Or take peacocks. Male peacocks with the weight and length of their heavy tail feathers could barely get airborne, had a hard time escaping predators. Logically it seemed a female should want a male with a smaller tail so any male offspring she had would be less likely to get snagged by a leopard. However researchers found, in the jungle, a more certain threat than a leopard was parasites. Cecal worms, trichomoniasis, tapeworms—they sapped calories and health. Since protozoans, as well as worms of all kinds, had shorter lifespans than peacocks, they had the advantage of being able to innovate genetically faster than their hosts. In order to maximize her chance of having offspring capable of living long enough to reproduce, a female had to find a male with some proven ability at deterring these parasites.
It turned out the most certain way to determine which peacocks had few parasites—aside from expensive medical tests—was to examine their tail feathers. Freeloading worms of different kinds sapped the calories and chemistry necessary to grow long and vibrant feathers. The longer and more colorful the peacock’s tail, the better that peacock was at deterrence.
The first step in any male’s courtship was to stand his tail straight up and fan it out to display every inch of it, hoping his tail might pass inspection.
For two decades, evolutionary psychologists had continued in this manner, obsessively cataloging the practical reasons behind female mating preferences.
Frankie, for her Ph.D. dissertation, had decided instead to examine the whimsy, the mating preferences with no logical reason at all.
The feathery top hats she glued on the heads of a few randomly selected male finches obviously showed nothing about their genetic abilities. From a strictly evolutionary viewpoint, the females shouldn’t care about the hats.
However, it turned out the females craved them. They wanted the hatted males so much that—although normally they required their males be monogamous and share the childcare—if a male had a hat, he could philander to his heart’s content and not help one whit with the offspring.
The red stockings Frankie painted onto some of the male finch legs were also not related to genetics. However, again the females had a strong opinion, hating the stockings. These red-stocking males were lucky if they managed to find a mate at all and if they did, they got stuck with most of the childcare.
In her thesis, having shown that females could have strong aesthetic preferences utterly unrelated to evolutionary survival, she ventured the theory that females who shared a similar ideal of male beauty (no matter how capricious) would outcompete those who didn’t. Using the analogy of fashion trends, as well as some elegant math, she pointed out it didn’t matter what the desired style was—high hems or low hems, top hats or red stockings—only that the majority of available and healthy females wanted it. In this case, the males with the trait had their choice of many females. They were able to mate more often and could select the very best females, thus creating more and healthier offspring. The male offspring were more likely to have the desired trait, the females to want it. The trait replicated.
Certain aspects of male beauty, in other words, became the equivalent of the platform heel, demonstrating primarily the exuberance of life.
She called her paper The Whimsy of Desire.
The men in her department were confounded by her study, kept asking about it. They seemed to have a hard time putting the words male and beauty in the same sentence, or female and desire. In no way is science immune to the surrounding culture. Just a decade earlier in the field, one of the research topics had been if females of other species experienced orgasms and, if so, what possible function that experience could fulfill.
One of the men in her department who seemed most bewildered by her study had a girlfriend who worked at Bust Magazine. The girlfriend ended up writing a story about Frankie, asking which famous men might be so desirable that simply looking at them made strong women ignore their principles. Frankie answered these questions while thinking of her old college professor, how when he spoke about evolution her mind lit up, making her utterly forget about his wife.
Two years before, she’d learned that red meat, chocolate and wine accelerated endometriosis. Since then she’d been surviving off what she termed rabbit food. She had developed a visceral hatred of the watery scent of salad bars, as well as the earnest smiles of waitresses at vegan cafes. She dreamed each night of slicing flesh off the shoulder of a sleeping cow, the cutlery made of pure chocolate, each mouthful bloody and sweet. She would startle awake, her pillow wet with drool.
In the magazine photo, she looked lanky, her hair gleaming.
A local entertainment-show host saw her photo and brought her on for a five-minute segment on a slow news day (avatars in those days were only on national sites). He questioned her about women’s preferences and what she in particular wanted in a man. She kept trying to bring the conversation back to zebra finches and statistically significant correlations. For this morning show, the two of them were seated at a kitchen counter on stools, facing the cameras and studio lights. Perched on the uncomfortable stool, she worked to sit perfectly still, her right arm cradled protectively over her gut. She imagined her pain locked away in a bank vault on 54th Street. The interviewer sat very close, saying the cameras needed to frame them. He leaned in closer. Three minutes into the interview, he asked her if the research showed older men were the most attractive. Under the kitchen counter, he pushed his knees hard enough against hers that she had to shift slightly. The bank vault opened. She said in her gravelly voice, Not if they’re like you. The station got a fair number of calls.
For two weeks she became popular on different shows. Although she tried to keep the conversation on the principles of evolution and her study of finches, the interviewers kept asking about the attractiveness of different male movie stars, as well as the details of her personal life. She explained she was not a zebra finch and expressed caution about extrapolating results across an entire phylum without additional testing. At the time, she had difficulty with patience. She was on 50 milligrams of codeine a day and, because of the internal adhesions, she hadn’t been able—with her legs straight—to reach her shins for two years. No matter what she said, the interviewers continued to ask her to draw sweeping conclusions. She responded by telling one interviewer if he had paid more attention during tenth-grade Bio, maybe he wouldn’t have to wear pancake makeup to work each day. She informed another if he learned not to interrupt then maybe his wife would have sex with him more often. Clips from her interviews went viral. In the city, for a short time, teenagers used her last name like a verb, the word meaning to be sharply insulted, as in He was Burked. She began to get mail calling her an angry lesbian or asking her if she was busy Friday night. She refused to go on any more shows.
In the field of evolutionary psychology, her study caused a lot of angry rebuttals. In a country where a large percentage of the population still expressed skepticism about Darwin’s theories, no evolutionist liked the word whimsy connected with the field, especially not in a public way.
She received her degree and managed to secure an adjunct position at Barnard, but had difficulty getting funding for further research. Every foundation she applied to denied her application. Unable to afford even finches, she searched for an animal she could get access to in the middle of the City.
Logically enough, she began studying the mating criteria of humans.
By that point she’d started dating JayJay, a 28-year-old waiter who moonlighted in a local funk band. She did a literature review on what details were correlated with lasting relationships. One of the strongest correlations was that the man needed to smell good to the woman. JayJay, an affectionate and good-looking man, smelled as attractive to her as Styrofoam. Her physically soft and older professor, on the other hand, had a sort of malted salty scent, like some combination of warm Guinness and fresh sperm. She used to cuddle in against him, her nose pressed into the center of his c
hest, her arm over his belly, dozing, content as a cat.
What might smell signal? Limited in terms of funds, she began an experiment with T-shirts and cardboard boxes, using students at the school as her subjects.
DAY 13
Seventeen
First thing in the morning, the keeper stepped into the enclosure to hide the food.
That new researcher, she saw, was sitting up on the balcony watching. She was skinny as a plucked turkey, wearing what looked like kids’ clothes. She always seemed to be near the enclosure, her posture clenched as a fist, watching the apes.
Once the keeper had hidden all the fruit, she let the bonobos into the enclosure and they spread out, searching. When any of them found one of the few slices of real fruit, they’d peep with happiness, calling the others over to share it. When they found printed fruit, they’d sniff it, then drop it to the ground and continue searching.
Later in the morning the keeper stepped back into the enclosure to clean up after the meal.
On the climbing structure several feet away, Tooch opened his mouth in what looked like a squeal and jumped onto her shoulder. He was her favorite. She was the one who had named him Touch for her favorite sense, but she hadn’t pronounced it clearly enough, so now everyone called him Tooch. Perhaps they thought Tooch was a family name for her—short for Tucciano or Tucciato.
With Tooch holding on, she systematically searched for feces or uneaten fruit, using her shovel to scoop all of it up and drop it into a trash bag.
She spotted a piece of printed fruit up on a beam on the climbing structure. She grunted at Goliath and gestured to the fruit.
Get, she signed.
He shook his fist No.
She made the sign for please, right hand moving in a small circle over her heart.
He looked at her with his dark eyes, then knuckled over to the printed peach and dropped it down in her bag.
Frankie, sitting in the balcony, watched this interaction, listening as the avatar on the wall translated the exchange. She was surprised by the gesture, Please. The meaning of please was hard to teach. It wasn’t a word that signified a physical object—like ball or stick—an object could be held out each time that word was used. Nor did it mean any clear action—like come or sit—actions that could be repeated until the meaning was understood. Please was more complicated and harder to convey. It could modify any verb and roughly meant, If you do that action, it would make me happy.
If a dog didn’t do the action you wanted, most people would never use please with it. If they did, the dog would just continue to stare, its ears perked. No, a person would only use please with someone who could really understand language, someone who also had choice, someone who also did not have to obey.
Frankie watched the keeper scrubbing the enclosure down, a small efficient tank of a woman. Stotts had mentioned she’d worked here for seven years, one of the only people who went inside the enclosure every day. As the keeper walked by Mama, Mama reached her hand out so her fingertips just brushed her calf, a casual gesture of affection.
*
At 8:15 A.M., Stella stood up on two legs to walk behind the small concrete hill. Goliath watched, then knuckled after her. Both of them disappeared behind the hill.
The temperature of Stella’s sexual swelling was still elevated. She was likely to be ovulating.
Frankie tried to call up the video feed from the cameras on that side of the hill, but got only static.
She rushed downstairs and ran through the building to look through the windows in the interaction area. By the time she got there, Stella was sitting in Goliath’s lap, her head on his chest. She didn’t know if they’d just mated or not.
She watched through the windows for several minutes, until Stella got up and wandered back around the hill. Frankie hurried back upstairs to the balcony, counting one Mississippi two Mississippi, her maximum speed a half trot. It was a big building. It took her 21 seconds to get down the long hallway, climb the stairs to the balcony, unlock the door and step out. By the time she’d arrived, Stella was now sitting in Sweetie’s lap, her arms around him.
Frankie leaned over, pressing one hand to her side and huffing. She was abruptly angry. She needed a way to see both sides of the hill. Given the general disrepair at the Foundation, she couldn’t depend on the video feed.
She let her eyes roam around the enclosure. They came to rest on the climbing structure. It was built on top of the hill. If she sat on its first level, just seven feet off the ground, she’d be able to see everything that happened anywhere inside the enclosure. There wasn’t another viewpoint that would allow her to do that.
So she walked downstairs to the door to the enclosure, the one inside the research room, and said, Ok Door, unlock.
Opening the door, she took a step inside, waiting to see what the bonobos would do. Other people stepped into the enclosure without a problem: the keeper, Stotts and a few others.
Every bonobo in sight turned to stare at her: furrowed brow, rigid stare, tight mouth. When she didn’t step back immediately, they started to scream. The screams, however, sounded like enraged parakeets.
She took a second step forward, further into the enclosure.
Parakeets didn’t weigh 70 pounds.
The Terrible Two—Marge and Adele—charged at her, two hairy bullets, shrieking Dobermans with huge hands. Mama right behind them.
The muscular grace, an inhuman speed, an unearthly keening.
Frankie jumped back out of the enclosure and slammed the door. She was standing there double-checking that the door was locked, when the keeper barreled into the room.
The keeper yelled, Don’t ever step in there without permission.
Frankie turned, incredulous. This woman was wearing coveralls smeared with dung. Permission, she asked, From you?
No, the keeper said. She pointed to Mama on the other side of the plexiglass and said, From her.
DAY 14
Eighteen
In the morning Frankie set out looking for the keeper. She found her and Bellows on the path near the Snack Shack, having some sort of disagreement. The keeper was leaning into her words, her chin jutted forward while Bellows stood there looking offended, then glanced down at his wrist. Frankie noticed he actually wore a watch, the wind-up analog kind, perhaps a real antique. Watches had come back in style lately, demonstrating wealth, and giving the owner a gesture with which to signal impatience.
As Frankie approached Bellows interrupted the keeper to say, It’ll be fine. They’ll get used to it. Give them a few more days.
Clearly expecting Frankie to want to talk to him, he turned to her and spoke in a very different voice, Dr. Burk, how may I help?
However Frankie instead addressed the keeper, I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced. I’m Frankie. What’s your name?
The keeper—powerful as a plow horse—answered, Daisy.
Frankie blinked. Unable to associate that word with this woman, she immediately discarded it, never using it either in speech or in her mind. She asked, How do I say, Can I enter, in sign language?
The keeper watched her lips, concentrating. She didn’t seem surprised at the question. She spoke the word for each sign, her actions graceful and exact.
She said, Me, while she thumped herself in the chest with her fist, thumb-first.
For the word enter, she scooped one hand under the other, as though her hand was sliding under a wall. She raised her eyebrows to signify a question.
Frankie repeated the gestures as best she could, unsure about the exact position of her thumb or the angle of her wrist, performing the visual analogue of mumbling.
The keeper demonstrated again, her movements as crisp as a voice on the BBC. Frankie tried again.
The keeper grasped Frankie’s hand and adjusted the curve of it for the word enter.
Frankie
repeated the two gestures again. Me enter?
The keeper nodded.
And Frankie simply turned away, without saying thank you. The whole interaction nearly silent. On the way back to the enclosure, she kept repeating the gestures to herself to memorize them.
Behind her, there was a pause, then Bellows and the keeper continued their disagreement.
*
Frankie sat in her chair in the visitors’ area, waiting. The next time Mama knuckle-walked by, just two or three feet away, Frankie got out of her chair to sit on the ground in front of Mama, only the plexiglass between them. She found by this point she could pull her legs into something approximating a cross-legged position.
Mama glanced at her, curious. It was just after lunch, only two tourists in the area. At Frankie taking a seat on the cement, they both looked over.
Frankie directed a bonobo pout at Mama, her lower lip pushed out as far as possible. A pout was used by inferiors when requesting a favor from a superior. She flicked her eyes to the spot just in front of her, then back at Mama, still pouting. In order to be clear, she repeated the eye gesture.
Mama tilted her head. Her lack of surprise reminiscent of the keeper’s. She sat down in front of Frankie, Tooch draped across her back like a cape that snored. Frankie had begun to think of Mama as Queen Elizabeth I—something about her high forehead and the regal tilt of her chin. All she needed was a red wig and a dress with a tall collar.
Looking into her eyes, Frankie thumped herself in the chest with the thumb side of her fist. Then her right hand scooped under the bridge of her left hand. She raised her eyebrows and waited.
Mama stared at her, thinking it over.
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