make this dramatic delivery: “Telegram for you, ma’am…”
The telegram consisted of four words.
It was a proposal. The only one I’ve ever made.
Hopefully, it will be the last.
The first two words of the telegram began: Will you…?
Pilar’s reply had come three thoughtful days later; the only time she’d ever risked telephoning me. She was tearful. She was resolute.
Her answer was no.
It had to be no, she said. She had no reasonable options.
Consider, she said, who I was: A North American; a gringo. How could that possibly be accepted by her people?
What she really meant was: Think about who you once were, about the work you once did to hurt my country.
I felt like an even bigger dope than usual. I pride myself on being reasonable, but I hadn’t even taken the time to analyze her position. Of course she had to decline. She had no other choice. So why the hell had I risked her refusal? It was out Of character for me to put so much emotional currency on the line.
Tomlinson’s assessment had been uncharacteristically blunt: “You’d have never asked her, Doc, if you thought for a minute she’d say yes. Most people live alone because they have to. But you… you live this way because you like it.”
Was that true? I wondered about it as I ran along the beach.
No, I decided. It wasn’t true. My proposal to Pilar had been genuine. I liked the idea of entering into a partnership with her… the woman and her handsome blond-haired son. That she could say no, that she had to refuse, still caused a jolt of disappointment in me that was as powerful as any physical pain I’d ever felt.
One thing was obvious: If I did not marry Pilar, I would ultimately lose her. And she would not allow me to marry her…
That realization created in me a feeling of internal deflation that seemed to wither my perceptions about whatever future I hoped to have. That is not a dramatic assessment. For weeks after making the decision not to see Pilar again, I felt like crap. I mooned around like some adolescent idiot. I felt embarrassed by my inability to control my own thoughts and feelings. The only emotion I’d ever experienced that was as intense was when I’d lost another good woman, a powerful woman named Hannah Smith. Finally,
I began to get mad. Mad at myself, no one else. And that’s when I began the slow, slow process of recovery.
Pilar was out of my life.
Fine. I had my work, my routine, my fish tank, my boats.
And no more proposals. Not of that kind, anyway.
One night, when I had dumbly observed, “Love can be extraordinarily painful,” Tomlinson had sagely replied, “No shit, Sherlock.”
An insightful man.
But not me, I told him. Never again.
I tried Calloway a couple of times at his office on Monday, didn’t get him. It was a Lauderdale area code. Apparently Frank did his work over the phone or by computer and probably made the occasional cross-state commute.
By car, Boca Grande to Lauderdale would have been two and a half, maybe three hours.
By chopper, maybe forty minutes.
I wondered if the efficient secretary who took my messages was the infamous Skipper. The wise thing to do when in doubt is to ask, so I finally asked.
No, indeedy, I was told. I was speaking with Ms. Betty Marsh, Mr. Calloway’s executive secretary. Without prompting, she added, “Ms. Worthington hasn’t worked since she became Mrs. Calloway.” Her tone carried the careful professional indifference that is designed to mask disapproval. I also noted the judgmental ‘hasn’t worked’ instead of the more specific ‘hasn’t worked here.’
Calloway’s longtime secretary clearly did not approve of her boss’s new young wife.
I wondered how far she was willing to go with it. I said, “I was aware that Frank married her, but I didn’t know she’d left the office.”
“Well, she has. Hasn’t worked here for nearly a year now.”
I said, “Must be nice,” with the slightly cynical, the-world-just-isn’t-fair chuckle that always accompanies that phrase.
And that’s when she closed the door just a little. “Who did you say you are?”
“Ford. First name Marion, middle initial D, which is why most people call me Doc. I’m a friend of Amanda’s.”
Her voice brightened. “You are? In that case, I’ll save you another phone call: Mr. Calloway won’t be available till tomorrow morning, maybe early afternoon. You try then, I’ll put you right through if he’s here in Lauderdale or give you the number where he’ll be. She’s one of the good ones, Amanda is. Enough character in there for two or three people. He’s in meetings today with investors, the whole bunch of them working late. Over in Tampa.”
So I went back to the lab where I’d spent much of the day carefully removing otoliths from grouper I’d collected.
It was exacting, painstaking work. First I used my Buehler low-speed saw to cut paper-thin sections, then Histomount to mount the sections of bone on a slide. Careful polishing was then required to make the annuli visible.
When I was done, the tiny white discs were as bright and delicate as cultured pearls. And so thin that a puff of wind could blow them around like autumn leaves.
If the annuli were readable (all too often, they weren’t), then and only then was I able to count the rings through my compound microscope.
One ring equaled one year of growth.
Painstaking work, yeah. Sometimes frustrating, but it’s the kind of work I enjoy. It requires precision and offers clarity.
So why was I spending so much time trying to figure out the age of a fish? Simple. The black grouper is no ordinary fish. It’s a large, aggressive bottom dweller that inhabits coral reefs and rocky ledges from North Carolina to southern Brazil. It’s a popular sport species as well as the most important commercial species of grouper in South Florida.
You see grouper on a restaurant menu, it’s most likely black grouper. Translation: economically, it is a very, very valuable animal.
An interesting thing about the fish is that, like most grouper species, black grouper are hermaphrodites.
That’s right, hermaphrodites.
Protogynous hermaphrodites is the exact scientific term. What that means is, all grouper are born female and, at a certain stage of maturity, most (perhaps not all) make the transition to male.
The data compiled by doctors Crabtree and Bullock had already produced some interesting statistics. We’d examined 1,164 black grouper and found that approximately 50 percent of the female population had reached sexual maturity at an age of slightly more than 5 years. By the age of 15.5 years, half the sampling had transformed into males.
This was noteworthy because Florida imposes both recreational and commercial regulations on black grouper caught in state waters. To be killed, a grouper must be at least twenty inches in length-a fairly large fish.
In isolated regions of rock and reef, did this mean that the largest fish, all males, would be the first to be exterminated? And, if so, would grouper respond differently to fishing mortality than typical gonochoristic species?
In plain English: Would the depletion of male stock cause the species to adapt more quickly? Would smaller, younger females make the transition to male in order for the species to survive?
I found the question intriguing. Successful species have an extraordinary ability to adapt quickly to ensure procreation. In humankind, adaptability tends to be behavioral rather than physiological, but the ability is there because the mandate is so strong.
