“Because…?”

“They’ll have more babies, and the babies will be like them. How they changed.”

“Very good. A near perfect statement of the theory of evolution by natural selection. But as they say, God is in the details. Or the devil. It’s all very well to think great thoughts about the origin of all things, but let’s see if we can figure out how tiny pieces of it actually evolve, a test, as it were, of the theory. Here we are fortunate in the fig wasp and the fig. You recall what I told you about the life of the Agaoniids? It was the day you found Moie in the Gardens.”

“No,” she said.

“Really? I thought I was being perfectly lucid.”

She had to look away. “I kind of tuned all that out. I’m sorry.”

After a moment, he said brightly, “Well, never mind. I’m sure you’ll absorb it, by and by. For the moment we have to get you keying out specimens. That means telling one tiny bug from another one that looks almost the same. She might evenbe the same to the eye but have important differences in her genes. You see, in these little wasps we have the opportunity-the privilege, I should say-of observing the generation of new species. Their mode of life is so tightly constrained, the evolutionaryniche, as we call it, is so small, that evolution itself is, one might say, squirted out so that we can observe it in a short human life span. Are you game?”

Jennifer nodded. “Uh-huh.” He smiled, showing his yellow teeth. “Splendid! If you’ll step over here…” He left his desk and went to a long wooden table on the other side of the room, where stood a binocular teaching microscope with two sets of eyepieces, along with racks and racks of shallow specimen drawers. From a shelf he reached down a plastic-covered chart, dull with age and use, and set it up before her. They sat on lab stools. “Today we have naming of parts. ‘Japonica glistens like coral in all the neighboring gardens, and today we have naming of parts.’”

“Say what?”

“A poem, but never mind that. I meant that you have to learn the parts of the bug before you can use the keys. Now, this long thing is the antenna. The tip is called the radicle. Say it!”

She did.

“Next the pedicle. Say ‘pedicle’! Good. Next the annelli.”

And so on, she repeating the meaningless words as he proceeded from the antenna to the head itself, the wings, with their diagnostic patterns of veins, to the thorax, the legs and the gaster, ending with the long ovipositor, all the little shields, knobs, and spikes with which taxonomists classify the insect world. This took half an hour. Then Cooksey pointed with the tip of his pencil to the tip of the model’s antenna. “What is this, please?” he asked.

She didn’t know. The pencil twitched down the hair-thin appendage. Blank. Blank again.

“I can’t do it!” she wailed.

“Nonsense! Of course you can. You’re resisting because you associate learning with pain. You must relax and let the names flow into you. We are made for memory, my dear, and there is a fruitful plain in your head that just needs some water and some seed.”

“I’m too stupid.” She was about to break down sobbing, and she bit her lip hard to stop it.

“No, you’re not. If you were stupid you’d be dead, or a drug addict, or a prostitute, or have three children. Think about it!”

Jennifer did, and it was true. She had thought it was just dumb luck. Something popped in her head, like snorting a long, long line of cocaine. The world looked different, and she knew that, unlike a drug rush, it was a difference from which she would not come down.

“In any case,” Cooksey continued, “some of the stupidest people I know are invertebrate systematists with international reputations. Now, from the beginning. This is the radicle. Say…”

“Radicle,” she said. “Radicle.”

On the evening after Paz brought Amelia to theilé, he and Lola had fought a major fight, and Paz hoped that it had been the main battle and not a mere carpet-bombing prelude to further assaults. Although it was a family principle to settle such things before retiring for the night, Lola had fled the field and locked herself in the bedroom she used as an office, whence he could hear the sound of weeping, of cursing, of small missiles being flung. An overreaction, he thought, and said so through the door, but received no intelligible response. This in itself was unusual and worrying. Lola was not one to avoid discussion about emotional states; to the contrary, she doted upon them, long explorations into their separate and conjoined-in-marriage psyches until sometimes Paz felt like a specimen on a slide. He bore up, however, this being a part of his beloved, and thought himself a better husband for it.

Maybe that was part of the problem, he mused as he sat in the early-morning garden with a cup of Cuban coffee in his hand: maybe he had been a littletoo accommodating. He considered the house itself, their home. Her house originally, a typical Florida ranch house in South Miami, made of white-painted stuccoed concrete block with a gray tile roof and aqua-blue-painted steel hurricane awnings. Charmless as architecture, it was, however, old enough to be surrounded with well-grown foliage: a huge bougainvillea covered one side wall and part of the roof with purple blossoms, and the backyard was shaded by a large mango, beyond which was a good assortment of fruit trees-lime, orange, grapefruit, guava, avocado. Inside she had furnished it with spare Scandinavian wood and leather, fanciful or abstract pictures in mirror-steel frames, and rya rugs. Not his taste; he preferred old stuff, eccentric junk, theLast Supper on velvet-no, not really, but that was occasionally implied by the wife. His mother claimed the house looked like a doctor’s office.

Yes, the mother-that had come up, too, big-time. Paz reviewed what he could recall of the charges and countercharges while he waited for the coffee to kick in. He had come home drunk, had endangered the life of their precious by driving drunk. How could he? Well, first of all, four beers did not make drunk. Then the lecture from the doctor on alcohol impairment. Okay, guilty, never again, at which point the kid pipes up with guess where we were today, and tells all, the voodoo ceremony, the yams, the stinky smoke, worshipping at false idols,plus the visit to the ladies who kiss boys for money and Daddy was talking to that lady who came to dinner. Easily explained, of course, although not the card from Morgensen. Paz had idly tossed it out onto his dresser, and when the wife, that skilled researcher, had discovered it lying there it proved to have on its reverse a set of lips imprinted in red lipstick. That Beth! What a kidder! And so the story of Beth and Jimmy way back when had to be told, or wrenched out, each perfectly honest statement out of Paz’s mouth sounding like a philanderer’s evasion. Paz was in the peculiar position of having done nothing wrong with Beth Morgensen but also secretly knowing he had wanted to,still wanted to, if it came to that, butwouldn’t, being an honest guy, butmight if this kind of shit went on much longer, and who could blame him?

Not a profitable line of thought. He was squelching it when Lola emerged from the house, dressed in her usual T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers and carrying a canvas bag with her work clothes in it. She shot him a venomous look and strode on through the patio and out to the shed in the yard where she stored her bike.

“Good morning!” Paz called. No answer. She got the bike and was wheeling it to the driveway when Paz got up and intercepted her.

“Are you ever going to talk to me again?” he asked, grasping the handlebars.

“I’m still too angry. Let go of the bike, please.”

“No. Not until we talk.”

“I have to get to work,” she said, struggling to free the handlebars. “I have patients…”

“Let them die,” said Paz. “This is more important.” At this, she sighed ostentatiously and folded her hands across her breasts. “Okay, have it your way. Talk.”