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Zoology
Ben Dolnick


A funny, wise and heartwarming story of a young man’s first forays into love during a long, hot summer in New York City.Henry likes to think of himself as a promising jazz musician. The truth, however, is slightly less glamorous. At 18, he's dropped out of university, lives at home with his bickering parents, and spends most of his time with the family dog. The outlook, it seems, is bleak. So when his brother offers to put him up for the summer in his New York City apartment, Henry leaps at the chance to start living the life of his dreams…But jazz gigs are not immediately forthcoming so Henry lands a job at the Central Park Children's Zoo. Over weeks spent chopping vegetables and shovelling dung, his world gradually expands to include a motley crew of zoo keepers, doormen and animals of every description. Amongst these, the undisputed star is Newman, the zoo's stoic Nubian goat, in whom Henry confides his growing love for Margaret, the girl upstairs, like him in town for the summer. As the months unfolds in a haze of jazz bars, ill-advised romance and hard truths about family, Henry learns what what it is to love – and to lose – in this hilarious, inventive and touching debut novel.





BEN DOLNICK




Zoology








For my familyandor Elyse




Contents


Title Page (#u668392bb-415b-589b-8656-af338555af96)Dedication (#ub73d0382-e13b-56b1-9819-f665d03b59ce)Home (#u9da4f575-d282-5abd-8eee-0262b9d6136e)New York (#u80d94f4b-cc9e-5b89-a060-e846f914298a)Virginia (#litres_trial_promo)Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




Home (#u33e77462-b4af-5440-ba9a-ce7ff19df296)


This book is about last summer. I’ll start before David saved me, though, when I was still living at home. I should have been in school, or in an apartment of my own, or teaching English in a village somewhere with noisy outdoor markets and old women who walked bent under piles of horsehair blankets. Instead I was in Chevy Chase. I slept every night under the same green baseball sheets I’d been sleeping under my entire life, the furnace clanking and chugging behind its door, and woke up every morning to Olive whining to be let in.

I’d started a semester at American—just a twelve-minute drive from home—and I’d been getting three Ds and a C. I kept thinking that someone would warn me if I was really getting myself into trouble, and then they did. When I got home for Thanksgiving Mom handed me a skinny envelope with the AU stamp. There was a letter inside from Dean Popkin telling me to take some time off and come back as a freshman next fall. He’d signed it, Have a restful year.

“Henry,” Mom said, reading over my shoulder, “is this a joke?” She sounded like it really might be.

Dad said, “Well, you know what? You may just not be a scholar. There’s no shame in that—or else I should be ashamed myself. Fall comes around again, we’ll see if you’re ready to give it another go. But in the meantime, this is not just going to be time to loaf. Let’s get you to work.”

So every morning, for all those months at home, I walked with Dad the five minutes up Cumberland to Somerset, my old elementary school. It was like working in a Museum of Me. Here were these same yellow hallways with their same sour-mop smell, and the library with the hard orange carpet and wooden boxes of golf pencils, and the brown tile bathrooms with their squeaking sinks and empty paper towel machines.

And here was Principal Morrow with his pink head and wobbly walk. And mean, round Mrs. Kenner, who used to always say, “Do I come into your living room and put my feet up on the sofa?” (I used to picture her living in our classroom, reading The Book of Knowledge at her desk, making her dinner at the sink where we rinsed the paintbrushes.) And looking small and pale now, here was Mr. Lebby, who had lost half of his left ring finger in a woodshop accident as a kid. He was the only teacher I ever had who picked me out as a favorite—when I was in fifth grade we used to stand around by the coat hooks during recess and talk about the Bullets, my opinions all stolen from Dad and so more important to me than if they’d been mine. The first time he saw me back, standing by the water fountain on the second floor, we had a fumbly hug and then he stood there with wet eyes saying, “Well.” But after that what could he really do? By January he and everyone else I used to know just nodded at me in the halls. I peed in the urinals that came up to my knees, and pledged allegiance along with thirty droning voices, and, in a trance of boredom between classes, I held a piece of paper over an air vent to make it float like a magic carpet.

I ate the cafeteria food for lunch. Holding a maroon admit one ticket that could have come off the roll I kept in my desk in third grade, I’d wait in line, having to work not to feel like part of the nervous elementary school nuttiness around me. Seventy-pound boys would prowl, making tough faces, looking to butt or back-butt, and four-foot girls with headbands—they could have been the same girls I’d gone to school with—would either let them in, quiet lawbreakers, or else raise their hands for the lunchroom monitor.

When I was a student there, Mrs. Moore, the gray-toothed lunch lady, would Magic Marker a symbol on the back of one Styrofoam tray each holiday—a heart on Valentine’s Day, a clover on St. Patrick’s Day, a pumpkin on Halloween—and in the second before you turned your tray over your brain would go quiet. You got to go first in line the next day if you got the marked tray, I think, but the point was the feeling: The whole day turned into a lottery when you knew one of those trays was out there. But Mrs. Moore died of lung cancer when I was in eighth grade (Dad brought home a newsletter with a smiling picture of her on the back, over 1932‒1997), and the trays they used now were made of hard brown plastic.

I’d eat the chicken pot pies and tuna melts and square pizzas in the art room, looking out at the kids stampeding around the basketball court, feeling a combination of sleepiness and hopelessness and boredom as particular to school as the smell of uncapped markers. New teachers would sometimes come sit with me, hoping to talk about apartments or what college I’d gone to, but eventually word seemed to get out that I wasn’t really one of them. I’d gotten lost in my life, I kept thinking, and now here—like someone lost in the woods—I’d walked right back to where I’d started.

Between classes, when I didn’t want to sit with Dad in the teachers’ lounge, I’d wander. That dark little staircase between Mrs. Rivini’s room and the computer room, where I once saw Teddy Montel kiss Sarah Sylver, dipping her like they were dancing. The Sharing and Caring room, with its posters covered in crinkly plastic and its taped-up beanbag chairs and its boxes and boxes of tissues. I’d run into Mr. Bale, the black turtle-looking janitor who once was in a commercial for the D.C. Lottery, and every time he saw me, every single time, he’d laugh and shake his head.

Dad taught six classes a day, forty-four minutes each, and I was his assistant. The kids called me Mr. Henry, so we’d know they weren’t talking to Dad, and it seems now like most of what I did for those five months was set up the xylophones. I can smell the spray we used to clean them if I picture pulling them out of the closet, the dark one the size of an oven, the little metal ones with corners that cut my hands, the long ones that made nice plunking sounds when the bars fell off. And all those classes of kids, Rachel and Lauren and Andy and Peter, with high voices and clean floppy hair and scrapes on their knees, always crying for reasons too painful for them to explain, and raising their hands to tell me their mallets didn’t work, and lining up for bathroom breaks. And the foreign kids, Gabor and Amir and Evelina and Nico. Dad used a special slow voice when he talked to them, and usually they were the strangest, quietest kids in the room, full of bizarre stories and languages that came out, when their brothers or parents finally picked them up at the end of the day, like the babble of people who’ve been possessed. (But they’re all foreign kids, I’d sometimes think—every one of them got to the world less than a decade ago.)

Dad seemed older when he was teaching than he did any other time, sitting on his tall stool with his elbows on his knees, treating every class like they ought to think about dropping out of school to concentrate full-time on their music. “If anybody wants to come in and play during recess, lunch, or after school, tell me and I’ll stick around as long as you feel like staying. I see a lot of talent here, a scary amount of talent.”

When I had him—when I was one of the little kids who loved shouting “Boo!” during the Halloween song—every music class was such a joy that all my weeks would aim straight for those Thursday mornings, the way other kids’ weeks aimed for Friday afternoons. Having him was like being the son of an actor or a politician, but even more electric because I wasn’t allowed to act like I was his son. I’d sit cross-legged on my mat, grinning, stuffed with secret power. At the end of the period I’d rush up to the front and stand there owning him while he packed away his music. From the piano bench now, though, I saw him the way the rest of the kids must have: an old man with huge glasses and gray hair and a loose belly who didn’t seem to really listen to the questions people asked him.

Walking home in the afternoon, getting waved across Dorset by a crossing guard with a bright orange belt, he’d say, “You’re a hell of a sport, listening to this rinky-dink stuff all day. You’re going to put in some work, and people one day are going to be bragging you were their teacher.”

Mom was less sure. Whenever Dad called me a musician, she looked down and starting paying angry attention to whatever she was doing. We sent little signals of hate and stubbornness to each other whenever she walked past me watching TV, or napping on the couch, or doing anything that wasn’t pretending to plan on going back to college. Before she went up to bed to read each night, she’d put a hand on my shoulder, tired from all the quiet fighting, and almost say something but then not.

My leaving school was only the latest thing to disappoint her, the easiest thing to put a name to. She’s always been dreamy, private, a little fed up with everyone she knows. She’ll sometimes let bits of complaints slip—“How long has your father lived here and he still doesn’t know where the can opener goes?” “If Uncle Walter doesn’t want to be alone, then he should do something about it”—but they just feel like spoonfuls from a bath. She doesn’t belong on the East Coast, she’s not interested in the women in Chevy Chase, she feels cheated that she’s fifty and all she’s done is raise children (and furious when she senses someone thinking that all she’s done is raise children). She has dark tea bags under her eyes, and for three, four hours a day she’ll sit in her blue chair and read the Post, looking disappointed. When she’s reading about politics she talks to the paper—“Unexpected by you, maybe,” “Oh, ho, ho, you are an idiot”—but if you ask her what she means she doesn’t answer. She clips her favorite “Doonesbury”s and uses them as bookmarks.

When she was twenty-one she took a bus from San Francisco to D.C. for a protest. She got arrested and put in the Redskins stadium for the night with thousands of other people, and sitting next to her on the field were four loudmouthed friends with beards and sweaters. They were in a jazz band, they told her, and the shortest, shyest one—the one who laughed like he had to think about it, who offered her his coat when she started to fall asleep—was Dad. She stayed in their house after they got out, and Dad convinced her to come on tour for a couple of months. She’d been looking for a reason not to go home.

She spent almost a year driving with them to clubs in Manhattan, Philadelphia, Delaware, even a few in Miami, only sleeping in the D.C. house a couple of nights a week. “I felt like an outlaw,” she says now, “sitting around smoky bars at three in the morning. It was divine.” But when the bassist quit to get married, Mom decided to go to nursing school. She loved doctors’ offices, loved medicine, loved the idea of spending her days so busy and helpful and serious. But at the end of her first year she got pregnant with David, and that summer, after explaining to everyone she knew how women went through nursing school pregnant all the time, she dropped out. (She still has her medical books in a box downstairs, though, all of them heavy and covered in furry dust. When I was in fifth grade I used to sneak down to read the part in Human Biology on orgasms—“… a series of involuntary muscular contractions followed by …”—and I’d go back up feeling as if I’d been downstairs with a prostitute.)

Dad had been managing a sheet music store in Georgetown while she was in school, and a few years after she dropped out he got a job teaching music to seventh graders in Gaithersburg. At night, instead of practicing, he’d stay up working on his lesson plans. “Those who can, do,” he likes to say. “I don’t kid myself about it.” Sometimes he actually sounds sad when he says it, but usually he sounds like he’s just trying to be modest, and hoping you’ll realize he’s just trying to be modest. Mom says—and you can see Dad wince whenever she says it—that she knew he’d teach for the rest of his life the minute he came home from his first day in the classroom. “You certainly don’t do it as a get-rich-quick scheme,” he says, but the truth is he doesn’t need a get-rich-quick scheme. When he and Mom were in their thirties, just before I was born, they inherited a lot of money from Dad’s parents. Mom, still good with a thermometer, still quick with cool washcloths, never got back to work.

In the pictures from when she was in her twenties she’s smiling, sitting on a porch I don’t recognize holding a cigarette, or standing in front of a mirror with Dad’s sax around her neck, looking like a girl who might make me nervous. Her hair was still all brown then and her skin didn’t hang and she liked to wear long, silvery earrings. Sometimes she sang with Dad’s band. When I was little, before she was sad or maybe just before I realized she was sad, she used to sit on the edge of the rocking chair next to my bed and lean over me, singing in her whisperiest voice.

But now her happiest moments, or at least the ones she cared most about, came on Sunday nights when David would call from New York. She’d be ready with questions about a new show at the Whitney, or a new Spanish restaurant in Soho. “Will you get the phone?” she’d say, not moving. “Will you please get the phone? Someone get … that … phone! God damn it.” On the damn she’d clap her hands and stand up. Once she’d convinced herself that at least one Elinsky had lived well that week, she’d hand me the phone, still hot from her ear. After a minute he’d say, “I’m beat, man, I’ve got to get to bed. I got up at five this morning, and then tonight we went twelve innings. Completely fucking brain-dead ump. My guys were getting reamed out there.”

My brother, a resident in dermatology, lived with his girlfriend, Lucy, in her parents’ apartment on Fifth Avenue. Her parents weren’t there, though—they lived in a house with a fountain in Connecticut and only came to the city for birthdays and operas. Lucy has a doughy face that gets flushed after half a glass of wine or a few minutes without air-conditioning, and a long, pale body she likes to show off. She’s a painter, but I don’t think she’s ever sold a painting to anyone who isn’t related to her or a close friend. Her parents put together a show for her in their house once—David sent us the catalog—and the paintings all had names like Never/Always and Music for Trilobites. Never/Always is about September 11, David says, and it’s just a long red line on an all-blue canvas. When David first started dating her he really was doing all the things Mom wished he was—on weekends he took cooking classes and went for walks through the Met—and he bought two of Lucy’s paintings to hang above his bed. When my parents talked about her, before David moved into her apartment, Dad just called her “the artist.” He said it teasingly, pretending not to have learned her name, and so Mom, for reasons having as much to do with Dad as with Lucy, started saying it respectfully, the way you’d say “the judge” or “the senator.”

She and David came home this year for a weekend at the beginning of June, and that’s when David invited me to come to New York. Lucy brought gifts for both of my parents and me—they were just cubes of wood, a little bigger than sugar cubes, each side painted a different color. When Dad unwrapped his cube he tilted his head back to look through the reading half of his lenses and said, “Wow,” each time he turned it. She’d forgotten that Walter lived with us, so she rushed out to the car and came back with a blank cube, and while we talked on the front porch she sat there painting it with her “travel set,” as careful as a Christmas elf.

OK, I’ve never liked her. And not just because she’s pretty enough to make my mouth dry or because David gets to have sex with her every night, but those things certainly don’t help. I try not to think very much about how many girlfriends I’ve had, but: one. Two if you count Lisa Gabardine. David’s life didn’t used to be like this—sharing slices of cake after dinner, picking out necklaces for Valentine’s Day, going to bed-and-breakfasts in Pennsylvania with hot tubs on the porch. On Friday nights when he was in high school he’d take me to the movies and we’d have to sit in the back of the theater so nobody in his grade would see him. He hid a stack of greasy Penthouses underneath his rock collection. At night he closed his door and made radio shows on his stereo—I’d hear him through the wall trying to sound booming. He met Lucy at a gallery opening just after he moved to New York, and she was only his second serious girlfriend. She’d turned him into the kind of guy who owns shoes for every occasion. When he’s eating she’ll lean over and wipe the corner of his mouth, and he just keeps on talking.

During dinner out at the table on the patio she sat making a face like she was straining not to look at her watch. She only perked up when Dad asked about the paintings she’d been doing lately, forests full of trees with shiny black leaves. “I don’t really know what they’re ‘about,’” she said, “in the sense of if I were writing a paper or something. I just want them to … well, capture what I saw, I guess. David and I were on the train up to Connecticut—did he tell you this already?—and we passed a graveyard behind some woods, and after that I just kept thinking about those dead people climbing up through the roots.” Dad—who’d said, “Well, they aren’t how I’d paint it,” the first time he’d seen Lucy’s catalog—turned to me now and thumped the table. “You see?” he said. “That’s art. Taking life and turning it inside out. I love it.” I’d put on too much bug spray before we went out, and besides my lips being numb, every bite I took had a dark green hint of poison.

After dinner Dad handed each of us a DoveBar (Olive barked and leaped up for Lucy’s), and while Mom and Dad tried to get her inside, and while Walter stood by the fence and looked sad, David said to me, “Lucy and I have a proposition for you.” He squeezed my shoulder. “Move in with us. Come live in our second bedroom for a little.”

“Even just a month or two, we’re thinking, could be really fun,” Lucy said.

“I can’t stand thinking of you here losing your mind.” And then quietly, “Doesn’t being here just depress you?”

My throat filled with tear-snot, my heart ached and seemed to lean out of my chest—it was as if David had yanked away a sheet and shown me, for the first time, the real wreck of my year.

“Could I come next week?”

“Of course,” he said.

“Tomorrow?”

He laughed and said the job he had in mind for me—he knew someone at the Central Park Zoo—wouldn’t be able to start for a few weeks. I said thank-you so many times that he finally said, “I get it. You’re welcome. Shut up.”

Now that I knew I wouldn’t have to put up with them, the hundred little shames of home felt unbearable. Having to answer, again and again, “Oh, just taking some time off right now.” And all the Sundays when the sun would set and I’d realize that I hadn’t even put pants on. Or the lunches that summer when Uncle Walter and I would sit together not talking at the kitchen table and even he’d seem worried for me. Lately he’d been knocking on my door some evenings (did he wait for the sound of my bed creaking?) to ask if I felt like coming downstairs to talk. And when I said OK, when I pulled up my pants and gritted my teeth and stomped down to the living room, he wouldn’t even have anything to say, he just liked having me around.

Walter has never gotten married, and he’s never had a real job, so when I was ten he came to live in our basement bedroom. It was first going to be for a month, then for a year, and then we all stopped talking about it. He makes his bed every morning, drinks tea that tastes like hot water, keeps his five shirts folded and clean. His room looks like a hotel room between guests. He inherited just as much money as Dad did when my grandparents died, so even without a job he could live in a place of his own, but Walter alone is too depressing to think about. He’s a balder, skinnier, sadder version of Dad—a failure who thinks, or pretends to think, that he’s chosen this life, that he’s living out some principled decision too obvious to explain. Being cheap is part of it. On the wall of his shower he keeps dried strings of dental floss, used and waiting to be used again. His clothes all smell sweet like cigars, even though he’s never smoked, and he’s got a permanent squint, Dad says because of how much he used to read. When I was home I’d go up into the office where he works, since it was right next to my room, and if it was eleven in the morning or four in the afternoon, he’d be snoring in his chair. “Quit sneaking up on me,” he’d say. “I can’t get anything done when you’re always poking your head in.”

Dad once said that when they were growing up, everyone thought Walter was going to be either a senator or a surgeon, but for three years now he’s been writing a self-help book. “He’ll be his own best customer,” Mom likes to say. At least once a month Walter ends dinner in tears. He’ll be talking, ordinary as can be, and then while he tries to get some word out his lip will start to shake. You hope at first it’s just a twitch, but then he’s looking down, and soon his eyes are red and full and he’s gripping his fork too hard. Usually it’s about being lonely, but just about anything can do it. How Olive never asks for anything from us, a sick kid he saw at Safeway, how lucky he is to be part of such an incredible family. The one topic that’s always safe—the one topic guaranteed to cheer him up, even—is spine care. He’s never had a mood so far gone that it can’t be set right by someone saying, “See, even when I try standing with my head up like this, after a while my back starts hurting again right down here.”

Within five seconds his eyes are dry and he’s standing up slowly from the table, pushing you gently against the wall. “But of course your back hurts,” he says. “You aren’t changing how you hold your shoulders. Standing like that’s an assault. Here. Now. Shoulders back. No, like this. Now try walking around like that.” He’ll sit down with a shy smile, and for a few minutes he’ll be as proud as a kid after a talent show. When I was little he gave massages part-time at the Rockville Sport & Health Club. Even now, fifteen years after he gave his last professional massage, at any moment during the day he might appear behind me and start kneading my shoulders.

Before I’d finished my DoveBar, I’d already moved in with David. I’d keep my saxophone in the corner, and I’d practice every night, do theory exercises on the subway. Whenever I learned a new song, I’d come out and play it for David and Lucy and any neighbors who were over having cocktails. I’d knock packs of cigarettes against my palm outside of bars and get drunk on drinks with real mint in them. David and I would go for walks at night and we’d talk strategy for his team, whether they should maybe move this guy to cleanup and that guy out to center field. I’d start getting gigs and David would take the drums back up and someone, some fan or writer, years from now, would say, “And it never would have happened at all if Henry hadn’t failed out of school.”

* * *

When I told Dad that I was moving he took off his glasses and covered his eyes. You would have thought I’d told him Olive had died. But then he said, “You know what, that’s great news. You’re going to love New York. That’s all I want, for my boys to be happy and together and for you to go give something an honest try. The kids’ll miss you, but you’re no music teacher, I know that. It’s like making Larry Bird teach PE.”

Mom hated the idea of me in New York, and for a few days she just sulked whenever it came up. Finally, after Dad had been bugging her at dinner one night, she said, “If this was part of a plan for school then OK. But the fact that he flunks out and we reward him—”

“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 laMoises 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 (#u33e77462-b4af-5440-ba9a-ce7ff19df296)


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 youwouldn’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 onyour 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’tHave 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 amthinking!

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 withMatthew at the pool, and I wanted to wish him the best of luckin feeling better. I also wanted to be sure you knew that everythingthat happened was my fault, and not at all your goddaughter’s.She seems to care about him very much, and I was the onewatching when the accident happened—I should have beenmore careful.

Again, I’m sorry, and if there’s anything I can do, whetherit’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’dagree that it doesn’t add much to a babysitter’s credibility tohave left a child in the care of a complete stranger—especiallywhen 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.




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