A Beautiful Truth (5 page)

They usually found such delight in seeing how much he could do, though, and, when they were in the right mood, they loved to watch him play. He learned by observation, by staring and remembering. He learned to crack eggs. You sit up on the counter there. He held the electric beater. He could spread butter on his toast with a knife. It was rarely done with grace or without a mess, but they imagined he would one day be more careful.

He loved to wear Walt’s ski-doo helmet, which was half the size of his body. He wore it backwards and walked into furniture. He laughed every time he hit something, and it was impossible not to laugh when he laughed. Larry saw him do this, and Walt said do other animals laugh.

Sometimes he could sit still. He liked magazines, especially ones that focused on home decoration and women. He loved pictures of women sitting in family rooms and he would make his I like this
noise, that creamy repetition of ooo through his soft lip-trumpet, and he would look at Judy and tap the page with the back of his fingers. There were lovely minutes where she could settle him down with a magazine and read one of her own or do some work in the kitchen with the sound of I like this in the house.

When he misbehaved they tried to be patient with him, but they had their own ways of making him obey when patience was exhausted. With Judy, the most effective was to make him feel guilty. You’re going to make mummy sad if you do that. Do you want mummy to cry.

His natural way of apologizing was to come to you with his hand held out, shrugging and bowing as if to acknowledge that, while he had had no choice, what he had done was wrong.

Walt found that shouts and threats were the best way to bring him in line. He was never physical—he never had to be. Looee instinctively understood that shouts were a prelude to something worse. Shout at him, and be done with it. They always got on well immediately after an outburst.

At some level these negotiations and struggles for power meant that Walt couldn’t help but see him as an equal—a child perhaps, but certainly not an animal. There was never any sense of ownership or mastery.

Walt shouted and took Looee in his arms and they went out for a drive, and Walt slapped his hands away whenever he reached for the wheel.

When it came to the artificial niceties of human life, he had his own approach. He ate with cutlery. They never taught him or said that he should; he just saw them doing it and wanted to do everything they did. If they presented him with a bowl of food, he never dug in without a fork or spoon. He only drank from a cup or glass.

He wore diapers for the first couple of years and they tried to train him to use the toilet. Looee had always been fascinated by it; he would let neither of them go into the bathroom alone and would flush for hours if he had his druthers—but getting him to use it himself had been a struggle. Walt had placed a step up to the toilet to encourage Looee to pee standing up, but he wouldn’t. Walt demonstrated how it was done but Looee either tapped on Walt’s penis or drank from Walt’s stream, and the two would emerge from the bathroom confused for different reasons about the significance of urine. Looee now went into the bathroom on his own sometimes and otherwise used a portable potty. There were accidents, of course, as with any other child, and sometimes he was deliberately dirty.

They learned that the ability to lie comes naturally to everyone. They never taught him to toy with the truth but they saw him do it early and it was often potty-related.

Judy had annoyed him by refusing to tickle or play with him, having done so for two hours. He went into the living room and shat on her sheepskin rug.

She was very upset when she discovered it and said why did you do that. He shook his head as though it hadn’t been him and he gestured towards the garage where Walt was tinkering.

It was daddy who did that, was it.

He nodded.

Walt put up a swing set in the front yard. Looee helped him fetch pieces to put it together, and as soon as it was upright he couldn’t get enough of it. He ripped the seats off and swung from the chains. Walt built a wonderland for Looee out front. Tires from tractors and cars which he flipped, hid in, gnawed on and rolled. Looee spent hours out there, not yet eager to explore beyond the property.
He and Walt would come in sweaty and hoot when Judy said we’re eating Italian rice balls tonight.

Judy bathed Looee and relaxed him with body lotion. She put him to bed while Walt envisioned his next day’s work downstairs. Conversations foreseen and successes planned, if this goes that way and that goes that way.

On the weekend Walt and Looee worked in the garage.

Walt said get me the ballpeen hammer. The one with the black handle.

Podo’s back hurts, and when he holds up a leaf to look at the ants on it, the ants grow invisible when he brings it near his face. He wonders where they are.

Fifi walks over and touches his balls and they both feel better for it.

Burke doesn’t want to play with Bootie. He pushes him, and Bootie thinks he is playing and won’t go away. Burke bites him.

Magda hits Burke and sticks her finger in his eye. She too finds Bootie annoying, but he is her son. Magda complains to Podo, who bluffs at Burke and nudges Bootie.

The rebuke stings Burke all the more because he wants to impress no one more than Podo.

Magda shows Podo her rosé, which looks to him as pale and unwilling as the winter sun.

He chooses to eat an apple. Fifi comes over and takes the apple from his hand, which he allows because she touched his balls.

Not all the guys were keen on Looee when Walt first brought him to Viv’s. One of them in the corner said is that a dog and Mike said that’s a monkey in a suit. Mike’s wife Cindy had been through a bout of cancer and was saved by the Blood of Christ. Mike would not want Cindy to know that he had been at Viv’s with a monkey, they’re full of disease. He watched Looee from the corner of his eye and thought of how guilty he had felt when he had tried certain things with Cindy after marriage and how the sin of the world caused good people to hurt each other, monkeys jeering at our earnest efforts to live in this quiet valley.

Susan was friends with Cindy, and while Susan was not, in Cindy’s mind, assured of escaping damnation, she believed in an eternity blanched and rich as cream where understanding would land like feather on skin and her faith was so strong she was breathless some nights. Susan just wasn’t sure that her friend Judy was spending her days as she should, and was really, frankly, afraid of seeing her with that chimpanzee.

So tell me what he’s like she said to Judy.

Judy wondered if Susan really wanted to know, and she was sometimes unsure if her words had any value when Walt was not around.

He’s just so special she said, already knowing she could never say how. He’s just so special.

Tell me about your days, do you still read on that couch by the window or is he always … Is he clean.

She tried to tell Susan what it was like to be surprised all the time and to feel a spread of warmth after each surprise. She tried to tell her that what he looked like didn’t matter but there was no certainty in her mind about what Looee was, and of course she looked down sometimes and saw this little hairy creature and thought is he my baby or a beast. He handed her blossoms and smiled. She could tell him to fetch his toys from the upstairs landing and he would. But he walked on all fours, always grunted before he ate, and idly put his finger in his anus and smelled his finger, sometimes licked it, although he heeded Judy on occasion when she said dirty Looee don’t do that. There was so much inhibiting Judy’s mind from following certain thoughts to their logical conclusions, and so much inhibiting her tongue from telling Susan about the contradictions and complexities of her days, that she simply tried her best to mention cute things like you know, Susan, he’s eating with a knife and fork like a real little gentleman.

Susan’s scone was dry in her mouth and the image of a chimpanzee with cutlery made her think of hair and tongues. She wondered how big Looee was and she was aware of the pain in her cheeks as she smiled.

Judy said we’re animal people, Walt and I. You know that. I grew up with horses.

She wanted to say something that would keep the conversation within the mountains of Vermont. She thought of her horses and
how no two horses she ever knew were the same, that animals have what you might call personalities. And Looee had such a personality that you might not even call him an animal. And what’s an animal. And none of the thoughts that rushed in would she dare or be able to say.

He kisses me goodnight she said. He climbs up and kisses me and I put him in bed with his toy gorilla.

That evening when she was washing dishes she said to Walt I was thinking about some things today and feeling really … There were things I wanted to sort of explain to Susan but I couldn’t get them out and I don’t know if it was Susan or me or what it was. Maybe I should read more.

Walt said those chimps I read about with the sign language. I’ve been wondering if we shouldn’t teach him to speak like that. Sign language.

She was pensive and kept washing the dishes. Walt looked at her and thought she’s gaining weight and she’s prettier.

There’s plenty I don’t know how to say he said.

When he next went to Viv’s he asked where Viv kept all his old magazines, there was one he wanted to look at. Viv said I used to keep all my magazines in bags in my basement. Then last year every time I went down there I caught my son Jack jerking off. I said I’m gonna throw those magazines out and you’re gonna get a job.

Walt couldn’t remember the name of the man in the article, he just had the photos in his mind. The library didn’t have space to keep old issues of all its magazines and Walt walked out before they asked him for another donation.

Where do you find out how to teach a chimpanzee sign language. Walt felt his old feeling that there are people with words and people without words, and the ones with words think they run the world and the ones without words will get the job done.
He thought about how he did well in life despite his failures in all those institutions that are meant to define what is smart. There are those who build and those who live off what is built—professors, councilmen, tax collectors and all those swarms of managers and middlemen making words we never needed, and all those terms of art are how they keep their sting in.

He nonetheless wanted to teach Looee so Looee could tell him what was wrong sometimes, so Walt could tell him more clearly what to do because it was occasionally more difficult to get Looee in line.

When Walt and Judy both had colds, Looee made them open the pantry. He got down from Judy’s arms and found a bag of onions and took it to the garbage can. He obviously assumed the onions were making them both sniffle. They made connections every day without words, but there could be so many more. Walt really didn’t know where else to look to teach him how to speak. There were those with words and those without.

Their first couple of winters had passed in the fog of exhaustion which envelops all young families, but time was somehow more regular this winter and they were more awake to its challenges. Despite all his hair, Looee really didn’t like the cold and was often sneezy and sick—and every illness he suffered, Walt and Judy caught as well.

He would go outside in his snowsuit for little more than a minute, and whenever he went back in he sat right by the fire. Sometimes Judy would be peevish because she needed her fresh air and she would say you know I don’t like it when you sit so close to the fire, and Looee would know it bothered her so he moved a little closer to it to punish her for taking him outside.

He was very sensitive to the emotions of others, and knew how to manipulate them. When Judy was sad he could tell as soon as
he saw her. He would hug her and bring her something, and if she had any cuts on her hands from the kitchen or bruises on her legs from the furniture, he would kiss them. He was very protective of Judy, and if anyone, even Walt, made a movement towards her that seemed remotely threatening, his hair would go on end and he would scream and stand in the way.

He was also reliably mischievous. They tried to have parties with old friends, and Looee charmed many of them, but there was an uneasiness with some which Looee usually exacerbated. He had a keen eye for insecurity. Chimps will naturally extend a hand in greeting, but Walt encouraged this to mimic handshaking. Guests would be at the door and Looee would amble towards them and stretch out his hand. Not everyone would take it, and things went down the wrong path from there. He went through ladies’ handbags and looked at himself in their compact mirrors. He took their lipstick and smeared it wide of his lips, or took men’s cigarettes and pipes and put them down his pants. Often the owners would feel he was mocking them. If he knew that they weren’t enjoying the joke, he pushed it even further. There was nothing so powerfully unsettling as his stare. Walt and Judy would scold him, and he might be good for a while, but if he sensed already that someone didn’t like him, their scolding only encouraged his own dislike.

He could learn to trust people over time, but it was obviously something immediate as well. He either liked someone or he didn’t, and sometimes he slithered out of someone’s arms no matter how much that person liked him.

He was on better behaviour when he was away from home, when he felt less secure. But at home he had an amazing ability to dictate the mood of any gathering.

Judy had two sisters who came at Christmas, and one of them had a husband. Looee was immediately suspicious of the way
they all behaved. He didn’t like the way the sisters hugged Judy and he tried to get in the way. He particularly didn’t like the way Carole, the unmarried one, always touched Walt on the shoulder and laughed at whatever he said. He emptied her handbag on the floor and threw the bag in the garbage. She said that’s all right. He heavily powdered his face with her makeup and she said that’s all right, it’s funny. He looked in her mirror at himself and laughed.