He gave her a tour that day of the department, the systematics lab, the ABA Prism sequencer that analyzed the DNA of dead birds. But only downstairs, in the vast, quiet crypt where they kept the collection of bird skins, sealed in cabinets, did he become fully animated. He recited numbers (850,000 study skins, the largest collection in the world). He pulled open cabinets, rolled out aluminum drawers, showed her shelf after shelf of birds, all laid out like iridescent items in a jeweler’s shop. There were twenty per drawer, still colorful, beaks all angled to the left, cotton plugs in place of eyeballs. They were so beautiful and fastidiously arranged Ana was almost afraid to touch them.

May I? she asked.

Be my guest, he said.

She gently picked up a skin, untwisted the yellowed tag attached to its leg. River Kingfisher, it read. Alcedo atthis. 1908. It was captured along the Cam River. Cambridgeshire, UK. The study skin weighed next to nothing, a paper doll; the stiff blue feathers smelled vaguely of naphthalene—musty, moth-ballish, not unpleasant. It reminded Ana of her grandparents’ apartment.

Russell stood staring at the bird in Ana’s hand.

“Thus lovely halcyons dive into the main, Then show far off their shining plumes again.”

She looked at him.

Shakespeare?

He shook his head.

Longfellow?

He made a disapproving face.

She handed him back the skin.

I give up.

William Cowper.

I would’ve never gotten that, she conceded.

You like coraciiforms? he asked.

Yes, in fact they were her favorite order. The family of kingfishers in particular. The punks of the avian world, with their harsh cackle, their outsize beaks, their attitude, the Mohawk.

And of course, Russell added, the story attached to them—all, sadly, untrue.

Uh-hmm, Ana said absently.

Russell laid the skin carefully back in its drawer. A portrait of Lord Rothschild stared down at them from the wall. They continued on that afternoon to the Chapman Memorial Hall of North American Birds, and then the rest of the museum. Months later, he made love to her under the same portrait of Rothschild, at night, pressed against one of the cold steel cabinets, with his sockless loafers, her bare foot on the back of his calf. Russell had keys to all the rooms; and at night, when everyone but the night watchmen had gone home, they roamed the tiled halls like teenagers, mischievously making love in the Chapman Hall, beside the Fuertes mural of flamingos or the dioramas of Peregrines on the cliffs of the Palisades (using the wooden banister for purchase) or the glass case of North American raptors. They copulated in the lab too, beside the humming DNA sequencer. Russell wanted to have sex in each room (it is a museum of natural history after all, he argued). They tried it in the Pickling Room as well, with its odor of formaldehyde, its shelves of glass jars filled with birds in alcohol—pickled puffins and grebes.