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“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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