“No,” she said. “Are you serious?” He nodded, thinking she would laugh, but she looked startled and sad. He said, “It’s all right. One thing Avicenna’s got, it’s got restaurants.”

“Don’t,” Julie said. Pain in her voice was as new a sound to Farrell, as if she had begun to crow or whinny—he hardly recognized it. “Poor topcoat,” she said. She took his hands between her own and brought them to her lips, looking at him over them with mocking, marveling eyes.

“Just don’t imagine me, that’s all,” she said. “Seven o’clock at Fouad’s.” She bit his fingers gently and left him there, watching her calm legs carry her away down a gravel walk and through a door. A momentary intuition that he would never see her again pinched his breath, as it had done the day before. You can only watch someone go away so many times. That was why—in spite of himself, in spite of what he had told Ben in the gym—he still mourned, grudgingly and foolishly, for so many doomed creatures and landscapes and ways of being that he had never seen. To feel the loss, to know what was lost. To remember. That might be what I do best, after all. I hope not. He got back into the bus and drove up to Barton Park in the hills, to see about the zoo.

Chapter 6

There was one job open, driving an electric train in the shape of an alligator around and around the zoo six afternoons a week, lecturing to his passengers about the animals they were glimpsing. Farrell had hoped for something to do with gorillas; but it was outdoor work, at least, and decently mindless. He agreed to start on the following Monday and left with a copy of the route and the recitation to memorize. There were five and a half jokes in it, underlined in red.

When he went home to change his clothes, he found the driveway occupied by a middle-aged yellow Pontiac, with the left front fender mashed into a rusty fist. He parked Madame Schumann-Heink a block further on and walked back to the house. There were skid marks behind the Pontiac where it had spun up the driveway, clipping off two of Ben’s birdhouses and grinding a patch of wild rosemary to rags. The driver was still sitting behind the wheel, randomly pushing the tape deck buttons, but he looked up and opened the door as Farrell approached. “Hi there,” he said in a cheerful, rather boyish voice. “Hey, you seen my wife yet?”

He was younger than Farrell, with a round, firm, deeply tanned face under a surfer’s helmet of crusty white-blond hair. His sideburns were a shade darker, thick and stubbly; his mustache colorless, almost invisible. Farrell saw that his lower lip had been bleeding.

“I don’t think so,” Farrell said.

The young man got out of the car as he started past it. He was stockily built, Farrell’s height but at least twenty pounds heavier. He said, “But you’re going to see her.”

Farrell stared. The man came closer, smiling. “I mean, if you go in there, into that house, you’ll see her. I mean, that’s where she works, isn’t it?”

“Oh, Suzy,” Farrell said without thinking, and immediately wished he hadn’t. The young man’s friendly expression did not change, but rather became fixed on his face, as if he had died. “Suzy McManus, right, you got it, good old Suzy. Well, I’m Dave McManus. Dave McManus. I’m good old Dave.” He caught Farrell’s hand and shook it long and gently, looking straight into the eyes all the while. His own hand was cold and wet and hard.

Farrell had seen pure white drunkenness before, but not often enough to recognize it at sight. He knew the thing itself, however—the freight train rattling and lurching comically from hilarity to slobbering sorrow, picking up speed as it passed through wild, aimless anger straight on into wild sickness; and then, running smoothly and almost silently now, into a dark place of shaking and sweating and crying, and out again with no warning to where a dazzling snowy light made everything very still. McManus neither swayed nor mumbled and hardly smelled of alcohol at all, but Farrell began to back away from him. McManus’s smile widened with each step.

“I won’t hurt you,” he said. “I just want to see my wife, the same as you do.” He patted his windbreaker pocket, and Farrell saw how heavily the fabric shifted and swung. “You take me on in there. In the house.”

Farrell took another step backward, trying to angle himself toward a parked car. McManus patted his pocket again and shook his head earnestly. “Come on, there’s a dog. I don’t want to hurt the dog.”

“She’s a trained killer,” Farrell warned him. “They had her in the Army, she used to give courses.” He was trying desperately to assess the chance of Suzy’s being in the house that morning. McManus put his hand in his pocket and whistled two notes. Farrell walked slowly past him and up the porch steps.

Briseis met him at the door, whining nervously at the sight of the stranger crowding in behind him. For a moment Farrell entertained a mad vision of scooping the Alsatian up in his arms and hurling, or at least shoving her at McManus. But the man was too close, and Farrell knew himself just as likely to rupture something important or throw his back out. McManus stooped to scratch Briseis’s ears, and Farrell tensed, thinking, This is not happening. Then Suzy came out of a tiny sewing room into the hallway.

When she saw McManus, she caught her breath, started to speak, and then shut her mouth and very carefully set down the sponge mop and bucket she was carrying, leaning the mop against the wall. “Dave,” she said, and stood waiting.

McManus’s ragged lower lip started to bleed again. Tears sprang out of his eyes in a sudden dreadful spurt, more like shotgun pellets than drops of water. “Bitch, fucking bitch!” he shouted at her, his light voice splintering into shrill fragments. “Bitch, I love you!” Suzy turned and ran for the living room, and McManus shoved Farrell aside and leaped after her, tugging at his pocket. He promptly tripped over Briseis and fell flat, landing with the gun under him. Briseis, who expected the end of the world at any given moment, screamed in confirmation of her worst forebodings. She threw herself on Farrell for comfort, buffeting him so frantically that he almost fell himself. McManus scrambled to his feet and lunged toward the living room. He had torn his pocket getting the pistol out.

“Do you come here often?” Farrell asked Briseis. There was a crash in the living room, and McManus yelled, “Well, shit, don’t blame me for that!” Farrell went into the room in a crouching waddle, taking cover behind chairs. Suzy was halfway up the stair; but, as he watched, she paused, turned, and started slowly back down toward McManus, who was standing over the shards of a stoneware lamp. “No,” she said, astonishingly loudly. “No, why should I run from you?”

McManus, who had been steadying the gun with both hands, now let it fall to his side. For the first time, he suddenly looked drunk. He chewed his bleeding lip and sniffed, muttering, “Okay, okay, come on.” But Suzy shook her head, and to Farrell’s amazement she smiled.

“No,” she said again. “Go home, Dave. I’m not coming with you, and I’m not running away from you anymore. I just now realized I don’t have to. She showed me.”

“Bitch,” McManus whispered. “Bitch, bitch.” Farrell could hardly hear him; and indeed, the words seemed not to be addressed to Suzy at all, but to someone remembered or imagined. “She showed you. Blow her flicking head off, she showed you.” He raised his head and smiled suddenly, coldly in touch with his drunkenness again. “I love you, Suzy,” he said. “You know I love you. Look, I threw Mike out, I mean for good, like you wanted. I just said, ‘out, man, Suzy’s coming home.” Something in the little shrug and cavalier flip of his free hand—like a Chaplin back-kick—made Farrell see for a moment what Suzy might have loved.