Before You Know Kindness (25 page)

The more difficult part of his breakfast preparation would be slicing the bread, and then spreading that jam with one hand. He would try out his Spreadboard for the first time, a device that resembled a baseball diamond’s home plate, with a pair of plastic guards along the apex against which he would place his bread to hold it still while slathering on the preserves and (perhaps) a little Soy-garine.

Even before he did that, of course, he would have to wedge the jar between his knees and then hope he could unscrew the lid with his left hand. Given the reality that these preserves had never been opened, he had a pretty good sense that the lid would be snug. He shook his head: He should have had Catherine open it for him before she and Charlotte had left for school.

Nevertheless, he had cereal in a bowl and a loaf of bread on the cutting board.
Even I can slice fresh bread,
he thought to himself,
and make my own breakfast.

HE WAS, ALAS, MISTAKEN.
In the cab to his office he tried not to focus on the degrading spectacle he would have made if there’d been any witnesses: the bread crushed instead of cut, crumbs on the counter and the floor and (somehow) the dish rack three feet away, soggy clumps of cereal flakes everywhere but in his bowl, the jam jar completely impregnable until finally—half in rage and half in despair—he’d thrown it into the sink, the container banging off the faucet and then (much to his horror) shattering against the white porcelain sides. He honestly wasn’t sure whether it was the faucet or the sink that had actually broken the glass.

Finally he just put his left hand into the box of cereal and grabbed a few fistfuls, and then wiped a wad of bread against the Soy-garine that was starting to melt on the counter. He was astonished at how tired his left arm had become in the failed effort and how much his right side had wound up hurting. The pain, exacerbated he knew by anxiety and exhaustion, was a soaring, white hot stinging in his shoulder and upper back, that—unfortunately—was now so pronounced that his head was starting to ache, his ears were ringing, and he wanted to put his head down in the cab that very moment and vomit.

He took in deep breaths through his nose and tried to concentrate on the sports radio talk station the cabbie was listening to softly on the radio. God, was Don Imus already off the air? Was it already after ten? Had it taken him that long to get dressed and make the kitchen look like a chimpanzee had just tried to make breakfast? When the cab braked abruptly before a red traffic light, he conked his head against the insufficiently padded rear of the front seat, and—despite the sling—his right hand swung forward just enough to cause the pain in his shoulder to slide off the charts for a moment. He heard himself cry out “Shit!” with such a pathetic shrillness to his voice that he grew embarrassed.

But even that embarrassment paled a moment later, when the cab jerked forward with the green light and he was pushed back in his seat. The cattle prod of pain deep inside him simultaneously pressed downward from his shoulder to his back and upward from his neck to his head, and though he brought his left hand to his mouth with impressive rapidity there was no stopping the vomit that was spewing up from his stomach, burning his throat and his mouth and his tongue, and spraying through his fingers like water sent full blast through a partly plugged faucet.

“What the fuck?” the cabbie was saying, “I can’t stop here! What the fuck are you doing?”

He opened his mouth—the acid on his lips a minor annoyance compared to the spikes of agony everywhere else in his body and the humiliation and disgust he felt when he looked down and saw the vomit on the knees of his slacks and the front of his shirt—and heard himself murmur, “Just turn around please. I want to go home.”

Nineteen

C
harlotte understood that her father was in excruciating pain most of the time and that he was trying to hide it from her: He didn’t want her to feel any worse than she already did. But she knew how much he hurt. She knew he was popping Percocet and Advil like they were M&M’s, and she doubted fifteen minutes went by when she herself didn’t think in some way about the accident and what she had done. She might recall the blast of the gun—and the feeling that she was flying backward—with a vividness that would cause her to flinch while performing a task as habitual as setting the dinner table or brushing the cats, or while in the midst of an endeavor that demanded serious concentration: reading through the scene from
The Secret Garden
that she was going to use in her audition for Brearley’s fall musical or trying to decide exactly which of her blouses were appropriate now that she was in the eighth grade and had a full year’s distance from that nightmarish elementary school jumper. She thought her father’s tolerance for pain was downright heroic.

This morning, however, on what they presumed would be his triumphant return to work, she had come across a photo of him in a magazine and for the first time since the accident she had grown angry. Furious. The magazine was four and a half years old, and she was really only skimming it to kill a minute or two while her mother made absolutely certain that Dad didn’t need anything before they left together for Brearley. She’d found the periodical wedged upright into the mass of glossy pulp in the brass magazine rack in the den, the one that sat beside the fireplace they never used.

In the journal was a photo essay about reading in America, in which dozens of photographers had captured all kinds of people reading in one twenty-four-hour span. Some were authors giving readings at universities or bookstores, and some were cameos of actors or politicians holding in their hands whatever book they happened to be enjoying at the moment. There were a few of small book groups gathered in suburban living rooms to discuss a novel they had just read together. And there in the midst of it was one of Molly the gorilla in her five-thousand-square-foot Woodside, California, pen with—of all people—Spencer McCullough beside her.

Over and over Charlotte read the photo caption:

Molly, a thirty-one-year-old female gorilla, and Spencer McCullough, the thirty-three-year-old communications director for the animal rights organization FERAL, savor one of both Molly’s and McCullough’s favorite children’s books,
Maurice and the Magic Banana.
Though McCullough read the popular children’s book aloud to the western lowland gorilla, Molly is capable of reading about Maurice’s adventures with the enchanted fruit on her own. Molly understands well over two thousand words.

“Molly’s and my DNA are 97.7 percent identical,” says McCullough, an obvious fan of both the very real gorilla and the fictional Maurice. “Should it really be all that surprising that the two of us share a taste in children’s literature, as well?”

No one had ever told her about the picture and when she saw it instantly she guessed why: When Maurice had enjoyed his brief stay atop the children’s best-seller lists—nudging aside Harry Potter and Violet Baudelaire—her father had refused to read it aloud to her because he said it was completely idiotic and (in some way she didn’t understand at the time) vaguely obscene. Certainly he hadn’t viewed
Maurice and the Magic Banana
as “children’s literature” when she’d been younger. Here he was, however, reading it aloud quite happily with some gorilla because he could use the opportunity to get some ink for FERAL. To make a point that gorillas were smart and should be respected.

Initially she had been hurt, and she had felt betrayed as she had ridden the bus across town with her mom. She had wandered into the school like a sleepwalker, and it was only after she had said good-bye to Catherine and arrived at her homeroom did the pain become transformed into resentment. Then irritation. Then, finally, disgust. She was well aware of the cyclical nature of her relationship with her father—or, to be precise, of her father’s relationship with her. She knew that he would go through phases in which he would be absent: Sometimes he would be literally gone, traveling to whatever dolphins or bunnies or baby elephants needed him that month, and sometimes he would be home in body but his spirit would be with those creatures great and small, all of whom, it seemed, were more interesting to him than his family. And then, almost as if he had suddenly discovered that he had a daughter (or a wife), for an all too brief period he would spoil her with whatever she wanted and do with her whatever she liked. She had grown accustomed to the pattern, savoring the waves when she could and accepting the barrenness of low tide when he was preoccupied with animals other than the mammals with whom he lived.

Including his cats. For an animal lover, he didn’t spend a heck of a lot of time with the family’s own cats, an irony that she discovered wasn’t lost on her father when she brought it up to him one time when she was in the sixth grade.

“They don’t need me,” he’d said simply, shrugging, when she confronted him. “They’re anything but mistreated. Besides, they have you and your mom.”

And when she’d gone through that phase when she wanted a dog desperately, a big and gentle golden retriever like Grandmother’s, her father had adamantly refused to subject a dog to the confines of their city apartment.

“Grandmother’s dog is happy, and Grandmother lives in an apartment,” she’d argued.

“No, your grandmother lives in a private Park Avenue wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We just call that massive sprawl an apartment to be polite,” he’d responded, smiling. But he hadn’t budged.

Now in algebra, her last class of the day, she was still unable to push the image of her father and Molly and the banana-touting Maurice from her mind. Her ire was so great that she thought she might cry, and she vowed that before going home—after school and the information meeting for the kids trying out for
The Secret Garden
—she would stop by the bookstore near their apartment and buy a copy of
Maurice and the Magic Banana.
When her father came home from FERAL (and she had no delusions that he would leave work early this afternoon, not on the day of his triumphant return), she would paw at the air like a gorilla, and she would grunt, screech, and ululate like the monkeys she had seen on TV. (
Of course
she had never seen a monkey at a zoo like a normal child, a source of periodic bitterness for her—including this very moment.) Then she would toss the book into his lap and demand that he treat her as well as he had a big, hairy gorilla he’d probably met one time in his life.

PAIGE SUTHERLAND
would never tell Dominique Germaine or Keenan Barrett what she thought of the FERAL offices, because she valued their business and people were entitled to their tastes—however misguided. Still, whenever she dropped by for a meeting it was always disarming to see so many framed images of rabbits intentionally blinded by cosmetic companies and chickens trapped in what looked like hatbox-sized cages and monkeys with wires up their . . . well, in every orifice on their bodies, it seemed. Dominique’s office didn’t have those sorts of photos, of course, because she had those massive paintings instead of birds whose plumage looked more than a little to Paige like human vaginas. She thought they would have been great in a New Age gynecologist’s office.

There was also a massive, framed presentation of the Ovid poem that FERAL used parts of almost everywhere, the lettering in this case a pretentious cross between wedding invitation calligraphy and the ninth-century script of the monk of Saint Gall:

He who can slit his calf’s throat, hear its cries

Unmoved, who has the heart to kill his kid

That screams like a small child, or eat the bird

His hand has reared and fed! How far does this

Fall short of murder? Where else does it lead?

Away with traps and snares and lures and wiles!

Never again lime twigs to cheat the birds,

Nor feather ropes to drive the frightened deer,

Nor hide the hook with dainties that deceive!

Destroy what harms; destroy, but never eat;

Choose wholesome fare and never feast on meat!

Moreover, because so much of what FERAL did revolved around publicity, many of the employees’ cubicle or office walls were covered with posters of the organization’s recent campaigns against leather and ice cream and the running of the bulls in Pamplona. Most of these were pretty unpleasant, though she did notice an exception this morning: On a wall in the reception area hung a nice new poster of fashion models posing nude to protest fur. It was taken in one of the Greek statue galleries at the Metropolitan, and she couldn’t imagine how Dominique or Spencer (or one of his minions) had convinced the museum to let them do a photo shoot there. She was mightily impressed. She thought the group would be a lot more successful if they did more with nudity and less with Ovid.

Nevertheless, Paige, too, was a vegetarian, though she still had her share of leather in her wardrobe and accessories. Oh, she’d been a bit of a phony when she’d first agreed to help FERAL with a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission about New York State’s “Lucky Cow” campaign: a series of television commercials the state’s dairy board had produced that suggested Empire State dairy cows were the luckiest bovines on the planet. In Dominique and Keenan and Spencer’s opinion, the ads took the notion of permissible puffery to an altogether new pinnacle of deceptiveness, since they suggested a dairy cow led a long and bucolic life, and stood around grazing and nursing her young in green fields with small coppices of shade trees most days. This was complete malarkey—but, alas, not everyone knew it.

What pushed her over the line firmly into FERAL’s camp occurred the following year, during an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Europe. She watched on the television news a pyre made from the carcasses of three-hundred-plus sheep on a farm near Inverness, a tiny fraction of the ten million cows and pigs and sheep being shot and burned and buried all across Great Britain and the continent across the channel—most of whom weren’t even sick. Suddenly she was sobbing uncontrollably, since she knew from her work with FERAL that foot-and-mouth disease wasn’t lethal either to people or animals and was actually treatable with appropriate veterinary care. Instead of trying to heal the animals, however, humans were obliterating them, and all because their value as food was in jeopardy and the slaughter was viewed as a reasonable way to restore confidence in meat.

Bottom line? Paige considered most of the individuals who worked for FERAL a tad fanatic and their behavior more times than not a bit extreme. But she was glad they were out there fighting the good fight, and she was happy to help—especially given the serious pile of money this particular case was likely to be worth. An injury this terrible? Her share of the contingent fee alone might well approach seven figures, given her firm’s policy that you “eat what you kill.” (Now, there, she thought, was an expression she was unlikely ever to share with Keenan or Dominique.)

She guessed altogether that somewhere between twenty-five or thirty people were employed in FERAL’s New York office and another ten or twelve in Washington, D.C. Somewhere in central Connecticut the organization also rented space in a warehouse, where they stored the FERAL shirts and mugs and canvas totes, the Pleather cat suits and skirts, and the myriad trinkets people could buy to show their support for the group. Most of the New York employees seemed to be involved in what FERAL called its “campaigns”—education and publicity, which included everything from sending a “humane instruction trainer” into one of the few public schools on the planet that would actually allow a FERAL staffer onto the premises, to getting Spencer or Dominique on
Good Morning, America
—while most of the employees in Washington assisted with the legislative lobbying efforts. FERAL had five full-time attorneys, but Keenan and his young assistant were the only two based in New York.

This morning Paige expected to meet with Dominique and Keenan and Spencer, and she was neither surprised nor flattered that on Spencer’s very first day back in the office she was on his agenda. She knew that what she did was important.

Consequently, when the receptionist, that strange young woman with the twin piercings in both eyebrows (four thin rings altogether) and the metal stud in her tongue told her (the stud occasionally clicking against her teeth as she spoke) that Spencer wasn’t coming in after all, she began to wonder exactly what had happened to the poor man. She wasn’t worried, because in the long run it could only make her life easier if he was physically falling apart. But in the short run it might complicate certain tasks. After all, they were planning to have a press conference the week after next, and one of the things she wanted to discuss today—and Spencer was critical to this part of the plan, both because he was the victim and because he was in charge of FERAL’s communications programs—was the timing of their various announcements.

Still, it was clear that she and Dominique and Keenan would meet anyway, and the receptionist made it sound as if one of Spencer’s assistants would join them as well. She guessed it would be that sweet Randy Mitchell, a young woman who had wanted originally to be a model but was just not quite beautiful enough: She was a tad too short, her face a bit too round, and even in long sweaters and those blouses of hers that were meant to remain untucked it was evident that she was little too wide in the hips. But she was certainly pretty enough to pose in many of FERAL’s promotional pieces, and in the course of three and a half years she had gone from being one of the FERAL Granola Girls—the young women who wore little but strategically draped garlands of granola while handing out vegan granola bars for free outside of Taco Bell, McDonald’s, and Kentucky Fried Chicken—to being Spencer’s principal assistant. She was, Paige knew, on a first-name basis with the producers of all the morning news programs and afternoon talk shows, and Paige had a pretty good sense that Randy was capable of getting the attention of the lifestyle and science reporters at most of the nation’s premier newspapers.