But Angelica pregnant, Angelica in labor; Angelica changing diapers and making Play-Doh and watching The Brave Little Toaster? Not in a thousand years.
I finished my lemonade, dropped the empty cup atop a trash can already filled to overflowing. I walked slowly back across the Mall. A murky breeze carried the greasy smells of hot dogs and egg rolls from the lines of roach coaches parked in front of the museums. A bunch of marines in summer whites posed on the museum steps with a cardboard cutout of the president and his wife. Two museum guards watched, laughing, and saluted.
Too weird. I let the heavy revolving doors bear me inside, breathing gratefully the cool recycled air, the heady scents of tourism and scholarship, and returned to my office.
A little while later Baby Joe called. “What’s shaking, hija?”
“Baby Joe!” I was unexpectedly relieved to hear his voice. “You okay?” Silence. It had been only a week since Hasel’s death. “Yeah, I guess. Why?”
“Well—I just saw the weirdest thing on TV. On Opal Purlstein—”
“You watch Opal Purlstein?”
“Angelica was on! I saw her, she was promoting some new book—”
“Oh, yeah. Waking the Moon. It’s supposed to hit the best-seller list this Sunday.”
I was flabbergasted. “I have a friend at the Times Book Review,” said Baby Joe tentatively, “he says—”
“You knew?” I exploded. “You knew about Angelica and didn’t tell me?”
“Hey, Sweeney, it’s not like it’s some kind of state secret—”
“I know that! But all that stuff about Hasel, and you never even mentioned—”
“I didn’t even know until a few months ago. I mean about her,” he said, aggrieved. “And—well, with Hasel and everything, I kind of forgot—”
“How could you forget?”
“Cut me some slack, Sweeney! My best friend fucking died!”
“But Angelica—Hasel said he saw—”
I could hear a soft intake of breath as he dragged on his cigarette. “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about Hasel right now,” he said finally.
“Fine,” I snapped. “Can we talk about Angelica?”
Another long silence, followed by a sigh. “Yeah. But listen, Sweeney—there’s something weird going on. I mean with Angelica—”
“So that’s news?”
“Back off, huh? Okay, this is what I know: someone here interviewed Angelica for the Leisure section a little while ago. She’s got some kind of cult following out on the West Coast, feminist grad students, something like that…”
“You could have told me, Baby Joe. Jeez, I almost had a heart attack when I saw her—”
“How’d she look?”
“Fantastic. I mean, she doesn’t look different at all, she looks just like—”
I thought of how she had looked the last time I’d seen her: crouched over Oliver, as though she were a wolf and he her prey. I felt a clutching in my chest, the same awful disjointed feeling I’d had when Baby Joe told me Hasel died.
“—she looked just like always,” I ended lamely.
“Yeah.” Baby Joe sighed again. “Okay, I guess I should have told you when I first found out. But I kept thinking of Oliver, and—well, you and Angie had all that weird history—”
“We did?”
“Hey, hija, you tell me. But Oliver, you know, I thought it would just make you feel bad…”
His voice drifted off. I imagined him sitting at his computer, hazed with blue smoke and a dusting of ash. My anger melted—because seeing Angelica did make me think of Oliver, and that did make me feel bad.
“It was a long time ago,” I said at last.
“A long time ago, in a university far, far away,” Baby Joe giggled softly. “Hey, you didn’t videotape her or anything, did you?”
“No. I guess I should have. But I was so—well, I was kind of shocked. It was like The Picture of Dorian Gray or something.”
“Yeah. And somewhere there’s a very bad photo of Angelica, with her mascara running and no lipstick. Very scary.”
I laughed. “So she’s a best-seller now, huh? I had no idea. I’ll have to get her book. You know anything about it?”
“Not really. But I’ll fax you that interview.”
We exchanged a few scurrilous remarks, and I told him about the Aditi.
“Sounds pretty wild. I bet the food’s good—”
“It’s great. You should come down and check it out.”
“Do they have baluts?”
“What’s baluts?”
“Filipino specialty. You take these embryonic chickens and bury ’em in the dirt for a couple months, and then—”
“That’s enough. No, I’m pretty sure there’s no baluts.”
“Too bad. Don’t you ever do any work down there?”
“Nah. This is the government. Mostly we just take turns answering the phone and going to lunch.”
I heard someone calling to Baby Joe in the background. “Listen, hija, I gotta go. I may have something else for you later. You gonna be there?”
“I guess—”
“Okay”
He hung up. I sat for several minutes staring at my desk.
“Katherine?”
I turned to see Dr. Dvorkin framed in the doorway. “Robert! Come on in.”
“Thanks—I can’t stay, Jack left me some paperwork I’ve got to fill out for his fire-eaters.”
He grimaced: a small round man, with white hair and a neatly trimmed white goatee, wrinkled and kindly and smartly dressed as an F.A.O. Schwarz Santa doing time in a fancy law firm. Even now, in D.C.’s broiling summer, he wore an immaculate grey three-piece suit, complete with testosterone yellow tie and matching pocket handkerchief.
“Katherine, I have to attend a Regent’s Supper at the Castle tonight. Would you mind checking in on the cats for me?”
In addition to being my boss at the museum, Dr. Dvorkin was my landlord. For the last eight years I’d rented the tiny brick carriage house in his back garden on the Hill. It was the most wonderful place I’d ever lived. The only place I could even imagine might be nicer was Dr. Dvorkin’s own town house.
“Of course not. Should I be looking for white smoke rising from the tower?”
Dr. Dvorkin sighed. For several months now the search had been on for a new Regent; three months earlier one had died at the age of ninety-seven and his replacement had yet to be named. “Not yet, I’m afraid. We’re meeting someone else this evening. I hope to god this thing doesn’t take all night. I think there’s some basil in my refrigerator, you should take it when you come over, it’s about to go bad.”
“Thanks, Robert.”
“Thank you.” He turned to go, then stopped. “I almost forgot—you got a fax.”
I took the pages, tossed away the cover sheet, and settled back into my chair to read.