Black Dahlia & White Rose: Stories (24 page)

A small woman with a wizened face came trotting to her, with a smile—“Mariana? Dr. Gelder is waiting for you. Come with me.”

Mariana was thrilled. She believed this was the emotion she felt—excitement, anticipation—and not rather anxiety. She glanced about at the buildings in the cold autumn sunshine, the fenced-off enclosures, young assistants in jeans, hooded jackets, boots. The perky little woman with the wizened face was one of these young assistants who’d grown old in the service of Dr. Gelder’s animal labs.

How strong, the animal-odor! Mariana’s nostrils pinched. Was she the only one who noticed it?—of course, the others were accustomed to the smell. So this was the “field station”—an outdoor variant of a scientist’s laboratory. Something like this might have been her life—her professional life—if she’d continued as a research biologist.

There came a low whooping cry—a greeting: “Mariana?” A man in a bulky jacket approached her at a trot—a man with a battered face, wind-whipped silvery-sand-colored hair—shyly smiling, his hand extended—“It’s me—Robb.”

Mariana stared at this middle-aged man—of course, this was Robb Gelder—her friend of twenty-two years ago . . . Boldly he’d taken her hand to shake it—she felt something strange about the hand—she saw that two fingers were missing.

“Oh, this? Sorry! A little accident I had a few years ago, in Africa.”

Robb Gelder laughed as if the memory were something private, embarrassing and yet cherished.

“One of your spotted hyenas didn’t tear off your fingers, did he?”

“ ‘She,’ actually. Yes.”

Mariana was trying to smile. The mood between them was exhilarating, jovial. She was conscious of her heart beating rapidly and a sensation very like a swoon coming over her, as if the earth had tilted beneath her feet.

Robb took Mariana’s arm, as if in disbelief—was she real? He stared bluntly at her, and leaned close. Mariana could smell his breath—a meaty, earthy smell—a faint under-smell of decay like something overripe. Here was a middle-aged man with a creased face, a lopsided smile framing uneven stained teeth, in a woodsman’s jacket festooned with zippers and pouches, mud-splattered trousers and boots. If Mariana had seen him on the street—would she have recognized him? Would she have wished to recognize him? How happy he was to see her, yet nervous, visibly tremulous, like one who can’t believe his good luck. “I would know you anywhere, Mariana! You’ve changed very little.”

Mariana laughed, drawing back from Robb Gelder just slightly; she wasn’t accustomed to being so
stared-at
, so
concentrated upon
, and from someone so physically close to her, his breath in her face.

Physical closeness with her husband was very different. There were—still—intimacies of a kind between them, but Pearce was not very much aware of Mariana; wherever his mind was, it wasn’t likely to be on
her.

“I’ve changed entirely. I’m a married woman . . .”

“But—have you had children?”

“No. And you?”

Robb smiled, and Robb shrugged. He had three children, he said, now fully grown, adult—“Not in my life right now.”

“And—your wife?”

“ ‘Wife’? No. Not for—a while.”

A look of longing and loneliness came into the man’s face. His stained teeth glistened. Mariana felt a swirl of vertigo—
This is why he has summoned me. He wants me, he’s bereft.

There was a curious childlike frankness about this man—this stranger—as if he weren’t entirely accustomed to human contact, for he continued to stand just slightly too close to Mariana, and continued to stare at her. She had the uneasy idea that surreptitiously, Robb Gelder was
sniffing
her . . . His nose was of no extraordinary size but the prominent, dark nostrils contracted and expanded.

With a snap of his fingers Robb summoned the little wizened-face woman and sent her scuttling off to prepare coffee in his office. He would take his visitor on a tour of the field station and return to his office in about twenty minutes.

“So wonderful that you’re here, Mariana! You’ve come . . .
here.
”

Walking with Mariana, fingers gripping her upper arm as if he feared losing her, Robb asked her about her life since he’d seen her last at Penn—had she become a biology teacher?—had she continued her interest in science?—and what of her marriage, had she married a scientist? Mariana laughed at the thought of Pearce as a scientist—he hadn’t the temperament, he certainly hadn’t the patience—briefly she told Robb about Pearce in the only way Pearce could be summarized—“He’s a litigator. He’s chief counsel for Extol Pharmaceuticals. He’s very successful.” Mariana heard her own words with something like chagrin.
Successful!
How vulgar that sounded—if
success
mattered. “He’s a very intelligent person—I mean, it’s a certain sort of intelligence. He’s a nice person . . .” Mariana paused. In fact, was Pearce a nice person?

“Did you—do you—regret not having children?”

A peculiar question to ask within minutes of their meeting! But Mariana understood the biologist’s preoccupation with reproduction, genetics. Another woman would have been offended—Mariana answered frankly: “I might have regretted having children, with Pearce Shutt.”

Robb nodded gravely. His fingers had not relinquished their grip on Mariana’s upper arm.

They were approaching a series of enclosures, on a concrete walkway. Robb was telling her that the foremost spotted-hyena field station was at Berkeley: the Bangor field station was smaller, but in other respects the equivalent. Certainly, he and his assistants were as dedicated. Their ideas were as original. Mariana was having trouble concentrating as Robb spoke, feeling blood rush into her face—what had she confessed, to Robb Gelder? To a man she scarcely knew?
Might have regretted having children, with Pearce Shutt.

The words had seemed to leap from her, impulsively. Not only had Mariana never spoken such words before in her life, she had never had such a thought until now.

“Here—here’s Naxos and Troy.”

The spotted hyenas froze in place, staring from about fifteen feet away. Their blunt snouted noses shifted and shivered and their mica-eyes glittered. The smell of animal urine was very strong here, almost overwhelming.

“Naxos? Come here.”

The smaller of the two hyenas came forward, slowly. The larger, at the rear of the enclosure, remained unmoving, closely observing.

“Here’s a visitor, Naxos—‘Mariana.’ ”

The hyena inclined its head. Its rounded ears pricked. The rapid oscillations of the damp, dark nose were evident.

Robb had brought Mariana to the first of the chain-link enclosures, which contained just two spotted hyenas. The enclosure resembled a zoo cage open at the rear so that the hyenas had access to a larger, outdoor space.

Robb was cooing at the creature, poking his fingers through the wire mesh invitingly. Though Mariana made no move to approach the cage, Robb motioned for her to stay back—
he
would approach the cage; he’d stepped over a white stripe painted on the concrete, about eighteen inches from the chain-link fence which Mariana supposed to be a warning not to come any closer to the cage.

“Naxos is just a year old. I helped raise him—we’re ‘bonded.’ Eh, Naxos? Good boy . . .”

Mariana held her breath as the dog-like creature approached Robb Gelder’s extended fingers—three fingers and a stubby thumb were all that remained on Robb’s right hand. Though the sharp stained teeth were bared, and the tongue lolled, and the eyes glowed and glittered like glass come coldly to life, the hyena lowered its head as if in deference to the man and allowed Robb to stroke it. The low, rounded rump quivered with mute animal pleasure.

“They’re from the African savannah, originally. I mean—the clan. We established the spotted-hyena field station here in 1989 and it has continued ever since. Spotted hyenas reproduce reasonably well in captivity.”

“It’s a—he’s—a beautiful creature . . .”

Mariana spoke with enthusiastic insincerity. Though the coarse silvery-tawny-spotted fur was in fact attractive and the intensity of the animal-stare suggested an almost human attentiveness. Mariana supposed you might fall under the hyena-spell even as the rank hyena-smell ceased to make your nostrils pinch. She held her breath hoping the animal wouldn’t suddenly tear off her friend’s hand.

“Thank you! Yes, some of us think so. No animal has quite the undeserved reputation as the hyena—the ‘laughing hyena.’ Jackals, vultures, any sort of scavenger—you’d think that people would be intelligent enough to realize that, in the ecological scheme of things, all creatures are ‘equal’—all have ‘equal’ status. Without scavengers, without maggots—where would we
be
?”

Mariana tried to think. Where would we
be
?

In the voice of boyish earnestness Mariana recalled from their days at Penn, Robb told Mariana that he had fourteen spotted-hyena adults at the field station—seven females and seven males. There was an alpha female, and there was an alpha male. These were related hyenas, in a strict pack relationship. The clans were matriarchal—comprised of subgroups of mothers, daughters, and offspring; in the wild, adult males appeared as “immigrants” from other clans. What was exceptional in spotted hyenas was that the females were larger than the males, more aggressive and more dominant in social situations; the alpha female had dominance over the alpha male, and her offspring had dominance over the offspring of other females in the clan. All of the females mated and had offspring but the alpha-female offspring were dominant over the offspring of the other females.

“The most extraordinary feature of spotted hyenas is that the female external genitalia are ‘masculinized’—the clitoris has evolved to a considerable ‘pseudopenis’—and there is no external vagina. The female spotted hyena urinates, copulates, and gives birth through the clitoris.”

Distracted by the dangerous animal on just the other side of the fence, tilting and bumping its head against Robb’s maimed hand, now making a low soft grunting sound, Mariana wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly. Clitoris?
Pseudopenis?

Robb continued: “The female clitoris expands almost exactly like the male penis, and to the same approximate length. It isn’t quite understood why. You would think that androgens are responsible—converted to testosterone at various stages in the hyena’s development—but we haven’t found evidence for this. When the female gives birth it’s through the narrow, tunnel-like organ—the very tip of the clitoris—it can be a difficult birth sometimes.” Robb spoke gravely as if he’d witnessed such difficult births upon more than one occasion.

Mariana shuddered. How awful! She remembered how, in the interstices of her schoolgirl fascination with biology, she’d been overwhelmed by the purposelessness of such facts of animal life.

She knew—Darwin’s great theory of evolution was one of natural selection and the acquisition of random features of survival—no, not the acquisition, for that was the Lamarckian heresy—was it?—only just random, chance, purposelessness . . . A biologist like Robb Gelder would laugh at her if she uttered such words as
acquire, purpose.

Possibly she’d been defeated by this principle, as by her advisor’s chilly condescension. A woman more than a man is likely to believe in purpose in life, she must believe that she herself has some purpose—otherwise, how to endure?

“But it must be dangerous, working with these animals. Even if you’ve ‘bonded’ with them . . .”

“Well, yes. Mistakes are made. But we love our spotted hyenas here at the field station—it’s exciting and exhilarating work. One day we will discover why, alone among the hyena species, the spotted hyena female is the one with the ‘pseudopenis’—unless our colleagues at Berkeley discover why, first.”

They walked on. Mariana noticed now that Robb was walking with a very slight limp, favoring his left leg. She didn’t want to ask what might have happened to him.

“My limp? You’ve noticed?” Robb chuckled, stroking his left upper thigh. “This was an accident, really—a quintessential accident. Not carelessness. When the first of the hyenas arrived at the field station here . . .”

In an offhand voice he told an alarming tale meant to amuse as well as to impress. Mariana winced, hearing.

“Well—this is a mammalian species in which cubs have been observed to attack each other
at birth.
”

Robb shook his head, smiling. Imparting such brutal information seemed to evoke in the biologist an air of admiration, even pride.

Mariana noted that her old friend’s face was both freckled and pitted. His skin was coarser than she recalled, very likely from having been exposed to the African sun, and wind; the pores of his nose were riddled with minute bits of dirt like buckshot. And there was the meaty-smelling breath, an odor of earth, dried blood . . . And the greeny-hazel eyes now less distinct, behind wire-rimmed bifocal glasses. She found herself staring at him with a curious sort of tenderness.

He has summoned me here. This is why I am here. But why?

Robb was saying that he’d become interested in spotted-hyena research as a consequence of post-doc work he’d done at Berkeley in animal social behavior and reproduction—“Definitely, the spotted hyena is the most exciting animal to work with! Two of my close friends were drawn into monkey research and my wife—ex-wife—worked with marmosets—but those of us who work with spotted hyenas feel a special mission, I think. The spotted hyena has such a lurid, unmerited reputation—we want to redeem the species. For instance, in the eye of the credulous public, hyenas are perceived as ‘cowardly’—‘vicious’—inferior to lions, their predator-rivals—and this is wholly unmerited.” Robb spoke vehemently, stroking his upper left thigh.

In the next enclosure several hyenas were trotting about excitedly, as if Naxos and Troy had subliminally alerted them to expect a visiting stranger. These were Mei-Mei, Cubbie, Baxter, Kimber, and Condoleezza. Robb summoned the little wizened-faced assistant to feed them—“It’s almost lunchtime. We won’t disturb their schedule by much.” Of the several hyenas, the largest was clearly dominant over the others; this was Condoleezza the alpha female, Rob explained, who ate first while the others kept at a little distance pacing anxiously about and emitting low cries and whimpers. Mariana had to resist an impulse to hide her eyes—the hyena-feed was so brutal, so bizarrely sensuous, it had almost an erotic component; it was not at all pleasant to observe. Under what terrible circumstances, Mariana wondered, might
she
devour food in such a way?