THE AQUARISTS

7 5 R T H E A Q U A R I S T S S E T H L E R E R ‘‘I wouldn’t want to get those shoes wet.’’ The aquarium assistant, a girl of maybe twenty-five with red hair, crooked the hose under her arm, stopping the water with a bend. ‘‘Those are such nice shoes. Tell your dad,’’ she turned toward my son, ‘‘next time he comes not to wear such nice shoes.’’ All the sta√ were in boots, and their hoses carpeted the concrete floor with running water. I lifted up each foot, checking the soles as if I’d stepped in something, then crooking each leg to rub the tops against the back of my black jeans, drying them o√. Hopping and lifting, I must have looked like a folk dancer trying his steps to some invisible fiddle, shifting from foot to foot, bending each leg, and then coming down as softly as I could so as not to splash. If anyone had actually been looking they would probably have laughed, or clapped along, but the assistants were too busy now, spraying the sides of the tanks, trying to loosen the dirt and algae with the hoses before they put them down and turned the water o√ and got their brooms and scrubbed the dripping glass. I stood there, watching their dance for a good five minutes until someone 7 6 L E R E R Y I hadn’t seen before came by with a towel and spread it on the ground and I stepped onto it. My son was giving me a tour, backstage he called it, behind the exhibits along concrete alleyways and metal bridges. He had been volunteering for about a month, cleaning the tanks and cutting up food for the aquarium that had grown out of the Oceanographic Institute in La Jolla. I had cut a campus meeting short, greeting him in the parking lot still in my oxfords and blazer. No men wore ties here except lawyers, and certainly none of the other deans at U.C.–San Diego, but I had put one on, a gray silk knit, hoping it would make me look the worldly humanist, setting me apart from the khakied scientists in the room, with the spread-open collars of their permanent-press shirts. I took the tie o√ for the tour, but when I met my son at the aquarium I still felt like Nixon on the beach, his wingtips brushed with sand. We entered the building from the side, slipping past tourists, and walked up a metal staircase to the roof. Pacing our way along the corrugated paths, we looked down through the tops of the big tanks. The fish, no longer magnified by glass and water, climbed up the kelp. Great forests bloomed under the sea, but from up here the seaweed rose only ten feet o√ the tank floor. Local fish fed under their fronds. From the top, the little silver perch clouded the current. Moving down, bigger fish stacked up, and I said their names aloud as he had taught me: porgy, scup, sculpin, cabezon. Then, almost at the very bottom, a spectrum of rockfish arched: blue, black, canary, vermillion, greenling, brown. And below, at sand depth, were the bottom-feeders, rays and halibut, an angel shark, a turbot. There we were, walking by the tops of the tanks, looking down into mock seas, listening to the swish of a paddle move across the surface, faking a tide. I’m the oldest man here, I thought, and then: except for him, I’m the only man here. All the aquarists and the assistants were in their twenties, their hair pulled back or balled up, some of them redheads, some blondes, and I watched them swirl about the tanks and pumps, knowing that in their place, I would only have dropped brushes or slipped or fallen in. He moved about them, clearly at home but junior to their ministry, catching the bits they missed or T H E A Q U A R I S T S 7 7 R disappearing in a doorway and...