Greedy Little Eyes (17 page)

Yesterday, he held one of my hands and it hurt, the fleshy part beside my thumb. It felt bruised and sore, deep inside like an overworked muscle. I said nothing; he felt it.

“Do you have a headache?” he asked me, and I said I did though I didn’t. I just wanted the easy hiss of
yes
off my tongue right then. He said something about adrenal glands and pressure points, things I couldn’t quite make out through the fog of his pale smooth hands cradling the backs of mine, his thumbs kneading the ache in the bellies of my palms. His wedding band glinted. A moan
nestled in my throat waiting for release, and it was then I could feel my soul lifting. Not in any joyous sense; it was as though I were losing myself, as if my soul were seeping away, and I started to cry. I didn’t know the watchmaker’s name.

Last night, Thomas said that he couldn’t go to a therapist. It would get out, he said, and spread like wildfire:
Thomas Gary is a porn addict.
He’d be a laughingstock.

I fingered my watch.
Madge from Jim 1940.

Thomas slept in his office again. He left for Toronto first thing this morning.

After work today, I got into the car and drove past the café without stopping. If the watchmaker could really read palms, he’d have seen this coming, he would understand. I drove past the watch repair and the café and past the turnoff toward home. Wading into the thick traffic on Highway One, I headed east until I was lost—nothing but farmland and the odd strip mall.

I passed a sign that said vancouver zoo and aquarium, made a U-turn and parked.

I am at the zoo now and the sun is setting. It won’t be open much longer but I feel as if I am prowling, groping for something. I wish I had a child on my hand right now. Something in a size small with messy curls and
a precocious mouth, a child who has just learned to talk a blue streak but doesn’t know yet how to censor herself.

I pass by the reptile pavilion, stopping only briefly before I realize I’m not interested in snakes. The cat cages don’t work for me either; their restless paws make my heart race. The penguins look too fishy and the fish too hungry. Instead, I am drawn to the monkeys, which normally I am not, but I don’t question. This morning I made a decision to have what I crave.

The first cage has the orangutans. I stop and watch them: frantically hairy, they stretch arms out to each other, to food, to the chain-link fence, to outside bodies. It’s a slow day at the monkey cage and only two other people are there: a woman and her bored boy-child who is whining, “Ma-a-wm. The
sharks
.” He needs to get to them before their official feeding time, he insists. His mother
yes-
es him, absently, but she is busy: she is engrossed. She’s leaning across the thin moat that’s supposed to discourage patrons from getting too close to the cages. It’s only about a foot wide, though, not all that discouraging. A young orangutan, barely her son’s age, has attached himself to the fence near her, one hand and both feet entwined in the chain link, the other hand reaching through, reaching for her. She ignores the do not touch sign and takes his hand. They stare at each other. He sighs a little, wraps his fingers loosely in hers and closes his eyes, then opens them on her, tilting his head. She kisses the fingertips of her free hand and touches them to his, and her son says, “Mom,
I’m going. I’m serious, I’m going.” But she is transfixed. The orangutan’s mouth turns up and he looks grateful and loving and resigned in a way that he can’t find words for. The boy huffs and stalks away, toward the big-fish house.

Ten minutes later, the woman is still holding that dark hand, running her light thumb over the fur at his knuckles. He’s resting his lips on his own wrist, on his side of the cage. He looks as if he would squeeze himself through one of those two-inch diamonds in the chain link, as if he would gladly let her tear his hide through, limbs scraped off in the process, if it meant he could curl against her breast on the other side. Her eyes are welling and her son is long gone, watching big-toothed fish swallow chunks of flesh the size of dachshunds.

I am mesmerized. And watching them—her and the monkey—gives me a peculiar twinge: sympathy and jealousy all mixed up. And hunger: the real kind and the figurative kind. I suddenly want to swallow everything I come in contact with, and I wonder if I should have gone along with that boy of hers to commune with the sharks.

I am only four or five feet from the woman and the orangutan, when the zoo guy comes between us.

“Excuse me,” he says. “Ma’am! Can’t you read the sign there? Do not touch the animals and do not feed them; don’t touch ’em, don’t feed ’em. Understand?”

She turns her head, eyes red and brimming. “I’m not feeding him.”

The orangutan doesn’t look at the zoo guy, just squeezes his other hand through and takes hold of the woman’s forearm, pulling her closer.

The zoo guy scowls. “Now, look what you did. These animals are very unpredictable and you riled him. It’s almost closing and now we’ve got to extricate your damn arm outta there.”

The woman gives the furry face a closed-mouth smile and smoothes the fingers on her arm. The orangutan takes sharp breaths and holds tight. She turns her head just a little, snuffles quietly, and says, “Please go away. We just need a couple of minutes. I promise I’ll be gone by the time you get back.”

“I’m gonna go get the primate guy. And Security. Bet your ass you’ll be gone,” he mutters. And he heads off in the zebras direction.

The woman looks back into the monkey’s eyes, tears sliding toward her jaw, and starts to sing, her voice cracking, “
Lullaby and good night …”

The orangutan lets go of her forearm and reaches farther, straining his hand to her face. She leans her wet cheeks closer and lets him touch her jaw as though she is beautiful; as though she is the most wondrous thing he has ever seen, until they let each other go.

According to Madge and Jim’s watch, it’s nearly seven o’clock. An announcement comes over the loudspeaker: the zoo is closing in ten minutes.

I’m not ready to leave and I don’t know where I’ll go when I do. I feel as if there is just too much blank space around me suddenly. I need to sit a minute and collect myself.

Walking toward the duck pond, I move fast to wake up, get some adrenalin going, some fight-or-flight. I ball up two fists and dig my nails in and take a lot of sharp breaths and shake my head hard when the wrong thoughts come in, and I don’t care what kind of lunatic I look like.

My calves ache a little by the time I sit down on a bench—it looks brand new, wood stain, no slats, and sanded smooth as a pup’s ear. Sun hits the pond and droops lower in the sky, falling into an orangutan-coloured haze, and I take off the watch, set it beside me, whisper to it to go back home, where it belongs.

Greedy Little Eyes

S
HE RIDES SHOTGUN IN SOME EARLY-SEVENTIES
convertible, candy apple red and the top’s down. Playing her boyfriend is a twenty-something guy sporting a great white Dentyne smile. He shifts gears and regards her with a whole and perfect love. She glances at the map and grins back; her smile is Pepsodent. They are so beautiful and clear-eyed and strong; together they could win best of breed.

Eventually, they spot it, the cabin; in the midst of a wheat field, not another building in sight, not a person, not a thing, nothing but this cabin and endless waving grain. The cabin sits on stilts as though it were near water and built for flooding. Seeing her uncle outside the door, plump in a suit, smoking a cigar, a fat black moustache behind the smoke, she and the boyfriend climb out of the car and run up the stairs. The uncle smiles and holds his arms open, gestures them inside to a small, single room. Her heart sinks. There is nothing inside but a bed and a dresser. On the
dresser is a pile of flawless white eggs and a heat lamp. They have been duped.

It is clear now that she and the boyfriend have been lured by this uncle of hers to procreate and leave the egg behind, where it will be hatched, the baby sold through the black market. The door closes.

Knowing they will be held until they comply, they do what needs to be done and add their egg to those warming on the dresser.

They break past the uncle before he can change his mind, rush back to the red convertible and speed off. Until her furious boyfriend stops the car only minutes from the cabin.

She panics. “Drive!”

“I’m not leaving it.”

“Forget it! They can’t be alive with just a heat lamp. They’re dead. Drive!”

“I’ve not leaving without it.”

“You’re on your own.” She gets out.

The boyfriend turns the car around and leaves her in the dust.

She’s scared that he’ll be killed, that they’ll come after her or she’ll die there alone in the long yellow grass. But he returns in seconds with an egg-filled sheet, its four corners twisted together, transforming it into a sack. She leaps back into the car. Suddenly another vehicle gives chase.

The boyfriend is fierce now, driving for his life. She holds the sheet of eggs in her lap until the prairie grass ends and they are suddenly in Vancouver, rolling right onto the beach. The car stops and she jumps out, eggs in hand, rushes down the hot sand. The sun is falling; the horizon in front of her is
turning pink and orange as her feet hit the ocean. She has a stranglehold on the sheet, swings with both hands like a batter, sending the eggs into the setting sun until they splash, bobbing light on the water. Peach rays shine through the eggs, illuminating the babies inside, their hands held up to the warmth and bright. “They’re alive. They’ll die now and it’s my fault.”

Fern jolts from sleep and stares at the ceiling.

She is giving out Lindt balls in a department store, handing each shopper a Swiss-made blob of sugar, cocoa and hydrogenated fat, wrapped in one layer of red foil and another of clear crunchy plastic, twisted at either end, giving them the look of legless flying bugs in gaudy formal wear. Fern has an agent who rents her out at sixteen bucks an hour—three for the agent, thirteen for Fern—to hand out food and drink samples in supermarkets, liquor stores, wherever they want a shiny-faced girl with a quick smile and a miniskirt.