The Foreigners - Maxine Swann [72]
“I don’t know if I forgave him. I just forgot. I became myself and we went on.
“A few years later,Tanya died. She’d had a kind of prostitute life. We wanted to adopt her baby. It was my idea. We tried, but it didn’t work out. I don’t know what happened to her.”
Suddenly, she was laughing.
“Why are you laughing?”
“I’m just remembering, it was that year, the year that I started feeling better again, that the practice of blow jobs was imported to Belarus.”
“What do you mean?”
“Yeah, no one did that. But then our friend Ludmila went to Poland with her husband, whose business had sent him there, and came back one day and told us about kissing everywhere on the body. None of us could believe it. I thought it was so disgusting that for months I couldn’t eat off of Ludmila’s plates. Just the thought of her eating off those same plates made me sick. Then little by little, we all started trying it.”
twenty-four
The botanist wrote me. He was even more excited. The latest news was that they were launching a massive counterattack on the Iris pseudacorus invasion, a measure known as biological control.
In a biological control scenario, natural enemies such as insects, fish and pathogens are purposefully introduced by scientists to weaken and suppress invading plants. In order to find the right biological control agent, scientists travel the world in search of the target plant’s natural enemies. Once found, the weakening agent is imported to the host country and placed in a quarantine laboratory. There, meticulous experiments are carried out to ensure that the organism will affect only the invading species and will not impact native or crop species.
Next the enemy agent is released into its new habitat to prey upon the invader. Classical biological control relies on numerous generations of the enemy agent to suppress the invading species over a long period of time. Another method, inundative biological control, functions through vigorous and swift counterattack, with enemy agents released en masse.
In this case, inundative measures were being taken.Vast quantities of mottled weevils had been released in the wetlands. Simultaneous intergenerational damage was hoped for with the adults feeding on the leaves, where they would produce characteristic feeding scars, and the larvae tunneling in the petioles and crown of the plant. While the plants would not be wiped out immediately, their vigor would be considerably compromised, with the youthful irises suffering particularly.
I called Leonarda. “Whatever happened with that dinner with the Beast?”
“Really? You want to do it?”
“Why not? I’m hungry.”
“Okay, great.”
I knew it would be something absurdly laborious, baby ducks steeped in wine for several days prior, then cooked low for twelve hours. Whatever. The perfect aperitif, wine, digestif. I relished all this preoccupation.
We settled on that coming Thursday at 9:00 P.M. I snuck into the back garden a bit before that, positioning myself against the wall by the kitchen window, pressed into the jasmine.
Inside, there was an immense amount of fastidious bustling. Leonarda was wearing green corduroys with a short skirt on top. She disappeared for a little while and came back transformed, the skirt alone, little heels, a blouse with a ruffle.
I knelt there, breathing in the jasmine. At 9:30, she called me. I was holding my vibrating phone in my hand.
“Hiiiiiiiiii. We’re waiting for you.”
At 10:00, she said, “Where the hell is she?” She was angry and flounced petulantly around the house.
“Let’s start anyway,” Miguel said from the stove.
“I don’t want to start,” Leonarda said.
He had already poured them aperitifs.
He turned back to the stove. He was stirring. “Well, the risotto can’t wait. It’ll be ruined.”
Suddenly, he looked agitated. He started moving his feet up and down, as if the floor were too hot.
She glanced over with a look of scorn. “What’s wrong with you?”
He pulled the pan off the fire. He was quivering, seemingly in a state of uncontrollable fury. This, at least, was