Animal Planet Part Five

PART FIVE

NEW YORK STORY

1. DOMESTIC HELP

FOR A SINGLE girl on her own in New York, Wanda the Gorilla didn’t think she was doing half bad. According to the slick women’s magazines, her wants were few–a boyfriend, an apartment, and a job–and she already possessed all three.

Employed as a below-minimum-wage au pair and general roustabout for the Garfields on the Upper East Side, Wanda lived in their house, bathed and fed their children, vacuumed their carpets, cleaned their windows, and, whenever Mrs. Garfield and the kids weren’t around, allowed Mr. Garfield to perform hasty sex upon her on a rattly aluminum cot in the back hallway.

“You bitch!” Stan Garfield liked to expostulate at the exact moment of fulfillment. “You bitch, you bitch, you hairy animal bitch–”

“There there,” Wanda soothed, wrapping long, recently shampooed arms around her chubby and unillustrious lover. “It’s okay, baby. Come to Wanda and let yourself go.”

Sometimes, in his frenzy, Stan knocked the struts out from under them and the aluminum cot went crashing to the ground.

Other times he expended himself with a sigh, and crashed his pale sweaty face against Wanda’s bosom, snoring faintly. Wanda loved these moments best of all. The simple warmth of Stan, without any of his complexity or shrewdness.

“I can’t say I actually love him,” Wanda told her analyst, Dr. Bernie Reikoff, on 53d and Madison. “But he’s really not as bad as he sounds. He’s just got a lot of anger inside on account of his father, who abandoned him to live with his crazy mother when he was only fourteen.”

“Does he ever make you angry, Wanda?” Dr. Reikoff’s voice was unobtrusive, almost like an afterthought. “We’ve spoken a lot about Stan’s anger. But what about yours?”

“I’m not an angry person, Dr. Reikoff.” Wanda brushed cracker crumbs from her blouse. Due to the sofa’s slight incline, she usually spent entire sessions gazing into the furry abundance of her own cleavage. “I’m a loving, nurturing sort of person. A lover, Dr. Reikoff. A mother and a friend. Sometimes, you know, I wish I could be angry, but I’m not angry, not really. I guess the closest I ever get sometimes is maybe disappointment. I mean, I get disappointed in myself.”

“Is it because you think you’re not good enough?” Dr. Reikoff’s voice got excited sometimes, a little out of breath. “Inadequacy, Wanda? Low self-esteem? Do you ever wake up in the night and just wonder? What the hell am I doing here? Why can’t I ever feel good about myself, or my occupation, or my life?”

At times like this, Dr. Reikoff’s voice slipped along on a stream of warm air. He almost sounded exultant. Until, of course, Wanda brought him quickly back to earth.

“I’m plenty good enough, Doctor,” Wanda steadfastly informed him. She folded her arms on her chest. There were places Dr. Reikoff kept trying to take her that she simply refused to go. “Plenty good enough, I promise. It’s just that sometimes I look around me, you know, at Manhattan and all that? The expensive shops, the noisy traffic, the millions of people hustling so hard to get by? And I feel, I don’t know, just disappointed, I guess. What more can I say? I look around me at this crazy city and I keep asking myself, Why did it take me so long to get here? How could I have wasted so much of my life anywhere else?”

***

WANDA WASN’T A success, exactly, but plenty of her friends were doing a lot worse. There was Bobo, for example, the hatcheck girl at La Coupole. Bobo was an orange orangutan forced to wear too-tight skirts and too-sheer silky halter-tops while fat male customers pinched her behind and made lewd jokes about her cleavage. And as if that weren’t enough, whenever Bobo didn’t flirt with the customers, they stuck her with lousy tips.

“My boss,” Bobo frequently complained during Girls’ Night Out, which convened the first Tuesday of every month, “is the stingiest bastard on the face of this stingy little island.” Bobo was digging into a plate of angel-hair pasta at Angela’s on First and 63rd.

“Stingy?” interjected Betty the Baboon, a fork-lift operator down at Pier 49. “We haven’t got Disability where I work. We haven’t got decent Medical. Don’t try telling me about getting ripped off, Bobo. Until you’ve operated a forklift, honey, you don’t know what work is. ”

Bobo was tearing open hunks of french bread and stuffing them into her mouth. Betty was sucking down oysters and shaking Parmesan cheese over everything like holy water from a broken censer.

“Oh yeah?” Bobo said, spilling flaky yellow crumbs everywhere. “The government taxes my tips, and that’s like all I earn. And my boss, Mr. Davenport, charges me ‘cleaning services’ for my so-called uniform, which means I get twenty bucks docked out of my check every week because his wife threw my miniskirt in the washer-dryer!”

“The men in this town are all bastards!”

“My studio apartments infested with lice!”

“I can’t afford to visit the doctor! And I think my last stupid fling with Pablo the cook got me pregnant!”

Girls’ Night Out, Wanda often reflected, was a little like Professional Wrestling with food. As Bobo and Betty grew more depressed, they ordered additional pasta and guzzled more bottles of dry white wine. Wanda, who had spent all day shopping and beautifying, was wearing a new pearl gray cashmere sweater, a floral patterned chiffon scarf, and wool gabardine trousers.

“Now, girls, quit moaning,” Wanda told them, and began brushing her thick, callused fingernails with a dusty orange emery board. “Try looking on the bright side for once, will you? We’re in New York! The Big Apple! The city that never sleeps! Sure, we work hard for a living–but that means we play hard, too!” Wanda was always carried away by her vision of the burning life: movies, dancing, penthouse apartments, rooftop terraces, and twenty-four-hour private nightclubs. This was not a zoo, New York told Wanda again and again. This was the Real World.

Wanda was leaning across the table and shaking her emery board at Bobo when she felt a long attenuate hush reach across the restaurant.

Wanda had just finished saying, “Now I want you girls to stop moaning and start living,” when a firm, well-manicured hand gripped her right shoulder. Startled, Wanda snapped the emery board in two.

She turned.

It was the proprietor and maitre d’, Luigi Chong. Luigi was a Taiwanese refugee who had come to New York in the late Eighties, made his millions, and then married a famous Italian screen actress, to whom he had dedicated this First Avenue restaurant.

Wanda felt something slip in her stomach, something that made her feel abruptly ashamed. Around her, the table was a shambles. Bobo and Betty were matted with swirled spaghetti, linguine, vermicelli, and pesto, like something on display at the Museum of Modern Art. Bread baskets and wine bottles were overturned, and Betty had spilled bolognese all down the front of her new denim jumpsuit.

“I never thought I’d have to make this rule, girls,” Luigi Chong told them in a clipped, methodical voice, as if he were toting up figures on an abacus. “But from now on, we don’t serve animals in this restaurant no more.”

***

WEDNESDAYS WERE THE bleakest mornings of the entire work-week. Wanda would awaken at five, and lumber down to the parking garage, where she washed herself with a long green garden hose and a bottle of smelly flea shampoo. Then she pulled on her simplest white cloth housedress, devoured half a sack of Kibbles, and started the children’s breakfasts. Eggs, fresh fruit, and cereal. Orange juice and a honey-bran muffin. By this point, the children were already sitting at the table, attired in matching silk pajamas and regarding Wanda with something that was either affection or misplaced courtesy.

“Good morning, Wanda,” the children said. Luke was a six-year-old boy, Dolores a four-year-old girl.

“Good morning, children,” Wanda said. The small, ugly, utterly hairless children reminded Wanda of her own far-more-handsome offspring, Ariadne and Rambo. The last Wanda heard, both had been sold to a clothing manufacturer in Austin, where they were being used to contravene the latest excuse for child labor laws.

Luke and Dolores each took a spoonful of cereal, chewed, and swallowed. Together they watched Wanda slump against the kitchen counter and sigh into the pale pink palm of her hand.

“What’s the matter, Wanda?” the children asked. “Why are you so sad?”

“I’m not sad,” Wanda responded glumly. “Aunt Wanda is just a little sleepy, that’s all.”

“If you’re sleepy, Wanda, why don’t you go back to bed? You don’t have to go to school like we do. You could lie in bed all day and watch cartoons.”

Sadness escalated into Wanda’s face. Lying in bed watching cartoons was Wanda’s favorite thing in the entire world.

“Wanda can’t just lie around, because she has to get you both off to school. Then Wanda has to make more breakfast for when your parents wake up.”

The children contemplated this information for a moment. It seemed at once familiar and incomprehensible, like a foreign language or subway graffiti.

“Oh,” the children said, blinking in unison. “Wanda has to work. Of course.”

Then, spoons raised, they launched bluntly into their honeydew melons.

And when they were finished, politely offered their leavings to Wanda.

***

AFTER HUSTLING THE children off to a uniformed chauffeur, Wanda sat at the kitchen table for a while, desultorily chewing her melon rinds. She heard buried movement from the master bedroom: two voices whispering, just loud enough for Wanda’s finely attuned animal ears to hear.

“Oh no,” Mrs. Garfield said. “Please, Stan. The housekeeper. Not now.”

Wanda fixed french toast and plenty of coffee. And by the time she brought in breakfast on the slatted wooden trays, they were sitting up in their rumpled pajamas, trying to look innocent. Mrs. Garfield was wearing cosmetics. Mr. Garfield was wearing a scowl.

“Please clean the drapes today,” Mrs. Garfield said, warily dipping her knife into the low-fat butter. “Please water the plants. And of course all the windows, outside and in. Do you know you’re fabulous, Wanda? Absolutely fabulous, you really are. All my friends, when they hire a domestic? They ask for a gorilla but they can’t find one anywhere. I do believe Mr. Garfield and I have the only decent gorilla-domestic in New York City, and Wanda? You have no idea what a terrific subject of conversation you are at parties.”

Mr. Garfield was sitting up in bed beside his wife, but his expression was a million miles away.

“More butter,” Mr. Garfield said. “More syrup. More toast. More coffee. I’m starved.”

He was clanking his pale knife around in the small white ceramic butter pot. He never looked twice at Wanda when his wife was in the room, but Wanda could always tell what he was thinking.

“And don’t forget, Wanda,” continued the nattery Mrs. Garfield. “I’ll be in meetings again all day. But Stan, as usual, will be home early for lunch.”

2. ON-LINE

“YOU’RE A NO-bullshit kind of animal, Charlie, so let me put it to you straight. I don’t care if you like me. I don’t care if you respect me. The way I see it, I’m a top New York commercial representative and you’re a first-rate commercial property who has recently been deemed highly profitable by the media-powers-that-be. Are you following me so far, Charlie? Or am I going a little too fast for you?”

“I’m afraid you’re not going too fast for me at all,” Charlie said thinly, and sipped his sparkly Perrier. “In fact, I kind of wish you were.”

“Good. Because I think we’re on the same wavelength, Charlie. I think we speak the same language. I think we’re going to be very, very good for each other. I think this could be the start of a beautiful friendship.”

Bunny took a long, satisfying sip from her Diet Coke as if she had just finished concluding a complex series of business negotiations and was now sealing the deal. I like you, you need money, I’ll consume you. Fair?

She put down her depleted aluminum can.

“I’ve booked you on Donahue, Oprah!, Montel Williams, Geraldo, Tom Snyder, Dick Cavett, and the Late Show, with David Letterman. I’ve hired your p.r. firm, your masseuse, your cosmetician, and your astral projectionist. I’ve taken out ads, signed merchandising agreements, and even stirred up a little fervor in Hollywood. How do you like the sound of this, Charlie?” Bunny held up her hands and sited through their lens, as if her mighty vision was being projected across the entire universe. “Dustin Hoffman as you, Charlie. Gene Hackman as Buster the Penguin. Demi Moore as Muk Luk. And in my part–who else? I see Meryl Streep, don’t you, Charlie? Don’t you see Meryl Streep in my part? Be honest, Charlie, because I promise. I’ll always be honest with you.”

Charlie was gazing around Bunny’s office with wide reticence. A long mahogany desk. Shiny books on shelves. Futuristic-looking telephone devices.

Outside in the reception area, Charlie could dimly hear Bunny’s new secretary taking calls.

“I’m sorry,” the secretary said, over and over again. “But Ms. Fairchild is in a meeting right now.”

Charlie felt expectation gather in the room like bad weather.

“Yeah sure,” Charlie said finally. “Meryl Streep. Or maybe Liza.”

Bunny expired a long sigh. It took a lot out of her.

“Or maybe Liza,” Bunny said distantly.

Charlie was sitting on a plush leather sofa, watching a familiar book gleam on the glass coffee table. Charlie leaned forward, resisting the sofa’s luxurious gravity, and reached for it.

My Life as a Rebel, by Charlie the Crow, as told to Bernie Weinstock. Worldco Books. $28.95.

Charlie put the book back down and, with a curt flutter of wings, traversed the spacious office and landed in front of the very large unornamented bookshelf. He always liked to see books arranged on a shelf, even when he didn’t like to read what was in them.

“I represent Mickey Mouse, Charlie. I represent Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge. I represent all the Warner Brothers cartoon characters, with the exception of Daffy. Remember that talking rabbit book that was such a big hit ten years back? Mine, Charlie, all mine. I represent mole books, wolf books, fox books; you name a furry species, Charlie, and I probably represent it. Is it any wonder, then, why your publishers came to me first? Because with all these famous animals under my belt, someone like you, Charlie, well, you’re still quite an exception. You want to know what makes you such a fabulous exception, Charlie? Well, I’ll tell you. Because I’ll always be honest with you, Charlie. And I hope you’ll always be honest with me, too.”

Charlie heard a Dopplering siren fifty stories below. An ambulance or a cop.

“Sure, Bunny,” Charlie said. Up here in these gleaming offices, Charlie was higher than he’d ever been before. “Why don’t you tell me. What makes me such a big exception, huh?”

Bunny smiled. Her capped teeth flashed.

“Because you’re real, Charlie. All those other animals–they were just cartoons, or make believe. But you’re like totally, awesomely real.”

Down there in the street, the sirens were wailing louder, entangling among themselves like errant streamers.

Charlie gazed out the fitted window. There was no visible way out.

“Yeah, Bunny, maybe,” Charlie said. “But when you get right down to it? You’re pretty goddamn real yourself.”

3. THE GOOD LIFE

CHARLIE’S EXPENSE ACCOUNT had relocated Buster, Muk Luk, and Rick to the stupendous grandeur of the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. All day long they occupied their perfumed penthouse, lulled into inactivity by the hard, clean beds and opulent air-conditioning. Room-service trolleys were parked around the room like patients in an ER. Foamy neon filled the curtains, while outside in the Square mangy disreputables gathered like flies. Animals without arms or legs. Animals without eyes or ears. Animals with serious drug and alcohol dependencies. Animals with guns and knives. It was no longer the wilderness, Buster and his friends often reflected. It was just the jungle, everywhere they looked.

While Buster and Rick absently munched french fries and onion rings, Muk Luk, stripped down to her hairy legs and smelly socks, watched direct-access pornography on cable TV.

“Muk Luk find this very intriguing,” Muk Luk said, her attention growing weirdly bifurcated at times. “Get your little butt over here, Penguin. Let’s try this on for size.”

***

SOMETIMES, THOUGH, MUK Luk reached out for Buster in the middle of the night and didn’t find him there.

“Penguin!” Muk Luk would cry, snapping on the bedside table lamp. “Muk Luk has needs!”

Sudden illumination prevailed. But only a lumpy indentation marked the spot where Buster used to be.

(And Muk Luk could almost hear the click of the penthouse door swinging shut on hissing pneumatic hinges.)

Muk Luk sat up in bed. She flicked off the color TV.

“Oh, Penguin,” Muk Luk moaned, and reached for her menthol cigarettes. “Muk Luk misses you already!”

Then, sitting up all night smoking in the harshly lit penthouse, she waited for Buster to come home.

***

IT WAS AS if everywhere Buster hurried reminded him of the places he had already been. Theater marquees, magazine stands, novelty shops, and movie posters all aspired to the same brute solvency. LU$T FOR $ALE, NAKED PASSIONS, EATING VERONICA, BONKING RAOUL.

“Hey, Penguin! Wanta buy a watch?”

“Hey there, buddy. Canya spare a hundred bucks–just kidding. How ’bout a quarter, then?”

“Make you happy, Penguin. Round the world. Blow jobs. You name it.”

“Blow jobs, Penguin. Round the world. You name it. Wanta buy a watch?”

There were nights when it seemed as if the entire world was up for sale. Watches, books, blow jobs, movies, hotdogs, papaya juice, used CDs, pretzels, honey-roasted peanuts, car stereos, and socks. Sometimes the enveloping urgency terrified Buster, pulling his attention in every direction at once. He would turn down a sudden alleyway just to escape the neon and find himself lost in time among primitive cardboard huts and senseless, zombielike animals draped in torn newspapers and green plastic garbage bags.

“I’ll do anything for five bucks, Penguin.”

“Blow jobs.”

“Clean needles.”

“Blow jobs really cheap.”

“Animal love, Penguin, and I mean really animal. Or better yet–how ’bout a blow job?”

Eventually Buster’s panic consumed itself. He would stop hurrying. He would stop trying to get away. He would wander among the shanties with a sort of forlorn inattention. Huddled figures in doorways. Crack vials strewn across broken pavement. Shattered wine and beer bottles, broken hypodermics, puddles of pale urine. More and more of it, Buster thought, freely distributing whatever change he was carrying. It never stops, never stops. Ultimately he adjourned to a corner food stand and ordered a papaya juice and a Polish sausage on a white paper plate. Since everything was for sale in New York, nothing was worthwhile. You could buy a Sony Walkman as cheaply as a human life, a burger as readily as a switchblade.

The more you sell, Buster thought, the less you have. And the less you have, the less you’re worth. Simple supply-side economics, as far as the eye could see.

It was a world that made sense to nobody but itself.

And for the life of him, Buster couldn’t find a Way out.

SOME NIGHTS, ADRIFT among the urgent marquees and steaming animal waste, Buster heard strange rumors taking shape in the night.

“Charlie sold out.”

“Charlie’s been co-opted.”

“Charlie’s on Donahue. Charlie’s selling Sugar-Frosted Flakes.”

“I never trusted that bird for one minute.”

“He’s a sellout.”

“He’s a reactionary.”

“He’s a narc.”

“I’d like to meet that coon in a dark alley some night. No moon, brother. No fucking moon.”

Every time Buster heard Charlie’s name, he experienced a little flash of recognition, like a gleaming pinball ricochetting off a score bar.

“Charlie’s in People. Charlie’s living in a penthouse apartment, surrounded by armed guards. Mr. Big says Charlie’s betrayed the Revolution. Mr. Big says Charlie’s the anti-Christ. We can’t have freedom until we get rid of that bird–that’s what Mr. Big says. Charlie’s got to be stopped. Charlie’s got to be revealed for who he really is. A cultural accomplice, a political turncoat, a recidivist reactionary, and a very selfish bird.”

Strange shadowy creatures approached Buster with smudged newspapers and badly lithographed broadsheets. They urged him to subscribe to Insurrection Weekly, The Guillotine Gazette, Animal Action!, and Mr. Big Speaks. The articles were filled with nothing but rage and invective, the only things animals agreed on anymore. After so many generations living against the grain, animals had no idea what they wanted. They only knew what they didn’t want. And they didn’t want it ever again.

“We don’t want Western Culture!” declared the pseudonymous and widely regarded Mr. Big. “We don’t want cages, we don’t want keepers, we don’t want jobs at McDonald’s, and we don’t want the status quo. And when it comes right down to it, we don’t want life. Not ours or theirs. If we can’t live our lives, then they won’t live theirs! No no no! No no no!”

The negativity resounded in Buster’s head like a ritual incantation. No no no. No no no. He saw the neon, the drizzling smog, the intermittent public services, the foreign cabbies, the hotdog vendors and sex shops, and underneath it all the same relentless indomitable chant, pounding underneath his feet in the gurgling sewers, hissing from fry grills and booming from boom boxes.

No no no. No no no.

When Buster beat his exhausted retreat back to the Grand Hyatt around three or four A.M., he could distinguish the light of Muk Luk’s bedside lamp all the way up on the thirtieth floor, but it didn’t worry him anymore. After a night of so much anonymous rage, Buster didn’t mind the idea of being loved. He even looked forward to it a little.

Letting himself in with his key card, he felt grizzly, spotty, and unshaven. Muk Luk was sitting up in bed, leafing aimlessly through Frozen Food: The Magazine of Arts and Entertainment for Eskimos Living in New York.

“It’s ugly out there, Muk Luk,” Buster told her. The room seemed terribly wide around him, and Muk Luk impossibly far away. “The world’s going to hell in a handcar.”

Muk Luk shut her magazine on her thumb and pulled off her eyeglasses. She regarded Buster for one slow beat, then another.

All the love, Muk Luk was thinking. All the love I’ve never received.

“The world never been no free-fish palace, Penguin,” Muk Luk told him. She pulled back the sheets and made room. “Now take off your clothes and come to bed.”

4. CHANGING TIMES

EVERY FEW MORNINGS or so, a letter arrived in the post for Wanda, its edges smudged with worrying. The envelope was scented with something that smelled like fresh mulch. The handwriting was coarse and lopsided.

Dear Wanda, the letter began,

I miss you. This is your husband Roy speaking. Do you remember me?

I live in Georgia. I work on a big farm. I pick cotton, beans, and peas. I like my job. Sometimes.

I know you don’t love me anymore. I know I am stupid. I’m sorry I am boring. I’m sorry all I ever talked about is bananas and organized sports. I’m just not interested in much, that’s all.

Will you come visit me? Do you know where our kids are? I want to send them nice birthday presents. I feel guilty all the time. I feel like I’ve done something terribly wrong.

I wish you would come visit me in Georgia. They have really nice bananas here.

Love,

Roy

Whenever Wanda received a communication from her former spouse, she cried for hours, even while she was mopping the floors or ironing the sheets. Big fat salty gorilla tears, splashing the ivory tabletops and carved marble figurines. Hearing Roy’s voice was like lapsing into a coma. She remembered the dull fatty absence of him, sitting beside her in the big cage, munching bananas and farting all the time. Having Roy far away was almost like having Roy near.

Lumbering through the flat with her cleaning rags and Formula 409, Wanda didn’t even hear Mr. Garfield come through the front door and begin slamming his briefcase around. Eventually, though, she did hear him transacting his eternal business on the living room’s cordless telephone.

“I don’t want to hear anymore crap about primary and secondary rights, Bunny!” When Stan Garfield grew especially intense, he filled the house with heat and pressure, like a stroke about to happen. “All I want you to tell me is that you’re lifting the injunction. That I can send those goddamn union apes back to the docks. That I can finally start unloading those sixty-odd tons of Charlie the Crow video games down at Sag Harbor. Don’t give me that ‘It’s only business’ crap, Bunny. Don’t try telling me it ain’t fucking ethical. If the kids want to buy a Charlie the Crow fucking aneurysm, than I’m just the fucking guy that’s going to sell it to them, and I don’t care what sort of bohunk deal you’ve cut with those assholes at Worldco.”

Stan’s voice never really paused so much as encountered blunt obstacles. Then Stan made grunty, whistling breaths of impatience, as if he were pushing those obstacles out of his way.

“Why, Bunny? You ask me fucking why? Because I fucking love kids, Bunny. Because I want to make the kids of this fucking world really, really happy!”

***

STAN EITHER SLAMMED the phone down or hurled it through the front window. Then he came pounding through the apartment filled with intention like a heat-seeking missile, and wherever he found Wanda he took her. In the playroom. In the kitchen. On the living room sofa. Or on the billiard table in the den.

“It’s okay, baby,” Wanda told him. She found his rage rather endearing, even though he made love a lot like Frankie in Blue Velvet. No matter how hard he pounded at Wanda, she made him feel at home against her thick muscles and hard, indurate skin. Like any true mother, Wanda had always been attracted to bad boys.

“I hate Worldco,” Stan Garfield raged against Wanda’s sagging breasts. His slacks were tangled around his thighs, exposing buttocks that were almost as round and hairy as Roy’s. “I hate the fucking EPA. I hate Kid Watch. I hate unions. And I hate Bunny Fairchild. I want to kill them, Wanda. I want to kill them all and run away with you to Africa. I want to sleep in the trees. I want to eat really fresh fruit salads and take dumps in the green grass. I want to breathe right for the first time in my life. I want to go with the flow, Wanda. Do you think that will ever happen to me? Do you think that I’ll ever, you know, calm down for one minute and just go with the flow?”

Wanda’s hard chitinous nails scouted routinely through Stan’s thinning hair for lice.

“Africa’s filled with oil refineries and cardboard box manufacturers, baby,” she told him. “If you want to go to a movie, you have to drive for hundreds of miles, and then it’s usually just some first-run Hollywood garbage. No foreign films, no Off-Off Broadway, no libraries or bookstores, no all-night delis and laundromats. I think you’d miss the Big Apple, Stan. I think we both would.”

But Stan Garfield, true to his nature, had already lapsed into his irregular snores and fetid dreaming. And in his deepest, calmest dreams, he dreamed of the Africa that Wanda never wanted to see again.

***

FOR THOSE BRIEF moments each weekday afternoon when Stan Garfield belonged to her alone, Wanda didn’t need anything or anybody else to be happy. For the rest of the day she worked with renewed vigor. She dusted, mopped, polished, baked, and basted with the best of them. She scrubbed crevices and hard-to-reach spots in the hardwood floors with an old linty toothbrush. She wiped the TV screens with Pledge and a damp dust cloth until they shined. And late every afternoon, when the bathrooms were so immaculate she could eat her lunch off the toilet seat (which, as it turned out, she often liked to do), Wanda departed for her daily ration of “alone time.” The pretense was shopping, but the actuality was much, much more.

Wanda aerobicized at a gym and beautified at a cosmetician’s. She had her hair done, her legs waxed, her eyebrows plucked, and her nails sculpted. She jogged in the park, swam laps at the Y, and consulted her personal numerologist. Then, just when she was feeling really good about how she looked and who she wanted to be, she dashed off late for her four-thirty appointment with Dr. Reikoff in midtown.

Dr. Reikoff, however, was growing less supportive of Wanda by the session.

“When are you going to wake up and smell the coffee, Wanda?” Dr. Reikoff tried to be impartial, but after thirty minutes of Wanda’s unremitting optimism, he grew so frustrated he was fit to burst. “You’re a bleeding gorilla, for chrissakes. You weigh three hundred and fifty pounds in your bare feet. You’re not Lana Turner. You’re not even Shelley Winters. You’re a big fat hairy primate, and I don’t care how many showers you take every day, or how often you shave your armpits, or how heavily you douse yourself with industrial-strength cologne, you still smell. I’m saying these things because I respect you, Wanda. I’m saying these things because I care.”

Wanda put on her bravest face, but she couldn’t prevent it from leaking. Within minutes, she was snorting her way through an entire Traveler’s Pack of Kleenex two-ply.

“He loves me, Dr. Reikoff.” She couldn’t even look him in the eye. “And Stan’s a good man, really. He’s just filled with so much anger he’s forgotten how to show it.”

“He treats you like the barracks whore, Wanda.”

“I have a home with the Garfields, Dr. Reikoff. What more could I ask? I’m living on Park Avenue–me, a divorced gorilla–and it’s the wealthiest zip code in the entire country.”

“You’re slave labor, Wanda. You work for less than minimum wage and you sleep in the hall on an aluminum cot. They’re not doing you any favors, Wanda, can’t you see that? You’re just animal surplus to them. You’re just a piece of reheatable meat. Let me ask you something, Wanda. And let’s keep this between you and me, okay?”

At this point, Dr. Reikoff was sitting on the edge of his padded swivel chair, leaning directly into Wanda’s personal space. His voice was strained. He was glancing nervously over his shoulders.

“Have you ever heard of the animal-rights movement, Wanda?”

Wanda felt a sudden chill penetrate between her shoulder blades.

“What are you talking about, Dr. Reikoff?” She sat up on the edge of the couch. All the hairs were alert on the back of her neck.

“Don’t be frightened, Wanda. This is Dr. Reikoff, remember? I’ve only got your best interests at heart. And so do the good people at Animal Action! Here, let me show you a few of our brochures…”

Like a flash Wanda was out of there. She threw her keys into her handbag and swung out the office window on a curtain railing. She scurried along one ledge, then leapt crosswise to another. The breeze in her face. The wheeling gravity of the high buildings all around her.

“Wanda!” Dr. Reikoff shouted. He was leaning out the window with a distraught expression, reminding Wanda a little of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. “Just read one teensy little article, please–that’s not asking too much, is it? His name’s Mr. Big and he wants to help you, Wanda. Mr. Big wants to help us all very much!”

5. POINT COUNTERPOINT

CHARLIE BEGAN DRINKING. Not just beer, but the indubitably hard stuff. Bushmills, Stolichnaya, Gordon’s, Johnnie Walker, Jim Beam. He started at breakfast and didn’t taper off until around three A.M., at which time he collapsed heavily sedated on the sofa’s plush leather upholstery, gazing blearily through his penthouse window at the city filled with light. The Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the World Trade Center, the nebula-like blotches of Washington Square and Central Park.

“Nine A.M. meeting with the State Commissioner of Parks and Recreation.”

Susie, Charlie’s personal secretary, was glossy with lipstick and nylons. Every morning she arrived with Charlie’s daily schedule attached to a solid wooden clipboard.

“At ten you’ll be interviewed by Regis and Kathie Lee. There’ll be an early lunch sponsored by your publishers, meetings with the Serial and Film Rights Departments, then a quick air–conditioned ride back to your penthouse for mild sedatives and a late-afternoon nap. Later, of course, you’ll film your segment for tonight’s Larry King Live. The show’s topic is Honesty in Politics, and you’ll be discussing it with Larry’s other guests, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole and House Speaker Newt Gingrich.”

Because the culture industry had gradually eroded Charlie’s image down to a level at which he didn’t represent anything anymore, everybody wanted to meet him. Liberal congressmen, reactionary populists, religious extremists, foreign dignitaries, radical activists, TV newsreaders, corporate CEOs, and working-class union organizers. Day after day Charlie was chauffeured from one wet meal to another while the flashbulbs popped and the news minicams hummed. And everywhere he went, Charlie carried a bottle in the vest pocket of his crisp linen sport coat. Dewar’s, perhaps, or Jameson’s. But never any ice, and never any mixer.

Opinion may have been divided, but it always shared the same flavor.

“Charlie’s a saint!” declared Paul Livingstone, the bespectacled New England commentator on Point Counterpoint. As a liberal, Paul Livingstone considered it his duty to be open-minded, and not to subscribe to any outmoded pseudo-liberal doctrines. For this reason he liked to refer to himself in the privacy of corporate boardrooms as a “neo-con.”

“Charlie’s the devil!” declaimed George Stephenson, a former Secretary of State who had betrayed the trust of the American public and, after being asked to step down, was offered large sums of money to brag about it on cable TV.

The pro-and-contra talking heads swiveled slowly in their chairs. Camera One caught the glassy glare of their eyes simultaneously.

“And this,” they said in unison, “is Point Counterpoint.”

Fuzzily anesthetized with premium-priced bourbon, Charlie sat between the talking heads and stared directly into the studio lights.

“Tea-tie-tumm. Tuh.” Charlie didn’t splutter because he was nervous. He spluttered because his mouth was out of practice with words. “Totalum. Totalizhashun, thash whud I’m tryin’ to shay.” Charlie gestured broadly with his frayed wings, as if he were directing traffic on a freeway. “I mean, wha’ good ish it, huh? If you’re free to shay anything but you’re, erp, excuzhe me. But language, right? The language you’re uzhen belongsh to shomebody elsh.”

As soon as Charlie finished talking, the director curtly signaled the cameramen, and Susie emitted a glorious little spark. The instant her Camera lit up, Susie lit up, too.

“Charlie wants to say thank you very much for having us here,” Susie told her hosts. “And Charlie says that if we want to save the world, then we have to be really good people. And if we want to be good people, then we have to watch out for the very bad people, or else. ”

Then, as soon as Susie finished presenting Charlie’s “statement of principles,” Paul and George really got going. They climbed up one side of him and down the other–journalistically speaking, of course.

“Charlie’s insincere!”

“Charlie’s a hero!”

“Charlie’s untrustworthy!”

“Charlie’s all-American!”

“Charlie’s approval ratings are really, really low!”

“Charlie’s approval ratings are really, really high!”

“What makes Charlie so perfect?”

“What makes Charlie so perfect?”

“Every American child should watch out that someone like Charlie doesn’t start hanging around their schoolyard.”

“Every American child should grow up to be just like Charlie and nobody else.”

Paul and George took turns standing up and taking pot shots at one another like dueling hillbillies. Meanwhile, Charlie ducked repeatedly into his underarm for fortifying doses of Seagram’s.

The debate clattered on for a few moments, then segued into a commercial.

“And as I’m sure Charlie will agree,” George Stephenson said, holding up a box of cookies, “when you’ve been out campaigning hard all day to save your country, there’s only one thing that’ll pick you up when you get back home. And that’s a really good box of cookies!”

“Cut!” the director yelled.

George and Paul began patting each other on the back and evading one another’s semi-earnest dinner invitations.

Charlie pulled himself upright in his chair, brushed fragments of lint from his chest, and tried to catch Susie’s attention.

“Excuzhe me, Shusie.”

Susie continued staring into Camera One, trying to remember who she used to be.

“Yes, Charlie?”

“I wash wonderin’, thash all.” The studio was starting to spin. Charlie tried turning his head against the current, but the spinning only changed declination. “How come I can’t shpeak for myshelf? How come you guysh keep re-interp, terpreting me all the time?”

Charlie looked around at the startled technicians and supervisors. Even Paul and George looked slightly aghast, as if one of them had just farted on nationwide TV.

“I’m sorry, Charlie. Are you serious?” But Susie’s shocked expression let Charlie know he wasn’t really serious. In fact, it let him know he wouldn’t be serious ever again.

“Speak for yourself, Charlie–are you kidding? Everybody knows animals can’t talk.”

6. FUGUE NARRATIVE

THERE WAS ONLY so much damage Charlie could do to himself before it got really boring, so one night he just packed up his things and split. A shirt, some shorts and socks, a can of fizzy lemonade, and a few dozen complimentary solid-gold Charlie the Crow commemorative coins produced recently by the Franklin Mint. Encapsulated by the penthouse’s thick resinous windows, standing in the glare of the faceted luminous city, Charlie took a bottle of Seagram’s from the bar and looked at it for a while. It seemed like the only thing he could count on anymore, and that was why he had to leave it behind.

He gently replaced the bottle in the cabinet, washed his face, and preened his feathers. He donned a pair of dark sunglasses and his old wool hat. Incognito was better, Charlie decided. It might not always be possible, but it was definitely better.

“We strive to know ourselves,” Charlie told himself as he ducked into the penthouse’s golden corridors. “But while we’re at it, somebody’s out there striving to know us first.” Charlie was trying to bolster his courage with language; it was the only protective garment he had ever known how to wear.

Outside, the corridors were empty. And so was the gloaming elevator.

And that’s just what made Charlie nervous.

The corporate pretense that nobody was around.

***

IT WAS PRETTY hard not to notice Buster right away. Disguised in his old sailor outfit, he was still just about the only penguin in Times Square.

“Sort of thought I’d run into you out here,” Buster said. He was paper-bagging a sixteen-ounce can of Bud and carrying his change of clothes in a lumpy white pillowcase. “I just don’t see you doing the celebrity thing for too long, you know?”

“Fame is great–if you don’t mind being somebody you don’t want to be around,” Charlie said. “Now come on, pal. Let’s go find some place that isn’t New York.”