by T. C. Boyle
The oak was massive, its multiple trunks like the fingers of an uplifted hand. The nearest tree to it – another oak; they were all oaks here – was fifty feet away. She shook her head.
‘He isn’t going anywhere. And even if he could, there’s no way he’s going to do it. Not with you here.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He’s in love with you, haven’t you noticed?’
She shrugged, looked away from his eyes. She might have been blushing, for all she knew – she probably was. Guy had told her that blushing was unique to humans because the other species didn’t have anything to blush about, and whether he was joking or not, she couldn’t tell.
‘And you know what?’ he said.
Above them, Sam let out one of his low chuffing laughs. She shrugged again. ‘What?’
‘I can’t say as I blame him.’
The first time she slept with Guy was at the end of that week, after the film crew had finished shooting, packed up and left. There had been three of them, a reporter in his forties she thought she’d seen on the local news a couple of times, though the local news had never exactly been a priority with her so she couldn’t say for sure, a cameraman and a sound person (sound girl, actually), who dangled a microphone overhead on a telescoping pole while the reporter posed questions and Guy and Sam answered in tandem. Josh was there, off-camera, holding Sam’s lead as a precautionary measure, but it wasn’t necessary – Sam was as well-behaved and magnetic as he’d been on To Tell the Truth, and when the segment was aired, the audience wouldn’t know anything about it or what it implied, because the lead was hidden under his shirt. At one point, the reporter asked Sam what his favourite thing in the world was and without waiting for Guy’s translation, he signed, PIZZA. But then he shook his head, signed, NO and pointed to where she was standing behind Josh, and signed her name, finger-spelling the first letter, A, then pinching his right nipple in the shorthand version he’d invented for her.
‘He means Aimee,’ Guy said, ‘my assistant,’ and the camera swung round on her for one mortifying instant, capturing her startled look for all the world to see, not to mention her unwashed hair and chimp-stressed jeans and sweatshirt.
Aside from that – maybe because of it, because it was an unscripted moment that showed how sweet and charming Sam could be – it all went off beautifully. Guy was in great spirits, riding the high of it – and she could see he was feeling relief too, because all this meant so much to him. He wanted Sam to shine. Needed him to. Sam was a prodigy – his prodigy. And now he was hers too.
After the film crew packed up and they’d said their goodbyes, she, Guy, Josh and Sam lingered a moment on the front porch, watching the KCOY van recede down the drive. It was a cool, overcast day in late November, a gentle onshore breeze ruffling the leaves of the oaks lining the drive and a faint whiff of woodsmoke drifting over from the house across the street. She was conscious of Guy at her side, just inches from her, his hair shining, the make-up she’d helped apply smoothing his features till he looked like a picture of himself, flawless and idealised. ‘So how’d I do?’ he asked, turning to her. ‘Pretty good, huh?’
‘Yeah,’ she said, in a voice that drained the breath out of her. What could she say? He’d been brilliant – professorial, yes, but not at all overbearing or self-obsessed like so many of the other professors at school, and entertaining too. And he’d brought out the best in Sam, treating him with real affection, almost as an equal and not just some trained animal on a leash.
‘You were incredible,’ Josh put in. ‘And so were you, Sam. Congrats all around.’
Sam – Josh still had his lead – sidled up to her then, wrapped his arms around her legs and buried his face in the crotch of her jeans, something he’d taken to doing the past couple of days, though according to Guy he wasn’t even close to puberty yet. ‘Yes, Sam,’ she said, ‘you were the star, you’re always the star, you good boy, you,’ and she bent to lift him to her chest and then her back, where he perched, grunting softly, his weight dense and compacted.
When she straightened up, she saw that Guy was watching her closely, as if she were the marvel and not Sam. A slow grin spread across his face. ‘In that case, let’s do some celebrating,’ he said, pulling open the door and bowing in invitation. ‘I’ve got a couple bottles of champagne on ice, what do you think about that? Sound good?’
She nodded, feeling the exhilaration of the moment rising in her. Sam must have felt it too – he shifted position and let out an escalating series of pant-hoots ending with a soft drawn-out coo of pleasure.
‘What do you think, Sam?’ Guy said, signing it at the same time. ‘Champagne? Does that sound good?’
Sam might not have known what champagne was – how would he? – but Guy’s tone told him everything he needed to know. He dug his knees into her sides for balance so he could free his hands long enough to clap once, twice, and never mind that he was slipping back and snatching at her sweatshirt to steady himself, he was making a point and the point was most definitely affirmative. Champagne. Sure. Why not?
If Sam hadn’t tasted champagne before, neither had she. Not real champagne anyway – French champagne, which Guy explained was the only true champagne, the sparkling wines produced up north in places like Guerneville and Napa a poor substitute, Don’t be fooled by them – and it wasn’t till he filled her glass a second time that she began to appreciate what he was talking about. The flavour was subtle, faintly sweet, faintly acidic, and the carbonation seemed to propel the alcohol content – 12.5% by volume – right to her brain. When he popped the cork on the first bottle, he let it shoot across the room so Sam could have the fun of chasing after it, which gave him a moment to fill Sam’s flute not with Mumm but club soda and a splash of the cheap Chablis somebody had left in the refrigerator. He winked at her. ‘Why waste the good stuff ?’
Josh laughed. ‘Why, indeed?’ he said, holding out his glass.
But Sam wasn’t so easily fooled. He raced back into the kitchen, the cork clenched between his teeth, and sprang into his high chair, waving impatiently for his own glass. Guy leaned over the chair and handed it to him, then made a toast – ‘To Sam!’ – and they all clicked glasses and drank. All but Sam, who took a tentative sip, watching them closely. He made a face and lifted the glass to his nostrils, sniffing. Then he set his glass down, jumped to the floor and went directly to her where she was leaning against the kitchen counter. ME, he signed, reaching for her glass, ME. She looked to Guy, who just shrugged, then she handed it to Sam. Who gave it a suspicious sniff, then stuck his tongue in it, lapping like a dog, before handing it back to her. Then he glided over to the sink and poured his own glass down the drain, his eyes locked on Guy’s the whole while. GOOD STUFF, he signed, holding out the glass. YOU GIVE ME – he paused to snatch a look at her to be sure she was watching – GOOD STUFF.
Later, after Josh had gone home and Sam, woozy from the effects of the champagne, fell asleep in the middle of the story she’d been reading him, she tiptoed out of his room, leaving the door ajar so she could hear him if he awakened. From the living room came the sound of the TV, some nature show, the narrator talking in an awed, subdued voice about the majesty and intelligence of humpback whales: They can communicate to other individuals of their species from as much as a hundred miles away, and their songs rely on a complex and nuanced syntax. These giants of the deep – there was the sound of rushing water and a few orchestral shadings to underscore it – can hold their breath for forty-five minutes at a time and migrate as far as 6,000 miles each year. This information drifted down the hallway to her and just made her feel exhausted – one more nature show about the unique attributes of a species in decline and the various cruelties we impose upon it, the depressing numbers, extinction waiting in the wings. She’d drunk too much champagne, and dinner – takeout pizza, again – didn’t seem to have absorbed much of it.
She found Guy sunk into the couch, a book in one hand, a flute of champagne in the othe
r. On the screen, a great dark shape rose from the glassy depths, breached and spouted. He looked up at her, breathed, ‘Hi,’ and patted the pillow beside him. She was thinking she really ought to get to bed – brush her teeth, slip into her pyjamas and settle in beside Sam so he wouldn’t wake without her and feel abandoned, feel scared, crying out over whatever passed for bogeymen in a chimp’s dreamworld, snakes, hyenas, researchers – but then Guy flashed a smile and she came over and sat beside him.
‘Want some more champagne?’ He leaned away from her to lift the bottle from the sweating stewpot he was using as an ice bucket.
‘Uh-uh,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I think I’ve had enough. I think—’ She was going to say she had a hazy impression she’d drifted off while reading Sam his bedtime story, but just let it drop. Too much information.
‘We can’t let it go to waste, can we?’ He held the bottle up in evidence. ‘It’s not like we can force the cork back in, without shaving it down, anyway, and it always goes flat. My father used to say, “You pop the cork, you’re making a pledge,”’ and he filled the glass he’d been drinking from and handed it to her.
‘OK,’ she said, ‘just a taste,’ and then she had the glass in her hand. And that was all right. This was her celebration too. It could have been Elise’s, could have been Melanie’s, but it wasn’t – it was hers.
The whales gave way to something else – what was it, harpy eagles, perched in the treetops and ripping monkeys apart with their great hooked beaks – and Guy put his arm around her, drew her to him, and they kissed. They kissed for a long, slow inebriate time, the narrator – a new narrator now, but holding forth in the same hushed tones as the whale expert – saying, The harpy eagle’s talons are longer than a grizzly bear’s claws and can penetrate a monkey’s skull with ease. Then Guy took his mouth away and whispered, ‘Enough with nature, already, let’s go to bed.’ He got to his feet, and for a moment she thought he was going to lift her in his arms and carry her to the bedroom like in the movies, but instead he bent to take her hand and pull her to him for another kiss, this one standing, their bodies pressed tight so that she could feel his erection through the fabric of his jeans.
‘Eagles mate on the wing, did you know that?’ he said, leading her towards the bedroom now. ‘They’re locked together in the act and if they don’t let go at the last minute, they both hit the ground and get smashed to pulp.’ He laughed. ‘Talk about risky sex…’
He was caressing the back of her hand, his touch smooth and silken. She was in the moment, absolutely. She didn’t think about Sam, didn’t think about the fact that she was going to break the lease on her apartment at the end of the month and move in here permanently, didn’t think about Melanie or Elise or anybody else who might have been here before her – she just gave way and let herself be led.
He didn’t use a condom. He pulled out of her at the last second and spurted in her pubic hair. There had been no mention of birth control. He’d just led her to the bed, lit a candle and climbed in beside her, and he didn’t ask if she was on the pill, which she wasn’t, because until that very moment, it hadn’t seemed to make any sense – why mess with your hormones for nothing? She wasn’t dating anybody and her only previous experience, with Tommy Slizek, a tall, skinny boy with bad breath and a croaking voice who’d asked her to the prom at the last minute, hadn’t encouraged her to try again. He’d produced a condom he kept in his wallet – ‘For emergencies,’ he’d said – and then snapped it on like one of those latex gloves the gynaecologist uses for an exam. Which was what sex with Tommy Slizek was like, an exam. If she was supposed to feel something, she didn’t really feel it, and that was her own fault, she knew it, but she was shy with or without her clothes on, and she couldn’t stop thinking about what they were doing through the whole process, his fingers on her, in her, his tongue poking at hers like a hot, wet animal, biology, secretions, the mating process. It was different with Guy. Maybe the champagne had something to do with it. Maybe the fact that Sam was asleep in his bed down the hall made her feel proprietary and in control whether she was or not. Maybe she was in love. With Guy. With Sam. With the whole new life she was suddenly inhabiting. Could it have been that simple?
He handed her a tissue from a blue cardboard box on the night table and she wiped herself, then he put his arm around her and pulled her to him so her head rested on his chest, and she could feel the pulse of his heart and take in the odour of his sweat that was its own kind of perfume and it made her feel drowsy and contented. He began to talk in a low murmur, his chest rising and falling with the shape of his words. He didn’t talk about love. Didn’t talk about what they’d just done and were going to do again any minute now. He talked about himself, about how relieved he was that the filming had gone well and how he really didn’t think there was anybody out there who could have pulled it off the way he had. The other five researchers under Moncrief’s direction – he named them, three women, two men, all of them married and all but one, Lucas Borstein, located in the vicinity of Davenport, where Moncrief could keep an eye on them – were duds as far as he was concerned. ‘Science nerds, you know what I mean? Except for Borstein. He’s the real deal. And our main competition at this point because his chimp, Alex, is far more advanced than Sam – but he’s older by two years, so we’ll see how that goes.’
She nodded, but that felt strange since her head was pressed to his chest and the vertical had become horizontal.
‘None of them’s even remotely camera-friendly – I mean, not just in a physical way, but in the way they come across too. And I may be prejudiced – I am, of course I am – but I think I have a better rapport with Sam than any of them have with their own chimps…’ He let his hand slide down the slope of her back and brought it up again, gently massaging. He was talking, she was listening. He was thirty-two, she was twenty-one. He was a professor, she was a student. And they were both here, in this house, in this bed, because of Sam.
‘And that comes across on the screen, like on To Tell the Truth? That was a win all the way around. Pretty much everybody I talked to – random strangers, like that cop who stopped me? – were just stunned. And you know what? As far as I can gather, only one of the others, Gina Markowitz, has been on TV, which was just some local programme in Iowa, and her chimp, Alice, is three years older than Sam and not half as proficient at signing. They’d tricked her out in some frilly little dress, and all Alice did was stick her hand up her dress and play with herself while Gina droned on about lexical frequency and lemma glossing. And she never looked into the camera, not once. And when she did get Alice to sign, the signs were so sloppy you could barely read them. What we need – are you listening?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘We need something really big – we need Carson. And that’s going to happen, I know it is. It has to. Because this is our window of opportunity, right now – Sam’s not always going to be like this, you realise that, don’t you?’
She wanted to say, ‘Uh-huh,’ but her tongue felt thick in her mouth. She thought of the term ‘post-coital’ from her Human Sexuality class sophomore year. She thought of oxytocin, the ‘love chemical’. She repeated the syllables in her head, ox-y-to-cin. That was what was running through her veins – and his too.
‘We’ve got maybe a couple years and then he’s going to be too much to handle. Or maybe not. Maybe we get lucky. But the way he bit Elise, that’s asserting himself. And once he realises he’s stronger than we are – and he’s going to reach that stage before long – we’re going to be in new territory. Which is why it’s so crucial to establish bonds with him now—’
He broke off and sat up abruptly, which made her sit up too. Sam was there, in the doorway, poised over his knuckles. He looked puzzled, as if he couldn’t quite piece together what he was seeing. For a long moment he just gazed at them, then pushed himself up and rose to his full height, wading into the room with that sideways motion peculiar to monkeys and chimps, as if they were perpetually negotia
ting the deck of a ship at sea. Guy said, ‘It’s OK, Sam – go back to bed.’
But Sam had begun to bristle now, all his hair standing on end. He let out two short barks, then sprang on to the bed. ‘It’s OK,’ she said, but it wasn’t OK, not as far as Sam was concerned. He gave her a long steady look, then pulled back the sheet and touched first her right breast, then the left. Then he looked at Guy, and without shifting his gaze, touched her breasts again, first the right, then the left.
CLOUD BREATH
What he was seeking in the irreversible now of the worst moment of his life, he couldn’t really say because it wasn’t a word and it wasn’t a picture. All he knew was that he was COLD, colder than he’d ever known or imagined he could be, the movie of the sliding black-and-white birds he’d seen with her on TV no more real than the screen allowed, a white world that was made of ICE, but the ice wasn’t real, wasn’t COLD, not like this. Touch the screen and it was neutral, touch the ice and it was COLD. What did it mean? Why was it like this? What had happened to the leaves, to the water, to the bugs and birds? She wasn’t here to explain it to him. She wasn’t anywhere near here. He knew that now and it filled him with despair.
He’d run off, panicked, plunging through briars and dead yellow brush, in what direction he didn’t know, as long as it was away from the FENCE and the cutting wire and the BIG MAN with the stinger. That was when? When the sun was still high, a bright ball caught in the treetops that didn’t give off any heat whatever, as if it wasn’t the sun at all but some counterfeit object propped up in the sky to mock him, to torture him and make him HURT inside. Where was he? He was in the middle of a vast yellow canebrake at the edge of a POND composed not of water but ICE that stung his feet and made him bury his hands in his armpits for the saving warmth. He breathed in and his lungs HURT, breathed out and saw his own breath steal away from him in puffs and streamers and clouds like when he smoked a CIGARETTE with her and Guy. He wasn’t smoking a CIGARETTE now, he was smoking air. And the air chilled him until he was shivering all over.