The boy glanced down at her cart. There were fifty yams — she’d counted them out herself — six gallons of full-fat milk, and a five-pound block of cheese buried in its depths. All the bananas she could find, ranging in color from burnished green to putrescent black, were piled on top in a great towering pyramid that threatened to drop the bottom out of the thing. “They’ve got Italian chestnuts,” he offered, looking up again and showing off his teeth in that big tentative grin. “And in a month or so they’ll get those little torpedo-shaped things that come off the cactuses out west — prickly pear, that’s what they call them.”
She cocked her head to give him an appreciative look. “You’re very sweet,” she said, the lisp creeping back into her voice. “But you don’t understand — I’ve got a visitor coming. A permanent visitor. And he’s very particular about what he eats.”
“I’m Howie Kantner,” he said suddenly. “My father and me run Kantner Construction?”
She’d been in town less than a week, haunting the chilly cavernous house her mother had left her sister and her sister had left her. She’d never heard of Kantner Construction.
The boy ducked his head as if he were genuflecting, told her how thrilled he was to meet her, and turned to go — but then he swung back round impulsively. “Couldn’t you…I mean, do you think you’ll need some help with all those bananas?”
She pursed her lips.
“I just thought…the boxboys are the pits here and you’re so…casually dressed for the weather and all.…”
“Yes,” she said slowly, “yes, that would be very nice,” and she smiled; She was pleased, terribly pleased. A moment earlier she’d felt depressed, out of place, an alien in her own hometown, and now she’d made a friend. He waited for her behind the checkout counter, this hulking, earnest college boy, this big post-adolescent male with the clipped brow and squared shoulders, and she beamed at him till her gums ached, wondering what he’d think if she told him he reminded her of a chimp.
Konrad was late. They’d told her three, but it was past five already and there was no sign of him. She huddled by the fire, draped in an afghan she’d found in a trunk in the basement, and listened to the clank and wheeze of the decrepit old oil burner as it switched itself fitfully on and off. It was still snowing, snow like a curse, and she wished she were back in her hut at Makoua with the monsoon hammering at the roof. She looked out the window and thought she was on the moon.
It was close to seven when the knock at the door finally came. She’d been dozing, the notes for her lecture series scattered like refuse at her feet, the afghan drawn up tight around her throat. Clutching the title page as if it were a lifejacket tossed her on a stormy sea, she rose from the chair with a click of her arthritic knees and crossed the room to the door.
Though she’d swept the porch three times, the wind kept defeating her efforts, and when she’d pulled back the door she found Konrad standing in a drift up to his knees. He was huge — far bigger than she’d expected — and the heavy jacket, scarf, and gloves exaggerated the effect. His trainer or keeper or whatever she was stood behind him, grinning weirdly, her arms laden with groceries. Konrad was grinning too, giving her the low closed grin she’d been the first to describe in the wild: it meant he was agitated but not yet stoked to the point of violence. His high-pitched squeals—eeeee! eeeee! eeeee! — filled the hallway.
“Miss Umbo?” the girl said, as Konrad, disdaining introductions, flung his knuckles down on the hardwood floor and scampered for the fire. “I’m Jill,” the girl said, trying simultaneously to shake hands, pass through the doorframe, and juggle the bags of groceries.
Beatrice was still trying to get over the shock of seeing a chimpanzee in human dress — and one so huge: he must have stood better than four and a half feet and weighed close to 180—and it was a moment before she could murmur a greeting and offer to take one of the bags of groceries. The door slammed shut and the girl followed her into the kitchen while Konrad slapped his shoulders and stamped round the fireplace.
“He’s so…so big,” Beatrice said, depositing the bag on the oak table in the kitchen.
“I guess,” the girl said, setting her bags down with a shrug. “And what is all this?” Beatrice gestured at the groceries. She caught a glance of Konrad through the archway that led into the living room: he’d settled into her armchair and was studiously bent over her notes, tearing the pages into thin white strips with the delicate tips of his black leather fingers.
“Oh, this,” the girl said, brightening. “This is the stuff he likes to eat,” dipping into the near bag and extracting one box after another as if they were exhibits at a trial, “Carnation Instant Breakfast, cheese nachos, Fruit Roll-Ups, Sugar Daffies.…”
“Are you—?” Beatrice hesitated, wondering how to phrase the question. “What I mean is, you’re his trainer, I take it?”
The girl must have been in her mid-twenties, though she looked fourteen. Her hair was limp and blond, her eyes too big for her face. She was wearing faded jeans, a puffy down vest over a flannel shirt, and a pair of two-hundred-dollar hiking boots. “Me?” she squealed, and then she blushed. Her voice dropped till it was nearly inaudible: “I’m just the person that cleans up his cage and all and I’ve always had this like way with animals.…”
Beatrice was shocked. Shocked and disgusted. It was worse than she’d suspected. When she agreed to take Konrad, she knew she’d be saving him from the sterility of a cage, from the anomie and humiliation of the zoo. And those were the very terms—“anomie” and “humiliation”—she’d used on the phone with his former trainer, with the zookeeper himself. For Konrad was no run-of-the-mill chimp snatched from the jungle and caged for the pleasure of the big bland white apes who lined up to gawk at him and make their little jokes at the expense of his dignity — though that would have been crime enough — no, he was special, extraordinary, a chimp made after the image of man.
Raised as a human, in one of those late-sixties experiments Beatrice deplored, he’d been bathed, dressed, and pampered, taught to use cutlery and sit at a table, and he’d mastered 350 of the hand signals that constituted American Sign Language. (This last especially appalled her — at one time he could actually converse, or so they said.) But when he grew into puberty at the age of seven, when he developed the iron musculature and crackling sinews of the adolescent male who could reduce a room of furniture to detritus in minutes or snap the femur of a linebacker as if it were tinder, it was abruptly decided that he could be human no more. They took away his trousers and shoes, his stuffed toys and his color TV, and the overseers of the experiment made a quiet move to shift him to the medical laboratories for another, more sinister, sort of research. But he was famous by then and the public outcry landed him in the zoo instead, where they made a sort of clown of him, isolating him from the other chimps and dressing him up like something in a toy-store window. There he’d languished for twenty-five years, neither chimp nor man.