The Evolution of Jane (12 page)

"Jack!" Martha called, beckoning with her finger, then pointing at the weedy growth.

"Vesuvium?" he said.

"Sesuvium," she said with some satisfaction, both at how close he'd come and at how wrong he'd been. "Those tiny white flowers are the only flowers on the island. Have you noticed that all the flowers, such as they are, on every island we've visited, are white or yellow? They show up better at night, when moths come out, when most of the pollination is done."

"I have white roses on my terrace," Jeremy Toll said. "My decorator suggested it. For entertaining at night."

"How Darwinian of him," Martha said.

We climbed to the top of the mountain of ashes. We saw tubes created by lava flowing down the slope toward the sea, its outer crust cooling in the air while beneath it ran on, inside its own tunnel. We saw smaller cones, places where gas had escaped from the main funnel and had bubbled up, leaving spatters, like a messy cook. These were called parasitic, since they lived off the main flow. The great frigate birds flying above us were called kleptoparasitic, because they not only lived off other animals, they stole food from them, crashing into the poor old boobies, causing them to vomit their catch, and then catching it themselves as it fell through the air. We stood atop parasitic cones beneath kleptoparasitic birds.

"Do you think I'm kleptoparasitic?" I asked Martha. I knew this question was tiresome and self-involved. And yet I could not stop myself.

"Do you steal other people's vomit?" she said. "And eat it?"

"Well, only metaphorically," I said.

"That will do," Jeremy said. He said it with some severity.

"Yeah," said Dot. "That's so disgusting."

"Just cover your ears and hum," Gloria said.

"I was just asking," I said.

"I was just answering," Martha said.

In spite of a vagrant, sentimental impulse to revive our ancient patterns of argument, I decided not to resume with Martha the subject of my possible kleptoparasitism.

"Good," Gloria said. "Anthropomorphism can go only so far." She patted my back in the encouraging way teachers sometimes do. "And even metaphor has its limits."

Our schedule assumed the inevitable, unchangeable, reassuring birth-to-grave reality of our small town life: we slept as the boat sailed; we woke up on the shores of a new island at 6:30 when Pablo walked by our cabin ringing a bell; we pointed to fish in the freezing water and lizards on the burning ground. We watched sea lion cows nursing their young. Blue-footed boobies whistled at us, masked boobies posed for us, their beaks to the sky. Red-footed boobies watched us from bare white-barked trees. Yellow land iguanas smiled up at our cameras.

"They're so beautiful," Martha would say,
gazing
at a crusty iguana.

That is why you're a good guide, I thought. You are essentially curious; your enthusiasm is undaunted.

Into this dusty, blissful nature hike that went on day after day, an occasional pang of guilt intruded: I had insulted Martha somehow. Then the pang of guilt was followed by disgust: no, I hadn't; how had I? Then the Galapagos reappeared. Tiny orange-throated lava lizards did tiny push-ups on the lava tuff. Diminutive Galapagos penguins pecked at our goggles. Sea lions, always more sea lions, splashed and dove and invited us, like excited children, to play.

"All the animals are so friendly," Mrs. Cornwall said. "No wonder poor William loved it here."

By this time, I had shed completely whatever initial reservations I'd had about my companions. Who would I sit next to at breakfast? Anyone! With whom would I snorkel, sharing an intimate look, a brief visual exchange, our heads rising from the waves of the Pacific as moray eels slid by us, our eyes clouded by our masks? With anyone! One black-rubber-clad body beneath the steely water was as good as another. Tug on a slippery latex arm, point to the blood-red starfish. Whose arm is it? Anybody's.

"I'm not used to being in a group," I told Gloria. "It's almost liberating. Do you think every group is like this? Should I start going on tour buses to Provence?"

"We are congenial, aren't we?"

"Unless the atmosphere radiates from Martha."

"Perhaps you
should
try a tour bus, dear," Gloria said. "Do you good."

We had sailed that day into a bay surrounded by a huge circle of guano-stained cliffs. We landed at a narrow crack in the cliffs that twisted steeply up the side, a nearly vertical corridor of black boulders referred to as Prince Philip's Steps. The prince had visited this very sight some years back, in anticipation of which these indentations had been banged into the rocks and named in his honor. At the top of the jagged slabs, a level expanse greeted us. The silver palo santo trees were heavy with nesting red-footed boobies, long-beaked white fluff peeping out beneath them. The red of their feet, wrapped around the scorched branches, the blue of their bills, bright as a baseball cap, struck me suddenly as both beautiful and doomed. Surely there was no place for such extravagance in the real world. But this was the real world, wasn't it?

We walked through bare trees, their silver branches rattling with our passage, flashes of red and blue and white appearing on every side. I took pictures of everything, roll after roll, red feet, blue beaks, fluff, masks, and the large nests of the frigate birds, their long hooked beaks hanging over the twiggy edge, their babies tucked carefully beneath them. I watched the boobies as they pointed their beaks to the sky, knocked them against another's beak, picked up feathers and sticks and passed them back and forth, beak to beak. They were courting.

I have a clear, sharp memory of a particularly icy snorkel that afternoon, a beautiful journey of weightless, numb astonishment above pallid sea cucumbers and colorful fish and a magnificently flat ghostly hammerhead shark sliding beneath me in the dark. Dot and Jeremy were partners. They were friends now, too. They had formed a bond, drawn together by a mutual recognition of their shared understanding of and affection for those lesser beings who surrounded them.

"Quite right, too," Jeremy would say when Dot muttered some preadolescent slur.

Cindy was my partner. I had not spent too much time with Cindy on the boat, but I did find her to be a compelling underwater companion. She was an expert swimmer, she dove down with her camera and its strobe flash to absurd depths, she seemed to smell out the biggest, reddest starfish, the longest, whitest-tipped shark, the most dazzling school of angelfish. And she never wore a wet suit! This last fact I found the most wonderful, and I realized I followed her in the water not so much to see the fish she inevitably found, but to watch her not get cold. I followed her until my head hurt from the frigid water, then lifted my face from the shadowy depths to see Sally Lightfoot crabs and snoozing fur seals on the black cliffs above me.

A
FTER SNORKELING,
we headed for the
Huxley's
unlikely Jacuzzi to warm up. The hot tub, which sat on the deck outside my cabin, was really a tepid tub, and it was meant for perhaps three people. Still, when we climbed off the
panga,
shivering in our wet suits, the little pool of lukewarm water could not have appeared more luxurious, and stocking it with ten or eleven or twelve bodies, as many bodies as possible, struck all of us as much more amusing than it probably was. But we had turned out to be, or at least felt ourselves to be, a particularly convivial group. Other groups, when we encountered them now and then on a beach or a rocky trail, struck me as dour and pompous and alien; or, if they, too, were a jolly group, they offended me even more, polluting the islands with their tourist laughter and comments.

"What if I put my left leg under your right leg?" Mr. Tommaso said, climbing into the tub.

"Mine is already there," said Jeannie.

"Well, then, over, I guess."

That afternoon, even Martha got in. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. We were all still in our wet suits, and they billowed absurdly beneath the surface, full of air and swirling water.

Mrs. Tommaso said, "Martha, why do those poor sea lions have so many scars? Something should be done about it."

Martha opened her eyes and lifted her head just a little. The water bubbled around her throat. "The story of those scars is a love story," she said. "They're dueling scars. You know the big, boisterous male sea lions we see, surrounded by sleeping females? That bull has had to fight off a lot of other bulls to get where he is. He has to continue to fight off challengers, too. And the rest of the time he spends copulating with all the females, one after the other, as they come into heat, over and over again, until he's so tired and worn out that some other male can challenge him, fight him, and take his place."

"What an exotic land this is," said Mrs. Tommaso.

"Meanwhile, the females calve," Martha said. "That's all they do for the rest of their lives. They copulate, have offspring and raise offspring, and have more offspring."

"The whole thing sounds like a depraved religious cult to me," Jeremy said.

He stood on the deck beside Dot, his new friend and kindred spirit, both of them watching us in shared, superior amusement.

There were already seven of us in the tub, all women except for Mr. Tommaso. Then Craig and Jack approached the Jacuzzi, and Mr. Tommaso began barking at them like one of the bull sea lions.

"I think that's disrespectful," Mrs. Tommaso said.

"Of whom?" said Mr. Tommaso.

"Those poor male sea lions," said Mrs. Tommaso. "They have so much responsibility."

"Now, here's another Galapagos love story," Martha said. "It's a true story, one that is often mentioned in the guidebooks. But to get this story straight, to be able to indulge yourself in the details of it, to understand its true fascination, to delight in its lacy, farcical intrigues or wallow in its lugubrious tragedy, you would have to do a bit of research. You would have to go to the library and find diaries that are no longer in print, examine old newspapers. Or, better yet, you would have to come on a trip with me, after I had already done those things. You all have chosen the latter path and so I am able to recount to you with some degree of reliability the story of Adam and Eve on Floreana Island."

I had been transfixed, watching Jeannie's impressive cleavage bobbing up and down in the water, but now I turned away to observe Craig and Jack as they tried to climb into the Jacuzzi. Perhaps it was the thought of them as suitor sea lions, but they both seemed suddenly so attractive. Craig was a pleasant muted monochrome sort of person—light brown hair, light brown eyes, regular features, even white teeth, a light brown tan, usually dressed in a beige T-shirt, khaki shorts. He spoke in his soft Canadian murmur. It was a beige accent. There was something comely about him, about how unassuming he was in his looks and his manner.

Jack was quite different. He was small and handsome in an angular way, with his big face and black hair and small blue eyes, which actually seemed to flash. He didn't say much at all aside from his aggressive botanizing and geologizing and entymologizing remarks. And one did have to wonder what kind of a twenty-five-year-old man went on a trip with his mother, not to mention his incinerated father. Either a very weak or a very strong twenty-five-year-old man, I thought. He slid next to me in the hot tub, his knees bent, his arms resting on them. There was no more room in the tangle of wet-suit legs. I noticed we were wearing the same watch, a diving watch.

He gave me his big smile, which made me smile back. I wondered what clothes he wore in real life. I wondered if he had a girlfriend. It was hard to imagine. I could envision him only in camping clothes, on the boat, surrounded by his family, by us. But maybe he'd thought he was going on a different kind of cruise. Maybe he came on this trip to meet girls. Well, there weren't any girls to meet. Except me.

Oh, and Martha. I had forgotten Martha.

"Chapter one," she was saying. "There once was a dentist, a Nietzschean dentist. His name was Dr. Karl Friedrich Ritter, and he really was a Nietzschean of the crudest sort. Dr. Ritter
über alles!
This dentist recognized it as his destiny as a superior person to enlighten one of his patients with the philosophic doctrine of the two of them leaving their marriages and children and starting a new race of super-Nietzschean dentist offspring in an Edenic setting, for the benefit of mankind."

Martha was openly enjoying our attention. She was a good storyteller and like most good storytellers, she seemed to exist solely for the benefit of her audience and simultaneously to find that audience completely extraneous.

"For years, Dr. Ritter and his patient and disciple, Dore Strauch, secretly stockpiled tools and seeds in Germany," she said. "Then one evening, they threw a party for their spouses.

"'We are leaving for Paradise tomorrow morning,' said Herr Doktor Ritter and Frau Strauch.

'"We are?' said Frau Ritter and Herr Strauch.

"'No, not you,' they explained. 'Us. But, we don't want you two to be lonely while we live in Paradise, so we have planned to have you move in together!'

"And they did."

Now,
that
is a splitting event, I thought. Compared to those harsh, overly intellectual, and at the same time Romantic, which is to say Germanic, divorces, my divorce seemed to me suddenly so namby-pamby. And what about the Other Barlows' divorce, Martha's parents'? If most divorces are ugly, I think you'd have to describe the divorce of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Barlow as pretty. Mr. Barlow was incredibly generous to Mrs. Barlow after their divorce, even though it was she who left him, and he continued his genial and unstinting behavior even when he acquired a young wife and infant twins to support. My mother said, with a combination of annoyance and satisfaction that struck me as rather odd, that Mr. Barlow had behaved far better than most men embarking on their midlife nonsense. Certainly he was a better ex-husband than Dr. Ritter.

"Chapter two," Martha was saying. "Dr. Ritter and Dore Strauch decided to locate Paradise in the Galapagos Islands. They settled on Floreana, an island Darwin had visited one hundred years earlier. When Darwin landed there on September 23, 1835, it was called Charles Island. It had recently been populated by several hundred Ecuadorian political exiles who eked out a subsistence diet of bananas and sweet potatoes. 'It will not easily be imagined,' Darwin wrote of Floreana, 'how pleasant the sight of black mud was to us, after having been so long accustomed to the parched soil of Peru and Chile.' The colony of political prisoners had died out by the time the Strauch-Ritters arrived, and there wasn't all that much black mud, either. There was a freshwater spring far in the interior, but most of the island was as arid and parched as anything Peru or Chile could have offered.