Tania James - Aerogrammes - and Other Stories

“Give him time,” Joseph told the perplexed curator. “He might be depressed. Or gay.” The smile slid off her face.

Joseph sensed a long-steeping sadness in Henry, dark as his own. His girlfriend had been trying to snap him out of it. Elaine had even taken to stitching ugly pillows with Bible verses, and he loved each wobbly seam. He loved her, too, but he wondered when she would leave him. Joseph could tell that she was tiring of him, especially since he had refused to seek the services of a pastor or a shrink. He couldn’t help his beliefs — namely, that there was very little to believe in, though he did believe in Henry’s right to withdraw from females if he felt like it, to withdraw from the whole world when it seemed too harsh to weather. Sometimes it was a wonder that more people were not huddled like Henry, praying for life to pass quietly.

But in time, after the glass shield was erected, Gigi prevailed upon Henry. The keepers were unsure of when and how exactly this happened, but Joseph was the first to notice Henry mounting Gigi on a tranquil Saturday afternoon, without excitement or energy, simply because it seemed required of him. The act inspired a variety of responses among the zoo visitors. Some snickered and laughed; others primly turned away. As for Joseph, he sensed Henry’s sadness and surrender. On some occasions, Henry continued to court the blondes, even if from a distance, even if their rejections led him to perch among the branches of a dead oak and sullenly watch the clouds.

• • •

Henry was in his early twenties when a new volunteer joined the Willow Park staff, and at first, no one recognized her. Only Joseph, the oldest keeper still in employment, squinted at her in the sunlight and asked, “Aren’t you the Groves girl?”

Neneh smiled through her headache, caused by the red headband cinching her close-cropped hair. At twenty-seven, she was probably too old to be wearing a headband. At least that was what Pearl would have said, as she believed in “dressing your age, not the age you want to be.” In her last days, Pearl always wore her antique pearl-drop earrings, even to sleep, even to her grave.

Only a few people had attended the funeral the month before. Pearl had been sick for years, and over time, she’d withdrawn from her remaining friends and kept to the house. Toward the end, there were many nights when she tossed in her sleep, calling out for Henry until Neneh crept into bed and held her.

Pearl hadn’t spoken his name in years. She had refused to visit Henry, in spite of the contract; nor would she allow Neneh to do so, believing that he would survive among his fellow chimps only if he forgot his old life, his more human behaviors. “He can’t be two things at once,” she said, to which Neneh wanted to ask, Why not? But Neneh said nothing, knowing that Pearl also wanted to forget Henry, and the family they had been.

While in high school, Neneh found an article about Henry in a Florida newspaper, titled “The Ape Who Loved Blondes over Baboons.” She didn’t show it to Pearl.

Several years later, Pearl’s kidney began to fail. Neneh decided to live at home throughout college, to watch over Pearl. She accompanied Pearl on her thrice-weekly trips to the hospital, where Pearl was attached to a dishwasher of a machine that cleansed her blood and sent it back into her forearm. When they finally got the letter that a kidney was available, Neneh baked a kidney-shaped red velvet cake. “Ugly and damn good,” Pearl declared with a red velvet grin, and suddenly it seemed to Neneh that everything would be fine.

But soon after the operation, Pearl’s body began to refuse the new kidney. Her face swelled from the antirejection drugs; her limbs dwindled. Neneh could feel her own body humming with terror and energy. Whenever the hospice nurse tried to take Neneh aside and carefully talk about Pearl’s hypertension, “a bad sign,” Neneh bit at her fingernails so intently that all she heard was the sound of her clicking teeth. When Pearl began to murmur of funeral arrangements, Neneh went in search of fluffier pillows. Neneh made every effort to be of use, to pave the way toward Pearl’s decline with petals and prayers, as if death were a graceful thing, not the gradual gouging of life from Pearl’s eyes until what was left was only a decimating, and yet ordinary, stillness.

And now, here she was, at the Willow Park Zoo, a place she had longed for ever since she left it.

“How is your grandmother?” Joseph asked.

“She’s fine, just too old to travel.”

Neneh hadn’t planned on lying, but the truth would have led Joseph to treat her as everyone did, with equal portions of care and discomfort. Neneh knew how she was often perceived: a girl who had revolved around Pearl for decades and now, having no one else, was a planet spinning out into the unknown.

But as strong as her pull toward Pearl had been, Neneh had always felt an equal pull in Henry’s direction. She had done her college thesis on “Cooperative Behavior Among Captive Chimpanzees”; she had kept the newspaper clipping about Henry and the blondes; she had brought along the contract with the Willow Park Zoo. She could not have admitted it to herself when Pearl was alive, but as the end approached, Neneh had felt a small and terrible part of her waiting to be released.

• • •

Nervous about seeing Henry, Neneh wandered the grounds on her first day at the zoo. Many animals were new to her, like the antlered blesbok behind rusted grids of wire and the Chilean flamingos with their knotted knees. She meandered through the Bird Hut, filled with the soft hiss and squeak of the Balinese mynah, the toucan, and the fruit dove, mingled with the noise of stroller wheels and shouting children, disappointedly searching the cages.

Eventually, Neneh made her way through the Primate Forest, past the red-nosed mandrills and the goateed colobus monkeys, finally arriving at the chimp enclosure. A zoo worker named Britta was sitting on the bench in front of the enclosure, a pretty face if not for the poorly dyed orange blond of her hair. She seemed to know a great deal about the different chimpanzees, their alliances, their diets, their “mouth-mouth contact.” Neneh searched the enclosure, unsuccessfully, for a face she recognized.

Britta pointed out Henry, who was crouched before a termite mound, a stick in his fist, which he dipped into the mound to fish for termites. He looked darker and rangier than Neneh had expected, especially compared to Max, whom Britta called “the new alpha male.” Max’s thick, bristly hair was being groomed by one of the females while Henry sat alone. Neneh searched Henry’s face, but she was too far away to tell whether his eyes were still the hue of maple syrup. She waited for him to look up and notice the red headband she was wearing, which she had bought from a department store back in Canton, thinking that this might jog his memory to the first time they’d met in Bo. But he did not look up from his termite mound.

Britta explained last month’s upheaval, how Max had overthrown Henry through a mounting assault of bluff displays, which often ended in blows. Over the years, Max had grown to be Henry’s physical equal, and by nature Max was confrontational, often violent. Once, during a more brutal fight, Max tore a gash across the sole of Henry’s foot so that Henry limped for days. Presuming that this was a game, two of the newer children, Crouch and Walt, followed Henry in a single-file line, mimicking his limp.

As Britta chattered on, Neneh felt a thickening knot in her throat. “But no one stepped in to help Henry?” she demanded.

“Well, we can’t butt in whenever we want,” Britta said tautly. Neneh looked out at the man-made boulders, the man-made trickle of water between them. “We can’t just impose our world on theirs. Chimpanzees abide by their own rules, even if they’re in captivity.”