Flight Behavior
Page 113

Dellarobia sat down with the last plate and gestured for everyone to dig in. They both made appreciative groans, genuinely pleased, she could tell. It was hard to fake that kind of enthusiasm for a meal. She remembered his offhand remark about his wife’s cooking that she’d taken for disloyalty, and now saw that Juliet probably would have agreed and laughed about it, had she been there. Juliet had bigger fish to fry. Suddenly Dellarobia thought of the knitters.
“You know what? There are people up here on the mountain doing what you’re talking about. Making representations of the butterflies.”
Juliet kindly spared her the embarrassment of going too far with this. She knew all about the knitters already, had followed their blog and communicated with them directly. She wanted to photograph their work and do interviews, but had had to wait until her break in classes to fly out for this visit.
“Juliet’s teaching load is oppressive,” Ovid said. “She is the departmental mule.”
“Associate professor,” Juliet said, with an unmulish smile. “Not a luminary like this one.”
“She has a sabbatical coming up,” Ovid said.
“I do,” she agreed. “Our first whole winter together in seven years of marriage.”
“I’m not sure how she will tolerate me,” Ovid said, and Juliet smiled again with her amazing glossy mouth. Plainly, she would tolerate him.
Juliet knew things about monarchs her husband did not. Dellarobia asked about the name King Billies, and she knew it. From colonial times, she said. Protestant settlers noticed this butterfly wore the royal colors of their prince, William of Orange, who got around eventually to being the king of England. The name monarch came from the same old king.
“You never told me that,” Ovid said to his wife.
Juliet’s eyes blinked in their slow-motion way. “You never asked.”
“You see my strategy, Dellarobia. I keep myself surrounded with smart women.”
Ovid wore a loose, bright shirt similar to Juliet’s with the same embroidered front placket instead of buttons. Dellarobia would not have dreamed he owned a shirt like that. Like the day he’d worn a tie for the kindergartners; here was a whole different Ovid she knew nothing about. He too had a father who’d died young, Alcidus Byron. Juliet never got to meet him but was great friends with Ovid’s mother, Raquida, a forceful woman who supervised all postal affairs on the island of St. Thomas. Ovid’s most comforting pastime as a boy had been to float in the sea and watch the sea turtles grazing in the sea-grass beds. Juliet was the one who described this. He’d taken her snorkeling many times, beginning with their honeymoon. “You can’t be anything but happy when you watch them. Their little turtle mouths are always smiling.” She demonstrated, moving her head slowly from side to side as if she were chewing sea grass instead of potatoes.
“When I look at your sheep, I am often thinking of turtles,” Ovid confessed. “I will miss those sheep. Especially the naughty brown fellows that stay up on the hill.”
Dellarobia was floored. She didn’t think Ovid paid one bit of attention to the sheep. “This is Reggie we’re eating, by the way. One of the naughty brown ones. Maybe that’s not an introduction for polite company.”
“To Reggie,” Juliet said, raising her plastic glass. Preston clinked with his cup and made Cordie lift her juice box. They were all hungry, and for several minutes everyone ate quietly, even Cordelia, giving Dellarobia the unaccustomed pleasure of hearing the clicks of forks against plates and tasting the melting texture of the slow-cooked roast. All the pasture and sunny days that had been Reggie.
“We get to name the lambs this year,” Preston said. “Because we’re the ones getting them born.”
“What will you name them?” Juliet asked.
“Mama says one will be Tina Ultner.”
“Oops,” Dellarobia said. “Maybe don’t mention that at school, Preston.”
Ovid seemed appreciative. “You think she will be safe for consumption?”
“We’ll probably just shear her,” Dellarobia said.
“That post is brilliant, by the way,” Juliet said. “Did you make the video?”
Dellarobia was surprised. “My friend Dovey. You heard about that?”
“Are you kidding? I saw it before he called me. A friend of ours in Canada forwarded the link. My Ovid is a star.” She reached her arm around his shoulders and hugged him like a little boy. He grinned like a boy. “Honestly? I think it’s the best presentation he’s given in years. I’ve probably told him that fifty times since Thursday.”
Dellarobia’s surprise gained a new dimension.
“He’s so reticent. He hides his light under a bushel.” Juliet playfully cuffed him under the chin. “The climate science community will probably give him a medal now.”
“The purple heart,” Ovid said.
“You’re still in one piece,” said his wife. They toasted to Tina Ultner.
Dellarobia wondered what Ovid had told her about his first evening at this table. All that lame-brained prattle, her monarch-fact parade, the testicle balloon above the table. The emergency-room fever of that evening’s embarrassment seemed fairly tame now, given the litany of embarrassing delusions that were still to come, regarding Ovid and herself. Her vision of Juliet as an interloper now struck Dellarobia as bizarre. It was hard to feel the remotest sympathy for any of the different fools she had been. As opposed to the fool she was probably being now. People hang on for dear life to that one, she thought: the fool they are right now.
The climate subject left them a little subdued. Ovid confessed they didn’t know where they would spend their sabbatical winter, with the monarch system disintegrating under the pressures of fires and floods. His life was now at the whim of a livid ecosystem. Dellarobia watched as Cub meticulously cleaned his plate, avoiding eye contact, not out of step with the present company but staring through it. If he’d said one word this whole evening she could not remember it. She thought it unlikely that he had any real issue with Ovid and Juliet, Cub was not one to put a lot of energy into tact; he was just brooding, as he had been all day. It was so public and implicating, his sulk, like a forehead bruise on one of the kids that customarily made her blurt explanations to casual strangers at the grocery. Yet here she sat, detached, as if this gigantic miserable husband were not her fault. Just being the fools we are right now, she thought: a condition that inevitably changed, often for the worse. In one transcendent moment buoyed by about two ounces of Riesling she saw the pointlessness of clinging to that life raft, that hooray-we-are-saved conviction of having already come through the stupid parts, to arrive at the current enlightenment. The hard part is letting go, she could see that. There is no life raft; you’re just freaking swimming all the time.