He doesn’t respond. But he’s begun inching forward, flicking his brights on and off by way of suggesting to the people in the BMW that their behavior stands in need of correcting. “Why don’t they just park in the middle of the fucking street? Come on,” he mutters, coaching them, “come on.” Whoever they are — shadowy forms emerging suddenly in sharp relief, the back of a man’s head and a woman beside him, in profile, her hair massed like an unraveling turban — they’ve begun to get the idea. There’s a quick sharp movement of the man’s shoulders, the wheel swinging right, and the car rolls grudgingly out of the way.
That’s when the feeling comes over her — what is it, dread, mortification, hate? — and she doesn’t want to know, doesn’t want to look, staring rigidly ahead, as if she’s been frozen in place, as Tim pulls even with them, right there, right in the operatic glare of the headlights of the next car in line. She can feel his eyes sweeping sourly over them, the engine of the Prius gurgling softly, the windshield wipers beating time and the faintest whisper of a voice leaking from the radio as he eases past, but she doesn’t turn her head. She’s shut them out, negated them, hide-and-seek, but not before the sticker on the side window leaps out at her, vermilion letters on an electric yellow background superimposed over the figure of a cartoon rodent’s anthropomorphized face. FPA, it reads, and beneath it, in characters that seem to bleed away from the banner: For the Protection of Animals.
But then she feels the car accelerate and they’re parting the curtain of rain, or at least the visible portion of it, wheeling down the long double line of parked cars and back up again on the far side. Before she can protest he’s pulling up in front of the entrance, on the wide strip of macadam reserved for Pedestrians Only, skidding to a stop within inches of the snaking line of slickered, umbrella-wielding people waiting to purchase tickets in the rain, already leaning forward to reach across her for the door. “Go ahead,” he says, the seat belt tugging at his shoulder and the smell of him — of his aftershave and shampoo and the hot fungal odor of the hair under his arms and between his legs, her leman’s smell, her mate’s — rising to her, primal and comforting and confusing all at once. For a moment she doesn’t know what to do. “I’ll park back there someplace at the end of the lot,” he tells her, making a vague gesture at the expanding arena of shadow behind them, “and catch up with you later.” The door swings open. She unfastens her seat belt, tucks her folder and laptop under one arm, and emerges to the breeze and the blown rain and the taste of it on her lips, sweet and rank all at once. He’s watching her. Grinning. “Break a leg,” he says.
Before she can respond — and what would she say anyway, I’ll try? — here’s Frieda Kleinschmidt, the museum’s director, stalking up to her with a bright pink parasol, the lights along the walkway fuzzed with mist, people looming out of the shadows to hunch under the parapet, furl umbrellas and stamp and blow and brush the rain from sleeves, shoulders, hats. Tall, narrow-shouldered, her face clenched round the shine of her steel-framed glasses and the alarm in her magnified eyes, Frieda stands there rigid, staring at the Prius skewed across the pavement where no car has ever dared go before it. She shoots an anxious glance at Tim—No, he’s not a terrorist, Alma wants to tell her, only my boyfriend—and then says, “You picked quite a night for it. Who would have thought?” She pumps the umbrella in evidence, then lowers it again to Alma’s height. “I mean, it was clear an hour ago. Wasn’t it? I thought it was anyway. Last I looked.”
Alma murmurs something in response, and then they’re striding across the courtyard, past the entrance to the auditorium and up to the door of the room where the unlucky grizzly (Ursus arctos californicus, declared extinct 1924) stands guard. “But all these cars — this isn’t all for me, is it?”
“I don’t know who else,” Frieda throws over her shoulder, bending from the waist to manipulate a clutch of keys and let her into the cold too-bright room, brisk now, hugging her arms to her and revolving around the floor on the spongy soles of her running shoes as if she’s about to dash off into the night. She’s anxious, Alma can see that, anxious because of the size of the crowd and the subject matter and what happened in Ventura last week. “But you have everything you need, right? There’s water out there on the podium — and we’ll start a little late, I think, maybe ten minutes or so, just to let everyone get settled, what with the rain—”
“Yes,” Alma murmurs, “that’s fine. “I’ll just need to plug my laptop into the projector. And the microphone—”
“I did the sound check myself. You’ll take questions afterward?”
The grizzly, formerly on display but exiled to this back room for crimes unspecified, looms over them with its plasticized eyes and arrested teeth, snarling mutely down the ages. There are other artifacts here too — a great stiff comb of baleen propped up in the corner, cast-off mammoth bones aligned neatly on an oak desk and looking unsettlingly like the refuse at the bottom of a Colonel Sanders bucket enlarged to implausibility, Chumash arrowheads and shards of pottery in a dusty glass display case skewed away from the far wall at a forty-five-degree angle, museum clutter awaiting the donors’ dollars to rescue it from eternal storage. “Yes. I mean, that’s what they’re here for. Most of them, I guess.”
Frieda gives her a look. “If any of them get, well — I don’t know, contentious—don’t be afraid to cut them off, and I do have Bill Braithwaite at the door, just in case. .”
This is the point at which she’s supposed to say, Don’t worry, I can handle it — I’ve done it a thousand times. But she says nothing.
Erect, her glasses shining and her pigeon-colored eyes in retreat, Frieda claps her hands together and spins halfway round with a faint squeak of rubber or plastic or whatever it is they’re making running shoes from these days. “Well, I guess I’ll leave you to your thoughts then. I’ll come get you in”—she raises her wrist to squint at a flat gold watch on a band no wider than a shoelace—“say, seven and a half minutes?”
It’s warm in the auditorium, very warm, all those people — standing room only, which means three hundred at least — bundled tightly together, post-prandial, variously digesting their dinners, processing proteins and starches and sugars, generating heat. And it’s humid, the rain beating remorselessly at the roof and percolating through the downspouts with a peristaltic tick and gurgle. And, of course, since it’s November, the museum’s central air has been long shut down for the season. Sitting there in the middle of the front row while Frieda reads through a list of announcements — upcoming events, classes, fund-raisers, opportunities to get in on museum-sponsored field trips, films and slide shows — she can feel the sweat rising from her pores, collecting at the nape of her neck beneath the thermal blanket of her hair, trailing down her spine to where the blouse has begun to stick to the small of her back. When she slipped in stage left and took her seat, she caught a glimpse of the crowd, surprised all over again by the turnout, especially on a rainy night, but she didn’t look closely enough to individuate anyone, not even Tim, who must have been part of the contingent, mostly male, milling around in the rear without hope of finding seats. If she was nervous a few moments ago, in the green room with Frieda — and the grizzly — she’s over it now. In fact, all she can think of — hope for — is that Frieda’s introduction will be short and to the point so she can get up there and get this over with.