Enter the Aardvark Read online

  The funeral, it says, is tomorrow, two o’clock, at Murphy & Milliken’s Funeral Home on Prince Street.

  The news shocks you. But there is a part of you that is also relieved. Like, of course it is terrible when anyone takes his own life, like, you’re no monster, but now there’s zero possibility that anyone will ever find out about you and Greg Tampico, and, let’s face it, that was some fairly unsavory business you got yourself mixed up in, and it all could have gotten worse, much, much worse—so yes, you do feel shock, relief, but there is also some guilt: for you now recall how Greg Tampico had asked you only two weeks ago if he might come work for you, how he could not stand seeing you just once a month if that, and wouldn’t you both have a great time traveling the country, he said, campaigning together, and he had already arranged for a kick-ass parasailing trip off the Oregon coast because he knew how much you like parasailing.

  He could help you, he said, you know, relax on the trail, and you could even go hiking and camping and other wildernessy stuff, and he had this idea for promoting Plaine Truth involving divvying up and privatizing the national parks. You could be an updated, inverse Roosevelt, he explained, outfitted with a lodge in, like, Montana or something, and you could even pick up hunting as you led your half of America—Right America—by capitalizing on her natural wildernesses (“The Grand Canyon, brought to you by Tampax,” he laughed), and how great would you look in the publicity pictures hiking one of the minor mountain ranges decked out in North Face, Patagonia—

  “Okay, Brokeback,” you said.

  “I don’t mean like that,” he said.

  “What about the foundation,” you said.

  “What about it,” he said.

  “Don’t you have that responsibility,” you said.

  Greg Tampico said that he’d just given notice at the foundation. He’d been at his job for twelve years. He felt he’d done good. He’d helped many, many children in Namibia, he said, and believed the time had come to step down. Besides, he’d been feeling blue lately, he confessed, and knew he could be a great asset as one of your staffers—or maybe even your director of communications or something—but as Tampico said what he was thinking, you were thinking, Of course this changes everything.

  You had to apologize. Told Greg Tampico that something came up and climbed out of his bed. You began dressing yourself, in front of the aardvark. You had to go, you said, and he looked pretty crestfallen.

  He asked when he was going to see you next.

  You shrugged. You didn’t know, you said, but it could be a while given that you were going to be doing your regular governing work along with your reelection campaign, and that’s when Greg Tampico had actually started to fucking cry, and suddenly the walk-up in Alexandria with all his weird African masks and African prints and the gigantic stuffed aardvark that was always looking at you with the oddest expression?

  It creeped you right out.

  You would call him, you said, maybe next week, and did not look at his face as you walked out the door because you could not have gotten out of there fast enough.

  So you could not have known how Greg Tampico collapsed on his bed. Or how hard he sobbed when he heard you sprint all the way down the three flights of stairs, knowing, at that moment, that he would never see you again, and that’s why as the news sinks in you feel bad about it, but mostly you feel lighter, unencumbered, if truth be told, and you’re even breathing differently now, like the news moved the lungs in your chest.

  You signal the Tahoe and make a uwee toward home. Because the fact is, you rarely think about Greg Tampico at all when you are out of that apartment, and you are now growing just, like, incredibly relieved that you never brought him to 2486 Asher Place. It means Greg Tampico never saw your canary-yellow velvet Victorian sofa just like the one Reagan had in Images of Greatness, or your growing wardrobe of clothes just like Reagan wore. Or Reagan’s original American flag cuff links, which you bought at an auction for a whopping $5900 and break out just for debates.

  He never knew that you once even put in a bid to buy a vial of Reagan’s blood from when Hinckley shot him, nor that your anonymous bid was in the tens of thousands before news of the auction was leaked to the media and shut down from “poor taste,” and you assure yourself that, in general, you cannot feel all that bad about Greg Tampico’s suicide because Greg Tampico never really knew you, never knew the full depth of your ambition, the lengths to which you know you will have to go to get reelected, to start getting serious, which is why upon hearing the news about Greg Tampico, you decide your staffers are right. It’s time to get serious.

  It’s time for Congressman Alexander Paine Wilson to Find A Wife.

  * * *

  Enter Kensington, half of the Royal Borough of West London, shared with Chelsea. Enter the excellent road Gloucester Walk, nestled between two verdant parks, Holland and Hyde. Enter Rebecca Ostlet’s modest two-bedroom flat, which suits her because the parks are where Rebecca goes walking in the afternoons with her three rust-colored Irish setters named after the Brontës—Anne, Charlotte, Emily.

  “Come in, come in!” begs Rebecca, and Titus Downing, dressed head to toe in his black wool even though it is a brutally hot day in August, steps into Rebecca’s abode exactly like a ghoul into a garden.

  The flat, furnished with an army of upholstered pink chairs, upholstered pink settees and sofas, ornate gilded frames and vases from the Orient, is wallpapered, floor to ceiling, in decorous pink roses, and there is a painted secretary in one corner also covered in roses, and the drapes, too, are rose-pink, and her floors have been recently polished with rose-petal oil, and flowers of every rose breed hang their heads in her windows, and the dogs, just bathed and clipped, even smell rosy.

  When Lady Ostlet asks Downing to make himself comfortable, to take a seat, the man, accustomed to the scent of earthy animal skins, of chloroforms, formaldehydes, oxides and an occasional tobacco product of some kind, glances around the place and is acutely perplexed: there are too many places to sit, for one; for two, every place is right next to some fecund belly of flowers; and for three, Downing also knows that once he sits, the Brontës will be instantly upon him.

  He must linger too long in deciding because Rebecca grabs him by the arm and says, “Please, first let me show you your room,” and leads him to the room where he will be staying for two what appear to be absolutely interminable days, and he considers bowing out of the whole thing entirely until Rebecca opens the door and he finds the walls of the guest room at the Ostlet’s city flat to be dark green and sans fleurs.

  There is a 17th-century wooden writing desk with the requisite paper and inkwell. A twin bed with brass knobs in the shape of pheasant heads. On top of the bed, a folded white coverlet, nothing more.

  An ashtray is perched thoughtfully upon a small table by the window next to an assortment of books, titles from which Downing, whose thoughts remain with the aardvark, can deduce no hidden meaning: Man and Wife, by Wilkie Collins, Trollope’s latest, Phineas Redux, and a faded copy of Jane Austen’s Persuasion. He notices only the absence of any Dickens and Dickens is his favorite.

  “It’s perfect, thank you,” says Downing.

  “Oh good,” says Rebecca Ostlet, and claps her hands, escorting Downing back into the parlor where a tea setting of scones with fig and Devonshire have magically appeared.

  After Downing eats and drinks he relaxes some, but he is always uncomfortable in the company of women. He wishes today were tomorrow. He has scheduled an appointment with Skinner tomorrow and knows that the aardvark, once completed, is going to be even more thrilling than the giraffe, so as Downing speaks perfunctorily with Lady Ostlet, he loses himself in a dream of crowds coming out in gaggles to View it:

  Women, he has heard, upon seeing strange animals have been known to faint, and Downing allows himself to imagine that perhaps it will be the story of the fainting women that will make the aardvark extremely valuable, eventually purchased by the New Walk for a very high pr
ice, and this, combined with the success of the giraffe, will enable him to pay off the remaining balance on his shop, easing him into retirement or, if he allows himself to dream as deeply as he only rarely dares to dream, a bit of travel—and so it is that Downing only purports to appear interested in Rebecca Ostlet as she chats with him about his life in Leamington Spa, but he is obviously uninterested until, after some minutes pass, he notices that the woman, a brunette dressed in simple black crêpe, the collar and cuffs edged in black piping, well-aged at twenty-eight, pretty/plain in the manner of the era (though perhaps a bit too narrow chested), is nervous. Her hands quiver unsteadily when she drinks her tea. Her small eyes seem to dart around the room as though of their own will.

  Lady Ostlet is constantly looking out the window, Downing realizes, and it is not long before it becomes obvious that the woman is eager to get to the matter at hand, and the matter at hand is, of course, the absence of her husband, Sir Richard.

  Downing is polite. He waits for a pause in the conversation before clearing his throat. He asks delicately, with care, but not so much care as to appear probing:

  “Where is your husband?”

  Rebecca Ostlet lowers her head and stares through the rose bundles tipping neatly in the Oriental vases stationed in her front windows. She is gazing forlornly at the brick side of Gloucester Walk, and Downing now worries: while he is donning his usual gloomy black, the short frock coat which has long been his preference, he also displays on his person the smooth front of a white linen shirt, a textured brown brocade for a waistcoat, matching Windsor scarf, and when he arrived at the flat, he removed his round, gray-ribboned Gambler, his beaver-skin gloves—but there is nothing on Rebecca Ostlet that is not black, and women, they wear full black only in mourning, and so something must have happened to his close friend, he coldly deduces, and this, whatever has happened, is the reason why Lady Ostlet has invited him to London, to share some kind of bad news, and if it is true, Downing wishes she could have just written it, for the love of Christ, for what’s the point in receiving bad news in person when people like to grieve in private, and he barely knows this woman, and if the news is as bad as he thinks, it will be downright rotten for him because Rebecca Ostlet cannot know how close he and Richard were; how they had been first acquainted in a custodial closet at the Great Exhibition nearly a quarter century past when Downing was sixteen, Ostlet twenty-five, forging a fast friendship over their mutual interest in naturalism: Ostlet, an academic on the side of Mammalian Behavior, and Downing, a budding artist on the side of the Study and Preservation of Species—and there is even a small part of Downing that had imagined retiring somewhere close to Ostlet when the time came.

  But then Sir Richard Ostlet went and married Rebecca Green, a woman half his age. He was talking about having children. As Downing was eagerly anticipating even quieter years ahead, Ostlet was eagerly anticipating some kind of comic re-creation of a youth he never had, and what man at the age of fifty, Downing is thinking, would want to have a child, when the slim botanist at long last looks away from her windows, turns toward him and asks with shocking directness:

  “Mr. Downing, do you believe in life after death?”

  * * *

  The Parkway, it is empty as you are scrolling your phone for the number of Tabitha Castle, daughter of the one and only Brian Castle, tech billionaire, and she is a tough, cheeky girl you have dated in the past who goes by, adorably, “Toby.” Toby Castle is turning twenty-nine this year and you are turning thirty-five this year, and you and Toby always have a good enough time together, and you like seeing Toby, so you are going to pursue Toby.

  Toby Castle is fit. Toby Castle is blond.

  Toby Castle wears starched sleeveless dresses to show off her toned arms and directs a financial company that helps minor investment businesses get off the ground, and though it’s all her father’s tech money portioned off, investments in exchange for a whopping 85% return, “Castle” is one of those names in Washington—hell, in America—and suddenly it’s so easy to see you and Toby Castle hitting the social circuit, going to the fundraisers, the galas and balls, and you can, like, definitely see yourself marrying Toby Castle, living with Toby Castle in the townhouse, maybe starting a family (you have tasted her vagina, it’s not terrible), and then, once you start a family, you won’t have to live with Toby Castle anymore. You can do what representatives Rutledge and Olioke do, which is keep the family outside of DC, and it’s how you’d prefer it since the truth of the matter is, it’s nothing against women, but by and large they make you uncomfortable.

  It’s not about sex. It’s like: women make you feel like a man, but men make you feel like a human. It’s not your fault you are who you are, and they are who they are. After all, there are certain biological facts at work here, there is such a thing as Natural Law, and sure, we can call them Divine Principles if we have to appease evangelicals (secretly you do not believe in God, though you do, at times, atmospherically fear him), and you make a mental note to work on this idea about biology and theology for Plaine Truth.

  Because it’s not just women. There are also many minorities out there that make you uneasy, like black people or LGBT or whatever, but you do not take them seriously. LGBT sounds like something you’d order in a diner with mayo. As for black people, they only make up 13.4% of the population. Latinos are more.

  You honestly have no problem with black people at all.

  Representative Olioke is black, and even though you kind of hate Olioke, he is a Republican and you have always been friendly with him and he has always been friendly with you, and there is a part of you that’s imagined, you admit, one day, like, milking Olioke’s blackness by asking him to be your running mate.

  “Divide to unite,” you imagine yourself saying in front of a huge crowd on the steps of the Capitol, and lose yourself for a second—okay, wait for it, there you are—standing in front of the white pillars on the bright white steps with five military planes overhead farting out clouds of red, white, and blue while you gently pull out your cuffs, fingering Reagan’s flag cuff links, looking, like, so fucking good in that $4560 Calvin Klein mod-breasted silk suit.

  And you neither now nor will ever recall the numerous parent-teacher conferences endured by your mother, nor the way she looked at you fearfully after the counselors said you were “empathically…deficient.” What does that mean, you overheard her asking your father that evening, and he answered, He’s a jerk, that’s what it means, and your mother, she sighed. Ever since he was born, I felt it, she said, like they lived on the frontier, felt it deep in ma bones, and from that point on you extricated yourself from the both of them and do not care or even wonder what your parents will think when you are standing on the Capitol steps in the manner which you will most certainly one day be standing, waving to the teeming crowd, Olioke on your left, Toby Castle your right, embracing your waist, grinning, her adoration for you positively unbridled, and Brian Castle, one of the most famous billionaires in America, he is there too, he’s behind you, proud father-in-law, wallet at the ready, and you really don’t know why you even waited so long to call Toby Castle.

  You find her name. You tap the screen.

  When she answers, Toby does not say hello, she says: “Hi, Asshole,” and you forgot how much you like that, and her voice sounds damned terrific if you want to be honest about it, and you immediately apologize for not calling her sooner.

  Yes, you know it’s been months, you say, and make a plan to meet that evening for dinner at that restaurant in Georgetown, she knows the one, with the name that sounds like a law office, where they only serve food in vintage tin lunchboxes and you have to recite a poem to get a menu.

  The Brown, Lake & Peterson Company.

  It’s the last place you two went together, and even though you hate that hipster shit, you know girls love that hipster shit, and Toby wants to go there, and so when you decide to go there, she sounds tickled about it but also confident, like she knows what you’r
e up to because, let’s face it, you both have mutual acquaintances, and your mutual acquaintances have already let Toby Castle in on the game: your staffers are pushing you to Find A Wife, she knows it all, and she was probably already expecting your call, but still—Toby sounds glad to hear from you, and that makes you glad, pretty glad, and when you end the call you are feeling great actually, just great, and you have forgotten all about Greg Tampico and the aardvark until you’re about to cross the 14th Street Bridge and have to pull your Tahoe over to the side of the Parkway, because a cop, lights circling, has driven up right behind you.

  * * *

  What a question to ask a taxidermist, thinks Downing as he stares at Rebecca Ostlet, and the question only sets him thinking further about the aardvark’s jiva, about Darwin and the Guyanese slave, about his belief that in order to truly succeed at the art of taxidermy one must supplicate before the animal, one must immerse one’s soul into the creature’s soul so that it, through Downing, may be reborn—and so the answer to Lady Ostlet’s question is, to him, both blindingly simple and blindingly complex.

  Downing settles his teacup and saucer deep in his palms. “I do believe in life after death,” he says, and for this answer, Rebecca Ostlet looks relieved.

  “Of all of Richard’s friends,” she says, “I knew that you would be the one to contact,” and proceeds to explain about her husband’s strange, sudden death, about how she waited for weeks with no word until at last word arrived, and the word was terrible: about the pills of camphor he swallowed. About how he would never return from safari.