Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Father observed in the gravely creased face of an older bonobo, who held himself apart from the cavortings of the younger bonobos, an expression of—recognition? Identity? For a moment it seemed almost that their eyes locked: each was an elder, and had reason to be exasperated with their young offspring. Then, to Father’s surprise and disappointment, the seemingly dignified patriarch leapt onto a boulder, glared and grinned at Father with bared yellow teeth and, with rubber-like prehensile fingers, grabbed and shook his large fruit-like genitals in an unmistakable gesture of antagonism. Father winced—such vulgarity! Of course, the creature was just an animal. Father was grateful that Mother didn’t seem to have seen this obscene display as other visitors pretended not to have seen it.

  Younger bonobos, very lively, charmingly childlike, jumped about onto rocks, and off rocks; set up a high-pitched chatter of merriment that must have carried for some distance in the zoo; winked, grinned, spat and “signed” at observers who waved and called to them in return. Mother was most taken with the comely female bonobos nursing their hairy young, or hugging the young to their droopy enlarged teats, that did resemble the breasts of a nursing Homo sapiens female, to a degree; she saw, too, the uncanny flat-faced beauty of certain of the females, and the adorable gamin-faces of the very young. Rickie glowed with pride as if the bonobos were in some way his—a gift of his, for us.

  It was thrilling to Rickie, we could see, when the ashy-haired Hilary turned to him, suggesting that he answer a visitor’s question—which Rickie managed to do, quite intelligently. (We thought!)

  Only when Hilary’s mini-lecture ended and the visitors moved on to the next enclosure did Rickie hurry to greet us, with a hug for Mother and a handshake for Father; he was eager to introduce us to Hilary, a senior staff member. Impulsively Rickie invited Hilary to join us for lunch but she declined; she could see, as our heedless son could not, that we were not enthusiastic about the invitation, wanting to spend some time alone with our son.

  At lunch in a restaurant inside the zoo Rickie chattered happily about his internship, his fellow interns and older colleagues; he’d become, within a remarkably short period of time, something of an expert on bonobos, it seemed, and spoke to us in an excited disjointed way about the exotic species of “ape” as if we’d made the trip to San Diego not to see him, but to see and hear about his newest-favorite animal.

  Some of what Rickie recounted to us was an echo of the guide’s talk. In his boyish voice, it did sound fascinating to us, initially.

  “Bonobos, often called ‘pygmy chimps,’ should not be confused with the more common, more widely distributed and far more aggressive chimpanzees. That’s an insult to us. I mean—to them.” Rickie paused, as if to let this sink in. “Bonobos are much more attractive than chimpanzees, as you probably noticed—smaller, more slender, with heads that more resemble human heads, as well as other human-like features.” (In fact, we had not so much as glanced into any of the other ape-enclosures in our haste to get to the bonobo enclosure.) “Genetically, bonobos are our closest primate relatives. Bonobos ‘laugh’ as we laugh—virtually. Bonobos walk upright as we walk upright—almost. Wouldn’t you know”—Rickie’s voice lowered to a mournful growl—“of the great apes it’s the bonobos who are the most endangered species. Go figure!”

  “That is so sad!” Mother said.

  “Shit, Mom, it’s tragic.”

  Rickie seemed annoyed by Mother’s innocent remark, as Father was annoyed by Rickie’s profanity in Mother’s presence.

  “But not surprising,” Rickie added quickly, seeing the disapproval in Father’s face, “since bonobos are the most peace-loving and the least aggressive of apes. Not like Homo sapiens.”

  “Do chimps kill ’em and eat ’em?”—Father had to ask a facetious question.

  Rickie winced. This was a topic he didn’t like to consider.

  “Well—maybe . . . Chimps are definitely ‘opportunistic’ carnivores and bonobos, at least bonobo babies, would be vulnerable to them. But I don’t know for sure. I’ll ask Hilary.”

  Father suggested to Rickie that they change the subject? We’d come to San Diego to talk about him.

  “Sure Dad. Cool.”

  Slowly then the radiance began to fade from Rickie’s face.

  Rickie was clean-shaven and well-groomed. His wavy fawn-colored hair was neatly cut and his zoo uniform T-shirt and jeans were clean; his running shoes didn’t look nearly so bad as Rickie’s running shoes usually looked. Mother had to resist an almost overwhelming impulse to touch Rickie’s smooth forehead with her fingertips as he and Father talked of more serious matters. The boy didn’t look a day over seventeen!

  Father was pointing out that the internship was just for the summer and Rickie had “no future” in the San Diego Zoo or in any other zoo without a Ph.D. in—zoology? environmental zoology? Seeing a sulky look in Rickie’s face, Father said, with the air of a surgeon cutting into flesh just a little more emphatically than required, “It’s a tragic time for us. I mean—Americans. We are reaching a saturation point of highly and expensively educated young men and women—like you—who have B.A. degrees from outstanding universities, even honors degrees. There are just too many of you—that’s the fundamental, Malthusian problem. But you are not unified, you don’t form a distinct cluster. You’re likely to be scattered, living with your parents. Not at all the way the world was when your mother and I graduated from college, in the late 1960s and early 1970s—everyone couldn’t wait to get away from home . . .”

  But this struck a wrong note, a hostile note Father hadn’t meant to strike. And at the moment, Rickie wasn’t living at home but was renting an apartment near the zoo with another recent Stanford graduate whom we had yet to meet.

  Father said, “Well—you’re lucky to have part-time employment in this marketplace. Of course, you aren’t exactly employed—you are volunteering your time. Some of your prep school friends who’d graduated last year or earlier seem to have given up seriously looking for jobs. There’s a rush to graduate schools, too. In most fields, if you are second-best, forget it. Manual labor like lawn work and service jobs at Wendy’s, Taco Bell, KFC is for illegal immigrants or the dumbest high school kids. No one wants an overqualified Stanford graduate. No one wants adolescent irony.”

  Rickie’s boyish-tanned face darkened with the blood of adolescent humiliation.

  Mother tried to soften Father’s harsh words by speaking warmly of Hilary, whom she’d scarcely met, and the “pygmy chimps”—“So very lively.”

  There were exhibits at the zoo, Mother said, where the animals are just so boring, they don’t move and don’t look at you, because they don’t have the brains to see you; and sometimes, like with the great snakes, or some kind of dwarf “tapir,” you couldn’t be sure that there was anything in an enclosure at all.

  “Animal life is boredom,” Father said. It was like Father, in times of crisis, to speak in such terse brittle remarks you were led to think that they were aphorisms of Montaigne you should have known, or clever cutting jokes of Oscar Wilde.

  Rickie had been eating haphazardly, pushing food around on his plate. We’d scarcely noticed then—we would recall only in retrospect—that Rickie hadn’t ordered a cheeseburger, chicken nuggets, or a pizza slice with pepperoni sausage but a large Waldorf salad containing no meat. With the sudden and surprising belligerence of the patriarch-bonobo who’d so offended Father he said, “Nooo Dad. Don’t think so. The fact is, animals are not different from us: we are them.”

  “But,” Mother said, flustered, seeing the anger in Father’s face, “we are not really—are we? We can talk, and we—we wear clothing; we can add up numbers in our heads, and we can—well, make tools—cook food—grow food. Not many animals can do such things can they?”

  Rickie shrugged as if Mother’s question was so foolish he wasn’t required to answer. Father said stiffly, “Well. We are mammals, I suppose—but not ordinary animals. I draw the line at that.”

  FRO
M THAT POINT onward, relations with Rickie became increasingly difficult.

  We were expecting Rickie to return home in early September, when his summer internship ended, but, in late August, he called home excitedly to inform us that, though his applications for graduate programs had been rejected at sixteen California universities ranging from Stanford and Berkeley to San Jose State and U-C Eureka, his internship had been extended for another six months!

  “Oh no,” Father said.

  In a stricken-voice voice Rickie said, “What d’you mean, Dad—no?”

  Father said, “I can’t continue to support you in a—hobby-kind of job. In a summer-vacation-kind of job.”

  Rickie protested, “Working with bonobos is humanitarian work. It isn’t just some trivial pastime. Everyone I know at the zoo would inform you you are so mistaken.”

  “Rickie, it’s unpaid labor. The zoo pays its staff, you can be sure it pays its administrators generous salaries. Why should you, an intelligent young man, with a B.A. cum laude from Stanford, volunteer for unpaid labor?”

  As Father spoke, Mother was listening to the conversation on a cordless phone. Quickly she said, hoping to deflect the conflict, “Rickie, what good news!”

  “Mom, thanks. I’m glad that someone is on my side.”

  Later, when Rickie reluctantly came home for a weekend, Father tried to reason with him in private.

  “You do understand, son, that you should be making a serious effort to support yourself at the age of—is it twenty-one?—twenty-two? You are welcome to stay with us while you’re looking for employment or applying to graduate school, and we are willing to support you as an intern for a little while longer, but, you must know—the idea is to be self-supporting. If there is any lesson of evolution it is that each generation must become independent of the preceding generation—that is a law of nature! You will want to marry, Rickie, won’t you?—you will want to have children?”

  Rickie said, with a hoarse, deep-throated laugh, “I will? Who says?”

  “But—it’s normal. It’s what is—expected.”

  It was then that Rickie said, frowning severely as he scratched at his armpit, “Well—I look into the future, I guess, and it’s like I’m looking into a mirror in which there’s no reflection.”

  What a strange utterance! We had no idea what it meant at the time, nor would have we ever.

  RICKIE HAD TO be cajoled into coming home for Christmas, which had always been his favorite holiday; another time he arrived late for dinner; another time he insisted upon “forgoing” meat—in this case, a delicious Virginia ham Mother had prepared with cloves, fresh pineapple, and brown sugar. Of course Rickie ate—in fact, stuffed himself—with everything else on the table including several desserts. We noted that his table manners had disintegrated—often, he ate with his fingers. His untouched napkin fell to the floor at his feet. Cagily Rickie didn’t allow himself to be drawn out on the sensitive subject of the bonobos or what his future employment might be but simulated an intense interest in our conversation about—whatever it was our Christmas-table conversations were about. (It’s impossible to remember even our most intense dinner-table conversations even a few hours later. Politics? Football? Illnesses, surgeries, therapies? Christmas presents, to be returned the next day for credit?) Near the end of the lengthy meal, when Rickie was finishing a second piece of chocolate-cream pie, Father leaned toward him and said, as if reluctantly, “Rickie, we should discuss—you know. What you might be doing when the internship runs out.”

  Rickie’s expression froze. But he spoke politely enough saying, “Sure Dad. Cool.”

  “You have to understand, those—bonobos”—(Father pronounced the word with fastidious disdain)—“are not a serious future for you. You would have to return to school and get a Ph.D., at the very least. You’d have to be trained in—some kind of bonobo-zoology. There is no future at the San Diego Zoo, Rickie. Please understand. We are not being—controlling. We are only concerned for your future happiness.”

  “Good! The bonobo-work is my happiness.”

  “But—those are animals. They are not your family.”

  “We’ve been through this, Dad. They are my family.”

  Mother left the table, upset. Father tried not to raise his voice. The other guests—Father’s brother and sister-in-law, Mother’s sister and brother-in-law, Rickie’s sister Amber and his younger brother Tod, cousins, Grand-daddy and Grand-mom, among others—sat hushed, embarrassed. Father said, “You are saying reckless things, son, which you can’t possibly mean. Who is it who supports you, for instance? And who loves you?”

  The words supports you had an immediate sobering effect. Rickie said OK he was sorry. Just that he felt strongly about his work, as other interns at the zoo did. It wasn’t a job but a vocation. Mitzie, Stalker, Bei-Bei, Claus, Kindle, Herc, Big Joe, Juno, Juno’s new baby Astrid—they were so real to him, there was nothing else like them in his life. The other day he’d been allowed to assist a vet who was examining Big Joe—Big Joe was the patriarch of the clan, whom the younger bonobos liked to tease. Big Joe had screwed up his face as if he’d been about to kiss Rickie but had spat at him instead. (Was this funny? No one except Rickie seemed to think so.) Big Joe was the alpha male, with a real sense of humor! Rickie smiled, recalling a private, precious memory.

  Dryly Father said, “Good. I’m glad that someone sees humor in this pathos.”

  THERE FOLLOWED WEEKS of unanswered phone calls. Unanswered e-mails.

  A steady stream of attempts from Rickie’s family to contact him, ignored.

  In late February Father left a phone message for Rickie, straining to keep his voice steady: “Son! I’ve calculated, we have spent more than two hundred thousand dollars on your education and what do we—or you—have to show for it?”

  And: “Is this how you repay us, son? Going over to the animals?”

  At last in March we returned to San Diego. We had little hope of confronting Rickie otherwise.

  At the zoo, at the bonobo enclosure, we didn’t see Rickie anywhere. A crowd of appreciative visitors watched the bonobos cavort and play—exactly as they’d done on our previous visit. In the animal world, time did not budge.

  We inquired at an administration building but were told that Rickie was “no longer an intern” at the zoo. His internship had expired at the end of December.

  No longer an intern! How was this possible? We’d been told that Rickie’s internship had been extended for another six months . . .

  We asked to speak with “Hilary Krydy” but were informed, somewhat rudely we thought, that the senior staffer was traveling in Africa right now and was not accessible by e-mail.

  We had a street address for Rickie, in a haven of close-clustered stucco buildings a few miles from the zoo; the neighborhood was what Mother worriedly called “mixed-ethnic”—a predominance of Hispanics, Asians, and very black blacks. When we rang the doorbell at 1104 Buena Vida a bearded and shaggy-haired man with bloodshot eyes answered the door to tell us sourly that “Rickie Asshole” no longer lived there. We were stunned by this crude remark and when we tried to identify ourselves the bearded man said, smirking, “That asshole’s your son? You can pay me then, he owes me fucking six hundred forty-six dollars in back rent.”

  Mother wanted to pay this “debt” at once—Father said he would “mail a chack.” Mollified, to a degree, the bearded man had no idea where Rickie was and told us we’d be better off checking the zoo. He’d lost his internship but continued to hang out there, so far as anyone knew.

  We returned to the zoo. Where is our son? we demanded. Our son seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth.

  Again, the administrators spoke to us cautiously. We thought, evasively.

  If only we’d recorded these conversations!

  Desperate, we returned to the bonobo enclosure. Strangely, each bonobo in sight appeared to be female at that moment. The slender creatures were exceptionally affectionate, grooming, caressing, hu
gging and kissing one another amid much excited chatter. (They were sexually adventuresome with one another, and even with the youngsters, but we tried not to notice.)

  Then, as if they’d just been released from another part of the enclosure, a swarm of males came in—the younger, playful bonobos and at the rear the patriarch who had to be Big Joe, who’d insulted Father previously. Big Joe moved with a stiff sort of arthritic dignity, the hair of his large head seemingly parted in the middle, like a gentleman banker of the 1950s. Rudely the younger bonobos rushed past him, jostling him and taking no notice of the furious glares he cast at their sleek backs. The younger bonobos were fueled by an infectious sort of energy—leaping, swinging, wrestling with the females and one another. (We tried not to stare.)

  “Oh look!” Mother cried. “Behind that rock—do you see?”

  There crouched a lanky male bonobo with narrow shoulders and a small head; his face was a childish gamin’s face but his eyes were hooded and covert.

  “Do you see? It’s him—Rickie! Oh God.”

  Mother began frantically crying “Rickie! Rickie!” while Father tried to restrain her. Zoo visitors were astonished to see a well-dressed middle-aged woman making a gesture to climb over the railing, to press herself against the glass wall, arms outspread. “Rickie! Come back, Rickie! You know us—don’t you? Rickie!”—so Mother pleaded. The female bonobos gazed at her with sympathy welling in their dark brown eyes. Big Joe was glaring, grinning, stomping his feet, scratching his belly and genitals in an effort to direct attention to himself. The lanky bonobo at whom Mother was calling had quickly retreated to the rear of the enclosure, hiding his eyes behind his hands.