.”

“And can you not take pisco when the moon is full?”

“No. He doesn’t like it, and he may need me tonight or the next day or the next. After that I will be happy to drink your pisco with you.”

“What will he do with you? If he comes.”

“Anything he wishes to do, of course. You shouldn’t ask foolish questions, for you are not entirely a fool.” He turned his attention to Jenny, who smiled at him and said, “Hey, Moie, what’s up?”

He ignored this and said to Cooksey, “The Firehair Girl seems happier than she was before. I see she has drunk a lot of your pisco-with-air, but also there is something else. She’s found something she lost, I think.”