The Evolution of Jane (20 page)

We sat on the beach and watched Cindy play with the hermit crabs she found on the mangrove roots. I wanted to ask Martha more about the engagement. How old were they? How had they met? I tried to imagine them making love, or even kissing, their identical blue eyes staring like incestuous mirrors.

I wondered again if Craig could have been one of the wandering nocturnal blankets, or the man talking to the woman outside my window a few days before. I listened carefully to his mild voice as he asked Jack if he was satisfied with his hiking shoes. And what
about
Jack? Perhaps if I knocked on Jack's cabin door later, he would say, "Is that you?" like the anonymous blankets, and I would recognize the voice. How could I get him to say, "But where? When? Oh, if only..." like the man outside the cabin window?

Silly thing to think about as one sits on a green beach viewing the biological mysteries. Silly to think about assignations or English papers from long ago or broken engagements. I felt vaguely guilty, petty. And yet we were on Floreana, isle of the guilty, isle of the petty, an island even a naturephobe could love, a soap opera of an island, a great seething volcanic cauldron of human vanity, a land of no opportunity, and even that squandered. Floreana, the New Jersey of the Galapagos. Pirates and fierce red-haired hermits, a penal colony, and, best of all: The Nietzschean Dentist and His Lame Love Slave! The Austrian Whip-Cracking Faux Baroness—Self-Proclaimed Galapagos Empress!—and Her Three Abject Lovers! Jacob Astor's Yacht! Nudists! Norwegians!

"If flies and horses and humans all evolved separately," said Jack's sister, Liza, "along different branches of the universal tree of life, how did we all get eyes?"

Our cameras and binoculars hung like huge beads from our scarlet necks.

"Eyes are useful," Martha said after a while.

Frau Wittmer received us in the dining room of her post office-hotel. She stood in a cotton housedress beneath maps of Germany and a print of the cathedral at Cologne. Dark wooden beams, lace curtains, and flowered tablecloths—we could have been in the Black Forest with Hansel and Gretel. We were in a fable, a German fable transported to a Pacific island. The white-haired, pink-cheeked suspected murderess with sparkling blue eyes shook hands and posed for photographs. Even Mrs. Cornwall recognized that here was a matriarch of unusual stature. Over the years, Margret Wittmer's name had come up in connection with seven murders. She outlived the superman dentist by many decades. Some people think she killed him, for he died after eating a portion of that potted chicken she sent around each month. I don't blame her for that one, though. Ritter was a vegetarian, and he had some scientific training. He ought to have known that chicken is not a vegetable. And when he fed it to his livestock, the stuff had killed them. Most of us, even without that training in dentistry, would at this point throw the potted chicken away. But perhaps because Herr Doktor Ritter was more than a dentist, because he was a philosopher, he boiled the spoiled potted meat. Then he ate it. Then he died. I'm sorry, I don't think you can lay that one at the feet of old Margret.

When I saw Margret Wittmer, so pink and white and robust, I wanted only to marvel at her as I had at the frigate birds with their inflated red balloon necks, at all the flora and fauna, at the volcanoes on which they all lived. As Gloria raised her camera to take a picture of me with Frau Wittmer, the old lady quickly pulled her glasses off, then stared blankly in the direction of the camera lens and smiled. She seemed to me in that instant so utterly human and so absurdly vain. It was unnerving.

Behind her house, or, properly, her hotel, there was a pen in which she raised Galapagos tortoises. They sunned themselves, hardly distinguishable from the dirt of the little corral. We walked past them, down the dusty road that ran by the few other houses, in which lived various Wittmer descendants. Chickens scratched at the dust. Martha pointed out some trees. I heard someone behind me grumbling that this excursion had nothing to do with natural history.

Jack, who was walking quietly beside me, said, "Quite the contrary."

Jack's face was golden in the equatorial sun. I walked beside this friendly man with beautiful eyes, and I thought, Perhaps my same old self, which I've accidentally brought along to this new world, will get to work in a brand-new way, will blossom and flower, like a thick-trunked tree of daisies.

"It may be argued [that] representative species [are] chiefly found where [there are] barriers," Darwin wrote in an entry in one of his notebooks, "and what are barriers but [an] interruption of communication?"

Gloria pointed this passage out to me after lunch. She said she felt as if there had been an interruption of communication. I thought she meant communication with me, and I agreed, saying perhaps she should listen more carefully when I told her my interesting theories about high school and such, but it turned out she meant that she felt far, far away, just as I did, just as Jack did, just as we all did.

"Look! Here's a definition of species for you," she said, pointing to a passage in the huge red paperback volume of Darwin's notebooks. She was looking through it as we stretched out on our bunks for a short siesta.

"Definition of species: one that remains at large with constant characters, together with other beings of very near structure—Hence species may be good ones and differ scarcely in any external character:—For instance two wrens forced to haunt two islands one with one kind of herbage and one with other, might change organization of stomach and hence remain distinct."

"But how near is 'very near structure'?" I said. "At what point do we say 'Aha! Not near enough'?"

"You'll have to find that one yourself," Gloria said. She tossed the book onto my bed.

"I think the organization of my stomach has changed," I said. I felt vaguely seasick and I took a nap. When I woke up, Gloria was gone. A gloomy peace suffused the cabin. I lay in the stillness listening to the boat's creaks and nautical groans. And then I heard the voices, the same voices. They were rendezvousing in the same place, criminals returned to the scene of their crime.

"Can we ever make this work?" said the man softly.

"Of course we will," said the woman. "Soon."

"You can't imagine what it's like," he said. "Every day. Having to pretend..."

"I know it's hard."

"Thank you," he said. "Thank you."

It was Jack. It was Martha. I heard them clearly this time. I recognized their voices. I tried to determine if I was dreaming. I often have lifelike banal dreams about someone calling and canceling an appointment or complaining about an unpaid bill, which I have a difficult time identifying as dreams in the morning. But this dream hardly qualified as ordinary. Perhaps the changed organization of my stomach had produced a changed organization of my dreams. That was a more welcome explanation than Jack and Martha making assignations outside my window.

We landed on a small beach on another part of Floreana late in the afternoon and walked a few hundred yards on a path toward the interior. I watched the vegetation change as we crossed from the coastal zone to the arid zone. The change was ridiculously abrupt, as if the plants knew where they belonged, which I suppose they did, in a way.

I was more angry than I'd been in a long time. Of course things changed. I understood that. Things change. Things change in time. The Galapagos Islands had changed from hot, sterile, volcanic explosions into oases of oddball populations. Things change in space. Even in that short distance, we were moving from one ecological environment to another. Things die. I understood that, too. Who didn't? Things happen for no reason. Yes, yes, the commonplaces of modern life. Bumper stickers. I got it.

Still, one was not a Buddha. One was a human being, flesh and blood and nerve endings and chemical messages to one's brain. And those messages said, "Fuck you, Martha."

We arrived at a small clearing. In the middle was the post-office barrel atop a heap of sticks and boards and flags, like a big wooden bird on a big wooden nest. There were plaques and carved medallions from visiting groups like ours, laminated ID tags from students, and one or two religious medals.

The post-office barrel, or one like it, had been on that spot for over a hundred years. Sailors, whalers mostly, on outgoing trips would leave letters for ships on their way home and vice versa. My great-great-grandfather might have mailed a letter here. Now tourists left letters. If I, for example, had found a letter addressed to someone in New York City, I would have taken that letter home and delivered it or put a local stamp on it and popped it in a normal blue mailbox.

Martha removed a plastic bag full of letters from the barrel and began looking at the addresses. Many from Germany. Many from Israel. France. England. Ohio. There were also about two dozen business cards from lawyers.

Fuck you, Martha, I thought.

We sat down and milled around and read other people's postcards. Jeremy Toll seemed the most animated of the group. The light grew dimmer, but if you squinted you could still eavesdrop on these unknown correspondents. "Wish you were here!" the postcards said in one language or another. "Hope you get this!"

"They're all writing to their children," Jeremy said. "How utterly unimaginative."

I had a postcard I'd bought earlier that day from Margret Wittmer's hotel. I addressed it to my mother and father. It said, "Thank you. Love, Jane."

"What lovely manners," Jeremy said, looking over my shoulder.

It was dusk. The sky was a beautiful dark softening blue. Gloria was staring off in a particularly distracted way.

"What's a species?" I said.

"Oh, Jane."

"Darwin saw that every barnacle was different from every other barnacle, right? So how can they all be barnacles? If every one is different?"

Gloria said she was sorry the trip was almost over. "It's very beautiful here in a stark and impersonal way."

I looked out at the bushes around us, at the sky, which had turned the color of iron. It was getting cold. Fuck you, Martha, I thought again. And then again.

"It's ironic, isn't it," Gloria said, "that the scientific understanding that led us to realize that we are one with the animal kingdom relied on the recognition of the existence of the individual."

Brian and Liza Cornwall and Mrs. Cornwall herself squatted on the sand to read the notes, the ID tags, the wooden plaques left hanging from the post-office barrel as souvenirs, great heaps of sentimental trash. The Tommasos were scrutinizing a stalk. Craig and Cindy flipped through the lawyers' business cards for familiar names. Jeannie sat with Ethel, Jeremy sat with Dot.

Gloria pointed to the group. "A species is a collection of individuals," she said.

But I didn't say anything, for I realized that two individuals were missing from the collection. Martha and Jack.

"The individuals have certain things in common," Gloria went on. "Historically those things have changed. Aristotle grouped animals differently than we do today. People have used all kinds of criteria—what animals ate, whether or not we eat them, or how many legs they had, or whether they had fur or feathers. Now we look at populations that can share DNA. Okay? Does that help? Species are real, with real boundaries, but they're always changing. All right? They're statistical entities. You're part of a species, but you're still you. And you can't mate with a barnacle."

"Just sheep," Jeremy called from the log where he was sitting.

"That's called a sheep shagger," Dot said.

"You astonish me, young lady," said Jeremy. "And delight me."

Gloria gave me a fairly friendly push, then turned away to resume contemplating the sky, which was now even deeper and darker. It was the latest we had ever been ashore anywhere.

"Where's Martha?" I said.

"She went up that path," Jeannie said. "Some old ruin of a cement mixer or something equally fascinating. I prefer other people's mail."

If Martha had wandered off, I could wander off after her. The ruin of a cement mixer sounded important and intellectually engaging. I could ask her more about the relationship of the individual to the species. I could ask her more about our parents' broken engagement. What could I ask Jack about? Well, it wasn't as if I were following them. Fuck them.

I slipped away from the group and walked nonchalantly along the path that Jeannie had pointed out. It was almost dark, and I reminded myself that the only wild animals on this island were mice and cows and donkeys and cats and dogs. Strays. Brought there on ships, left behind by ships. Goats. Rats. It was quiet. So different from Barlow at dusk with all its birds and squirrels and insects. So different from New York, where people called for taxis and discussed their therapists and fought with invisible spouses on cell phones. I looked through the gloom at the barren landscape.

"Taxi!" I said, very softly.

I spent only a few minutes sneaking, lonely, through the scant brush. Then I saw them.

They stood close to each other.

"This is perfect," Jack said.

"I told you it would be worth the wait," Martha said.

Jack put his arms around Martha.

"You're incredible," he said.

"Just one of the Ecuadorian park ranger's many services," she said.

"Taxi!" I said, as Martha caught sight of me.

I think you could say they both blanched. They moved away from each other. Jack muttered, "Oh dear." Martha coughed.

"Hi!" I said.

"Hi," they answered.

"I was just..." I started to say. But I was just what? Following them? That didn't sound very nice. "I'm really sorry. I didn't mean to—"

But I did mean. I meant to follow them, to find them and, I realized, I meant to tell Martha off, finally, after all these years.

"I'm sorry I didn't mention this before," Jack said. He walked over and took my hand.

I took my hand back. I was here to see Martha, to speak to Martha, to confront Martha. I would deal with him later. Or not. He was a sidebar. I moved past him. I faced Martha.

"We have to get a few things straight, Martha."