She sipped her wine and her lips curled ever so slightly—and there it was, the enigmatic smile that launched a thousand magazine covers. “I did. It’s that little city on Route 66. We drove through it when we were coming to California. My mother and I.”
“There are a lot of cities on Route 66.”
“Ah, but only one with an ostrich farm.”
“You went there?”
“To the ostrich farm? Yes! Wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
“An ostrich has three stomachs and only two toes on each foot. They’re seven feet tall and can run forty miles an hour.”
“Why not Katie Ostrich?” He had been kidding, but she seemed to think about it.
“The phonetics are wrong. And it sounds fake.”
But then she elaborated on how she loved movies in which there were exotic animals, and how even now she was a little jealous of Mia Farrow and Elsa Martinelli and Deborah Kerr because they had all filmed movies in Africa.
“Hatari is a terrible movie,” he’d said, afraid the moment he had spoken that he had offended her because she might know someone in the cast or the crew. Hollywood was a surprisingly small community. God, for all he knew, her friend Terrance Dutton was in it.
But she had agreed with him. “In all fairness, I’ve made some real stinkers, too. But think about it: Elsa was on the set with hippos and lions and—don’t laugh—ostriches. And the ostriches weren’t on a fenced-in farm in a part of the world where they don’t belong. They were in Africa, where they’re supposed to be.”
“You’ve never been to Africa?”
“No, have you?”
He hadn’t. He wanted to suggest that it would be fun to take her there someday, but the gallery hadn’t gotten off to a great start. It was barely holding its own, and the bank wasn’t about to extend a penny more credit: not to the business and not to him. And his parents certainly weren’t going to lend him the money: whatever the hell his father had done with the OSS and did now with the CIA—personnel, really?—it wasn’t lucrative. Even if it was important, you didn’t get rich beating the Nazis or trying to outwit the communists unless you were a defense contractor. His parents simply didn’t have the kind of cash that he needed sitting around. The two of them had moved to Washington, D.C., in 1954 because his father’s responsibilities demanded that he be there full-time, but he hoped to retire in three or four years. He was now, at least ostensibly, in personnel and training. Nothing clandestine, he’d insist, a lot of paper pushing. But David suspected there was more to it than that. Mind control. Brainwashing. He’d overheard a little one time when he’d visited his parents in Washington, and he’d seen the manila folder his father had tried to hide in a newspaper after breakfast. Regardless, one moment his old man would be talking about East Berlin or Vietnam, and the next his vision of a little place on a golf course in Sarasota, Florida, where he and his wife could live out their days, always with a brooding aside about how little money he had been able to squirrel away. Apparently, it was going to be a photo finish to see what happened first, after he retired: he and his wife died or they went broke.
“I haven’t,” David said finally. “Maybe someday. Africa. Imagine.”
“I’ll get there. Either because I’m making a picture or on my own.”
“Do you worry about all the revolutions? Central Africa, East Africa. I can’t keep the countries straight, but it all feels like insanity.”
“No. I don’t worry.”
He couldn’t decide whether she was brave or naive. The little he knew about Africa was what he’d read over the last few years in the newspapers, and he wasn’t sure he’d finished any one of the articles. “Congo. Kenya. Tanganyika,” he said. “They’re all a blur.”
“The Serengeti doesn’t change. Wildebeest don’t respect national boundaries. They don’t care about borders.”
“You’ve done your homework. I’m not sure I even know what a wildebeest looks like.”
“Imagine a very wise, very slender American buffalo.”
“Wise?”
“They have little beards that make them look like professors.”
“I never had a professor with a beard.”
“Well, I wouldn’t know about that,” she said, and he realized that he had inadvertently pressed upon a bruise: the fact that she had not gone to college. Her mother felt she had wasted too much time on the stage and was already desperately far behind the Natalie Woods of the world. College was never an option.