ON THE BUS TO VERMILLION, Lowell told me, he’d sat for several hours next to a mail-order bride only a year older than he was and just arrived from the Philippines. Her name was Luya. She’d shown him the photo of the man she was marrying. Lowell could think of nothing good to say about a man who wouldn’t even meet her at the airport, so he’d said nothing.
Another man on the bus asked her if she was in the business; neither she nor Lowell knew what that meant. And another man leaned in from the seat behind, eyes darting, pupils enormous, to tell them that the lead levels in breast milk were part of a deliberate plot. Women didn’t want to be tied down to house and family anymore. If their milk was toxic, that’d be just the excuse they’d been waiting for. “They all want to wear the pants,” the man said.
“I’m seeing so much of America today,” Luya kept telling Lowell in nervously accented English. It became a personal catchphrase for him—whenever things were not to his liking, he’d say that—I’m seeing so much of America today.
I went back to my apartment. It was a chilly walk. Ghosts of Fern and Lowell swirled around me, all ages, all moods, appearing and disappearing in the fog. I moved slowly to give myself time to recover from Lowell’s visit and from Lowell’s departure. And also, truth be told, to delay seeing Harlow.
I didn’t want to be worrying over Harlow. She shouldn’t have been the very last thing Lowell said to me. She should have been the very last thing on my mind. But once I got home, there she would be, lying in my bed and needing to be dealt with.
I didn’t like to think of Lowell as one of those guys who has sex with a girl and then immediately ditches her. Leaving without a word was just Lowell’s thing and nothing personal. Harlow could join the club.
In Lowell’s defense, he’d struck me as crazy. Real, run-out-of-medication crazy. I know I haven’t conveyed that. I’ve made Lowell sound more lucid than I found him. I did so out of love. But I’m trying to be nothing but honest here. And no one is helped by this evasion, least of all Lowell.
So, out of love, let me try again. The whole time we were with Harlow, he’d seemed perfectly ordinary, a completely believable pharmaceutical rep, which is what he’d told Harlow and maybe really was, who knows? The things that disturbed me all happened later, when we were alone at Bakers Square.
It wasn’t the flashes of anger—he’d been angry for as long as I could remember, a foot-stamping, middle-finger-thrusting, boy-shaped storm. I was used to that. His fury was my nostalgia.
No, this was something that looked less mad and more madness. It was subtle and deniable; I could pretend not to see it, which is what I wanted very much to do. But even after ten years empty of data, I knew Lowell. I knew his body language as well as I once knew Fern’s. There was something wrong in the way his eyes moved. Something wrong in the way he held his shoulders, worked his mouth. Maybe crazy isn’t quite the right word, after all—too internal. Maybe traumatized is better. Or unstable. Lowell appeared unstable in the most literal sense, like someone who’s been pushed off his balance.
So I would just explain that to Harlow. He’s not a cad, I’d tell her. He’s just unstable. She, of all people, should understand.
Then I put Harlow out of my mind so that Fern would have more room there. Enough with the tears and regrets. Lowell had said that Fern was my job now. Hadn’t she always been so? Past time to do my job.
Periodic reports were all well and good; our Fern could not be left in a cage in a lab. But Lowell had been trying for ten years to free her. He’d come up against any number of problems—how to take her quietly (and now Hazel) and whom to ask for help and how to keep their whereabouts secret so they wouldn’t be instantly identified and returned. The few chimp refuges operating in the U.S. were maxed out and none of them would take a stolen pair of animals if they knew they were doing so.
Where to take her would have been an enormous problem even if she hadn’t needed to be hidden. The financial difficulties were huge; the danger in introducing two new chimps, one of them a child, into an established troop severe. How could I possibly succeed where Lowell, so much smarter, better connected, and more ruthless, had failed? And would Fern really wish to be uprooted again, taken again from the people and chimps that she’d come to know? Lowell had told me she had good friends at the lab now.
I suspected that all these problems could be solved with cash. Lots of cash. Making-a-movie or starting-a-foundation kinds of cash. You’ll-never-see-a-tenth-of-that kinds of cash.
So many problems, however infinitely varied they first appear, turn out to be matters of money. I can’t tell you how much this offends me. The value of money is a scam perpetrated by those who have it over those who don’t; it’s the Emperor’s New Clothes gone global. If chimps used money and we didn’t, we wouldn’t admire it. We’d find it irrational and primitive. Delusional. And why gold? Chimps barter with meat. The value of meat is self-evident.
By now I’d reached my own street. There were three cars parked in front of the apartment house and one had its interior lights on. I could see the driver, a hulking shadow in the lighted cab. My spider sense was tingling. FBI. How close they’d come to catching Lowell. How terrible I would feel if I’d talked him into staying.
Then I looked more closely at the car. An ancient Volvo, white once upon a time. The scrapings of a bumper sticker that someone had committed to and then thought better of, with only the letter V remaining, or else half a W. I knocked on the passenger window and slid inside when the door unlocked. It was warmer in there and smelled gross but with a minty overlay, like morning breath on Altoids. The light was on because the driver was reading—a large book, Intro to Biology. He was stalking his girlfriend and studying for his finals at the same time. He was multitasking. “Good morning, Reg,” I said.
“Why are you up so early?”
“I’ve been off with my brother. Eating pie.” What could be more innocent, more rosily American than that? “What’re you doing here?”
“Losing my self-respect.”
I patted his arm. “You did well to keep that for as long as you did,” I told him.
• • •
OBVIOUSLY, THIS WAS awkward. I’d told Reg on the phone the night before that Harlow wasn’t here. His presence on the street, his little stakeout, openly called me a liar. It would have been nice to have the time to feel the insult, marvel at the crazy of his jealousy, but it was all spoiled by the fact that Harlow might, at any moment, walk out the front door.
“Go home,” I said. “She’s probably already back there now, wondering where the hell you are.”
He looked at me hard, then looked away. “I think we’re breaking up. I think I’m breaking up with her.”
I made some noncommittal sound. A brief sort of hum. He’d been breaking up with her the first time I’d laid eyes on him and most times since. “Hathos,” I offered finally and then thoughtfully provided the definition. “The pleasure you get from hating something.”
“That’s it exactly. I want a normal girlfriend. Someone restful. You know anyone like that?”
“I’d volunteer if you were rich,” I told him. “Like hugely rich. I could be restful for massive sums of money.”
“Flattered. But no.”
“Then stop wasting my time and go home.” I got out of the car and went into the apartment. I didn’t watch to see what he’d do next, because I thought it would look suspicious if I did. I took the stairs.
There was no sign of Ezra, it being too early in the morning to shoulder the burdens of apartment management. Todd was still out. My bedroom door still closed. Madame Defarge was on the couch with her legs folded friskily over her head. I carried her with me into Todd’s bedroom and fell asleep holding her. I had a dream where Reg and I argued as to which was more humane, the guillotine or the electric chair. I don’t remember who took what side. I just remember that Reg’s position, whichever it was, was not tenable.