The Children’s Zoo

Chuck and I ate lunch together almost every day. This was probably twenty-five years ago, but I remember it clearly. Something about the city skyline made me melancholy. Central Park South always depressed me—too many awnings, all those fancy doormen, all those tourists. Chuck ate barbecue potato chips and drank Coke; I ate a cheese sandwich. There were bald spots in the grass. A pretty young woman nearby was reading a big book, we wanted to know what it was. “Principles of Accounting,” Chuck said, after a good squint. Hmm. Not what we’d thought.

The smell of horse manure wafted over on a breeze from the hansom cabs parked on Fifty-Ninth Street, and sometimes we could hear the clopping hooves. I asked Chuck if he was filled with longing the way I was. A chronic longing I didn’t understand.

He nodded.

“What is it,” I asked, “what are we longing for?”

“There is only the longing,” he answered.

One lunch hour we were too depressed to sit down. We wandered over to the Tisch Children’s Zoo, where we came upon three little pigs eating shit. We patted them, smelled our hands afterward, and moved on to goats. Chuck noted that goats were particularly dumb, but delicious roasted. I told the goat never mind and it started eating my skirt through the fence. It was a pretty day.

On the way back to work I bought a paper snake on a stick for a dollar and Chuck grabbed it away, and practiced the wrist action, getting the snake to strike in the air all the way back to work, cheering us up.