The Evolution of Jane (7 page)

Darwin, the English lad off on a rugged adventure, did think the marine iguanas were hideously ugly. He thought the Galapagos were ugly, too. They are indeed dry and weedy and bare, neither scenic nor sublime, but scrubby and grim, a place of emptiness.

"But it is a half-finished, rather than an abandoned, desolation, don't you think?" Martha said. "They're like arid island dwarfs that lift themselves from the sea. They look expectant, I think, almost hopeful."

We swam off the beach in water that had made its way up from Antarctica. The equatorial sea was cold and calm, disturbed only by sea lions hoping to play with us. We had all brought our wet suits, snorkels, and masks, just to test them out, and as I paddled along looking at the sandy bottom, I saw Martha swim by me, a flash of black rubber.

I started to say, "It's so cold on the equator!" As I opened my mouth, it became evident that I was sucking on a snorkel, that I was underwater, that I could not in fact speak, that I was coughing and spitting out water. I hastily stood up in the shallow water and looked down at the black form swimming around me.

I said, "I forgot I was underwater!"

Martha stared back at me with huge round black eyes, a snub nose like a puppy, whiskers swaying in the water. Martha wasn't Martha at all. She was a sea lion.

The sea lion shot beneath me. I screamed with all the vigor of a lady who sees a mouse. If there had been a chair to jump up on, I would have jumped. I was gasping, my heart pounding. I was absurdly shaken, as if I had been swimming not with a friendly sea lion, not even with a mouse, but with Moby Dick himself.

Jeremy Toll, surprisingly fit in his wet suit, was standing near me. We looked at each other through our foggy masks.

"It really startled me," I said. I pointed to the sea lion, now doing somersaults between us. "I thought it was Martha."

He spit out his snorkel. We watched the fat, slippery animal dash off.

"I wouldn't tell her that," he said. "If I were you."

In the
panga
on the return trip from our first Galapagos island, there was a chilled, relaxed, fulfilled alertness among the group. We each stared back at the island, shivering silently, aware that we had visited a noble monument, like Chartres.

When we reached the
Huxley,
one of the crew, a tall gaunt young man with a skinny mustache, waited with a hose at the bottom of the ladder leading up to the deck. He grinned politely as he sprayed each of our legs in turn, washing away the sand. He rinsed off our shoes as well, and threw them in a plastic crate on deck, a great mound of shining black Tevas. Grinning indulgently at our excitement, he exchanged some rapid, amused Spanish with Martha. I had refused to learn Spanish as a child. That was my mother's language. I took French in school instead. As did Martha. Señorita Martha.

"Take nothing but photographs, leave nothing but footprints," Martha said, in explanation of the ritual bath.

I watched my colleagues lifting their bare feet into the weak trickle, turning to expose their sandy calves, thrilled to have visited a place so peculiar that even its sand must be purified. One island could pollute another island, and so the patched green hose rinsed away any lingering traces. It was oddly satisfying, a rite of purification, not of us but from us.

I said, "Absolution."

"If only it were that easy," said Gloria.

I
WENT BACK TO MY
cabin and lay down on my bunk, cradled in fatigue, the sting of frigid salt water still on my skin. Gloria stretched out on her bunk, fully dressed, a sleeping exhibit of ecological artifacts. I have read that once an organism starts up the evolutionary tree in one direction, as much as it branches out and changes along the way, it cannot retrace its steps or leap over to someone else's branch. Human beings will change, undoubtedly, but they will not gradually turn into reptiles, except metaphorically, of course. But Ms. Steinham, as her students apparently called her, and as she sometimes referred to herself, flew in the face of this information. She appeared to encompass all the branches of evolution at once. Her earrings were feathers, her necklace was shells, her bracelet was seeds. She was adorned with claws and suede pouches and tiny gourds. Her hat was printed with tropical fish. Wrapped around her, a cloth of a primitive African pattern created an ostentatiously primitive skirt. Her shoes had been woven by an aboriginal Asiatic desert tribe. Her socks, though, were knee socks and they were nylon. She lay on her back, her hands folded lightly across her ample breasts, like the stone coffin lid of a medieval queen.

Gloria fascinated me. How could her mother let her go out of the house like that? Her mother was dead. That was the only explanation. I stared at her, and I wondered if I was glad I had come on the trip or not. It was an adventure, as I had hoped. There were boobies and volcanoes. There was Gloria. Even Darwin didn't get to meet someone quite like Gloria. And there was Martha. If Darwin had discovered Martha, I thought, if he had dipped her in formaldehyde and pinned her to a board, what would he have seen? An intelligent, enthusiastic young guide? Or an alienated, cold misanthrope who had moved to a desert and lived in the solitude of crowds of strangers?

No matter how many times I looked back at my friendship with Martha, and at its untimely demise, I could not decipher it. I lay on my bunk, closed my eyes, and tried to picture Martha's face as it now was. Instead, I kept seeing her as a sixteen-year-old, so that when I finally did conjure up the adult Martha, it was hard not to regard her as an old-looking sixteen-year-old, someone who had weathered a terrible tragedy which had prematurely aged her.

I was being ungenerous. And petty. I was quite conscious of it. I was disappointed that Martha hadn't, against all odds, immediately poured out her heart to me. Martha had once defined the world for me. Now that she was a naturalist and guide, it was clear that she would still define the world, at least this little world that I had temporarily joined. Friendship is context, at least ours was. It was what ordered the world. And even though I was an adult myself, even though it had been so many years, even though I had made many friends in the interim, I could somehow not let go of that first real friendship. Particularly when it turned up next to me at dinner.

Martha sat beside me in the dining room, with its large, slightly bleary windows, booths of gleaming varnished wood, and benches of pink leatherette. Gloria and the middle-aged couple named Tommaso sat across from us. I could see from their demeanor that Martha's choice of me as a dining partner, and even her proximity, had elevated my status aboard ship, as if we were dining at the court of Versailles.

"What have you been doing all this time?" I said to Martha. "You kind of disappeared."

"I went to school in Oregon. I told you. Botany."

"No, I meant before."

Martha smiled and looked thoughtful. "Before? Before, I guess I was home."

She went to get dinner, which was laid out on a buffet table, and we all rose from our tables to follow her.

"Pork chops?" said Mrs. Tommaso. "Is that native food or tourist food?"

"Depends on who's eating it, I suppose," said Gloria.

"I didn't know you got married," Martha said to me when we sat down.

"It was sort of a blip on the radar screen. I barely knew I got married."

"My parents are divorced."

"I know. I was really surprised."

"Mmm. No blip, that," Martha said. "Time flies," she said after a pause.

I wanted to say more, to ask more. But Martha had closed up shop. She drank her coffee and read over some notes she'd brought with her.

There are other people on this boat, I thought. I looked at Gloria. It was a good thing visitors were not allowed to remove anything from the Galapagos, I thought, not just for the islands, but for Gloria Steinham's wardrobe, which was already sufficiently embellished by all those sticks and stones and bird feathers and bits of clay she must have picked up on other, less restricted trips. Because she could not collect specimens this time, she was a most avid photographer. The thought occurred to me that when she got home and had the photos developed, she would wear them.

"It's funny that
species
means money," she said.

Species. What
didn't
species mean? But then, what did it mean? When we had returned from our field trip, Gloria, who in addition to her remarkable wardrobe had brought a considerable library on board with her, showed me one book that said the individual, not the species, was the unit of evolution, and another that said the species was, but then another warned that a species should not be confused with a taxon. (This was discouraging. Since I didn't know what a taxon was, there was every probability that I confused them daily.) Some scientists thought the clues to a species lay in an animal's form, others in its DNA, others in its ancestry. One group said that geographical isolation was necessary to form a species, another said that reproductive isolation, not geographical isolation, was the key. One group said that when we speak of survival of the fittest, a fit organism is one that is best suited to cope with life's exigencies. That made sense to me. But then another book said that
fit
meant reproductive success. A fit organism was one that left more copies of its genes to the next generation. That made sense to me, too. These two points of view were said to be at odds with each other, the basis of a heated scientific feud, so I obviously had a lot to learn. And what did either view have to do with one branch of a family tree splitting off from its parent branch, or with one friend splitting off from another? What did either have to do with speciation, which was the real mystery, the only mystery, the mystery of mysteries?

"Don't you think that
transmutation
is a better word than
evo
lution?
" I said. "For the mystery of one thing being transformed into another? Evolution sounds so wonderful."

"But evolution is wonderful," Martha said, looking up from the notes she was reading.

"Well, but change is not progress. Necessarily. Change basically stinks. Most of the time."

"Jane's just trying to provoke us," Martha said.

"No, I'm not," I said. I'm trying to provoke you, Martha. But Martha just continued to look at me with a benign and amused smile.

Before coming on the trip, I read somewhere that you cannot tell when speciation is occurring. There is something called a splitting event, but you cannot see the split until after it's happened. You can only look back. You cannot predict the future or even interpret the present. It's not yet clear which slight variation will prove useful, which organism will be favored by natural selection, will prevail over a change in climate or the introduction of some new group into the territory, or the extinction of an old one. Perhaps I had just witnessed a splitting event without realizing it. Martha eating dinner. Perhaps I had seen the seminal episode, a splitting event of tremendous significance: the moment that Martha, now thin, began to get really fat. Years from now, seeing an obese Martha, I would look back and think,
That
was when it started.

I wondered if imagining someone getting immensely fat was a sign of hostility or just envy, because with the rocking of the boat, I could manage to eat only a little rice myself. I decided it didn't matter because I was entitled to both envy and hostility, considering how unpleasant even slight seasickness was and what a bad friend Martha had been.

"I was divorced once," Gloria said.

"Doesn't that mean you're still divorced?"

"For better or for worse."

Gloria and Martha began talking about lenses and filters, which bored me. It was clear that Martha was not ready to have a heart-to-heart talk, which would not have bored me, so, in the interest of science and camaraderie, I decided to entertain myself with the Tommasos. Mr. Tommaso was a saturnine man, a retired high school history teacher, who was forced to come along with his wife to carry her luggage, though he soon would prove to be the most gung ho of any of us, wanting to crawl into every lava tube, dive into every icy pool, tramp across every field of guano. Mrs. Tommaso was a volunteer at the Humane Society and was therefore quite understandably disappointed in the human race. She was in favor of Nature, though: she seemed to view it, and the Galapagos by extension, as an abandoned litter of kittens.

"Poor little islands. No water for six months."

"I read that two years can go by without rain," Jack Cornwall said from the neighboring table.

Mrs. Tommaso shook her head and clucked. "Such a shame, such a shame, such a shame," she murmured.

I looked from Mrs. Tommaso to Gloria to Mr. Tommaso to Jack and his family, and I felt myself suddenly, rapturously charmed. My heart expanded at what I saw before me: not a cabin full of strangers, but rather, there, in those padded booths, a floating world of curiosities to be collected and labeled in a neat and orderly hand. Darwin could not have been more eager upon first setting out in the
Beagle,
or more content upon packing his first fossils to be sent home. Had I really ever cried for a lost husband? Stuff and nonsense! This group of men and women in many-pocketed shorts seemed so much more appealing than any marriage could be. Had I mourned a lost friendship? What rubbish. Here was a whole world, unnamed, uncategorized. Its creatures stood in a genial line to spoon out their pork chops and rice and squash from the buffet.

There are certain signals upon which one can usually rely when distinguishing those individuals who might become one's friend. "I like your glasses," someone might say. Or you might be wearing identical shoes. A phrase of unexpected sensitivity or wit is casually thrown into a conversation. Or a haircut will catch your eye. A nice New York accent on a trip to the Midwest. Or someone on the bus reading Sybille Bedford. There is a moment of recognition, of hope. Then the courtship dance begins, the chat, the questions, the families and hobbies and prejudices and phobias offered up for scrutiny. The signals on the
Huxley
were a little muddled—we were all so out of context, all dressed the same, all reading the same book. And though my first impressions have proved wrong time and time again, it was unsettling not to have any. Everyone blended together at first, a pleasant blur of companionship, a group of people whose names I sometimes remembered, toward whom I felt a mild, reassuring condescension.