Chapter 3
It had been her idea for them to lunch in Central Park at the cafeteria which adjoins the zoo. Because the McNeils’ apartment was on Fifth Avenue and almost opposite the zoo, she had long since wearied of it, but today, goaded on by the novelty of eating out-of-doors, it seemed a gala notion; and furthermore, it would be all new to Clyde, for he drew a blank concerning certain sections of the city: the entire territory, for instance, that, beginning around the Plaza, stretches and widens up and eastward. This park-east world was naturally the New York Grady knew best: except for Broadway, she’d not often ventured out of it.
And so she’d thought it was a joke when Clyde said he hadn’t even known there was a zoo in Central Park; at least, that is, he had no memory of one. These ignorances intensified the overall riddle of his background; she knew the number and names of his family: there was a mother, two sisters who worked, a younger brother—the father, who had been a sergeant of police, was dead; and she knew generally where they lived: it was somewhere in Brooklyn, a house near the ocean that required over an hour by subway to reach. Then there were several friends whose names she’d heard often enough to remember: Mink, whom she’d just seen, another called Bubble, and a third named Gump; once she’d asked if they were real names, and Clyde had said sure.
But the picture she had devised from these oddments was too amateurish to deserve even the most modest frame: it lacked perspective and showed few talents for detail. The blame of course belonged to Clyde, who just was not much given to talk. Also, he seemed very little curious himself: Grady, alarmed sometimes by the meagerness of his inquiries and the indifference this might suggest, supplied him liberally with personal information; which isn’t to say she always told the truth, how many people in love do? or can? but at least she permitted him enough truth to account more or less accurately for all the life she had lived away from him. It was her feeling, however, that he would as soon not hear her confessions: he seemed to want her to be as elusive, as secretive as he was himself.
And yet she could not quite properly accuse him of secretiveness: whatever she asked, he answered: still, it was like trying to peer through a Venetian blind. (It was as if the world where they joined were a ship, one becalmed between the two islands that were themselves: with any effort he could see the shore of her, but his was lost in the unlifting mist.) Once, armed with a far-fetched idea, she had taken the subway to Brooklyn, thinking that if only she could see the house where he lived and walk the streets that he walked, then she would understand and know him as she wanted to; but she had never been to Brooklyn before, and the ghostly lonesome streets, the lowness of the land stretching in a confusion of look-alike bungalows, of empty lots and silent vacancy, was so terrifying that after twenty steps she turned and fled down back into the subway. She realized afterwards that from the outset she’d known the trip would be a failure.
Perhaps Clyde, without conscious insight, had chosen best in by-passing islands and settling for the solitude of a ship: but their voyage seemed to have no port-of-call of any kind; and, while they were sitting on the terrace of the cafeteria in the shade of an umbrella, Grady had again sudden cause to need the reassurance of land.
She had wanted it to be fun, a celebration in their own honor; and it was: the seals conspired to amuse, the peanuts were hot, the beer cold. But Clyde would not really relax. He was solemn with the duties of an escort on such an excursion: Peter Bell would have bought a balloon for mockery’s sake: Clyde presented her with one as part of a tenacious ritual. It was so touching to Grady, and so silly, that for a while she was ashamed to look at him. She held fast to the balloon all through lunch, as if her own happiness bobbed and strained at the string. But it was at the end of lunch that Clyde said: “Look, you know I’d like to stay! Only something came up, and I’ve got to be home early. It was something I’d forgot about, or I would’ve told you before.”
Grady was casual; but she chewed her lip before replying. “I’m sorry,” she said, “that really is too bad.” And then, with a temper she could not detour: “Yes, I must say you should’ve told me before. I wouldn’t have bothered to plan anything.”
“What kind of things did you have in mind, kid?” Clyde said this with a smile that exposed a slight lewdness: the young man who laughed at seals and bought balloons had reversed his profile, and the new side, which showed a harsher angle, was the one Grady was never able to defend herself against: its brashness so attracted, so crippled her, she was left desiring only to appease. “Never mind that,” she said, forcing a lewd note of her own. “There’s nobody at the apartment now and I’d thought we’d go there and cook supper.” Tower-high and running halfway across a building, the windows of the apartment, as she had pointed out to him, could be seen from the cafeteria terrace. But any suggestion of visiting there appeared to upset him: he smoothed his hair and twisted tighter the knot of his tie.
“When do you have to go home? Not right away?”
He shook his head; then, telling her what she most wanted to know, which was why he had to go at all, he said: “It’s my brother. The kid’s having his bar mitzvah and it’s only right I ought to be there.”
“A bar mitzvah? I thought that was something Jewish.”
Stillness like a blush came over his face. He did not even look when a brazen pigeon sedately plucked a crumb off the table.
“Well, it is something Jewish, isn’t it?”
“I’m Jewish. My mother is,” he said.
Grady sat silent, letting the surprise of his remark wrap round her like a vine; and it was then, while splashes of conversation at near tables rolled in waves, that she saw how far they were from any shore. It was unimportant that he was Jewish; this was the sort of thing Apple might have made an issue of, but it would have never occurred to Grady to consider it in any person, not Clyde certainly; still, the tone in which he’d told her presumed not only that she would, but emphasized further how little she knew him: instead of expanding, her picture of him contracted, and she felt she would have to start all over again. “Well,” she began slowly. “And am I supposed to care? I really don’t, you know.”
“What the hell do you mean care? Who the hell do you think you are? Care about yourself. I’m nothing to you.”
An antique lady with a Siamese attached to a leash was listening to them rigidly. It was her presence that kept Grady in check. The balloon had wilted somewhat, the swell of it was beginning to pucker; still clutching it, she pushed back the table, hurried down the steps of the terrace and along a path. It was some minutes before Clyde could catch up with her; and by the time he did it was gone, the anger that had provoked and carried her away.
But he held her by each arm, as if he supposed she might try to break loose. Flakes of sunlight falling through a tree lilted about like butterflies; at a bench beyond them a boy sat with a windup Victrola balanced on his lap and from the Victrola the eel-like song of a solo clarinet spiraled in the fluttered air. “You are something to me, Clyde; and more than that. But I can’t discover it because we don’t seem to be talking about the same things ever.” She stopped then; the pressure of his eyes made language fraudulent, and whatever their purpose as lovers might be, Clyde alone seemed to understand it. “Sure, kid,” he said, “anything you say.”
And he bought her another balloon; the old one had shriveled like an apple. This new balloon was far fancier; white and molded to the shape of a cat, it was painted with purple eyes and purple whiskers. Grady was delighted: “Let’s go show it to the lions!”
The cat house of a zoo has an ornery smell, an air prowled by sleep, mangy with old breath and dead desires. Comedy in a doleful key is the blowsy she-lion reclining in her cell like a movie queen of silent fame; and a hulking ludicrous sight her mate presents winking at the audience as if he could use a pair of bifocals. Somehow the leopard does not suffer; nor the panther: their swagger makes distinct claims upon the pulse, for not even the indignities of confinement can belittle the danger of their Asian eyes, those gold and ginger flowers
