Читать книгу Zoology - - Страница 5

The sidewalk outside David’s building isn’t like most sidewalks. The squares are bigger, smoother, more like slabs. He’s on the corner of Fifty-third and Fifth Avenue, and you go in through a golden revolving door pushed by a doorman who stands there frowning at the street, dressed to drive a carriage. No matter how hot it gets outside, if there are Italian ice stands on every corner and the horses in the park are sweating through their saddles, inside the lobby it’s cold enough for you to see your breath. The lobby even sounds cold. (The building’s depressing too, though, the way an empty hotel ballroom is depressing. Every hallway on every floor has the same purple carpet and 7-Eleven lights and yellow walls. Through the living room windows—and the walls there are really nothing but windows—the whole city sometimes seems as dead as a diorama in a glass case.)

A Greek guy named Georgi sits behind a marble desk during the day, running his hand over his silver hair, waiting for you to ask him where you can get good Thai food or a roll of stamps. Each of the elevators (polished as bright as mirrors) has a guy outside it who holds out his hand to guide you in. At first I always tried making conversation with the elevator men, to show that I didn’t think I was better than them. I’d say it was a good day to be indoors, or if it wasn’t, I’d say it sure was a long shift, huh? But most of the time they just stared straight ahead and kept their hands folded behind their backs and nodded at the rows of buttons. People who survive that kind of boredom, I think, ought to be celebrated like soldiers or astronauts.

But Sameer, from the first time I saw him, seemed not to be suffering at all. He turned around while we were riding in the elevator on one of my first days and said, “If you don’t mind, what sort of opportunities bring you to the city?” He’s even smaller than I am, and he has a mustache as dark and perfect as the one you put on a Mr. Potato Head. I told him about the zoo, and from then on every time I rode with him he gave me a tiny bit of his own zoo story. “In Karachi, I studied for over one year in the largest zoo in Pakistan, particularly I studied the behavior and mannerisms of a species of bat that is quite rare anywhere outside of Asia.” For that first couple of weeks, whenever I didn’t want to be in the apartment anymore, I’d go down to the lobby and ride with him up to forty-two and back down to the lobby.

Something was the matter between Lucy and David—they always seemed to be having some important, angry talk that they were careful to keep to themselves. This was for my sake, I guess, but Lucy would sometimes seem to forget that I was around. At dinner one of my first nights there, sitting around their glass table with plates of flank steak that could have been in a magazine, David said, “We should make this for the party Sunday, huh?” Lucy sipped her wine and stared straight ahead. The skin by her ears turned redder and redder. “All right,” David said. “Henry, how’d you do today?” She threw back the last bit of her wine, stood up, and went into her room and closed the door behind her. David chewed a bite of steak longer than he had to, then said, “Look. She’s … you know—this is something we’re dealing with.” And then, while we did the dishes later, he said, only half to me, “Well, this is just fucking great.” She didn’t come out until the next morning.

David’s gone so much that it’s hard to think how they build up enough stuff to fight about. Six days a week he’s out of the apartment by six in the morning, and most nights he isn’t back for dinner until at least eight thirty. He’s been like that since he was at Somerset, finishing projects weeks before they were due, typing up ten-page study guides for quizzes that hardly counted, working in bed at night until Dad would come in and unplug his lamp. Especially compared to the hour or two Lucy spends up in her studio painting, it’s a lot.

I shouldn’t be so hard on Lucy, though—she’s been through a terrible thing. Her first serious boyfriend, who she dated all through college, died just after they got engaged. This was in Brooklyn, about five years ago, three years before she met David. Her boyfriend, Alex, fell asleep reading one afternoon with a candle lit next to a curtain, and when Lucy came home from work her street was so busy with fire trucks and ambulances that she couldn’t see, at first, which building had had the fire. Alex died from the smoke before the fire even touched him, David told me, and that word touched—the idea of fire tickling, then covering, then swallowing—left my heart pounding.

(“How’d they know he fell asleep?” I asked, quietly enough to let David not answer me if he didn’t want to, and he didn’t.)

I stared at Lucy sometimes, when I first moved in, imagining her face when she walked onto her block, when she heard the roar, the second when she understood that the disaster everyone was watching was hers. But you could stare at her all day and not get any closer to understanding how that felt. This Lucy, the one who collects ceramic elephants and who talks on the phone to her mom twice a night, was someone who seemed never to have been through anything harder than a crowded subway ride. I froze, once, when she walked into the living room while I was watching Backdraft, but she just glanced at the TV, picked up her magazine, and walked out.

I got to spend less time sitting around the apartment once David gave me the number of Herbert Talliani, his patient who was on the board of the Central Park Zoo. “Just say some stuff about loving animals and everything. He says they’re always looking for keepers. He’s really a hell of a guy. Used to be an editor at Newsweek.”

When he picked up, Mr. Talliani had a coughing fit and then said, “So you’re the guy with the fever to pick up monkey shit, huh? Send my secretary your name and résumé and everything and I’ll pass it on to Paul. Tell David my skin looks like hell, by the way.” And then he laughed, which made him cough so hard that I had to hold the phone away from my ear.

My interview was at one o’clock, but I walked up to the zoo early to look around. I’d been there once, on a trip to New York with Dad when I was seven, but I didn’t remember anything about the zoo except that it was raining then and that outside the gate a guy in a bright green suit kept wanting to wrap his python around my neck. I also remember Uncle Jacob, who we stayed with that week, telling me that the animals all looked “wretched.” But today it was the sort of day when people talk about the weather without seeming like they have nothing to say, sunny with a few popcorn clouds, and even homeless people looking healthy, almost. The path into the park smelled like something sweet that could have been either pollen or pee.

In a tunnel past the ice-cream vendors, a bald Asian man sat with his legs crossed on a stool, playing a bendy-sounding instrument that only had one string. I stood listening for a minute, and there wasn’t anything you’d walk away humming, but if you listened long enough, it started to sound like a lonely old woman singing. I put all the change I had in his case, and right away he stood up smiling and held out his instrument to me. Did he think I wanted to buy it? Borrow it? I was wearing one of my new shirts and David’s gray pants, so he might have thought I was a banker looking for a hobby. He kept shaking the bow at me, grinning bigger and bigger each time, but he wouldn’t say a word. “No, thanks,” I said. “You sound really good, I’m going to go.” And so I just walked away—feeling not much better than if I’d robbed him—while he stood there shaking his instrument at me and smiling.

A sleepy black guard let me into the zoo for free when I told him I was here for an interview, and just past the entrance was a tank and a sign that said, WATCH OUR SEA LIONS HAVE LUNCH! Kids were clustered around the glass, throwing popcorn in the water or struggling while their parents smeared suntan lotion on their faces. The sea lions—I coultank and a sign that said,d see four of them—had huge bright eyes, long whiskers, and skin like a wet suit. The tank smelled like fish and chemicals, and was as big as a swimming pool, shaped like a stop sign. In the middle was a tall island of brown rocks, and a couple of the sea lions lay there in the sun. There was just a short glass wall between me and the ones who were swimming. I could have dipped my hand in the water—with a little work I could have dipped my body in the water. Another sea lion was up there on a rock now, his skin still wet and dark, but if you stood watching for a minute you could see the light spread over his fur. A red-haired girl in a stroller next to me pointed at the water and said to her bored nanny, “Look! Look! Look!” Swimming sideways, a sea lion would shoot around the edges of the tank, one little flick of its flippers every time the tank’s wall changed direction, its belly out to the crowd, the smoothest swimming I’d ever seen. It hardly even made a ripple. It would spin slowly while it swam, and a lip of water just above it would spill out onto the ground. Every now and then it would have to come up for a breath, but really it didn’t look like it was any harder for the sea lion to swim than it was for me to stand there watching it.

One of the ones up on a rock, because he was too hot or maybe just because he saw how much fun his friend was having, decided to plop back in. He moved like a handicapped person who’d fallen out of his wheelchair—until he was in the water, where he could have been an Olympic swimmer. I hung around the tank for about forty-five minutes, sitting on a bench watching and trying to read a zoo brochure I’d picked up, but the sun was so bright that the pages kept looking blank.

Once I’d been sitting there for a while, a skinny zookeeper with thick glasses came up to the tank and rested her bucket of fish on the bench right next to me. She looked about forty years old, with straight brown hair and careful makeup—if it weren’t for the fish and the uniform, she would have looked more like a lawyer than a zookeeper. “Hi,” I said. “Do you work here? I’ve got an interview in a little bit to be a keeper. Is it a pretty good place to work?”

For a second she looked so confused, almost panicked, that I thought she might not speak English. But she was just considering her answer. “Oh, it’s very rewarding. You have to really love animals, but if you do, you hardly even notice the other stuff.” She gave a nervous smile, like she might have said too much, and walked off with her bucket toward the crowd.

The sun was just above us now, and I lowered my head to let it reach all over. A job like this might even beat playing music, I kept thinking. I’d put on a bathing suit in the mornings and jump in the tank, race the sea lions around the edge, hang on their flippers, then lie up on the rocks with my eyes shut while I dried off. A group of pretty girls would walk over to me (I imagined them visiting from somewhere like Tennessee, giggly and polite), and they’d ask how long it had taken to get the sea lions to trust me. I’d smile, sitting up, and ask if they wanted to come in. And even if the job was nothing like that at all, at least I’d be earning money that didn’t feel like just another version of allowance. At least I wouldn’t be measuring out my days in forty-four-minute chunks, listening to the same five songs fumbled in exactly the same places while Dad kept time on his leg.

Before I knew it I’d drifted off in the sweaty-faced way I sometimes do in the sun, and when a stroller wheeling against my foot woke me up, it was two minutes before one.

* * *

In a brown, empty office, a man with a fat neck nodded hi without shaking my hand and pointed me to a wobbly table. His name tag said paul. He couldn’t have been older than twenty-five, but he acted like I was a student and he was a busy, disappointed principal. By the time we’d sat down, I’d already decided—for whatever reasons we rush to this kind of feeling—that Paul was my enemy. He wore an outfit like a Jurassic Park ranger and stared past me with his forehead wrinkled. His clothes had the sour, bready smell of saltines. “So. Tell me why a job at the Central Park Zoo appeals to you.”

I told him about all the pets I’d had growing up, about watching the keepers in the D.C. zoo wash an elephant. Everything I said just seemed to hang there, waiting for me to take it back. He played with his key chain while I told him, struggling to come up with the word hidden, about how I used to give Olive her pills stuck in a ball of cream cheese.

“All right. I’m going to tell you a little about the job, then you’re going to ask me some questions.” He hunched over and lowered his voice. “If we hire you, you’d be working in the Children’s Zoo, and you wouldn’t get moved to Main unless you stayed for probably over a year. We always start people in Children’s so they get some offstage experience. It’s not a nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday thing. Your off days are scattered depending on the schedule, and if something needs to get done, you stay until it’s finished. And there’s not much glamour to it. I tell everyone who comes in, if you think it’s going to be like the Discovery Channel, then you should walk out right now.” I made a face like I thought it was funny that some people thought it was going to be like the Discovery Channel. “It’s dirty work, and you’ve got to be out there all day if it’s snowing, raining, a hundred degrees, thirty degrees, whatever. The animals always need to be taken care of. I’ve had too many people here who’re good as long as the weather’s nice, but it starts raining and suddenly I can’t find anybody.”

Together we walked over to the Children’s Zoo, with Paul staying a few steps ahead of me, and when we passed the Asian man (who was sobbing with his instrument again) I kept my eyes down. Once we were through the gates, Paul said, “Children’s is shaped like a doughnut, farm animals on the ring, aviary in the middle.” His walkie-talkie kept buzzing while we walked, and he’d flip it out of its holster and say quick, military things to whoever was on the other end: “Children’s one to base, fifteen thirty at animal Main. Over.”

The first animal he introduced me to was Othello, the black bull. He smelled oily, and he lived alone in a pen that looked too small for him. When he saw us he grunted and walked up to the fence. You could see his muscles move under his skin. His nose was shiny with some clear goo, and his eyes, as big as pool balls, looked hungry and worn-out. To show how good I was with animals, I reached over and scratched him on the flat, bony place between his ears. He butted my hand away, and Paul said, “Othello’s probably the rowdiest animal here—he doesn’t know his own strength, and he gets jumpy with men sometimes. Don’t ever turn your back on him.”

Through a tunnel in a plastic tree came a group of little kids, all black, all wearing green T-shirts that said, summer is for learning. None of the noise—the talking, the squealing, the laughing—seemed to come from any one kid.

“It’ll be like this every day. Three to five camp groups at once.” In front of the sheep pen, a fat zookeeper with bushy eyebrows was saying, “No. No. No,” to a group of Asian kids in pink shirts.

Paul moved like a cowboy-bear. Leading me around the ring, past the alpacas and the sheep, he said, “Here’s Lily. Back there in the shed’s Chili. They’re potbellied pigs.” The sight, at first, is like the kind of fat person you see on the subway who takes up three seats: You stare at them not quite believing they live entire lives in those bodies. Lily and Chili’s stomachs scraped on the ground every time they took a step. Folds of fat covered their eyes and hung down from their cheeks. They looked miserable under all that, trapped. I reached over and petted Lily, and her hair, black against all that tough black skin, felt like the wires in a pot scrubber. “She’s been overeating, so something you’d have to be very careful of is Lily eating Chili’s food. She loves pushing him around.” Lily grunted when I touched her, and it could have meant, “Help!” or it could have meant, “More!”

A purple thundercloud was hurrying toward us, and when it started to rain a minute later, big, slappy drops, I pretended not to notice the water on my glasses so Paul would know that I wasn’t a complainer.

As we came through the screen door into where all the birds lived, it sounded like we were suddenly hundreds of miles from the city. The air felt thick from the mulch, and full of plant smell. “Right up there are the magpies. Those two are getting ready to mate, so we’re trying to make sure they have everything they need.” I couldn’t see anything, but I made nodding noises. “We have three doves sitting on nests right now, so every afternoon you’ll have to go around and count them and make sure everyone’s here and the nests are OK. This is the chukar partridge, Chuck.” A fat, striped bird waddled by, as uninterested in us as we were in the trees we walked past. “He’s had a thing with his balance for the past few weeks, so we’re trying him on a special diet, and he’s spending every other day in the dispensary. You have to keep an eye on him and write down what he’s doing every morning.” On either side of the bridge we stood on was green water, and ducks with wild colors and paddling feet zoomed underneath us.

Finally, in the pen closest to the exit, I met the goats. There were seven. “That little one’s Suzy. She’s the mom. Her kids are Pearl, there, and Onyx, who’s over there with the gray spot. Sparky’s up on the stump, Spanky’s this one—he’s trouble—Scooter’s asleep right there with the long beard, and that,” he said, pointing to the tall white one, the only one without horns, “is Newman. He’s a Nubian. Totally different species. He’s a big goof. One of the security guards calls him Jar Jar, because of the ears.” The goats looked smart and scrappy, a gang of cartoon grouches and goofballs. Their pupils went the wrong way, and they all looked up at me expecting something—they were the Bad News Bears and I was their new coach. Newman came right over, nibbled at my collar, then rested his head on my shoulder and took a loud breath. He had big pink nostrils and little square teeth. He smelled like dust and hay. His ears hung below his chin, and he looked—with his barrel of a body on top of those long, skinny legs—like a little kid’s drawing of a horse. The Summer Learners came around the bend with their hands full of food, and Newman scrambled to get in position, his front hooves in the mesh of the fence, his neck leaning way over, and his head bouncing from hand to hand.

“He’s just a big kid, always hungry,” Paul said, and that’s when, with a quick bob, Newman lifted the glasses off my face. Paul jumped the fence and grabbed a handful of Newman’s neck hair, then wiped my glasses on his shorts before he handed them back. “He’s terrible sometimes. I’ll make a note for him not to get Enrichment this afternoon. Usually, something like that happens, you’ve got to fill out a report. Last month he broke some woman’s camera, we had to pay two hundred bucks.”

I still haven’t fixed the scratch on my glasses’ left lens. He snuffled the food from a row of girls’ hands, snuffled them again to make sure he hadn’t missed anything, then lifted his head before bobbing off down the line.

* * *

When Paul called Monday afternoon to offer me the job, I decided to go for a celebration walk, and while I was looking for a place to get an egg-and-cheese sandwich, I realized I was right by David’s hospital on Fifty-first. Long escalators led up to a busy lobby with a gift shop full of flowers and silvery balloons. A week before I would have felt uneasy in a place like that, suspicious that everyone who walked past was wondering why I wasn’t at work. But I felt now like a businessman paying a visit to a friend, full of easy braggy charm.

In the elevator I only noticed that I was humming because of how the nurse was staring at me.

David’s face—like mine but wider and flatter, like a cow’s—can’t hide anything, and he wasn’t glad to see me. For some reason he shook my hand. “Good to see you. Just stopping by? What’s up?”

“I can come back later.”

“No, I’m sorry, it’s just hectic here. I’m an hour behind on my afternoons and I’ve gotta get somebody’s lecture notes for this morning. I’m about to see a nice kid now, though. You wanna come sit in? I’ll tell her you’re a first-year.”

She walked into the office wearing shorts and carrying a folder, and she did seem nice, but to tell the truth I could hardly look at her. There wasn’t a spot on her face that wasn’t covered in acne, a Halloween mask she could never take off. David shook her hand without wincing, and she hopped up on the table, swinging her legs and crinkling the paper.

“Your chin’s looking better,” he said, “and it’s a lot less angry up here around the temples and the hairline. How many milligrams do we have you taking now?”

“A hundred.” It was strange to hear a little girl’s voice come out of that face, like expecting milk and getting orange juice.

“I think we’re going to step it up to one-twenty for the next two weeks. This is Henry; Henry, this is Joan. Henry here’s at NYU, hoping to be a dermatologist himself.” He stuffed his tongue in his top lip to keep from smiling.

“I want to be a doctor,” she said, looking at me now. “Either an open-heart surgeon or the person who helps with babies.”

“She designed the entire Web site for her school. One of the most talented people I’ve seen,” David said. “And within six months we’re going to get her all cleared up and she’s going to be one of the most beautiful people I’ve seen too.”

She smiled and seemed so brave, so patient and gentle about living with her face, that I hated myself for being disgusted by her.

David has never had more than ten pimples in his life, but he’s always been a fanatic about his skin. When we were growing up he was full of weird ideas: olive oil and sugar, Aqua Velva, ice water—his routine before he’d go to bed used to take half an hour, but I don’t think he would have had any pimples if he’d wiped once with a wet rag and eaten nothing but chocolate cake. I wasn’t so lucky. From the time I was in eighth grade until a couple of years ago, I didn’t have a single day where I woke up and my face looked the way I wanted it to. Every night I’d smear on the creams and swallow the pills that Dr. Fordham, nutty in his toupee, would send me home with each month, but I may as well have prayed or done a skin dance. In the morning I’d stand in front of my bathroom mirror and with however many fingers it took I’d cover the biggest pimples of the day and think, Like this you wouldn’t look so bad at all. On the worst days, Dad, who had bad acne when he was in high school and still has scooped-out-looking scars on his chin, would say, glancing over while he drove me to school, “You’re a very handsome kid.”

When the girl left, the office secretary, a fat woman with braces and heavy makeup, said, “Stephen Takas just called and canceled, and Dr. Harrison’s just come back in, so you’ve got about forty minutes if you want to take lunch. Now, is this your brother? Why haven’t I been introduced?”

“Laura Ann, Henry; Henry, Laura Ann. This is the famous secretary who can balance her checkbook and do a month’s schedules and talk to two people on the phone, all at once.”

She blushed and looked down at her lap. Like he was already a big-shot doctor, David rapped his knuckles on her counter and said, “We’re gonna go around the corner. What can I bring you back?”

“Nothing for me, I’m having cottage cheese,” she said. “Here, Mona, come meet Dr. Elinsky’s brother. Henry, this is my niece.”

From a back room full of file cabinets stepped a girl who looked my age. Tan with blond hair pulled into a ponytail and a tight white T-shirt and a big smile. If I could get close enough I was sure she’d smell like warm laundry. “Hi there,” she said.

“Can we bring you anything, Mona?” David said. There was something about the way he didn’t quite look at her when he said it.

“No thanks.” And something about the way she didn’t look at him. “I was just about to leave for the day.”

David took me into a pizza place on Fiftieth. He asked me about the zoo, what I’d be doing, how much I’d be getting paid, but all I could think about was Mona. The idea that girls like her lived in the same world as girls like the one with acne—that girls like her lived in the same world as me—filled me with bright, itchy panic, like there was something crucial I’d missed doing years ago.

A crumpled old man was working behind the counter, opening and closing the ovens. There was something wrong with his hands—arthritis, maybe. He held them and used them almost like they were paddles. “How you doing today, pops?” David said in a voice I’d never heard him use.

“I’m not dead, and if you can say that, how bad a day can it be?”

David laughed hard and patted the old man on the shoulder while he paid.

“This place is great, huh?” he said when we sat down, but my slice wasn’t much better than the pizza I’d been getting at Somerset. “Silvio opened it when he was thirty-two, and he hasn’t been gone for more than two days since. A doctor told me he ratted on his brother in Florence and sent him to jail. I keep meaning to ask him about it when it’s not so crowded.”

I couldn’t figure out how to ask about Mona, but I had to know more about her. So I said, “Mona’s pretty, huh?”

“Mona?” But he flared his nostrils and had to really work not to grin. “She is pretty. I guess I haven’t thought about her like that.”

“How could you not think about her like that? She’s as pretty as a model.”

“I just … I don’t know—things in the office are a little strange.”

“What things?”

“Nothing. Enough. Tell me more about work. When do you start?”

“Just tell me what’s strange.” I knew how I was acting, but I didn’t care.

“Mona’s one of these people who gets a lot of crushes. She’s just young. How old are you now?”

“Eighteen.”

“Jesus. I’m not talking about it anymore.” The rest of my slice looked as good to eat as my stack of napkins.

“We don’t have to talk about it, just tell me what you meant. Then I promise I’ll stop.”

“No.” He put his big soft hand on my arm and looked right into my eyes like I was a mental patient. “No.” Once he’d decided I got it, he said, “Listen, I’d been meaning to talk about something anyway. Really Lucy’s been bugging me about it, just a couple of little things about staying with us—”

Had Mona seen David’s facial hair? Since he was fourteen he’d had to shave twice a day, and still he had a five-o’clock shadow by two o’clock. I once walked in on him in the bathroom with shaving cream all over his shoulders.

In high school he was the manager of the JV baseball team, and he never went to a single school dance, not even after Mom said she’d ground him if he didn’t ask someone. But while he worked in his room at night—when he was chubby and seventeen and I was chubbier and nine—I sat on the floor for as long as he’d let me, listening to his stories, mostly about the guys on the team.

“Seth and Pete screwed Carrie Feldman on the hood of Seth’s car, right in the parking lot. All three of them buck naked.” My penis would almost tear through my pajamas. “Last weekend Jon went to a place on N Street, and for ten bucks a Korean girl let him rub her all over with hot oil.” I’d throw tantrums when Mom would come in to make me go to bed. Just one more minute. Thirty more seconds. David sitting there muttering while he stapled packets at his desk was better than any TV show.

One night in his freshman year at Emory, when I was in fifth grade, he called home to talk to me. “I’m in trouble,” he said, almost whispering. “Big, big trouble. I’ve seriously never felt this bad. Everybody said it was going to be so different. But it’s not. It’s the exact same fucking thing.”

I wouldn’t have been any more terrified if he’d told me he had a brain tumor. I kept it secret from Mom and Dad, and I called him the next day, hiding in the bathroom with the portable phone crackling. After thirty seconds he said he had to run because his friends were leaving for a Braves game, and he never talked about feeling bad again. When we visited him that spring, he took me to a party at his frat, and I ended up playing Sonic the Hedgehog in the messiest bedroom I’ve ever seen with a guy with a yarmulke and a red beard.

While we dumped our crusts, he said, without looking at me, “What’s happening with you and girls, by the way?”

“I had something at home, but, you know, just looking around.” (Mona, we could play barefoot Frisbee in the park.)

“Nothing wrong with that,” he said. (I’d put suntan lotion on your shoulders, leave love notes on your side of the bed.)

Out on the street he puffed out his cheeks, glanced down at his watch, and said, “Time to get back to it.” He shook my hand again, squinting in the light, and said, “Look. Don’t worry too much about Lucy. Bottom line: I’m enjoying having you live with us, and it’s my place as much as it’s hers.”

In the elevator after one of my first days at work, Sameer asked me, sounding shy, if I liked to play Ping-Pong. He and Janek, the tall doorman from Slovakia, played every day on the seventh floor, next to the laundry room, with broken paddles and a baggy net and only one ball that wasn’t cracked. In middle school, before one of David’s friends jumped on our basement table and snapped two of the legs, I used to play most afternoons with Dad. We didn’t keep score—Dad said, smiling, that he didn’t like the idea of beating me. I kept score myself, though, and by eighth grade I beat him at least as often as he beat me. But now I couldn’t seem to remember how I used to grip the paddle, and my backhand wouldn’t stay on the table.

“Yesterday,” Sameer said, while we rallied, “I read a fascinating article in a magazine in the doctor’s office. In Elizabeth, New Jersey, there is a man who funds his life and his exorbitant family merely by the sale of his own hair.” The sounds of the game were as steady as a metronome. Janek sat in a chair by the door, picking at the rubber skin on his paddle. “This man has been blessed with the most lustrous and healthful hair that doctors have ever seen, and when he sells a full head of it—a head of hair more beautiful than Daryl Hannah’s—he earns for it upward of twenty thousand dollars, and this is hair he produces simply by the existence of his head.”

“Sameer, I am thinking that you read too much,” Janek said. “Every minute spent in a book is a minute spent not in a woman.” He laughed, and a speck of the foam that was always in the corners of his mouth flew onto the floor. Janek looked, every time I saw him, like he hadn’t shaved in three days, and there was something damaged-seeming about his body. He was at least a foot taller than me and Sameer, but he stood with a tilt that reminded me of Frankenstein cartoons—once when he pulled his left pant leg up I thought I saw a rubber foot.

“I will admit I read to the point of sheerest infirmity,” Sameer said, not looking away from the table. “When you one day pay me a visit, Henry, you may say that you have never seen so many books in your life. They are piled from the floor as well as on top of every surface, and all of them are both old and extremely well-read, first by me but also by my son, who is turning out to be a first-rate mind, albeit one without a sense of dedication. Even in the oven and in the cabinets there are stacks and stacks of books at all angles.”

“I don’t like to read any more than two things,” Janek said, still grinning, still foaming. “I read the instructions on how to cook food, and I read the instructions on how to cook women.” He held his arm out to give me five and spread his eyes wide, hoping we’d collapse against each other like teammates at the end of a game.

“As much is evident,” Sameer said. “Because otherwise you would be too distraught for foolishness by the news that there has been still another suicide bombing in Israel, in which seventeen different people have passed away. Every time an Israeli takes his place on a bus or in a café, he is risking the end of his life, and these are even the citizens who have no military association whatsoever. It is no better what Israelis are doing with the Palestinians. For our unfortunate friend Janek I already know the answer, but are you a religious man, if I may ask?”

“Not really,” I said. “I’m Jewish, but I don’t go to temple or anything.”

A little ripple of shock ran over his face. “You are a Jew? Oh, the Jewish people are a most fascinating people to me. I will tell you a horrifying secret. I have been studying the Jewish people for many years, and for the past year I have even been taking lessons from a dear friend in the art of reading Hebrew. Janek can verify as much. I do not read with much speed, but each night I practice my characters for one hour sharply, and I find improvement in myself every day. Oh, it is so wonderful that you are a Jew. Are you an Orthodox Jew, a Conservative Jew, or a Reformed Jew, if I may ask?”

“You had better click the lock on your door when you sleep,” Janek said. “Sameer loves a Jew even more than he loves a blond woman.”

Most of their fighting seemed like just a show for me, but now Sameer looked truly embarrassed. With his lips pulled back and his teeth gritted, he fired his next shot as hard as he could into Janek’s chest. It couldn’t have hurt more than a pinch, but it was enough to make Janek stop smiling. Sameer turned back to me, served a cracked ball from his pocket, and said, “The Jews have, in my opinion, played one of the most instrumental roles in every matter of human development. They have studied medicine, literature, music, and many other fields in which they have made great strides for all of humankind. I am honored and I am pleased.” For the first time since I’d met him, Sameer, leaning over the table, shook my hand. “I would be deeply honored if on a free occasion of your choosing you allowed me to accompany you to temple for prayer. I do not wish to impose, but it would be as utterly fascinating an event for me as I could conceive.”

“I don’t really go to temple.”

“Right, right.” This was something he said a lot, usually when he wanted a conversation to be over, and he used it to mean something like, “Well, we don’t have to worry about such small matters now.” He laid his paddle on the ball, still careful not to look at Janek, and, before he walked out of the room, he shook my hand again. “I will look forward to your invitation, and may I say in departure, ‘Shalom.’”

* * *

I spent my first few weeks at the zoo wondering if I’d been there long enough to quit. I came home each day too tired to practice, daydreaming about skipping work the next morning, hurting in my kneecaps and wrists and the right side of my neck (never the left, for some reason). And each morning, still so tired that I’d feel my mind wobble every time I blinked, I’d stand downstairs in the freezing zoo kitchen and chop yams and zucchini and carrots with a knife that could have chopped off a horse’s leg. Taped all over the room were angry messages from Paul, disguised as jokes: Animals Don’t Have Forks and Knives! Cut Veggies Small! The radio on the shelf could hardly get reception through the floor, so I’d listen to talk radio with gospel and oldies buzzing underneath. No matter how fast I chopped, by the time I was stacking the bowls to bring upstairs, Paul would show up in the doorway. “Hungry animals upstairs,” he’d say, “hungry animals. Let’s go.”

By the ten-thirty break, the idea of still having a full day ahead of me seemed like an emergency, something I couldn’t possibly be expected to bear. Zookeeping wasn’t hard work the way I imagine house building would be, where by the end you’d feel like tearing off your shirt and diving into a lake. It was hard work like making a hole in a concrete wall with your fingernails. Until I’d been there for a week, I had no idea how small the Children’s Zoo was. I’d walk circles and circles past Cow, Sheep, Pig, Goats, Cow, Sheep, Pig, Goats, and the only thing worse than walking those slow circles was when I had to stop and actually do something.

Cleaning Pig was the easiest job, because they lived on a hard floor—I’d shovel up their poop, soft apples that barely smelled, and then hose the whole pen down. The hosing was sometimes even fun, tilting my thumb over the hole, trying to make the water curve in a perfect sheet up over Lily. But when Paul would assign me to do Sheep or Cow, my legs would suddenly feel like they couldn’t hold me up. Such stupid, embarrassing work—raking and scraping and shoveling for animals that only wonder, while you grunt under another load, why you haven’t fed them yet. At first I’d make friendly, tired faces at the families standing looking in, but eventually I realized that they weren’t looking at the keepers any more than they were looking at the water bowls. We were stagehands in a play starring Dudley and Frankie and Kramer.

Cleaning Othello’s pen, even though he had more personality than the sheep, was the worst. He covered his square of dirt with heavy black Frisbees of poop, and the smell—sharp, sour, eggy—made me have to breathe through my mouth. But gnats were everywhere in his pen, and if you held your mouth open for too long one would fly in, tickling your lips or choking you. Every afternoon when Othello’s hay needed changing, we all fought to be the one who could hide out in the bathroom.

Cleaning Goat was almost as bad, at first—raking up all those piles of hair and hay and thousands and thousands of coffee beans of poop—but the Nubian goat, Newman, wouldn’t stand for sulking. While I leaned on my rake, he’d walk up next to me, like a dog, and nudge his head against my arm until I petted him. The rest of the goats made noises when they wanted something—they’d open their mouths, standing perfectly still, and force out a hard, angry myaaaaaaaa. Newman, though, was completely silent. In the afternoons, when I’d be squishing sweat with every step in my boots, I’d sit on the stump and he would try to crawl onto my lap. Fat, clumsy, and with elbows as hard as hooves, he’d stare up at me with his yellow eyes, wondering why he couldn’t fit.

The zoo disappoints most people who come, I think—the rats swimming in the duck ponds, the food machines that give you almost nothing for fifty cents, the animals that are too hot and tired of having their ears pulled to let you pet them—but that first sight of Newman makes almost everyone smile. He stands tall and white with his horse neck way out over the fence, and kids, coming around the corner, let go of their babysitters’ hands and start running.

After dinner once, David asked me if I’d mind taking a walk so he and Lucy could talk. I walked up Fifth to the zoo, not really thinking about it, and the Cuban security guard, Ramon, let me in without any fuss at all. First I walked a slow lap of the whole zoo, feeling gentle toward all these sleeping animals, embarrassed at how much hate I worked up for them during the day. Only the dim orange security lights were on. When I came around to Goat I was surprised—and, I realized, happy—to see Newman standing awake at the fence. His eyes followed me around the pen, and when I got close enough, he nibbled lightly on my sleeve—not to eat, I don’t think, but to check on me, to say hello. I scratched his head and he shut his eyes and pressed against my hand. I rubbed the smooth places where his horns would be, if he had them. You don’t really know how lonely you are, I don’t think, until you get some relief from it. I climbed into the pen, followed Newman back to the corner where he slept, and sat down feeling quietly and perfectly understood. Within a few minutes his huge white side was lifting, falling, lifting, falling. His head was against my leg. The ground in the shed was not quite wet, not quite dry, and almost the same temperature as Newman’s body. I scratched along his spine and talked to him—about living in the apartment, about being surprised to miss home—and whenever I’d stop for a minute, he’d tilt his head up so I could rub behind his ear.

When I was still living at home, I’d watched a show on the Discovery Channel one night about an African tribe called the Masai. I hadn’t even watched all of it, but for some reason now, in the dark, in the shed, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The idea that right then there were people walking in red robes with herds of animals, under a brighter sun than I would ever see, gave me goose bumps along my arms—it seemed like a challenge to change my life. To love an animal, to walk with a spear and a goat past loping giraffes, to sleep in a hut protected by thorns—sitting there with Newman it all seemed so admirable and, even stranger, possible.

As I was leaving, I said something to Ramon about Newman, how different he sometimes seemed from the rest of the animals, and Ramon said, “These goats, man, they’re like my seven other children. I get in a shitty mood sometimes, working overnight, I just walk over there and check out Newman, check out Suzie—five minutes and I’m good to go for the rest of the day, I mean seriously.”

Ramon worked some day shifts during the summer, too, and from then on he was the person at the zoo I talked to the most. Every day, no matter how hot it was, he wore his blue jacket with his name stitched on the chest. Besides security, he was in charge of rat control, and about this and everything else he talked like tomorrow he was taking a vow of silence.

“All my life I’ve been hating rats. As long as I could remember I been wondering, Whose life would it make even the littlest bit worse if you killed all the rats? People don’t think in those kinds of terms often enough. Whose life would it make worse if you killed all the mosquitoes? I’ll tell you: the birds’. And people don’t have birds, then the rest of the bugs get out of control and you’ll think the times before with the mosquitoes were a picnic. That’s honest thinking. But not with rats. All rats fucking do since Adam and Eve is give people diseases, bite people, scare people, ruin lives that were going along just fine till those sick gray fuckers showed up.”

He’d walk up anytime I didn’t look busy, and once he did I might be stuck for the entire afternoon.

“My father, have I told you about my father’s restaurant? The only good Cuban food you could find in the entire New York area. Seriously, unless you’re in my grandmother’s house, the only place in all of New York where you’re going to find halfway decent vaca frita, or if you want the real sweet maduros, the only place you’re going to find it’s in my dad’s restaurant. Right on the main drag in Washington Heights, one of the most popular restaurants in the Cuban community, probably on the whole East Coast. Oh yeah. Closed up by the city, though, and my dad died before we could raise the money to open it back up. One of the major regrets of my life. No, the major regret of my life. And you know why that happened? Rats. You get bathroom pipes coming up from the sewers and everybody thinks it only goes one way, but really rats are climbing right up those pipes, and man, you’d come into the bathroom and there would be rats just crawling right out of the toilet. My old man—man, you should have seen my old man—he’s in there with a broomstick he sharpened up like this so it’s just like a spear, and he’s stabbing those fuckers in the toilet, and man, it’s like a war zone in there. And me and my big sister are standing outside the door telling customers someone’s in there working on the pipes. This went on for like two years, rats in the kitchen, rats in the bathroom, one fucking rat even ran right through the restaurant under people’s legs one time, and I think that’s what did it, I think somebody went and told the health inspector to come bust our ass. One of the biggest tragedies ever to happen for all of New York.”

Ramon had a son in the army, and I tried sometimes to steer the conversation toward him, because on the slowest, hottest afternoons I liked to daydream about being in the Middle East, riding around in a tank with a gun against my shoulder and the desert blowing around outside.

“My son, third infantry, stormed right into Baghdad on March twenty looking for Saddam. Oh yeah. Stormed right in there with guns drawn ready to kick ass. Last Saturday of every month he calls up on the phone and you know what the first thing he says is, every time?” I’ve heard the first thing his son says about ten times more than his son has ever said it, but I always raise my eyebrows. “He says, ‘How are the Mets? How’s Piazza?’ Every time, that crazy fucking kid, from the middle of the desert, and all he cares about is how are the Mets, this from a kid who stormed right into Baghdad looking for the worst guy since Hitler.

“You know, I meet people who are against the war, people you see going around with the handouts and chants and everything, and I tell you what—I respect everything they say, I listen to it, I nod my head. But I don’t care whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat or a goddamn Martian, when our country’s at war you gotta support our boys. My son didn’t decide we should start a war, but as soon as it got going, he made sure he was on the first plane over there, and you know what I call that, no matter whether I think George Bush is a great president or not? I call that courage.”

Sometimes I imagined Ramon with a faucet on the top of his head, and when he’d been talking too long I could just reach up and twist it to off.

* * *

I decided to start swimming for twenty minutes every afternoon, first thing after I got back to the apartment. It would be as good as a shower, and maybe I’d burn off my stomach. Being on my feet all day I felt like I might be losing weight, but I was putting it all back on each day at lunch. On Fifty-sixth there was a place with Reubens, and every night, in bed, I promised myself I wouldn’t get one the next day, and every lunchtime I decided I’d worked enough that morning to deserve one. My high school PE teacher, Mr. Delia, told me when I was a senior that if I swam ten laps three times a week for the whole year he guaranteed I’d lose fifteen pounds. I stopped after two weeks, though, and ended the year five pounds heavier than I’d started. This time I promised myself I’d be disciplined.

Pool locker rooms smell just like pool locker rooms, even in a place as fancy as David and Lucy’s building: bleach and mold and person. When I was a kid I used to go to the Somerset pool all summer. Fifteen minutes out of every hour were adult swim, and I’d sit on the steps shivering while Dad and Walter played water H-O-R-S-E. Mom never swam, she just liked to sun. Even on cool days, when she had to drape a towel over her back, she’d wave her hand to get me out of her light. I hated it, having my wrinkly mom lying belly-up on a beach chair with pubic hairs crawling down her thighs. I had a crush on the lifeguard, a high school girl with brown hair and a tattoo of a dolphin above her anklebone. Abby. Once, during the worst of my crush, I saw her at United Artists in the popcorn line with her friends, and she smiled at me, but like an idiot I rushed into the bathroom and stood in front of the sink until I knew she’d be gone.

This pool was simpler. It was indoors, on the eighth floor, and, the first time I went, it was totally empty except for one old man swimming laps and wheezing in the far lane. A matchstick of an old man who I’d seen before in the elevator, always headed out for a run. A sign said, SWIMMERS ARE UNSUPERVISED AND RESPONSIBLE FOR OWN SAFETY. Four big windows looked out from one wall way above Fifty-third Street. Lucy swam first thing every morning, before she went up to her studio. I thought about her peeling off her bathing suit and running hot water over her boobs, and to stop myself I dove in. It wasn’t much of a dive, but it wasn’t a belly flop either, it was more like a tumble. The water felt cold for a second, and I let myself sink down so my feet tapped the tile, and, blowing bubbles, I rose back up and gave a big “Aaaaaaahhh,” because aside from the skinny old man there was no one there to hear me.

I started to swim, and the water felt chunky. Which sounds gross, but no, it was wonderful, it was chunky the way Jell-O’s chunky if you take it out of the fridge too soon, like every time I swept my arms big, solid pieces of water were being pushed back and I was shooting through empty space. I love looking at my body underwater. Every little arm hair waving and the three freckles in a line along my left wrist, my hands looking so huge and weird, every nick and dry-skin flake like it’s under a magnifying glass. What an amazing thing to be, a pink ape underwater! I love thinking in the water. For some reason it feels like I shouldn’t be able to do it, but I’ll putter along the bottom, my belly just barely clearing the tiles, and over and over I’ll think: I’m thinking! I’m thinking! Here I am thinking!

It only took two laps for me to start to get tired, and to start to wonder if ten minutes a day might be a better plan than twenty. I decided I’d rest for a little, then swim a couple more laps and see how I was feeling. I was holding on to the edge when a tall girl about my age walked in holding the hand of a skinny black-haired boy, six or seven years old. OK, I was peeing. The girl had thick brown hair, and it wasn’t that she was fat (but she wasn’t skinny), it was just that she was big, much taller than me, maybe heavier. If a lumberjack had a beautiful daughter, I thought, this could be her. She wore a blue T-shirt over her bathing suit and no shorts.

In case the water turned cloudy I had to start swimming again. Breaststroke is easiest for me, so that’s what I did. I can usually go the whole length of the pool with only three breaths, but after a few strokes the top of my chest was starting to burn.

I was resting again on the edge, pretending not to look at them. She was sitting on a pool chair reading a book while the boy jumped in and climbed out and jumped in and climbed out again and again and again. She had her left leg crossed over her right, and she looked like she was waiting for someone to fit a slipper onto her little curved foot. Her hair looked like it would weigh five pounds by itself. When she talked I thought she was going to tell me to stop looking at her, but instead she said, “Would it be all right if you watched him for a minute?” There was some little something in her accent—I thought she might be from Minnesota.

“No! No, I can watch him for a year if you want!”

She laughed loud and bright and went into the locker room, and I climbed out and went and sat in her chair. I started to open her book—it was purple with a crumbling cover—but my fingers left dark spots, so I turned it over and left it alone. The old man climbed out, shook off like a dog, and left. The kid didn’t seem to have noticed that I was watching him now. “That’s not bad jumping,” I said.

“I’m the best in my group. My dad says I’m the best jumper he might have ever seen for my age.”

He’d stand on the edge, gather himself for a few seconds, then jump in and move his arms and legs like he was being electrocuted before he hit the water. “Do you want me to show you the knee bounce?” he said. On the edge of the pool he got down on his knees and he hopped in and seemed to smack his chest, because when he came up he had a red splotch. “Do you want me to show you the flying kick?” For this one he jumped and stuck one leg out and gave a karate yell. “Do you want me to show you the double twister?” He bent his knees, jumped the highest I’d seen him, spun around, and on the way down smashed his face so hard on the edge of the pool that I screamed.

There was blood in the water. An instant, terrifying cloud. He came up and it looked like his whole mouth was full of blood, and he was howling. I reached over and pulled him up by his skinny arms, and I didn’t know what to do, so I took off my towel and sat him on the chair and tried to wipe off his mouth. “Noooooooooo!” That made sense, not to touch his mouth, and now blood was all over his chin too and dripping on his bathing suit. This was very, very bad. “I’m going to go get someone,” I said, but before I could get up the girl came back, and that made him start howling louder.

“What happened?” she said. “Oh, shit, what happened? What happened what happened what happened? Are you OK? Fuck. Are you OK? Is he OK?”

I told her about the jump and the spin and the side of the pool, and she went over and looked in at the bloody water, and she just kept saying, “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

“Can you walk?” she said, but he just kept crying, rising and falling like a siren, so she scooped under his legs and under his neck like he was a baby, a baby with wet black hair and dark blood still pouring out of his mouth, and she carried him out fast through the girls’ locker room, flip-flops clacking.

I was the only person in the entire pool area now. If part of the pool weren’t still dark, and if there weren’t a trail of bright drops leading to the locker room, it might never have happened.

The strangest part of terrible things is how fast they’re over. For the first minute or two afterward, like when Tucker, my old golden retriever, got hit by a car, I always think about how simple it would be—we could just go back a few seconds, a time close enough to touch, and it would never have happened. My mind would rush to the thought—a happy, grasping feeling—then bump against common sense, then rush to it again, then bump.

I didn’t know what to do, so I went over and looked down into the bloody part of the pool. There was a pink cloud now and a few darker drops floating up on top. For some reason I leaned down and with both hands scooped up some of the water and just looked at these drops of blood, a pair of dark little fish. My heart was pounding like someone was chasing me.

* * *

Sameer didn’t know about a little boy and a tall girl, so I came back again after the shift change and asked Richie. Richie was the oldest doorman, and he took the job more seriously than anyone else. If you walked in with a suitcase, he practically tackled you to get it out of your hands. Whenever he saw me he gave a hard, short nod and said, “Sir.”

“Do you know if there’s a little black-haired boy who lives in the building with a tall girl with brown hair?”

He nodded, not taking his hands from behind his back. “You’re looking for Matthew Marsen in twelve-F, I believe. And the young lady—whose name, unfortunately, slips my mind—is the Marsens’ goddaughter. Just here for the summer.”

That night David and Lucy were out to dinner with friends, and when they came home David was a little drunk. He laughs a lot when he’s drunk, and his cheeks get splotchy. He sat down with me on the couch, smelling like alcohol and cologne.

“How are you, buddy?”

I heard Lucy get in the shower.

“Something bad happened today,” I said, and I told him the whole story. Listening was such work for him right then that his mouth fell open.

“This happened to you today?” he said. “What I’d do, I’d write up a nice note, something about how you’re so sorry and you think the kid’s so great, and I’d put it under their door. That’s rough.” And then he stood up to leave, probably to get in the shower with Lucy, but he got distracted by the Mets game and stood there behind the couch with his shirt unbuttoned. “They’ve been down the whole time?” he said. I nodded. “They really stink, don’t they?” Then he looked at me, and I thought he was going to add some warm, wise touch to his advice before he said, “They actually, totally stink.”

In a drawer in the kitchen I found a card, still in its plastic sleeve, with a picture of a puppy running through a bed of sunflowers. Inside I wrote:

Dear Matthew and family,

I’m writing to tell you how bad I feel about what happened with Matthew at the pool, and I wanted to wish him the best of luck in feeling better. I also wanted to be sure you knew that everything that happened was my fault, and not at all your goddaughter’s. She seems to care about him very much, and I was the one watching when the accident happened—I should have been more careful.

Again, I’m sorry, and if there’s anything I can do, whether it’s bringing ice cream or anything else, please let me know.

Very sincerely, Henry Elinsky, 23B

On the envelope I wrote again, Matthew and family, and before I sealed it I decided to add one of the hotel chocolates that David keeps next to the cereal. Before I went to bed, I took the elevator downstairs, my heart pounding like a thief, and slipped the envelope under the door at 12F.

* * *

The next night I was lying on David and Lucy’s bed watching Emeril make jambalaya when David came in and handed me an envelope with HENRY written in small capital letters. On a folded sheet of lined paper I read:

Henry,

I’m not going to show your letter to the Marsens. I’m sure you’d agree that it doesn’t add much to a babysitter’s credibility to have left a child in the care of a complete stranger—especially when the stranger let the child chip two teeth and split his lip.

The chocolate was delicious.

Yours, Margaret

“Who’s writing you letters?” David said, and because he sounded a little insulting, I ignored him. I liked her handwriting, small and sharp. Yours. Mine. Delicious delicious delicious. In my memory she was suddenly beautiful. I imagined her eating the chocolate while she wrote. She must be lonely, I thought. She was probably desperate for someone to talk to other than this weird little kid.