Frank dropped by the Quiblers’ on a Saturday morning to pick up Nick and go to the zoo. He got there early and stood in the living room while they finished their breakfast. Charlie, Anna, and Nick were all reading as they ate, and so Joe stared at the back of his cereal box with a look of fierce determination, as if trying to crack the code of this staring business by sheer force of will. Seeing it Frank’s heart went out to him, and he circled the table and crouched by him to chat.
At the zoo Frank and Nick first attended a workshop devoted to learning how to knap rocks into blades and arrowheads. Frank had noticed this on the FONZ website and of course had been very interested, and Nick was up for anything. So they sat on the ground with a young ranger who reminded Frank of Robin. This man wandered around, crouching to show each cluster how to hit the cores with the breaker stones so that they would flake properly. With every good knap he yelled, “Yeah!” or “Good one!”
It was the same process used to make Frank’s Acheulian hand axe, although their modern results were less shapely, and of course the newly cracked stone looked raw compared to the patina that burnished the old axe’s broken surfaces. No matter—it was a joy to try, as satisfying as looking into a fire. It was one of those things you knew how to do the first time you tried it.
Frank was happily knapping away a protrusion on the end of a core, enjoying the clacks and chinks and the smell of sparks and rock dust in sunlight, when he and Nick both smashed their hands at the same time. Nick’s chin trembled and Frank growled as he clutched his throbbing thumb. “Oh man. My nail is going to be purple, dang it! What about yours?”
“Forefinger,” Nick said. “Middle knuckle.”
The ranger came over grinning. “That, gentlemen, is what we call the granite kiss. Anyone in need of a Band-Aid?”
Frank and Nick declined.
After they were done they went over to look at the gibbons and siamangs.
All the feral primates had either died or been returned to the zoo. This morning Bert and May and their surviving kids were out in the triangular gibbon enclosure. They only let out one family at a time. Frank and Nick joined the small crowd at the railing to observe. The people around them were mostly young parents with toddlers. “Mon-key! Mon-key!”
Bert and May were relaxing in the sun as they had so many times before, on a small platform just outside the tunnel to their inside room. Nothing in the sight of them suggested that they had spent much of the previous year running wild in Rock Creek Park. May was grooming Bert’s back, intent, absorbed, dexterous. Bert seemed zoned out. Never did they meet the gaze of their human observers. Bert shifted to get the back of his head under her fingers, and she immediately obliged, parting his hair and closely inspecting his scalp. Then something caused him to give her a light slap, and she caught his hand and tugged at it. She let go and climbed the fence to intercept one of their kids, and suddenly those two were playing tag. When they passed Bert he cuffed at them, so they turned around and gang-tackled him. When he had disentangled himself from the fray he swung up the fence to the south corner of the enclosure, where it was possible to reach through and pull leaves from a tree. He munched a leaf, fended off one of the passing kids with an expert backhand.
It seemed to Frank that they were restless. It wasn’t obvious; at first glance they appeared languid, melting into their positions even when hanging from the fence. So they looked mellow. But after a while it became evident that every ten minutes they were doing something else. Racing around the fence, eating, grooming, rocking; they never did anything for more than a few minutes.
Now the younger son raced around the top of the fence, then cast himself into space in a seemingly suicidal leap, but crashed into the canvas loop that crossed the cage just above the ground, hitting it with both arms and thus breaking his fall sufficiently to avoid broken bones. Clearly it was a leap he had made many times before, after which he always ran over to hit his dad.
Wrestling on the grass. Did Bert remember wrestling his elder son on that same spot? Did the younger son remember his brother? Their faces, even while tussling, were thoughtful and grave. They looked like animals who had seen a lot. This may have just been an accident of physiognomy.
Some teenagers came by and hooted inexpertly, hoping to set the animals off. “They only do that at dawn,” Nick reminded Frank; despite that, they joined the youths’ effort. The gibbons did not. The teenagers looked a bit surprised at Frank’s expertise. Oooooooooooop! Oop oop ooooop!
Now Bert and May rested on their porch. Bert looked at the empty food basket, one long-fingered thumbless hand idly grooming May’s stomach. She lay flat on her back, looking bored. From time to time she batted Bert’s hand. It looked like the stereotypical dynamic: male groping female who can’t be bothered. But when May got up she suddenly bent and shoved her butt at Bert’s face. He looked for a second, leaned in and licked her; pulled back; smacked his lips like a wine taster. No doubt he could tell exactly where she was in her cycle.
The humans above watched without comment. After a while Nick suggested checking out the tigers, and Frank agreed.
Walking down the path to the big cat island, the image of May grooming Bert stuck in Frank’s mind. White-cheeked gibbons were monogamous. Several primate species were. Bert and May had been a couple for over twenty years, more than half their lives. Bert was thirty-six, May thirty-two.
When a human couple first met, they presented a facade of themselves to the other, a performance of the part of themselves they thought made the best impression. If both fell in love, they entered a space of mutual regard, affection, lust; it swept them off their feet, yes, so that they walked on air, yes.
But if the couple then moved in together, they quickly saw more than just the performance that up to that point was all they knew. At this point they either both stayed in love, or one did while one didn’t, or they both fell out of love. Because reciprocity was so integral to the feeling, mostly one could say that they either stayed in love or they fell out of it. In fact, Frank wondered, could it even be called love if it were one-sided, or was that just some kind of need, or a fear of being alone, so that the one “still in love” had actually fallen out of love also, into denial of one sort or another? Frank had done that himself. No, true love was reciprocal; one-way love, if it existed at all, was some other emotion, like saintliness or generosity or devotion or goodness or pity or ostentation or virtue or need or fear. Reciprocal love was different from those. So when you fell in love with someone else’s presentation it was a huge risk, because it was a matter of chance whether on getting to know one another you both would stay in love with the larger, more various characters who emerged from behind the masks.
Bert and May were past that problem.
The swimming tigers were flaked out in their enclosure, lying like any other cats in the sun. Tigers were not monogamous. They were in effect solitaries, who went their own ways and crossed paths only to mate. Moms kicked out their cubs after a couple of years, and all went off on their own.
These two, however, had been thrown together, as if by fate. Swept out to sea in the same flood, rescued by the same ship, kept in the same enclosure. Now the male rested his big head on the female’s back. He licked her fur from time to time, then plopped his chin on her spine again.
Maybe there was a different way of coming to love. Spend a lot of time with a fellow traveler; get to know them across a large range of behaviors; then have that knowledge ripen into love.
The swimming tigers looked content. At peace. No primate ever looked that peaceful. Nick and Frank went to get snow cones. Frank always got lime; Nick got a mix of root beer, cherry, and banana.