May whimpers. She has crawled under the piano, though her eyes are fixed on Frank. I have to get her out of here.
“Fireworks,” he continues, as I jog toward her, “fire extinguishers, linoleum, perfume, upholstery, brake fluid, car tires, asphalt, car seats, fabric softener, wallpaper, crayons, candles, rugs, shampoo, lipstick, candy, photographic film, footballs, fertilizer, paintbrushes, paint, toothpaste, toothbrushes, plastic bags, piano keys, my shoes . . .”
He draws a long, shuddering breath, then barks: “What do all those things have in common?”
I crouch down in front of the piano, blocking May’s view of him. Terrified, she scrambles into my arms.
“Cows,” Frank shouts. “Cow parts. Sometimes horses, too. Boiled bones and hearts and skin.”
Rex has stopped struggling. As I carry May across the room I see him peer over Frank’s thumb, his chest heaving.
“Our world is their afterlife,” Frank continues. “Does no one see it? Subtract them, and we’d have nothing.”
Prue appears in the mouth of the corridor.
“What’s going on?” She glances at May, who buries her face in my shoulder.
“Your dad . . .” I begin, but she is already taking in the scene.
“Fuck,” she whispers.
“We’ve forgotten that the same thing that’s looking out of here”—Frank aims the pen at his temple—“is looking out of here.” In one swift motion, he points the tip at Rex’s eye.
As Prue pushes past us, he adds: “We’re hypocrites, just like my daughter said. Not just the scientists, but all of us. Bandaging rabbits at the animal clinic and sautéing them at the brasserie.”
“Dad,” Prue says.
“That’s God’s image for you.” He raises his voice. “That’s us.”
Something in the air unclenches. The guests begin to shift. As Prue strides forward they clear a path between her and Frank, who has lifted his chin in an effort not to see her.
“Get down,” she snaps.
“If God’s image built the abattoir,” he is saying, “then God’s not someone I want to meet.”
I deposit May in the study. “You sit tight, okay?” I say. “I’ll be right back.”
She nods, stricken, as I close the door and tear back down the corridor.
A ring has formed around Prue and Frank, who is sweating harder. The pen, still aimed at Rex, shudders in his hand.
“Pain is pain is pain,” he is shouting. “It isn’t any kinder, when it isn’t in your body.”
“Dad, listen to me,” Prue says, right in front of him now. “On the count of three, you’re going to hand me the—”
“You said it yourself,” he adds, finally hoarse. There are tears in his eyes. “What we’re doing isn’t right.”
As I come up behind her she grabs his elbow, and he staggers back, nearly dropping the pen.
“Wait,” he hisses. Then he kicks her in the ribs.
The room gasps. She stumbles against me, holding her side. I wrap my arms around her, but she shrugs me off, cursing.
“Who cares if they can talk, when they can suffer?” Frank cries out.
Headlights sweep across the glass, backlighting him. How absurd we must appear from outside, captive to a man we outnumber.
“It’s time to face what we’re doing, folks.” Frank swallows fiercely. “What civilization’s all about.”
In his face is a painful clarity. He draws back the pen, aiming the tip at Rex’s throat.
“Wait!” I shout. Without thinking I lift my knee, bringing my heel down hard on the console.
The wood buckles. With a look of pure surprise, Frank pitches forward into my arms. I stagger back under his weight, but manage to cushion his fall. Rex has broken free, meanwhile, squawking as the guests take cover.
Nine
Can you stand up?” I say.
Frank is slumped against me on the floor, bending and unbending his knee. He nods. Across his jaw is a ripening scratch.
“I’ll take that.” I indicate the pen. He hands it over, allowing me to help him up and shepherd him toward the corridor.
A familiar scent is coming from him—not sweet, but not stale, either—the first time I remember him smelling this way. Like my mother, I think suddenly. Like the dying. As we cross the room the guests’ eyes swarm us, pitying now, and shameless as flies to a corpse.
“Show’s over,” Prue calls out, with an empty laugh.
People drift toward her, murmuring. Others gather their coats. Three students, Natasha among them, linger behind the piano, making no effort to hide their fascination. Rex has settled on the mantel, preening furiously.
When we reach the guest room I turn on the Tiffany lamp. Frank lowers himself onto the unmade bed.
“They don’t care,” he says. The words come out thick, as though welling up from deep inside him.
“You . . .” I begin, but no predicate comes to mind. His duffel bag lies open on the rug, belching undershirts.
“They suffer.” Frank looks up at me, surprised. “They’re suffering, and no one cares.”
His shirt bellies out over his pants, its lower button undone, exposing the pale, fallen ripples of his stomach.
“What were you thinking?” I whisper. A stupid question. He hadn’t been thinking: that was the point.
“At least we have the concept ‘pain,’” he says. “We can float above it that way, give it a purpose. But when they suffer, there is nothing but suffering. Pain is all there is.”
“What’s the matter with you?”
He swallows. As I turn away he points a quivering finger at my hand. A pearl of ink has skated from the tip of the pen onto my palm, branching across the skin between my thumb and forefinger.
“God damn it.” I yank three tissues from the box on the dresser. Wrapping them around the tip, I add, “I hope you’re satisfied, Frank. I don’t think the eggheads will want anything more to do with your daughter after today.”
He searches my face, looking frightened. Before he can say anything else I retreat into the hallway, closing the door firmly behind me.
Natasha has left, along with most of the other guests. Only a few people linger around Prue, helping her stack dirty glasses. Quinn crouches before the ruined console, mopping up the splinters with a dampened paper towel.
“Satujin misui datta. Un, kakutērupātī de. Iya, tori o,” says Jeffrey Sato, speaking into his phone as he pulls on his overcoat. “Satsujin misui to ittemo satsutori o itta hō ga ii kamo.”
With a curt nod in my direction, he hastens past me and through the front door. Snow blows in from the darkness.
I shiver, about to duck into the closet for a garbage bag when I notice May’s trampled flower. It has been kicked to the edge of the fireplace, where a few lone embers are swimming through the ash. I kneel down and rescue it, peeling back the stiff white petals.
“Where is she?” says Prue. She steps around me to tip a plate of half-eaten canapés into the trash, her skirt grazing my shoulder.
“May? In the study. How is it?” I nod toward her rib but she only shrugs, pursing her lips. You rest, I’ll handle this, I almost say, but I am afraid if I do she will cry.
Josip has taken a seat at the piano. He leafs through our stack of sheet music, a relic of the lessons I bought Prue on our second anniversary. She seemed grateful at the time, though I sensed it turned her hobby into a chore. We haven’t tuned the thing in years.
Noticing me watching him, Josip offers a shy wave.
“Please,” I say. “Treat us.” But he has already begun.
* * *
—
“HE WAS GOING TO HURT HIM,” May sobs from the study, where Prue is tucking her in on the pullout couch. “He was going to hurt Rex.”
Prue murmurs something I can’t hear.
The apartment is ours again, finally, though Josip has only just left. While he played I picked my way across the frozen snow to lodge the broken console in the dumpster. The remaining detritus was manageable: stained plates, rogue cutlery, an orphaned scarf. Rex regarded me stonily as I moved about, dropping anything disposable into a garbage bag.
He is still pacing the top of the bookcase, warbling to himself, despite my efforts to goad him down with a mop. The room is tidy now, but still awash in remembered noise. May’s watercolors, my graduate diploma, and the framed wedding photo of Nadia and Frank—looking almost handsome, with his rakish grin—carry none of their usual warmth.
“Aunt Prue?” May says woozily, as I pass the study on the way to our bedroom.
“What is it?”
“Where do we go, when we go to sleep?”
“Nowhere, sweetheart. You stay right here.”
Thirsty for air, I crack open the bedroom window. The snow has relented, but it has gotten colder. A half-moon casts a bluish light over the telephone wires, the chimneys and, in the distance, the spire of the College chapel. Our street is carpeted in white, broken by two shallow troughs. A pair of red lights glow at the southern end, then disappear.
“It’s freezing in here,” Prue says.
As I turn she brushes past me, toward the bureau. She has let down her hair. Bits of mascara speckle the skin under her eyes.
I close the window. “How’s your rib?”
“Fine. Bruised, I think.” She draws a breath, letting me kiss her. Then she unbuttons her blouse, prodding a spot on her left side. I crouch down to inspect it, but find no discoloration.
“Is your dad asleep?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to think about him right now, honestly.” She unclasps her necklace and then her bra, flinging it into the hamper. As she unzips her skirt she continues, despite herself: “He keeps insisting he’s taking his meds, but there’s no way. He must be having some kind of breakdown.”
I sit down on the bed and pull off my dress shoes. She laughs bitterly, then says: “I knew something like this would happen. I should never have let him come.”
“Don’t blame yourself.”
“I’m going to call his psychiatrist in the morning. Maybe we can get him on lithium.”
Her skirt falls to the floor, its fabric pooling on the rug. Her body looks fuller than usual, more radiant, and despite or because of today’s catastrophe I have the sudden urge to take her in my arms.
“I’ve never heard him go off on this animal rights stuff before.” She pulls off her underwear, steadying herself against the wall. “He’s always said he was a vegetarian for health reasons. I mean, did you see that coming?”
There are a lot of things about today I didn’t see coming, I almost say. Instead I blow out my cheeks.
“Can I ask you something?” she says, as I move toward the closet. Without waiting for a reply she adds: “How did he get up there, to begin with?”
“Up where?” I fold my clothes and step into a fresh T-shirt and sweatpants. Out of habit, I think of my monograph, momentarily forgetting that I submitted it early this morning. The fact should liberate me, but instead it fills me with vertigo. My last shot at a major house, no less. Why hadn’t I proofread it one more time?
“You know,” Prue is saying, when I turn back toward her. “Dragging the cabinet over and speechifying, like that. Weren’t you there? Didn’t you see him?”
Her tacit indictment—You let him hurt me—hits me like a bad smell. I sputter, almost laughing: “I was in the kitchen with May.”
She pelts her tights toward the hamper and misses.
“I’m the one who put a stop to it, finally,” I add.
“Okay.” Without bothering to retrieve them, she moves into the bathroom, running her toothbrush under the tap.
“Christ, Prue.” I pick up the tights myself.
“I said, okay.”
“Where were you?”
“In here, actually,” she says, through a mouthful of toothpaste. “I was on the phone with Daora.”
I slide into bed, still wounded. “She was here earlier. Couldn’t you have done your talking then?”
“For a second.” She spits into the basin. “I don’t think she would have come at all if it hadn’t been for Edson.”
Of the two of them, Adaora is the more mercurial, with a mordant wit that balances Edson’s politesse. She was Prue’s first friend here. With the exception of a falling-out last year—about which Prue had been vague—they have never fought before.
“Look, I don’t mean to take this out on you.” She sighs. “I’m just confused. She’s really pissed about my speech.”
“Why on earth would anyone be pissed about your speech?” I say, but she doesn’t catch my sarcasm. She frowns, cracking her knuckles, a habit she knows I can’t stand.
“I mean, I get it,” she says. “Edson’s a neuroscientist, and I didn’t exactly sing their praises. But for god’s sake, I wasn’t talking about him specifically.” She disappears into her closet, and then emerges, pulling her silk nightdress over her head.
Like water, the silk tumbles over her breasts. Its yellow has dimmed over the years, enough to disclose two darknesses, hardening now at the touch of the fabric. Again, I have to fight the urge to pull her down and let our bodies say all that has to be said.
“But it was my moment,” she is saying. “And it’s not like I put him out of a job. I gave a lecture at a liberal arts college. Everyone will have forgotten about it by next week. I mean, do you think he has a right to be angry?”
“I don’t think he’s the only one who has a right to be angry,” I say, surprised at how casual I sound, given my thumping heart. “You put yourself out of a job today, you know.”
She recoils. “Excuse me?”
“Your tenure case. You destroyed it.”
She stares at me, evenly. Her eyes are hard, but something vivid, close to triumph, flashes through them.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says. “The speech isn’t even part of my file, and—”
“Yes, it was your moment,” I interrupt. “All the more reason to discuss your work, rather than indict your discipline.”
“Is this a joke?” She frowns. “Are you actually yelling at me right now?”
“I’m not yelling.”
She picks up her skirt. “I did discuss my work, as a matter of fact, which you’d know if you’d have—”
“Sure.” I toss my hand. “Your work. Or should I say, a ‘fallacy in action,’ as you put it. And Plato, and the Pleistocene, and fucking grieving rats. And all in the name of loving science!” I can’t help but laugh, remembering her response to John Sawyer during the Q and A.
“Voles. Get it right.” She whips me with the skirt, her eyes glittering. This could be foreplay, after all. When has our bickering not resolved in sex? Well, she has missed that boat.
“As for your diatribe against applied research,” I say, scooting up against the headboard, “I don’t even know where to begin. Your own father’s health depends on the work of the neuroscientists you scolded.”
“Actually, there’s very little evidence that animal models—”
“For Christ’s sake, Prue.” She has been talking all day, and now it is my turn. “What the hell was your endgame? Revolutionary science?”
She blinks. “I was trying to say something new.”
“Really? I never would have guessed.”
My voice is shrill. This is the closest I have come in recent memory to shouting at her, but she seems less angry than exhilarated.
She says, “I didn’t want to regurgitate—”
“If you want to say something new,” I break in, “don’t do it by calling your colleagues torturers. There are a lot of people who want to see your disci
pline go down the drain. How could you—”
“So you’re spying on me now?”
With a chill of embarrassment I realize I have echoed Jeremiah’s note. Before she can mount an offensive, I say: “You were afraid your dad would interrupt your lecture? I wish he had, to be honest. I was mortified, sitting there. You sounded so goddamn spoiled. The Biology Department has given you an entire wing, and this is how you thank them?”
She stares at me in disbelief.
“They don’t talk, P,” I say, backtracking. “Animals don’t talk. And you’re a respected scientist, not Dr. Doolittle.”
“You’re threatened by me,” she says.
“Oh, come on. What is that supposed to—”
“That’s why you never read my papers.” She backs against the bureau, nodding. “That’s why you want me to turn down the fellowship.”
The stint in Germany, she means. Of all times, she raises it now? “Don’t change the subject,” I say. “That has nothing to—”
“And that’s why you were late to my speech.”
“I wasn’t late.”
“And it’s okay, isn’t it? Because you happen to be the only animal on earth that thinks and feels. Am I right?”
“Are you drunk?”
Her nostrils flare. As she turns away from me, the image of Frank holding Rex rears up before me, and I feel a dull pang of remorse.
“P . . .” She has yanked open the top drawer of the dresser, rooting for something.
“You said we should get your dad on lithium,” I say. “Well, your speech wasn’t all that different from his. If you’re so concerned about animal welfare, why aren’t you a vegetarian?” I try to catch her eye in the mirror, but her face is in shadow.
“And if you really do believe they have thoughts,” I continue, “propose a way to show that empirically. Don’t just accuse your colleagues of anthropocentrism.”
“Thoughts don’t necessarily correspond to behavior,” she mutters. “That’s the point.”
She is ransacking the drawer that holds everything and nothing: glue, brochures, May’s broken kite, things for holding other things together. As a coupon for a frequent flyer program floats to the rug, I suddenly remember the Galápagos tickets I had planned to surprise her with tonight, and feel a surge of reproach and melancholy.
The Study of Animal Languages Page 9