“You talked to her?” Mitch had arrived.
“To her office. They said I’d get to speak to her in eight to ten weeks.”
“Wow. That’s great.”
Everyone agreed it was fantastic. Their wishes were so warm and their excitement so genuine that I forgot that what we were celebrating was actually very unusual.
We all went into the room and Leisl started. Great-aunt Morag came through for Mackenzie and reiterated that there wasn’t a will. Nicholas’s dad advised him on his job—he seemed like such a nice man, he really did. So concerned. Pomady Juan’s wife told him to eat properly. Carmela’s husband said she should think about replacing the stove, that it was dangerous.
Then Leisl said, “Barb, someone wants to talk to you. Could it be…it sounds like…” She seemed a little confused. “Wolfman?”
“Wolfman? Oh, Wolfgang! My husband. Well, one of them. What’s he want? On the scrounge again?”
“He says…does this make sense? Don’t sell the painting yet. It will rocket in value.”
“He’s been telling me that for years,” Barb groused. “I’ve gotta live, you know.”
By the end of the hour, no one had come through for me, but still on a high from my Neris Hemming contact, I didn’t mind.
I said good-bye to everyone and went toward the elevator, joining forces with some of the belly-dancing posse, then behind me someone called my name. I turned around: it was Mitch.
“Hey, Anna, do you have to be someplace now?”
I shook my head.
“Want to do something?”
“Like what?”
“I dunno. Get a coffee?”
“I don’t want to get a coffee,” I said. It had started to make me feel nauseous. I feared I was going to have to start drinking herbal teas (pronounced “horrible teas” by me and Aidan) and run the risk of turning into those aggressively calm people who drank peppermint-and-chamomile infusions.
Mitch’s face didn’t change. At the best of times his eyes were those of a man who had lost everything. Someone refusing to go for coffee with him didn’t even touch the sides.
“Let’s go to the zoo.” I had no idea why I’d said this.
“The zoo?”
“Yes.”
“The place with animals?”
“Yes. There’s one in Central Park.”
“Okay.”
The zoo was busy, with loved-up couples twined around each other and straggling family groups with strollers and toddlers and ice creams. Me and Mitch, the walking wounded, didn’t stand out; only if you got up really close to us would you see that we were different.
We started with the Rain Forest, which was mostly monkeys, or apes or whatever their technical name is. There were quite a selection—swinging from trees and scratching themselves and staring grumpily at nothing—too many to be interesting and the only ones who caught my attention were the ones with bright red bottoms which they wiggled at the crowd. “They look like they’ve shaved their butts,” Mitch said.
“Or,” I said, “had a back-to-front Brazilian.” I looked at him to see if I needed to explain what a Brazilian was, but he seemed to get it.
As we watched, one of the red-bums fell off a branch and two more red-bums came along to taunt and make high-pitched laughing sounds, which pleased the crowd enormously. They surged forward with their cameras and I got separated from Mitch. It was only when I was looking around for him that I discovered I didn’t really know what he looked like.
“I’m over here,” I heard him say, and I turned and found myself looking into those wells of bleakness. I tried to file a couple of other details about him for future reference: he had very short hair and a dark blue T-shirt—mind you, he mightn’t wear that all the time—and he was a bit older than me, late thirties probably.
“Shall we move on?” he asked.
Suited me. I didn’t have the concentration span to linger on anything. We found ourselves in the Polar Circle.
“Trish loved polar bears,” he said. “Even though I kept telling her they were vicious guys.” He stared at them. “Cute-looking, though. What’s your favorite animal?”
He caught me on the hop; I wasn’t sure I even had a favorite animal.
“Penguins,” I said. They’d do. “I mean, they try so hard. It must be tough being a penguin; you can’t fly, you can barely walk.”
“But you can swim.”
“Oh yes. You know, I’d forgotten that.”
“What was Aidan’s favorite animal?”
“Elephants. But there are no elephants here. You have to go to the Bronx Zoo for that.”
We arrived at the sea lions’ pool just as feeding time was about to begin. A large crowd of people, mostly family groups, were waiting, the air electric with anticipation.
When three men in Wellingtons and red overalls appeared with buckets of fish, the atmosphere became almost hysterical. “Here they come, here they come!” Bodies pushed toward the barrier, the air filled with the clicks of a hundred cameras, and children were lifted up in the air for a better look.
“There’s one, there’s one!” An enormous shiny gray-black force erupted out of the water, stretching up for his fish, then belly flopped back into the water, sending a huge wash across the pool. The crowd breathed “Wow” and children were shrieking and cameras were flashing and ignored ice creams were melting, and in the middle of it all, Mitch and I watched impassively, like we were cardboard cutouts of ourselves.
“Here’s another one, here’s another one! Mommy, look, it’s another one!”
The second sea lion was even bigger than the first and the splash he made on his return to the water resulted in half the crowd getting spattered. Not that anyone cared. It was all part of it.
We waited until the fourth sea lion had eaten a fish, then Mitch looked at me. “Keep moving?”
“Sure.”
We walked away from the people who were still starry-eyed and in thrall.
“What’s next?” he asked.
I consulted our map. Feck. It was penguins. I’d have to pretend that I was thrilled to see them, what with them being my favorite animals and everything.
I enthused as best I could, then Mitch suggested we walk on. We’d spoken very little. I wasn’t uncomfortable with it, but I knew next to nothing about him, except that his wife had died.