by T. C. Boyle
‘No, in fact, I don’t.’
‘He’s like any other kid.’
‘Yeah, well, from what I’ve read – and yes, I’ve been reading as much as I can about your new field, primatology? – he’s not really a kid any more, is he?’
‘But he is, emotionally, anyway. And I’m sorry, got to run. Call you soon.’
Sam was OK with sleeping alone in the afternoon, but it was always a trick to get him to settle down, and she’d have to climb into bed beside him, under the covers, even if it was a stifling day in July or August, and cuddle with him till he drifted off. Then she could slip away and try to deal with the ten thousand details of life exclusive of what was going on inside his head, which she couldn’t do at night because night was his time of dislocation and terror, even with the night light aglow. Leave the bed, even for a minute, even to go to the bathroom, and he’d wake screaming until she came back to him. That wasn’t healthy, she knew it, and he was manipulating her, she knew that too, but then she’d never raised a chimp before, hardly anybody had, and nobody knew the rules. She spoiled him. They all did. But really, what choice did they have?
She heard him bouncing down the stairs, feet and hands both, heard the soft, inquisitive hoots he emitted when he was talking to himself, and a moment later he was there, standing in the kitchen doorway. He’d shucked his nappy – he was old enough now, at four, to use the toilet, though he was indifferent to the concept, and every other day or so left a mess somewhere around the house. His ancestors, through all the aeons, had just let fly wherever they were and whenever the urge took them, and so why expect anything different of him? Except that this was a cross-fostering experiment as well as a linguistic one; except that he didn’t know he was any different from anybody else in his life – and they all wore clothes and used the toilet and encouraged him to do the same, even if he couldn’t quite manage to graduate from the anal stage. The fact was, he’d never laid eyes on another member of his own species, at least not since he was two weeks old and Moncrief darted his mother and took him from her.
Sam had no idea he was anything but human, which was the whole point. His favourite game was ‘Categories’, in which she or Guy or one of the others would lay out a series of cards imprinted with pictures of various people, animals and objects, and he was to sort them into piles by category, the buildings in one pile, trees in another, lions with lions, dogs with dogs, people with people. When he came to pictures of chimps, he placed them with the pictures of gorillas, orangs and monkeys, as if he were a primatologist himself – until he came to his own photo, that is. He would pick it up, extend his lips to kiss it, then grin at her as if the joke was on him, and place it, invariably, among the photos of people – and not just the category of people he knew personally, but strangers, men, women and children alike, generalising, selecting, making a statement.
Are animals self-aware? That was one of the big questions in the field of animal consciousness and the evidentiary standard was the mirror test, in which a sleeping animal – elephant, dog, crow, human child, ape – was tagged on the face with a bright-coloured sticker and then, on awakening, presented with a mirror. If the animal noticed the sticker and reached up to examine it, to remove it, this was proof that it recognised itself as a discrete individual, which in turn meant it exhibited a higher level of consciousness. Dogs failed, cats failed, but elephants, porpoises, crows, apes and human children passed easily, and Sam was so smart he could have conducted the tests himself. Sometimes, when she was putting on her make-up, he’d perch on the sink and apply her lipstick to his own lips, mugging for her and the mirror both, though admittedly she’d have to watch him like a hawk or he’d extrude the whole tube and swallow it before she could stop him.
Now, standing there in the doorway, blinking away the effects of his nap, he signed, GOOD FOOD NOW, YOU ME, and ambled into the room, pointing at the clock set in the face of the stove.
‘You want Oreos? Or what about Fig Newtons for a change? They’re better for you. I think.’
FIG. YOU WANT SOME TOO?
She shook her head. ‘I’m trying to watch my weight.’
He gave her a dubious look, then sprang into his chair, pointing one finger at his ear and rotating it twice, YOU’RE CRAZY. And then he made the sign for breasts and held out his arms for a hug.
‘You flatterer,’ she said, and she crossed the room, bent over and embraced him, his hands going to her breasts and his lips brushing the side of her face in the very place where he’d sunk his teeth into Elise. But he wasn’t the same chimp he’d been a year ago. And she wasn’t Elise.
As it turned out, they had their own Thanksgiving at the ranch, as planned, while her mother stayed home in Calabasas, cooking for Claire and Bob and Sophie. Which was a relief – not that she didn’t love them and miss them, but given the new conditions of her life, she was afraid it just wouldn’t work out, not this time, anyway. And she didn’t need the added pressure. As it was, Guy had invited the chair of his department and his wife, which would be a trial in itself, but Guy insisted that Sam had to get used to strangers, had to be socialised like any other child, so he’d know how to respond when he was presented with new situations and new people. Barbara and Sid would be there, as well as Janie, one of the student volunteers Sam especially liked. Josh was coming too – and at the last minute, he called to say he was bringing Elise, whom nobody had seen in months, so that was going to make things interesting.
‘Can you believe Elise’s coming?’ She was at the kitchen counter, mashing the still-hot potatoes Barbara was peeling and handing to her one by one while Sam, who’d climbed atop the refrigerator for no other reason than that he felt like it, looked on in a supervisory role, hooting softly to himself.
‘Tell me about it. But I hear she’s all healed now and you can’t really tell anything happened. Except under real intense light and if she isn’t wearing any make-up, which she always is.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Josh.’
She didn’t quite know how to take this – why was Josh confiding in Barbara and not her? And why would Elise come back at all when she’d been so bitter about the whole thing? Was she having second thoughts? Did she want her old job back? ‘More closure,’ she said, ‘right? But isn’t closure supposed to be final? I mean, what does she want?’
Barbara gave her a sly look. Her hair, kinky, dark, hair that was like a black cloud rising up off her head, had broken free of the band she’d tied it up with and bobbed in front of her eyes. ‘Your job, my job, I don’t know – she has dibs, right? And she’s got Josh too.’
‘Don’t even joke about it.’ She looked up at Sam, who was leaning over the face of the refrigerator rearranging the magnets that held her clippings in place (‘Vegetarian Lasagne’; ‘Chimp Speech Experiment’; ‘Pumpkin Spice Plantain Chips’). ‘What do you think, Sam – you want Elise to come back? You want her instead of me?’
Sam’s grasp of spoken English was exceptional, but sometimes he didn’t quite catch the meaning of a given phrase, especially when it involved rapid speech or complex syntax or even, depending on his mood, simple pronoun–antecedent agreement. He straightened up at the mention of his name, his legs dangling over the edge of the freezer compartment, but he didn’t respond. She tried again, this time signing it as she spoke aloud.
YOU, he signed, then gave it a beat, shook his head and signed, ELISE.
‘What? What are you saying?’
He signed it again: ELISE.
It was as if she’d been slapped in the face. There was no one in this world closer to him than she was, not even Guy, and certainly not Elise. She was the one he’d turned on. He’d bitten her. Maimed her. And now he was saying he preferred her? She couldn’t believe it.
‘You ingrate,’ she snapped, angry all of a sudden, and though he might not have had the specific term in his vocabulary, he knew exactly what she was saying. ‘You really mean to tell me you don’t want me any more? Is that it?
Huh? Talk to me, Sam, because you’re in trouble now, you are, and you know it—’
He was grinning. He ran both hands over his head, then hid his face in the mask of his intertwined fingers as if he couldn’t contain himself. Another beat and he peeked out at her, dropped his hands and signed, JOKE. And then, holding his arms out for a hug, he signed, YOU, and waved her to him impatiently, signing, YOU ME, YOU ME, YOU ME.
Guy had been in his study all morning and into the early afternoon. He was writing up the results of the double-blind tests they’d conducted on Sam’s ability to name objects and their photographic representations, all of which Josh had filmed for the record. The idea was for one researcher (Aimee) to hold up an object or photo for Sam to identify while another (Guy), who was positioned so that he couldn’t see her or the object, had to interpret it from Sam’s sign alone. When Sam was fresh – before he got antsy or bored, which usually happened fifteen or twenty minutes in – he was accurate 90 per cent of the time, and when he wasn’t, it didn’t necessarily mean he’d forgotten the sign but that his signing wasn’t crisp enough and Guy misread it.
She was setting the table in the dining room when Guy poked his head in the door. ‘Looks great,’ he said. ‘And the turkey – wow, smells ambrosial. What did you do to it?’ He came across the room and slipped his arms round her from behind.
‘A secret,’ she said. ‘My mother’s famous turkey baste – you’d have to torture me to get the recipe out of me.’
‘Sorry, got no time for torture now,’ he said, drifting over to the table and idly picking up one of the plates – Tupperware, exclusively Tupperware, because Sam was hard on china – and setting it down again. He glanced at his watch. ‘Sam’s naptime?’
She nodded.
‘Good. Well, looks like everything’s ready to go – and thanks, thanks for that. It’s huge. Especially with Leonard coming—’
‘And Elise.’
‘Right, Elise. And maybe – I don’t mean to lay this on you out of nowhere, but you heard the phone ringing like two hours ago? You know who it was?’
She didn’t have a clue. ‘That woman from the Tonight show?’
‘I wish. But no, it was Moncrief. He’s in LA for some conference, without his wife, for whatever reason, and he said he’d like to stop by and reconnect.’
‘You don’t mean today? On Thanksgiving?’
Guy shrugged. He looked guilty, as if he’d been holding back till the last minute – which he had. ‘He said he had nowhere to go for Thanksgiving dinner.’
‘You mean you invited him?’
‘Yeah. Of course. What else could I do? I mean, he is my mentor, after all, not to mention he’s the one who set all this up. For which I’m eternally grateful – aren’t you?’
‘But that’s a three-hour drive – where’s he going to stay? Not here – tell me not here.’
‘I don’t know. There’s plenty of motels, right? And if he drinks too much – and he does tend to drink too much – I can always drive him back to whatever place he winds up at, probably the cheapest, knowing him. But he might not come. It’s not set in stone.’
But it was. Moncrief – Donald – always did exactly what he wanted, when he wanted, and if he said he was coming, there was no turning him back short of wildfire or earthquake, both of which she began to pray for, as she set another place and lashed herself round the kitchen, trying to get as much done as she could before Sam woke from his nap. She had a glass of wine to calm herself, and Barbara, every bit as frazzled as she was, lit up a joint, the thin, weedy stink of pot creeping in around the edges of the dense aroma of home-made pumpkin pie and turkey with all the trimmings.
The first guests to arrive were Professor Biggs and his wife, whose name Aimee didn’t quite catch. She was bad with names, especially on first introduction, always confused and embarrassed with new people, and struggling to think of what to say. But the professor’s wife didn’t seem to notice – she was nice enough, not at all condescending, and with a smile that darted across her lips and fluctuated in a genuine way, as if she were actually engaged and not just putting on a show. She was in her thirties, with a beauty parlour coif and dressed in a pantsuit and simple strand of pearls, which could prove an unfortunate temptation to Sam, and the coif as well – he loved to get up close and personal, aggressive and curious at the same time. Anybody with sprayed-up hair was a target, and jewellery – earrings and necklaces especially – were irresistible.
Guy had put something on the stereo to set the atmosphere – classical, with ascending and descending voices and a groundswell of cello, something she didn’t recognise, though he was educating her on that score too, her favourite pieces so far being Barber’s ‘Adagio for Strings’ and Borodin’s ‘String Quartet No. 2’. They stood there just inside the door – the Biggses, Guy, Barbara and her, while Sam, as calm as she’d ever seen him in the presence of strangers, gazed up at them benevolently and everybody bent at the waist to jabber down at him. It might not have been evident to the Biggses, but anybody who knew Sam could see in an instant that he was stoned, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, given the circumstances. He’d slipped silently into the kitchen after his nap and before holding out his arms for a hug or demanding his snack, he made a show of sniffing the air and immediately produced the sign for STONE, right fist tapped to the top of the left, then SMOKE, two fingers pressing an imaginary cigarette to his lips. Barbara still had the joint in her hand, so there was no denying him, and of course over the past months, they’d all learned that a few tokes could have a wonderful mellowing effect on him, just like his nightly cocktail or glass of red wine.
All good. The Biggses cooed over him and he accepted the adulation magnanimously, with no thought of snatching pearls or disarranging hairdos – and he looked the perfect little gentleman in the suit and tie she’d bought for the Carson audition (though the show itself was still on hold, maybe permanently, a situation that had totally deflated Guy, who called Renee Flowers on the first of every month only to have her – or her secretary – tell him she was on board with it 100 per cent and would get back to him soon. Super soon.).
Guy was wearing a tie and jacket himself and he’d encouraged her to put on a skirt, though the way she saw it, her function was more on the level of server than hostess. ‘It’s not just about Sam, you know,’ he’d said, ‘I want to show you off too, OK? You reflect on me and Sam and the whole project – let these stiffs have something beautiful to look at, that’s the way I see it. Come on, do it for me. Is it really that hard to put on a skirt and some make-up?’
‘What stiffs? Your colleague and his wife?’
‘Yeah, my colleague and his wife. And now Moncrief on top of it.’
When Josh came in with Elise, they were all standing around the fire in the living room, except for Janie and Sid, who were helping out in the kitchen like the dutiful volunteers they were. Under normal conditions, the fireplace went unused because of Sam, but Guy had insisted on having a fire in honour of the holiday. Which meant they all had to keep an eye on Sam. Fires fascinated him. He loved basking in the heat, scooting across the floor till his backside was pressed right up against the screen, but more than that it was the process, the phenomenon of this neutral thing – wood, sticks he could chew on – turning hot, glowing, falling away to ash, that really got his wheels spinning. He could never resist experimenting with it, no matter how many times he burned himself, once even racing around the room with a flaming brand till Josh caught up to him and tackled him, leaving a scorched black scar on the floorboards as testimony and admonition both.
Elise tried to behave as if nothing had happened. She shook hands with the professor and his wife, gave Guy an abbreviated hug and chirped some inanity at Aimee and Barbara, all the while ignoring Sam, who, in turn, ignored her. Her face was fine – you could hardly tell, really – and she’d put some effort into her hair and make-up and the teal cocktail dress she was wearing, which brought out her eyes and made them shine l
ike little glass nuggets. Josh – he was in a sports coat too – was ready for anything, you could see that in the way he positioned himself between Sam and Elise when they came in the door, and then, even before getting a drink, he pulled Sam up on his back and paraded him around the room, to Sam’s delight. Sam hooted and kicked out his legs and laughed his soft aspirated laugh.
‘Wow,’ the professor’s wife said, grinning in appreciation, ‘he really likes that, doesn’t he?’
‘Oh, yeah,’ Josh said, swinging in close, but not so close that Sam could make a grab for her pearls. ‘He’s my boy, aren’t you, Sam? And in a minute we’re going to get down and play tickle – and chase, you want to play chase?’
Sam, perched on his back, signed, YOU CHASE ME, but Josh couldn’t see his hands. ‘What did he say?’ Josh asked, canvassing the room. He was keeping Sam occupied, both by way of distracting him and showing him off for the professor and his wife.
‘He says he wants you to chase him,’ Aimee said, and then, since she was part of the demonstration too, she signed to Sam, simultaneously speaking aloud: ‘Is that right? Or do you want to chase him?’
CHASE HIM.
‘Are you sure? Are you sure you don’t want to go in and try some of the good food first?’ She’d wanted to say ‘hors d’oeuvres’, because she was about to bring out a tray of stuffed mushrooms and the chestnuts she’d roasted specially for Sam, who liked to eat them hot, shell and all, but he didn’t have the term in his vocabulary.
Sam nodded. CHASE FIRST.
‘OK, then, my friend,’ Josh said, swinging round and dropping Sam into the easy chair. ‘If you think you can catch me,’ and he made a face of mock-fright and bolted for the stairs, Sam springing after him with a wild hooting laugh. They all watched until they were both out of sight. Everybody, including Elise, was grinning.
‘So impressive,’ the wife said. ‘He really understands, doesn’t he?’