Zoology

“I’m not rewarding him,” Dad said. “He’s deciding to move, and we’re not imprisoning him. Is that a reward?”

“Stop,” she said. “You’re being a shit and you know it.” She turned to me, still carrying her anger at Dad. “We’re not going to pay for you to have a year-round summer. That’s not the deal.”

“It is summer, for Christ’s sake,” Dad said, mostly to himself, and stood up from the table making more noise with his chair than he had to.

“Go to hell. Henry, promise me you’re not blowing off school.” So I promised, and I did the dishes while Mom looked mad at the TV and Dad and Walter finished their chess game from the night before. Olive stood wagging nervously next to me, sensing some change or just wondering if I’d hand her scraps.

The next morning I took my coin box to the bank and, while everyone behind me glanced at the clock and gave each other looks, I cashed it in for $143.56. With that I went shopping at the Banana Republic on Wisconsin—the air in the store is so fresh and leather-smelling that just walking in makes you feel more handsome. A pretty black saleswoman with a gap in her teeth came up to me at the mirror and said, “You look good. I think that shirt is you.” So I got two of them, and I walked out feeling something I hadn’t felt since I was about nine. It used to be that when I’d buy sneakers (at the Foot Locker in Mazza Gallerie, just across Western), I’d leave the store, laces tight, feeling strong and quick and full of new potential I couldn’t quite get my mind around. On the walk home from Banana Republic I bobbled my shopping bag in one hand and gave happy little nods to every woman I passed.

That night Walter pulled me into the den and made me sit down on the couch next to him. It was after ten, and Mom and Dad were already in bed. He put his hot hand on top of mine. “Henry, you’ve been so unhappy for so long. Watching you’s been very painful for me. I hope you understand the chance you’re getting.” He squeezed my hand. In certain moods his voice is much deeper than you’d expect it to be—a cello full of sad advice. “Don’t take what your brother’s offered lightly. Remember—for David’s sake, but especially for Lucy’s—that you’ve got to stay damn near invisible. If you throw a Q-tip out and miss, don’t say, ‘Oh, I’ll pick it up tomorrow morning.’ You’ve got to pick it up now, even if it’s freezing cold and you’re cozy in bed. And don’t”—Were his eyebrows reaching out? Was his lower lip starting to shake? Finish! Finish! Please finish!—“don’t let yourself get stuck in feeling blue. Just your expression lately, I was telling your father, it’s felt like watching you give up.” And now he’d infected me! To keep from crying I pretended to have just noticed Olive lying next to me. “We love you so, so much, kiddo. Your father wants for you to be happy more than he wants anything. I do too. I mean that.” I stood up, feeling like I’d either been diagnosed with cancer or cured, and for a second, before I shook Walter off, he looked like he might kiss my hand.

* * *

Before I left I needed to break up with Wendy. It was something I’d known I had to do for months, but now I had a reason to do it. A reason better than not liking her. Wendy was the only person from high school that I still saw. She lived at home in Bethesda with her parents, just a ten-minute walk away, and—no matter how old we got, no matter how little encouragement I gave her—she’d always had a crush on me. Always since eighth grade, when she was a shy, pimply-foreheaded new girl from Long Island. She talked too loud and played with her toes in class. She asked me her very first week at school if I wanted to go see Dr. Giggles with her that Friday, and I lied that I couldn’t because I had to go over to dinner at my grandfather’s. I was lonely and embarrassed and I felt like she might be making fun of me in a way I wasn’t following. But she wasn’t. Later she found out I didn’t have a grandfather, and for the rest of the year she followed me around saying that I had to make it up to her, teasing but serious.

I never made it up to her during high school, but in winter, after being home alone for a few months, I called her. The best part of my weeks at home, until then, would be going to pick up fajitas from Rio Grande, imagining while I waited for my food that it was an apartment full of friends I was going back to and not my parents and Walter. One Friday in December I’d gone to the bar in Adams Morgan where the kids from my dorm at American went, but I ended up standing by the bathroom the whole night talking to the little brother of a guy I didn’t know, worrying that someone would ask me why I’d moved out. Suddenly Wendy—who I’d hugged at graduation and thought I might be saying good-bye to forever—seemed like my oldest friend.

And besides, I wasn’t feeling especially choosy. I looked defeated and fat-faced to myself whenever I walked past a mirror, and the idea that Wendy might look at me and see someone completely different seemed too incredible not to test. I spent all of high school pretending to look through my bag when Wendy walked by, waiting for someone who looked like a girl from a music video to fall in love with me, and all I got out of it was a prom night with Abbey Budder asking if I’d mind having the limo drop her off at her friend’s party. David says, and I think he’s probably right, that girls are like boxing: You’ve got to stay in your weight class or you’ll get flattened.

Wendy told me she was working part-time at a Starbucks downtown and the rest of the time she was acting, which meant taking acting classes at the Leland Rec Center. She’d deferred a year from the University of Wisconsin—she was hoping she’d have enough luck acting that she could stretch it into more than a year. I asked her when her next play was, and that was all it took. “You want to come? Seriously? It’s kind of stupid, but I like my part. Sit in the front left so I can see you.”

The play was about a jewel thief who falls in love with one of the women he robs, just because of her jewels and the picture on her bedside table. The robber leaves her a note, and she falls in love with him too, just because of the note, and they start meeting up and breaking into people’s houses together, and the woman’s big, golf-loving husband never notices. At the end the jewel thief gets caught, and the woman can’t stand to have her husband find out, so she testifies against the thief, but he still keeps writing her letters and sending her jewels even from jail. Wendy played one of the thief ’s last victims, and her only part was to come into her room, see that her things are gone, and say something to herself about how she bets her crook of a nephew did it.

I hadn’t seen her act since Chicago in tenth grade, but based on this, and on her frizzy hair and (I’d forgotten) the twisted way she walked, I didn’t think she was going to make it. Afterward I gave her a handful of flowers I’d chosen from the freezing fridge at the Giant next door. She hugged me so hard she knocked the wind out of me.

Once we’d been dating for a few weeks, she said, “Isn’t it funny that we weren’t even really friends in high school, and now this?” Another time, lying back on my chest, she said, “What if we moved to Las Vegas? Shut up! I’m serious! I could be the Vanna White in one of those magic shows, and you could do the music, write up all the different parts for everyone.” I had to swallow when she said things like that, and pretty soon I’d stand up to get a glass of water. If you want to know how you really feel about someone, there aren’t many quicker ways than having her lie on your chest and ask you to move to Las Vegas.

I decided I’d break up with her at her house. That way I’d be able to leave afterward and my parents wouldn’t walk in and ask what all that crying was about. I went over for dinner and her dad met me at the front door with a bear hug. “Henry Elinsky.” Just saying my name made Mr. Zlotnick smile. “Before we go in there, tell me what’s new, what you’ve been doing.”

“Oh, helping my dad. The same stuff. Just thinking what to do next.”

“And what’s it going to be? What’s a young, talented guy do next? It’s a great question. It’s a question I wish I still got to ask myself. You spend every day thinking about what you’re going to do, obsessing about what’s going to come next, and pretty soon … well, you’re fifty and you’ve got a daughter and a wife and a great guy coming over for dinner and that’s that. It’s a good life, though, a great life.”

Sometimes I wondered if Wendy’s dad had me confused with someone else. I’d give a halfway funny answer to a question and he’d laugh so hard, this high, terrifying yelp, that his wife would give him a look. Drunk at Wendy’s cousin’s wedding, he once asked me with a grin how long I was going to make him wait before I’d give his daughter one of these. He noogied my ribs until we’d both forgotten the question. He was rubbery, with curly black hair, and an older version of Wendy’s pointy face.

We had turkey with potatoes for dinner. These potatoes were one more reason I was looking forward to being broken up with Wendy. The first time I ever ate dinner at the Zlotnicks’, Sheila served them, and because I didn’t know what to say and because I’d decided I wanted to lose my virginity to her daughter, I said, “These are great—I should tell my mom about them.” Sheila jumped up and wrote the recipe on an index card in very careful handwriting, then put the card in an envelope and wrote, For Carol—potatoes à la Moises on the front. In the five months since, I’d never eaten a dinner there without those potatoes. And not only weren’t they good to eat, but they actually hurt to eat. By the time I’d cleaned my plate, the back of my mouth would be stinging like I’d been sucking all night on pennies.

In front of her parents Wendy turned into a little girl, but she would always catch my eye and wink at me, or else put a hand on my leg under the table. “What did you do today, Mom? Is your knee feeling OK?” And then a big smile. And her mom, her scratchy-voiced, hairy-armed little mom, would say, “Thank you so much for asking! Well, my knee doesn’t hurt as much. Not as much. It doesn’t feel good, but I think these exercises may be starting to really work. Let’s see what I did today. I went to physical therapy at ten, and that was hard, really excruciating today. And then I had to go to Sutton Place to talk to Carlos about the party on Sunday, and then … God, senior moment! Then I went over to Angie’s and we had tea and talked about Susan’s graduation—the most insane production I’ve ever seen in my life, and I have no idea how she’s getting through it. And I think since then I’ve just been …” What kind of thrill does it give Wendy to rub my thigh while her mom goes on like this? Why? While her dad looks at Sheila hoping she’ll shut up so I can start talking, and Sheila stares up at the ceiling trying to remember what she did before she started cooking dinner, Wendy—trying to remind me how wild she is, maybe?—teases me about a hand job.

After dinner Wendy and I went to the basement. This was what we always did after dinner, so we could make out and watch TV. For the first few weeks we were together, I thought this—watching David Letterman’s monologue with Wendy clinging to me in just her underwear—was a kind of simple, animal happiness that might actually last. Slipping off her shirt, unbuttoning her pants, even she could make my heart speed up. Every once in a while her mom would open the door at the top of the stairs (“Knock, knock!”), and we’d have to jump under the blanket and stare at the screen. But all this had started feeling like a trap sometime in May or even April.

Before we sat down Wendy turned down the lights and with one motion took off her shirt so she was only wearing jeans and her blue bra. On the couch she started to kiss me, but I turned my head.

“I want to talk,” I said. “I don’t know how happy I am anymore.”

“You’re not happy?” She put a hand on my shoulder and suddenly she really was the sweet girl she pretended to be upstairs. I remembered her in tenth grade, turning red when Mr. Vazquez made fun of her for not being able to roll her Rs.

“I’m not happy with us,” I said.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think it has anything to do with you, but … I don’t know, I just stopped wanting this. Something changed.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. A week? Two?”

“Two weeks?” I wasn’t sure if she thought that was a lot or a little. “Let’s talk about it,” she said. “I want to figure out what’s going on.” There were goose bumps all over her chest.

“My brother asked me to move to New York, and I think I want to go. I told him I would. I think I want us to just be friends.”

She was starting to cry a little, but less than I expected. “So just done. Like that. Your feelings just changed for no reason? Obviously there’s something. What did I do?”

I didn’t say anything, and suddenly I didn’t know if I was going to make it out of this without crying too.

“What if I came with?” she said, and looked up. “To New York.” The look on her face, wanting to believe in what she was saying, was terrible to see. “I could do the whole thing, wait tables during the day and act at night, or the opposite, or however they do it.”

“I don’t think I want you to go with me. I want to go and just get serious about music. By myself.”

“You’re not going to start practicing just because you’re in someone else’s apartment. What, do you think you’re going to be out meeting girls at clubs, everybody crawling all over you?”

“No. I just want to stop living like I’m fourteen.”

“OK, so why are you going to live like you’re twelve, in someone else’s house, going to bed when they go to bed, not even working?”

“I’ll be working. David knows somebody who can get me a job at the zoo, and at night I’m going to get gigs.”

“You sound ridiculous. I can’t believe you’re doing this. I can’t believe I’m crying.” She stood up and didn’t bother to put on her shirt.

“I think I’m going to leave.”

“Why don’t you give my dad a hug and tell him you’ll write. He’ll probably cry harder than I will.”

“I’m going out through the back. Tell your parents thanks for dinner.”

Sounding less like she cared and more like she was just annoyed, she said, “So am I going to see you again before you leave?”

“I think I want to leave this weekend, so I’m not sure.”

She went into the bathroom and clicked the door locked. She blew her nose, and I could tell she wasn’t coming out for a while. I stood up and went out into the backyard, my shoulders tingling. Passing the side of the house, I saw into the kitchen, where Mr. Zlotnick was standing in front of the family calendar and massaging his chin. I thought of the face he’d make when he found out, when in a few minutes Wendy came upstairs with smeared eye makeup, and for a minute, as I ran up Drummond and through the alley and onto Cumberland, I felt full of dizzy energy—something like the feeling of tearing off a scab. The rest of Wendy’s summer would happen—the rest of her dull, complicated life would happen—and with fifteen minutes’ work I’d cut myself free from it.

* * *

My last night at home I stayed up with Olive, lying at the foot of the stairs. Olive’s always been fat, but now her legs were giving out and I wasn’t sure I was going to see her again. Lying in the dark, with Olive the only other Elinsky awake, I started to feel like I might miss home a little bit. The grandfather clock ticking its tick I could feel in my teeth, and this same soft carpet I’d been lying on since I was four. I could hear Walter snoring downstairs. Mom, Dad, and Walter, each having a dream, tugging a sheet, twitching. Even a prisoner must feel whatever comes before being homesick when he knows he’s seeing his cell for the last time.

I lay on my side facing Olive on her side, and we were like an old married couple in bed. The rug smelled very strongly of dust. She lifted her paw and put it down on my shoulder. “Take care of everybody for me, OK?” I said. “Mom needs it the most, probably, so just go over and sit with her sometimes. And keep letting Dad take you on walks. Try to do it at least every other day.” She flmmphed out her lip, breathing hot on me, and closed her eyes and fell asleep. I rubbed behind her ear and said, “Bye, girl. I love you very much. I’m going to bed.”

But up in my room I couldn’t fall asleep. A confused bird was six inches from my window singing his stupid song over and over. And every few minutes a car would drive by and I’d hear the car’s music quiet quiet quiet LOUD LOUD LOUD at the stop sign, quiet quiet quiet quiet. Then silence. And then that goddamn bird would start up. I imagined leaning out the window with a tennis racket—the thwack, the puff of feathers. His song went: Doe-ba-da-ba-dee-bo? Doe-ba-da-ba-dee-bo? Just when I was finally falling asleep the phone rang.

“Are you asleep?” It was Wendy.

“I don’t know. I think so.”

“How are you doing?”

“I’m OK. How are you?”

“I’m good.”

“Why are we whispering?” I said.

“Because it’s late at night.”

“What time is it?”

“One thirty. If you hadn’t broken up with me, you could be over here right now.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything. The room was completely dark except for the light from my alarm.

“I’m calling because I wanted to tell you that I’m not mad at you anymore. And I want to wish you luck in New York.” She really didn’t sound mad, but she did sound a little drunk.

“Thank you. I wish you luck too.”

“And Henry? You aren’t good enough to play professionally. Your tone’s not very good. Sorry. I’m just trying to be honest with you, like you were.”

“OK,” I said, but a little hurt had jumped to the back of my eyes.

“Good-bye.”

“Bye.”

“We might not ever talk again, huh?” she said.

“I don’t know.”

“Too bad. Sleep well.”

At nine o’clock Dad woke me up singing “New York, New York,” and I got on the eleven-o’clock train.

New York

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.