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Authors: Cary Fagan
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know. In bed, beside me. Iâve been very lucky in my life.â
IN THE MORNING, THE AUTOMATIC telephone call woke him. Getting out of bed, he felt sore on his left side from the fall. He washed, dressed in the newly pressed suit, and waited for the bellboy to come and fetch his suitcase.
He stood outside the glass doors of the hotel while the doorman walked to the street to flag a taxi. The morning was cold and bright. All that waited for him on the other side of the ocean was an empty house with the thermostat turned down. The driver opened the trunk and put in the suitcase. The cab door was open, but he hesitated a moment longer and, sure enough, he heard Sarahâs voice calling. He saw her hurrying across the square, hair loose, looking so wonderfully young and alive. She bounded up the stairs and now she was hugging him hard, her face wet, saying into his ear, âIâm really, really happy you came, Zeyde. Iâm just so glad.â
He tried to laugh but found himself suppressing a sob instead. âI am too, sweetheart. But you know what? I never finished the Heinrich Böll. It was good, but it was beyond me.â
My Life Among the Apes
FOR NEARLY A YEAR I lived among the apes. I knew by sight more than two dozen chimpanzees living by Lake Tanganyika in the remote Gombe Stream Game Reserve. Goliath, the alpha male. David Greybeard. Rudolph. Flo. I was among those who first saw a chimp make and use a tool — a twig stripped of its leaves and thrust into the hole of a termite hill. Once a mother held her infant out for me to groom. Once I witnessed a colony of chimps surround a stray member of another tribe and commit murder.
And then I gave it all up.
HOFFSTEDDER IS ON MY CASE again. First, someone in the branch has been using an anonymous blog to write slurs about management. Second, for reasons unexplained, the number of after-hour deposits at our ATM has declined by four percent. Third, a passcard has gone missing.
I am fifty-one years old and have not risen as far as others my age, but I came to banking late, after an unfinished Ph.D. and careers in housing management and commercial liability insurance. The best that I can say about banking is that I like the people I work with (all except Hoffstedder) and I can walk to work in forty minutes.
The staff under me, tellers and assistant managers, are fifteen to twenty-five years younger. They are first and second-generation sons and daughters of India, Pakistan, Portugal, Iran, the Azores. They are inexpensively but sharply dressed. Both sexes wear earrings, but other visible piercings are not permitted while at work. Little indentations can be seen, by an eyebrow, a lip, where a stud or ring has been removed. They spend their lunch hours text messaging their friends. On Monday mornings they look wasted from weekend raves, or whatever it is they do. The younger ones seem to form no permanent relationships but have a lot of sex. They live two worlds away from my own, and I wish them well.
ONE DAY WHEN I was eleven, I came home to find the latest
National Geographic
on the kitchen counter, along with a glass of milk and a wedge of burnt-sugar cake. I opened it and saw a beautiful, young blond woman washing her hair in a stream.
“Don’t disappear with that magazine,” my mother warned me as I slipped off the stool. “Nobody else has seen it yet.”
We lived in the suburb of Willowdale. I had my own room while my older brothers shared one. A desk, a bookcase, a
World Book Encyclopedia
, a telescope. I was short for my age, and overweight. I dreaded gym class. Two girls down the street tormented me every day on the way home. In the evening we watched
Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In
.
But that night I began to live in the jungle.
MY WIFE, LIZETTE, IS A teacher in a private girl’s school. Even when we met, over two decades ago, her anxiousness made it hard for her to see a movie or attend a party where there might be strangers. Not until
IN THE MORNING, THE AUTOMATIC telephone call woke him. Getting out of bed, he felt sore on his left side from the fall. He washed, dressed in the newly pressed suit, and waited for the bellboy to come and fetch his suitcase.
He stood outside the glass doors of the hotel while the doorman walked to the street to flag a taxi. The morning was cold and bright. All that waited for him on the other side of the ocean was an empty house with the thermostat turned down. The driver opened the trunk and put in the suitcase. The cab door was open, but he hesitated a moment longer and, sure enough, he heard Sarahâs voice calling. He saw her hurrying across the square, hair loose, looking so wonderfully young and alive. She bounded up the stairs and now she was hugging him hard, her face wet, saying into his ear, âIâm really, really happy you came, Zeyde. Iâm just so glad.â
He tried to laugh but found himself suppressing a sob instead. âI am too, sweetheart. But you know what? I never finished the Heinrich Böll. It was good, but it was beyond me.â
My Life Among the Apes
FOR NEARLY A YEAR I lived among the apes. I knew by sight more than two dozen chimpanzees living by Lake Tanganyika in the remote Gombe Stream Game Reserve. Goliath, the alpha male. David Greybeard. Rudolph. Flo. I was among those who first saw a chimp make and use a tool — a twig stripped of its leaves and thrust into the hole of a termite hill. Once a mother held her infant out for me to groom. Once I witnessed a colony of chimps surround a stray member of another tribe and commit murder.
And then I gave it all up.
HOFFSTEDDER IS ON MY CASE again. First, someone in the branch has been using an anonymous blog to write slurs about management. Second, for reasons unexplained, the number of after-hour deposits at our ATM has declined by four percent. Third, a passcard has gone missing.
I am fifty-one years old and have not risen as far as others my age, but I came to banking late, after an unfinished Ph.D. and careers in housing management and commercial liability insurance. The best that I can say about banking is that I like the people I work with (all except Hoffstedder) and I can walk to work in forty minutes.
The staff under me, tellers and assistant managers, are fifteen to twenty-five years younger. They are first and second-generation sons and daughters of India, Pakistan, Portugal, Iran, the Azores. They are inexpensively but sharply dressed. Both sexes wear earrings, but other visible piercings are not permitted while at work. Little indentations can be seen, by an eyebrow, a lip, where a stud or ring has been removed. They spend their lunch hours text messaging their friends. On Monday mornings they look wasted from weekend raves, or whatever it is they do. The younger ones seem to form no permanent relationships but have a lot of sex. They live two worlds away from my own, and I wish them well.
ONE DAY WHEN I was eleven, I came home to find the latest
National Geographic
on the kitchen counter, along with a glass of milk and a wedge of burnt-sugar cake. I opened it and saw a beautiful, young blond woman washing her hair in a stream.
“Don’t disappear with that magazine,” my mother warned me as I slipped off the stool. “Nobody else has seen it yet.”
We lived in the suburb of Willowdale. I had my own room while my older brothers shared one. A desk, a bookcase, a
World Book Encyclopedia
, a telescope. I was short for my age, and overweight. I dreaded gym class. Two girls down the street tormented me every day on the way home. In the evening we watched
Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In
.
But that night I began to live in the jungle.
MY WIFE, LIZETTE, IS A teacher in a private girl’s school. Even when we met, over two decades ago, her anxiousness made it hard for her to see a movie or attend a party where there might be strangers. Not until
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