My Life Among the Apes (8 page)

FIRING KATE SULIMANI HAS DAMAGED branch morale. The tellers resent losing their friend and feel insecure in their own jobs. I consider holding a staff meeting to discuss the matter but decide that I have nothing to offer, that all I would be doing is asking them to still see me as a nice guy.

I did not consider refusing to fire her. I have college bills to pay, the mortgage, the usual. What is Kate Sulimani to me? She’s young and will bounce back. She has her whole life ahead of her.

In the bathroom mirror, I see the beginning of pouches under my eyes, sagging jowls. I look the part I am playing: Hoffstedder’s man.

IN HIGH SCHOOL, I SMOKED a lot of dope, drank on weekends, bet on American football through a kid in history class who worked for a bookie. I read books on Buddhism, or first chapters of books. I failed two courses.

One day in the middle term of grade twelve, I found out that I had to present a project in biology that I hadn’t known about — hadn’t known because I’d skipped a week of classes. At home, I looked through our Time-Life Science books hoping for something I could pull together. Then I remembered my old Jane Goodall project. I found it stuffed in the bottom drawer and when I pulled out the file, the photograph of Jane Goodall washing her hair fell out. It seemed to me that I could pretty much recycle the old material, adding in details as I remembered them, but that I would need to make it longer. So I got out my portable cassette recorder, plugged in the microphone, and began to make chimp calls.

Imitating chimpanzees that I had heard on television documentaries had been all that remained from my Jane Goodall period. In a car with friends, at parties, walking at night with my buddies, I would begin with low hoots and then break into louder barks and howls. Everyone always said how real they sounded and I knew that Mr. Anderson, my dim-witted biology teacher who wore his hair long and liked to act chummy with us, wouldn’t know the difference. The next day in class, I gave my presentation, embellishing as I went along, and then explained how I had obtained a tape recording by writing to the National Geographic Society. I pressed the “play” button of the recorder. Every so often I paused it to explain the meaning of a call: anger, frustration, submission, fear, loneliness. Finally, I turned the recorder off and said that despite the fact that human beings had built cities, flown to the moon, and invented surface-to-air missiles, the difference between us and apes might only be a matter of degree.

Mr. Anderson looked at me a long moment and then said, “Get to the office.”

BROODING BEHIND MY DESK, I recall a long-forgotten detail. I don’t remember whether it was in that first
National Geographic
or one of the television specials that came after. How an adult male chimpanzee named Mike stole the dominant male position. The previous alpha male, Goliath, was huge and powerful, and the smaller Mike was no match for him. But Mike found two empty petrol cans in Jane Goodall’s camp. He learned to bash them forward as he ran, making an awful racket that terrified the other chimps, including Goliath. When Mike finally stopped, Goliath came over and, grunting in supplication, reached out to groom Mike’s fur. Mike became the alpha male.

All I need is some petrol cans to bash. I’m not sure if what I have in mind is equivalent, but it’s close enough. I pick up the phone.

“Hoffstedder here.”

“Stanley, it’s Allen.”

“You figured out why your ATM numbers are down?”

“I’m working on it. Listen, Stan, about that teller we let go. I’ve got a rep from the Civil Liberties Union coming here tomorrow. He’s asking about discrimination, unfair practises, even about going to the media. If I tell him what I really think —”

“Are you squeezing my balls, Allen?”

“No, of course not. But when he asks me —”

“You’ll know what to tell him, won’t you? That the girl was incompetent and posed a risk to our clients and that we gave her the standard package. I don’t want to hear any more about it. Now on those ATM numbers, you check if a homeless guy’s been sleeping in your doorway at night, keeping the customers away. Happens all the time.”

I hear the sound of the click at the other end.

AT HOME, I SAY TO Lizette, “Are the kids never coming home for dinner? Maybe we should just set up a trust fund for them.”

She dishes scalded rapini with feta, next to the sole on my plate. “We’re boring to them. It’s natural. And they’ve all promised to be home tomorrow. The only real problem is that you’re bored of me.”

“Likely the other way around. I wouldn’t blame you. I feel like I’ve become nothing but my job.”

“I have a present for you. Just a small one, so don’t get too excited.”

“What is it?”

“Look under your plate.”

“I feel like I’m twelve,” I say, shifting my plate over. Underneath is a ticket. Jane Goodall at Convocation Hall.

“It’s in an hour,” she says. “You better eat up.”

“Just me?”

“I’m sorry. I’m just not up to it right now.”

“Sure.” I get up and kiss her. “Thanks.”

I sit down again and we start to eat.

THE LAST TIME I WAS in Convocation Hall was to receive the diploma for my undergraduate degree. About all I could remember was what a bad hangover I’d had. Now I look down to the stage to see Jane Goodall behind the slender Plexiglas podium. Behind her a large screen shows a series of video clips. She no longer looks like the slim woman washing her hair in an African stream. She is a handsome older woman, comfortably filled out, a quaver in her voice. A good speaker, if overly rehearsed, as if she has given this same speech a thousand times.

After the talk, I buy one of her books and line up to have it signed. We shuffle forward, waiting for our turn at the table where she sits with pen in hand. As we get closer I feel increasingly agitated. At last it is my turn and as I move up she looks at me.

It takes me a moment to speak. “Ms. Goodall, I’ve been an admirer of yours since I was a boy.”

“Have you? How very nice.” She smiles wearily, as if she has met many like me and knows all our secrets. “Shall I sign it to you?”

“No,” I say. “To a friend of mine. Kate Sulimani. I’ll spell it.”

KATE SULIMANI LIVES IN A high-rise apartment in a cluster of six buildings off the Don Valley Parkway. An empty green space with a dry fountain in the middle. It looks like some invented city, Brasilia maybe. I look for the name on the directory and press the button.

“Hello?”

“Kate, it’s Allen Wernick.”

The buzzer sounds and the door unlocks. The lobby of her building smells of bleach. I take the elevator up, reading the notices taped to the bulletin board: nanny available, lost cat, whoever stole my bike please return it no questions asked. When I get off at the seventh floor, she’s already at her door, holding it open about three inches. She wears a cotton robe. From inside I can hear music, some techno thing.

“What do you want, Mr. Wernick? Are you here to give me my job back?”

“I wish I was. I really just want to say that I’m sorry. You weren’t treated fairly.”

“Yeah, well, life sucks that way.”

“I’ve written a letter of recommendation for you.”

“You can do that?”

“I don’t know, actually. Anyway, here, it’s inside this book. The book is for you, too.”

I hold out the book with the letter sticking out from between its pages. She looks at it a moment before taking it. Then she stares at the cover.

“The woman who lives with monkeys, right?”

“Chimpanzees, actually.”

She opens the book to the title page. “It’s signed.”

“Yes.”

“‘To a fellow animal lover’?”

“I guess that’s what she always writes.”

“A bit weird but thanks, I guess.”

“Don’t mention it.”

I take a step back and Kate Sulimani closes the door.

I PARK AT the curb and turn off the ignition. In the dark I rest my head against my arms on the steering wheel. I feel tired, but it isn’t the good sort of tired that comes from a long walk. I get out of the car and lock it with the remote key, making the lights flash.

I enter the side door as quietly as I can, but Lizette is still up, sitting at the kitchen table in a cotton nightgown. The cake we didn’t have time to eat is on the table.

“How was it?”

“Good,” I say. “She’s a woman who knows her chimps.”

“Is she older too or is it just us?”

I lean over and kiss her. “You’re very beautiful.”

She shrugs me off. “Do you want a piece of cake?”

“Hmm.”

She cuts a slice and puts it on a plate, slides it to me as I sit down. I take a bite. “It’s delicious.” I took another. “I don’t like firing people.”

The next few bites I eat without tasting and then the slice is gone. I want to go to bed but I can’t move. Lizette doesn’t move either and I become aware of the ticking of the clock on the wall.

“I think we should go on a holiday this year,” she says.

All right, I say. At least, I think I say it. I’m not sure, but I don’t say it again.

The Creech Sisters

THE SUMMER THE CREECH SISTERS tried to seduce my father turned out to be the last that we spent on the island. It was a very small island in Georgian Bay, all eight cottages clustered near the beach, ours closest to the water and the one belonging to Mrs. Creech the farthest. To reach the island we had to take a ten-minute boat ride. There were a couple of men on the mainland who used their boats as unofficial taxis for the cottagers. Mrs. Creech, who was not only heavy but an invalid (a word still used forty years ago), had to be lifted in and out of a boat by her two daughters. Three or four kids always hung around gawking, just in case the boat finally capsized and Mrs. Creech was plunged into the lake.

During this fourth island summer I had no inkling it would be the last and so no sadness or first taste of nostalgia. I am in my early fifties now; that July I was twelve-and-ahalf, a middle son. My brothers were fourteen and nine and the three of us had already explored the island with a freedom that we were not allowed back in the city. The interior rose gradually and stunted evergreens grew up between the rock plates. We sometimes found the remains of a campfire, or a shotgun-blasted coffee can, or a condom. The night was especially eerie because in the city there was no real darkness, while here the night skies were awash with stars. I never had bad dreams sleeping in the cottage, as I often did in Toronto, perhaps because at the end of those long days in the fresh air I was simply too tired.

MY FATHER DIDN’T LIKE BEING in the country. Born in Warsaw, he had spent his youth in Vienna, Brussels, Paris — wherever his merchant father took his family. He had entered Canada on a student visa in 1942, Jewish refugees no longer being permitted into the country, and was proud to have been the youngest graduating lawyer in his class. In the years that followed he lost his accent (although there was a non-native’s precision to his speech) but never his European air of sophistication. He was the only father I knew who liked to wear his overcoat draped on his shoulders, and when as a young adult I finally did see someone else looking so suave it was Jean-Paul Belmondo in a French film. My father was short but did not seem to know it, and he had a beautiful ease with people that I was just beginning to notice. Women were especially drawn to him. I once had a French teacher named Mrs. Lupenski who loved to hear his Parisian accent when he spoke French and once, in front of my class, called him a “dreamboat.”

My father thrived on the pleasures and obligations of city life, and spending three weeks on the island was like waiting out a prison sentence. He needed newspapers and magazines, opera, cocktail parties. He loved to take my mother to expensive restaurants where there was a band for dancing. But he had been given the right of occupancy of the cottage when one of his clients could not pay his legal bill. I’m sure my father would have preferred to forgive the debt, but when my mother heard about the offer she insisted that we take it.

My mother never liked the city, although by then she had already lived in Toronto for almost twenty years. She was a small-town Episcopalian who met my father in the University of Toronto infirmary, where she was a volunteer nurse to the new army recruits being billeted in tents on the campus lawns. Her parents had been against her going for fear that she would be undone by some private about to be shipped overseas, but instead she fell for my father. He came into the infirmary with one eye swollen shut, having hit himself with a badminton racquet while playing in the Hart House gymnasium.

Even if my father had wanted to practise law in my mother’s home town, as a Jew he would not have found many clients. So she got used to the city, taking us to visit her parents every Christmas where a tree and presents awaited. My father always stayed home, to clear up paperwork, he claimed. When my mother sometimes brought up the subject of buying a cottage he always said that it would be just another property to look after when he hardly had time to take care of the house. Actually, he didn’t take care of the house at all; it was my mother who called the plumber or electrician when something needed fixing.

When the offer of the cottage came up, he could think of no good reason to refuse her.

IN THE EARLY MORNINGS MY mother took her coffee down to the beach to watch the sun play over the water. Then she roused everyone out of bed and made pancakes or French toast, which we ate while still in our pyjamas. During the day she went for walks with my father or alone, watched us swim, baked pies in the wood stove. In the very late afternoon when the beach was usually deserted, she went for her own swim, doing the crawl out to the floating deck and back several times. She was not fast, but she had a fine form, as my father liked to remark, and hardly left a ripple on the surface. She would walk dripping onto the beach again and, ignoring our pleas of hunger, take a shower as she hummed to herself before dressing again to finish dinner.

My father appreciated her contentedness, even if he couldn’t stop himself from pacing the small cottage rooms, picking up and putting down the days-old newspaper, going outside in the hope of finding someone to talk to. Every few days he would take the boat back to the mainland and spend a couple of hours on the phone to his secretary and various clients, after which he would be calmer for a while. My mother said that he didn’t have to stay with us for the whole three weeks, that he could go back for the middle week, but he wouldn’t hear of it. At the time I thought it was because he didn’t want to leave my brothers and me. He played Monopoly and Clue with us and soccer games on the beach. I realize now that he didn’t go because he didn’t like to be away from my mother.