“Yes. But you aspire to higher education.”
“Not in math.”
“Then half the world’s closed to you. The language of physics. Chemistry.”
“I’m not the scientific type.” I pushed my plate back toward him.
“Really? Art is okay, and religion, but science, that other great mode of human inquiry, holds no appeal. Interesting. A little arrogant.”
“I didn’t mean-”
“I have no problem with arrogance; it can be sexy. You really think what bores you isn’t worth learning? Feynman was like that. He thought literature was a waste of time.”
A martini appeared in front of me. I took a long sip from the chilled glass and felt my ears twitch. Imagine getting so heated up about arithmetic. I popped the olive in my mouth and looked at him, his soft white shirt such a textural contrast to the steel booth he leaned against. What a masculine restaurant. Except for those fur-covered seating cubes. I took another sip.
“Chaco,” I said. But I mispronounced it, so that it sounded like “Tcheiko.”
“What?” His body tensed. I could feel it in the space between us.
“Ceratophrys cranwelli, predaceous South American horned frog. I’m painting it. The Chaco. Of the subfamily Ceratophryinae, within the family Leptodactylidae. See? Science.”
Simon relaxed. Smiled. “That’s not science, that’s showing off your Latin.”
The tension had been subtle, but it had been there. Simon had Vladimir Tcheiko on the brain. And he didn’t want me knowing. Tcheiko wasn’t just a drug lord. He was Big Fish.
I was wondering what to do with this when Simon asked how things had gone on the set. I told him I’d followed men to the bathroom all night, lurking in the hallway in case one used the pay phone between the men’s and ladies’ rooms. None did. “And no one,” I said, “stood up and announced, ‘I am Little Fish.’ One Celtic accent, no shopping bags. Nothing I did tonight couldn’t be done by any first-year FBI agent, by the way.”
A waiter refilled our water glasses. Simon thanked him without taking his eyes off me.
“So why me?” I said. “Why me?”
He just kept looking at me. “Stop looking for her,” he said, his voice soft.
I said nothing.
It really was a great restaurant. Our waiter brought me a second martini I couldn’t recall ordering, a salad I knew I hadn’t ordered, and some pasta thing. Simon had a steak the size of my shoe. There were colorful sauces, kaleidoscopically arranged on the plates, and an impressive bread basket with skinny breadsticks and curly pretzelly things shooting out like earth-tone flora. The whole experience was enhanced by the fact that I was drunk.
“I’ve never gotten drunk with a G-man,” I said, leaning over the table a little farther than the rules of good posture allowed. “I bet you have a conservative voting record. I don’t often date Republicans, but Joey says they’re good in bed, more so than you’d imagine.”
“It’s not something I’ve spent time imagining.”
“Speaking of Joey, why didn’t you recruit her? She’s brave, she’s intrepid, and she’s a producer of sorts, so she’s got a built-in excuse for hanging around the show.”
“I have my reasons,” he said.
“Let’s hear them.”
He sat back, his body languid, one hand playing idly with the espresso cup in front of him. He studied me. He studied me for so long I forgot what my question was. For a moment I sobered up. Should federal agents even be allowed to date, when the rules of conversation kept getting suspended every four minutes?
“Joey,” he said, “has a lifestyle and certain… characteristics that make her less than desirable to work with.” His hand lifted in a “Stop” gesture. “Anything I say about this is going to get you defensive. You’re a little fierce about your friends.”
“You mean I’m fierce about Annika but, Simon, if you knew her better, you’d like her. You’d like her better than me. She knew all this math stuff, she tutored me for free, she had no money but she volunteered at pet shelters, she was kind to plants, and so small, with those red cheeks and worried about World War II and she’s not even twenty years old. If they had a reality show called Who Should Not Disappear into Thin Air? she’d win.”
This was not, perhaps, my most lucid moment, but Simon looked at me with gentleness, a gentleness peculiar to tall men. Tall men with blue eyes. There are male frogs that turn blue in order to attract female frogs, I told myself. This got me to thinking about the most famous frog, the legendary frog turned into a prince by a kiss. I seemed to be living the legend in reverse, seeing men as princes and kissing them willingly, only to find they were in fact amphibians, leading a double life, one on land, one at sea. Perhaps this was because the woman in the legend was a princess and I was a commoner.
At some point we walked the long, long walk out of the restaurant, and when we were halfway down the flower-covered alleyway, Simon stopped. I turned to him, stood on tiptoes as if I were going to tell him a secret, which seems like something an informant might do with an FBI agent, and then I kissed him. He kissed me back. After a while, other people came down the flower-covered alleyway, and we stopped kissing and continued on our way to Sunset Boulevard, where it was the morning after Thanksgiving night.
He put his jacket on me while we waited for the valet parking guy to fetch his car. The jacket was too big. It made me feel little. When you’re a girl who is six feet tall, that is nothing to sneeze at.
31
I woke up on my living room sofa, dressed. Morning. My head hurt. Memory came in slowly, like coffee through a drip machine.
Why wasn’t I in my bed? Had I been so drunk last night I’d lost my way? No, my mother was occupying the bedroom. Okay. What day was it? Friday. I had to work on the frogs. I sat up. All my brains shifted to the front of my head. I lay back down. I sat up again, then stood. Okay, I was really making progress now.
Simon.
I clutched the back of the sofa and closed my eyes. Had we-?
Kissed?
I sat back down. Scenes replayed like a home movie. Kisses. Outside the apartment, under a tree, in the grass, the car, the elevator. I’d found the gun he wore on his waist. He’d checked out the apartment for plumbers, but then what? Please God, tell me he hadn’t stayed. Bad enough to not remember, but with Prana in the bedroom and paper-thin walls-
I got up, and this time made it all the way to the kitchen, to a quart of cold water and medication. I was able to manage the childproof cap on the Tylenol bottle, but the coffee grinder presented a problem. Would it wake my mother? Maybe. Was it worth it? No. This was why God had created instant coffee.
My eyes lit on my computer, sitting on the kitchen table.
While the kettle heated up, I logged on to the Biological Clock Web site. The fact that I hadn’t done so until now raised an interesting question. Did I simply not enjoy computers, or was I, in fact, in denial about this show? Was I, like Prana, appalled?
The Web site was itself a little appalling, all primary colors, capital letters, and exclamation points. I felt like putting on sunglasses. There was a page called “Who’s Got the Best B.C. Body?!” that I chose not to visit. I was drawn instead to “Biological Biographies!”
There was nothing about Carlito, Vaclav, and Henry I couldn’t have written myself, because I’d been dating them, and if there’s one thing I know how to be it’s an attentive date. The competition was another story. I clicked on Kimberly Karmer. Kim was from a large, loving family, was a former Junior Miss, an award-winning clarinet player, and fluent in American Sign Language, thanks to a hearing-impaired mother. In the summer she taught music to underprivileged youth and she was now working in retail while pursuing a master’s degree in psychology. Dear God, I thought, and clicked onto Savannah Brook. Worse. Laker Girl, French major. MBA from Columbia, then spent a year building houses for poor people in Guatemala, currently a systems analyst, whatever that was, for a banking consortium and an equestrienne. And, of course, a black belt in Krav Maga. The kind of date who’d fix your roof, balance your checkbook, and advise you on your groin kicks.