The Professor and Other Writings (44 page)

 

Smiles and tears and a Parting Shot. Blakey and I celebrated our wedding in August, the one I mentioned in my proglomena a thousand years ago. (Lo, since I began this piece, many months of whingeing and moaning over it have come and gone.) The ceremony was surprisingly moving for us—deep, even. We both cried when the twinkie-gay-guy Justice of the Peace at City Hall read the vows and asked us to repeat them. Harvey Milk looked on (or at least his bust did); our friends and families stood by in a little circle around us. B.'s brother Adrian was one of the official witnesses when we went in to sign the registry; my baby sis was the other. My mother got weepy, but nonetheless managed to keep her knickers up in the Humor Department. She would never have dreamed, she announced loudly during a lull at the wedding brunch, that when the first of her two daughters got married, she (the mother of the bride) would be a wobbly eighty-two-year-old and the bride in question (an extremely weird English professor) pretty much past it too at fifty-four.

And yes, the November election has come and gone; and yes, the
right-wing head-bangers did pass their stupid Prop 8 banning same-sex marriage in California.
Ugh.
The face-ache people at it again. B. and I think our nuptials are still binding, however: it appears that voiding existing marriages—as opposed to outlawing new ones—is close to impossible, or at least would require many court challenges, and possibly years, to bring off. So in the meantime—till death do us part in fact—we revel in our licit conjugalism.

It's been a big year all around, in fact, and not only on account of the Dearly Beloved stuff. We went round the world for the first time and that too was phenomenal—even if one's itinerary (owing to various far-flung conferences one was obliged to attend) was an oddball one to say the least: San Francisco to Aberdeen to Istanbul to Bangkok to Sydney to San Francisco. Bangkok, admittedly, was a bit of a low point—the fetid river canals and ubiquitous sex tourism got us down. But Sydney—lovely Sydney, our final stop before SF—was a different matter altogether. The Macquarie conference was fun; the city enchanting and easy and full, as always, of sweet, gleaming, carousing life.

No aggro at all—in fact—but, as we joked in our last e-mails back to the United States, lots of AGGRO! Aggro (her real name) was one of the more entertaining individuals we met on our trip, possibly even a new Best Friend Forever. Too bad she couldn't have come back with us for the wedding. Transport would have been a problem, though: Aggro is a seventeen-foot-long lady crocodile who lives under a sun lamp—stylishly enough—in a weedy faux-swamp at the Sydney Aquarium in Darling Harbor. We spent the morning with her our last day in Oz. And what an attractive nymph she is—svelte, greeny-yallery, with warm golden eyes, white scaly tum, and, yes, a big ingratiating smile for everyone. Alas, she suffers a little from Temperament: apparently in the past she has tried to eviscerate any other crocodile they put in the tank with her. Has a hard time getting close, in other words. Not especially nice to those whom she doesn't
trust. (No real love life either, obviously.) Her favorite activity would seem to be dozing under her infrared lamp for hours on end, preferably while digesting some large and savory prey. When we first came upon her she was in fact relaxing in just this fashion. Someone said she was going to be fed again very soon, however, so with considerable excitement, we joined the little crowd assembled for the event.

From our first vantage-point, on one side of her glassed-in enclosure, we could see Aggro well indeed: sluggish yet majestic, stretched out at full length, both the parts of her above water and those below. She lay on a sort of shallow, silty underwater ledge, with only her eyes, brows, and big flaring nostrils showing above the water line. All very revealing, but after a few minutes we decided to move to the observation platform directly above her. (Sad to report, but Aggro had just delivered herself—rather indecorously, we felt, given her otherwise regal demeanor—of a large yellow torpedo of crocodile poo.) From above the view was less intimate, perhaps, but more pleasing overall. Nor did any safety glass block one's line of sight. While we waited for something to happen, B. and I took pictures of ourselves next to the
No Jumping or Diving!
sign gracing the platform: a truly horrifying pictograph, showing the Universal Stick Figure falling into the open maw of one of Aggro's brethren.

At last, from behind a padlocked door at the far back of the enclosure, Aggro's two keepers finally emerged—a pair of young and sporty-looking digger-girls with blonde ponytails, big rubber galoshes, and matching blue polo shirts. After a quick gander round to confirm exactly where Aggro was, they began moving silently and gingerly toward the edge of the pond—the one in front having attached and braced on her forearm, medieval knight–style, a sort of clear plastic riot shield, almost as broad and tall as she was. Behind her, the second keeper hung back slightly, stayed hidden as much as possible behind her colleague and the shield. She, the second girl, carried a bucket and was obviously concealing something large, wet,
and scrumptious behind her back. As they proceeded—inch by inch, with utmost caution—the tension grew. Aggro had by now raised herself slightly out of the water, one saw, and was supporting her huge wedge-head and torso on her two tiny forelegs. Her finely marked features stood fully revealed now. She looked, by turns, pensive, feminine, intelligent, oddly expectant—the heroine in a Henry James novel waiting for the answer she both desires yet fears will never come. One's camera was at the ready; the suspense riveting.

Then—in a sequence almost too quick and fearsome to absorb: a Sudden Deranging Upward Lunge. The huge hoary form, vertical now and almost entirely out of the water, smashed up against the riot shield, powering its onslaught with a massive lashing tail. The keeper in front pushed back, reflexively and hard, struggled to keep her balance; her companion quickly braced her now from behind. The crowd of observers screeched at the blood-curdling shock of it all. And then again, just as fast as it had happened: a lull and a disengagement, a colossal slapping backwash. The monster had already slithered away in reverse, slipped easily down under the water. At peace too, presumably, having now been fed—though the residual water in the pond, so rapidly and violently displaced, still slopped from side to side, like that in an industrial washing machine.

There
had
been a fish, one gathered—Blakey says it was a big Aussie sport fish like a barramundi—but I never saw it at all. Not when the keeper thrust it up and over the shield; not the nanosecond flash of silver scales. My fault? Or a tribute to Aggro's balletic, crack-the-whip, zero-to-sixty? All I know is that the crusty little lady moved fast as soon as she saw what she wanted. Now, true enough: one had never entirely credited those gruesome stories one heard about alligators and crocodiles suddenly launching themselves out of lakes and rivers and snatching babies out of their prams. Or that someone's pet croc had suddenly appeared on a golf course at a resort somewhere in Florida, killed several golfers, then managed
to abscond with a full set of golf clubs. Hard to accept, even from supposed eyewitnesses, that a pile of man-sized bones—now stripped clean—lay in shards and disarray at the fifth hole. Or indeed that a long greenish beast—huge, dwarf-legged, and dreadful, its booty hanging limp in its humungous jaws—had been seen hotfooting it back to its swampy home faster than an NFL wide receiver. But Aggro had had her lunch mauled and down her gullet before those of us in the peanut gallery had even registered its existence. This lady croc was one awesome predator. What a smile! What personality! What teeth! One couldn't help adoring her. It was lucky, Blakey and I agreed, as we packed up our suitcases that evening, that those two young Aussie girls at the Aquarium were buffer and butcher than they first appeared. They'd had the plastic riot shield thing down pat and were obviously familiar with Aggro's quick little feminine wiles. For all our tough talk and cynicism, the two of
us
would have been eaten alive.