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’re 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.
That Rebecca cannot make sense of the suicide, there is no doubt, but Downing guesses there is something more the woman wishes to ask of him, and the grisly thought does cross his mind that the woman has somehow preserved the body and is perversely hoping he might attempt to stuff Richard, but these ghastly concerns are allayed when Rebecca talks freely about the burial, about how they managed to secure a lot for the coffin in one of the cemeteries, in Kensal Green—a relief, she says, given the lack of space in the churchyards—and as she says this, Rebecca shudders in a very conventional, female way, and if Downing were another man, he would go and put his arm around her, but at this moment he can only think about the utter impossibility of Ostlet, at least the Ostlet he knew, taking his own life.