Women and Children First (12 page)

What finally convinced her was nothing he did or said, nor the stories he told, nor the nature photos he showed her, but the charity ball he took her to, at which one hundred beautiful rich women signed pledges to never wear fur coats again. These women all knew him and spoke to him in hushed reverential tones; he smiled and lowered his handsome head toward their mouths. Then she realized that it wasn’t the city planners or the corporate heads who were behind this, but the wives of the city planners and corporate heads. And now his stories made sense, made even more sense when he told her: these women would do things for animals, work and care for animals in ways they would never work or care for their fellow men. He is often hired to make sure animals get enough to eat in countries where people are starving.

She has learned to rely on him to make sense of the world. When they watch TV news, he tells her which criminals are innocent, which are guilty, and though his perceptions don’t always match hers, she accepts his because she knows he reads deeper signs: lip curls, teeth baring, postures, blinks. She moves to the country, learns to live in the country—for the beauty and quiet, she says, but really to be more like the creatures he so admires. When he is with her, she thinks that this is the right way to live; at other times, she is more aware of the long commute to work.

She too is a scientist—a lab assistant, really. Her boss is a Korean biochemist who believes in the chemical nature of mental illness and gets grants to do elaborate analyses of the blood, sweat, and urine of schizophrenics. The other technicians are friendly, talkative women, mostly from exotic lands; at Friday lunch they have spectacular international pot-lucks. Ordinarily she likes her job, but when her lover is away, she makes frequent mistakes; the experiments require precise timing, and his absence distorts her sense of time. She has to concentrate on the clock, which only reminds her of how long until he comes home. Not that she knows. There is never any telling how long a herd of caribou, say, might take to accept their new grazing lands. She can’t help being impatient and ashamed of her impatience, thinking of the animals, thinking: Hurry up and eat.

Also, there is this: to get to her lab, she has to walk down a long corridor past the animal research stations. The smell and the noise—the howls, the perpetual barking behind closed doors—are unspeakable. Usually she can steel herself and go deaf. But when he is gone she feels unworthy of him for not rushing in and throwing open the cages and letting the dogs and cats and rabbits run wild. She fears that her not doing this will undo all the points she imagines herself earning for having put in a garden.

Being with him has made her conscious of resources, of taking advantage. Partly for this, and partly to convince herself there were reasons to move to the country, she has planted a garden. Last year they did this together, but gardening alone is a bore. Now, just to make sure the sun and the smell of the earth don’t trick her into happiness, she takes her ghetto blaster out for company and to drown out the sound of the breeze. She plays it loud, glad she lives in a place where there’s no one around to hear. People used to talk about rock music killing plants, but her tomatoes do fine; they have grown two feet tall when the deer come in and eat everything. By August the deer are so tame you can yell at them, and they will just stand there looking.

For two months she has been waiting for him to come back from Puerto Rico, where a new factory is displacing a colony of monkeys. The factory will make compact discs. Right from the start, this job irritated him. He said: CDs will never catch on. Leave the monkeys alone; in two years they can have the factory. She pictured monkeys perched on jungle ruins, sailing leftover CDs through the air like frisbees, like silver and rainbow UFOs catching the tropical light. But the company doesn’t see it this way, and now the charity is paying him to move the monkeys deeper into the jungle’s shrinking heart.

She has not heard from him since he got there. Mostly his jobs are like this—miles from a telephone, mail that takes three weeks to come. He says: Month-old mail is worse than no mail. He’d rather get no letters, would rather not write what will probably not be true by the time it arrives. She thinks this is a little harsh. She would take any mail over no mail, but defers to him in this, and doesn’t mention it to her lab technician friends with whom—when she stays in town after work for a movie or a fireworks display—she is trying to have a normal summer. When they ask after him, she smiles and shrugs, meaning, what can you say about someone who’d spend half a summer with monkeys? If she confessed that she never hears from him, they would point out that not writing at all isn’t logical, as if she should have just told him that, as if they didn’t know how rarely the logical thing is what you do. The Indians and Filipinos all have unhelpful stories of husbands who went off and started second families somewhere else. She knows he will call when he gets to San Juan, and that is, in fact, what happens.

By now she is used to his homecomings, and can get through them if she remembers not to expect any more than this: a certain distance, forgetfulness—that is, he seems to forget who she is and treats her with the dutiful politeness he must have shown whoever sat beside him on the plane ride home. She thinks they should hire an expert to repatriate
him
; but really, she is that expert. She knows what to cook: simple meals, no meat for a while. She could write a cookbook for women whose lovers have lived exclusively among animals. She knows to wait a day for each week he’s been gone before thinking he doesn’t love her, but even so, even knowing this, she’ll still think he doesn’t love her, and then
she
will forget, forget what grace she has, drop things in the kitchen, forget where the holes in the lawn are, and trip and fall.

She expects this, she is prepared for it, but not for the man who gets out of his car and walks up her drive after two months in Puerto Rico. Something about him is different, he has lost weight. His body makes a funny angle with the ground, forcing her to see pictures she’d rather not imagine: him hunkering, swinging his arms, screeching monkey talk about food. This is not how she wants to think about him, not ever, and especially not now, as he holds her, a little stiffly, so that she feels silly for hugging him, sees it anthropologically, really no different from jumping and clacking her teeth. Soon he lets her go, making such an effort to look into her eyes that she cannot look back, but only at his hands, hovering disappointedly in the air near her arms.

She offers him a beer but he doesn’t want beer. Wine? He refuses. He doesn’t want water, doesn’t want juice. He isn’t hungry. Banana? she says, holding up a bunch. That’s not funny, he says, and heads out to the garden before she can warn him that the deer have eaten everything. Soup boils on the stove, she has to turn it down, has to taste it, has to splash soup on her shirt, rub soap in the stain, put water on it, change her shirt. Already she knows to watch for holes in the lawn, so she is tiptoeing, creeping up on him, and so is witness to the most extraordinary sight. Not six feet from him, a doe is grazing what’s left of the pepper plants.

He will not eat dinner. He says he ate on the plane, ate something at his apartment. But what could have lasted in his apartment for two months? She has made him fresh corn chowder, broiled swordfish, red potatoes, sliced cucumbers with soy sauce and sesame oil, but she can’t eat much either. She does dishes, they go for a walk up the road. By now he has been in her house six hours. Then they go to bed. He keeps turning her, he will only make love to her from behind. She knows not to turn and look, it would be awful to see how surprised he’d be to see her face. And anyway, she prefers it this way: he can’t see she is crying. Later they lie there, not talking. She thinks he is totally gone, gone crazy, or worse, is going to tell her he’s fallen in love with a monkey.

After a while he says he is sorry. He lies on his back and tells the ceiling that he is having a very bad time. He says what he found in Puerto Rico were forty or fifty monkeys, mostly adults—strong, unpredictable, destructive. First they harassed, then actually attacked a couple of workers building the plant, a couple of monkeys were shot before he was called in. They moved the monkeys in cages on pickup trucks: it was like the aftermath of a war, like some Hollywood epic retreat scene, complete with the bloody bandages. He says everyone knows stories about animal populations that just didn’t make it, didn’t adapt. He had never seen this himself, but there was something about these monkeys that made him think of it right away.

At first he kept them in cages. He let them watch him gathering food, picking the bananas and breadfruit he then left within their reach. The monkeys picked the bananas up and looked at them and dropped them. They stayed on a kind of hunger strike for a week. Finally he gave up; maybe they needed to gather the food themselves. So he let them out of the cages, but now
he
had to be in a cage, for his own protection. Getting them out, and him in, was a complicated maneuver, but he did it, and still the monkeys wouldn’t forage, wouldn’t eat.

After two weeks he could see that they’d gotten thinner.
He
began eating like crazy, bananas, bananas, bananas, showing them how it was done, but they knew that. They didn’t want it. Another two weeks and the monkeys were very skinny, but there was nothing he could do, no one was going to force-feed them. Hospitalize them? Hook them all up to IVs? He began writing letters—Help, the monkeys are starving—mailing them out with the helicopters that dropped him extra food. And now he could see the monkeys getting dull and slack and sleepy; their fur was beginning to fall out. But maybe they were sneaking something at night, because it all happened so slowly, the whole thing took longer than he could believe.

Toward the end he thought of getting the trucks back and trucking them into the city and letting the monkeys die in the middle of downtown San Juan. But what would that have accomplished, except maybe scaring some children and getting him and the starving monkeys thrown in jail? So he stayed out in the jungle until they died. The children and the old ones went first. It took days, it was awful, bodies everywhere, like some nightmare monkey Jonestown. After he’d buried them all, he went into town. It was in San Juan that he realized he had stopped eating. He didn’t—still doesn’t—remember when he last ate. When he tries to eat, his throat clenches and he thinks he is going to choke.

Neither of them sleeps all night, though they both pretend. She wonders if monkeys ever pretend to sleep. She thinks of how once, long ago, a lover left her for someone else, a friend, a woman who used to visit them, and how the worst thing was wondering if the best way to win him back was to be more or less like that friend. What she feels now is so similar; she thinks: Should I be more human or more monkey?

In the morning she says she has a favor to ask him. She’s read that the best thing to do with the garden would be to turn the ground over now, stockpile manure and lay it on before fall, before the snow. She has arranged with a neighbor to borrow his pickup, and a farmer just down the road has said they can have some manure from his barn. Will he help her while he is here?

She has given this a lot of thought, so it is not nearly as weird as it might seem, asking a lover who’s just come home after two months to help you go get cowshit. She has found that chores like this—simple, physically demanding tasks connected unquestionably to survival—seem to do him good when he returns. The quickest recovery he ever made was one winter after he’d been with the elk: she got him to go out and split most of a cord of wood. Plus, this time she can’t help hoping that her planning for seasons ahead will make him think well of her, see in her the best of human intelligence and animal instinct combined.

He says that he would be glad to help. He even makes a joke of being back twenty-four hours and already shoveling shit. She sees this as a good sign. She makes a point of how he has old clothes—boots, overalls, a shirt—stored in the front hall closet. Look, she says, your stuff. It takes some restraint not to ask if he’s sure he doesn’t want breakfast.

They drive to the farm. The farmer shows them where to find the manure. They back the truck up to the barn door and start shoveling. They haven’t worked long, a few minutes perhaps, but already this job they are doing together—efficiently, wordlessly—is making her feel more hopeful.

Then he sticks his pitchfork into the pile and exposes a nest of wriggling pink creatures, no bigger than a finger, blind, squirming and squealing in terror. What are they? Newborn mice? Impossibly tiny pigs? Surely he knows, but doesn’t say; and suddenly she feels so distant from him that she can’t even ask. She thinks she may always remember these creatures and never know what they were. He throws a ragged slab of manure back on top of the nest, gently tamps it down so the animals are covered, then goes out and sits in the truck. In a little while she joins him, he guns the engine, and they leave. She wonders how she will explain this the next time she sees the farmer.

At home she makes coffee. He puts his hands around the cup but doesn’t drink. Through the window, she can see the pickup, the few clumps of manure still unloaded in back. Perfect, she thinks. He tells her he can’t be with her, can’t be with anyone now. He says it isn’t fair to her, he is in terrible shape. He means it, he talks without stopping, without leaving her any silences in which to wedge an offer of patience or of help. Then he gets in his car and drives off.

She sits quietly for a while, wondering if, and how much, she should worry about him. Starving yourself is serious business. But then she thinks: He won’t starve, he’ll be all right, he is an expert on survival. This makes her feel slightly worse—does this mean she would rather he go crazy than just not love her? And
this
makes her think she deserves what has happened: she has not loved him unselfishly, or enough.

Now she is sorry she has taken this week off from work. She had imagined them spending it together. She would be better off in the lab, distracted, but she has told her friends at work he is coming home. If she cancels her vacation and goes in, she’ll have to talk about him.