“Oh, yes, bunny has really captured her imagination,” Mrs. Angawa says. “Now promise me you will believe me. The streetlights disturb bunny at night, so the janitor advised me to put the cage in the coat closet. I don’t want you to think I’m cruel to a bunny! First thing in the morning, I come in and take him out and put his cage in the nice sunshine. These days, everybody is always on the lookout for cruelty. As every child can tell you, I cried and cried when the previous bunny died. What they don’t know is that I’ve had nightmares that the same thing may happen to this one. Every morning I hurry in, praying that bunny is fine.”
She opens the door. The rabbit is in a large cage, stretched out by a water dish.
“Pretty bunny, we will all see you tomorrow,” Mrs. Angawa says, making kissing noises. She closes the closet again. “One night after the first bunny died I was so upset I had a premonition of this bunny’s death. My husband and I had been to the movies, and we ran into the school janitor there. I told him how worried I was, and all three of us went to the school then and there — I was so sure there was trouble with bunny. There the three of us were, ten-thirty P.M., looking at a sleeping bunny. My husband was in an internment camp during the Second World War. He thinks that everything you count on is sure to go wrong, but he has found his opposite in me, because I believe things will often change for the better. This bunny is going to be all right. The other one must have had a mysterious illness.”
He looks behind him, at the closed closet door.
“Mr. McKee, the janitor, lives in the apartment building next to ours,” she says. “He was also in the Second World War, stationed in the Philippines. All he talks about are the misadventures on the boat taking the men to the Philippines. Once there, they liked to give the monkeys cans of beer so they would swing drunk through the trees.”
He frowns, wondering what she could be getting at.
“Usually the people who make you stop and listen to a story are the ones who deliver their story with a little humor. That’s all right, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of the real story being told. With Mr. McKee, I have been waiting the ten-plus years I’ve known him to hear the real story of what he did and what he saw during the war.”
“I see,” Stefan says. Every time the minute hand moves, the clock ticks loudly. The odor of chalk clings to the building like cigarette smoke in a bar.
“I believe that sometimes you have to be patient and listen for a long time before you hear the true story,” Mrs. Angawa says. “People talk quite a lot, but you often have to wait for their true stories. To be more specific, I think that it is all right to let Julie go on a bit. Eventually we will hear stories beneath those stories.”
When he met Francine, it was spring. She was taking acting classes at night and selling ladies’ nightwear at Lord & Taylor during the day. One of the stockbrokers at the company where Stefan worked was married to a dancer. The man, Bryant Heppelson, insisted that the one thing Stefan must absolutely take his word on was that he had met the most amazingly talented, beautiful woman he had encountered since he fell in love with Melly when they were both fourteen. Not only must he take his word, but he must experience her — at dinner at their apartment. Stefan had nothing better to do on Saturday night, so he went.
Francine and Melly (Melly was Bryant’s wife) had met through an ad posted on the bulletin board at the building in Brooklyn where Melly studied dance and Francine went to acting classes. Melly had a car in the city — an unimaginable thing! — and wanted to transport people to Brooklyn, partly for the extra cash and partly because she was afraid to drive alone at night. In the year they had been shuttling back and forth, the two women had grown as close as sisters.
During dinner it came out that Francine had grown up in the Midwest. She had gone to college on a scholarship. When Bryant joked about her ruthless ambition, she had asked whether pairing that adjective with the word “ambition” wasn’t a rather embarrassing reflex some men had. From the kitchen, Melly hollered out that with Francine’s talent, it was a good thing she took herself seriously.
Melly and Bryant lived in a basement apartment in the Village, and even though it was April, it stayed damp and cool. A portable heater was plugged in and sat angled out from the corner, blowing a stream of warm air over them as they sat in butterfly chairs covered with black canvas. It was before people began to get rid of their graduate school furniture, though by then the framed Peter Max posters were usually leaned against a closet wall, or steam-puckered from having been hung in the bathroom.
He could remember talk about dancers’ foot injuries — asking how the tape was used, whether permanent damage couldn’t be done by dancing in spite of pain. Some analogy was made by either Francine or Melly between binding one’s feet to dance and acting a painful scene that pertained to your own life. With more wine came more wild comparisons. Silly toasts were made by one person to some other person’s poorly paraphrased ideas. The conversation alternated, as so many conversations seemed to, outside the workplace, between lofty idealism and a mockery of that idealism that was meant to sound very pragmatic, very of-the-world and of-the-moment. The half-gallon bottles of Gallo Hearty Burgundy from grad school parties had disappeared, replaced by bottles of muscadet or cabernet. At some point between dinner and dessert a bottle of California champagne materialized in a silver champagne bucket. Melly shook her head, blushing and saying it was a wedding present she had tried to return, but it had been given to them without a box. When Francine’s best friend had been married, Francine said, she and her husband had returned all their wedding presents and, with the cash, bought toys for the children of their friends and relatives. They all shook their heads about hippie foolishness. A long story was told by Melly about twin girls who had lived next door to her parents in San Francisco, who were having an LSD party the night their parents came back early, unexpectedly, from Lourdes, carrying in their still-dying brother. Bryant brought the conversation back to earth by saying that as a child he had been hospitalized with meningitis, and that anyone forced to take Percodan at age five and hallucinate night and day would sooner sign up for the Army than ingest a psychedelic drug. Melly raised an eyebrow, and asked why he hadn’t served in the Army. “Because of my homosexuality,” he said. “That and not bathing or sleeping for three days before the physical.”
It was decided that because Francine’s brother was borrowing Melly’s car the next morning, it would be easiest for Francine to drive Stefan home and keep the car. Since moving to New York from Massachusetts, Stefan had not been in a private car, and sitting in the passenger’s seat, he felt almost loving about it. He leaned back and closed his eyes.
“I’m pretty drunk, too,” Francine said.
He opened his eyes, startled more that she had seen him in an inexplicable near-reverie than by what she had said. He offered to drive. She hesitated only a moment before agreeing, but asked him not to tell Melly she had turned over the keys.
“You don’t think Melly would trust me to drive?”
“It’s not that,” she said. “It’s that Melly thinks I’m so competent.”
“I don’t think they were trying to get us to function at our very best by serving three bottles of wine and champagne,” he said.
“She was trying to make it festive, so you’d like me.”
“What?” he said. He had not turned on the ignition. They were in an outdoor parking lot, around the corner from Melly and Bryant’s apartment. She had opened the padlocked gate with a key; the gate was swung back, so the car could exit. Barbed wire coiled around the top of the ten-foot fence. He thought of all the barbed wire he had seen in war movies — except for war movies, and in cities, he had never seen barbed wire — and then he thought that he, too, had lied his way out of the war, though no one had asked, and that at this very moment there was something ironic about two well-dressed, up-and-coming young people sitting in a parking lot in New York City, looking as if they’d been captured as prisoners of war.