Lightning People (25 page)

“What are you doing outside in this weather?” he finally asked.

The idea of being forced to explain made her cheeks go red, and she searched for a dignified response. One of the chief comforts of working at the zoo was that none of her personal acquaintances ever made their way into the park unless they phoned first at the gate, usually for free entry, and that gave her the needed minutes to cut a more professional pose.

“I'm working.” As if to prove it, she thrust a brochure into the chest of a passing grandmother, who in turn grumbled a complaint about visitor treatment. “The real question is, why are you here?”

“I was looking for you,” he said after a long, anxious laugh. “But it's a good question for me in general lately, isn't it? I've been asking myself why I'm here for a month. Shouldn't you be inside where it's dry?”

“Well, when you have a real job, you sometimes have to do unpleasant work along with all of the glamorous stuff. Educating the masses is a responsibility we don't take lightly.” She wanted to vomit for regressing into Abrams speak. “If none of my colleagues can stand outside in a little downpour, I'll have to do it.”

William waved his palms as if to show no offense, although his mind must be busy recalibrating whatever esteem he held for her career. Suddenly her fingers started to burn, and she cursed as she let go of the cigarette and slapped the sleeve at any smoldering embers. William stomped the butt out with the heel of his boot.

“Are you okay?”

“I'm fine,” she said curtly, sucking her fingertips.

“I tried to have the ticket desk call you, but they couldn't get through. I told them I was a friend of yours, so they let me in for free.”

“That's nice,” she said, pretending to look at something more important over his shoulder. Anything was more important than William Asternathy. The bagel-shaped hotdog vendor slumped over his metal cart was more important than this man. She decided to put a stop to the pleasantries. “Why are you here, William?”

“I went to the bat cave along the way. Have you ever been in there? It's called the World of Darkness. Don't you love that? All you see is this constant flutter in the dark. When I finally got a turn to push my nose against the glass, I saw one. It was just hanging there upside down. Weirdly, the bat looked peaceful. And why shouldn't it be? All of these animals have homes. They've got everything taken care of for them. The way I see it, they're at the top of the evolutionary ladder—no starvation, no predators, no cold nights. All they have to do is walk three feet and the whole audience claps like they've just witnessed a miracle.”

Del considered the possibility that William might be stoned. His pupils were dilated and his smile was constant. Teenagers often came in droves to the zoo reeking of marijuana. She could find them standing in front of the lion exhibition for hours, occasionally muttering a distant, protracted “wow” to no one in particular.

“I'm afraid I don't have time to give you a private tour,” she said impatiently. “But you're welcome to go inside and see the snakes.”

“Do you have a minute to get a coffee?” William looked around as if he were worried someone was listening. She knew she couldn't leave her post. Not with Abrams lingering around waiting for her to slip up, and especially not for a friend of her husband's who had gone out of his way to make her feel unwelcome in his own home a few
days earlier. She almost laughed at the invitation of wasting a work break sitting across from him in the cafeteria.

“I really don't have time,” she said, placing a hand on his forearm. “I'm sorry. I have to work.”

“You see, I tried calling Joseph all morning.”

“He's in Brooklyn shooting.”

“Shooting what?” For the first time, William seemed to concentrate on her words.

“I don't know. A commercial. Some last-minute booking. I really can't talk now.”

“Good for him.” William ducked his head down reverently. “He gets everything, doesn't he? As long as I've known him he's never had an ounce of bad luck. The guy's a fucking golden—”

“He's on the job for another day or two,” she interrupted. “I suggest you keep trying his cell.”

William chewed on his bottom lip.

“Thing is, it's an emergency,” he mumbled. “I need to borrow some money.”

She sighed. It was the sigh of both recognition and disappointment, the sigh a lover might give in the first moment of understanding that a conversation was moving irrevocably toward a split and everything said before it was merely empty words to get to this point.

“I'm sure Joe will be happy to help you. He always is. As I said, he'll be free in a day or two.”

“I need to borrow money
now
. Today. A thousand or two. That sounds like a lot, doesn't it? But like I said, it is an emergency. I'll pay it back. I hate asking. But I have to get out of town. That sounds crazy, I know. But people have emergencies, don't they? You saw what happened at the party.”

“All I remember is you screaming at us.” She appreciated that he had brought up the night of his party and hoped that memory stung him a bit.

“I'm sorry about that,” he said. “I was drunk. I meant to call you both the next day and apologize. But everything that's gone on, inside and out, all of the bad luck thrown my way, is the reason I'm
getting out. I'm making good on L.A. It's always been my plan and I'm beginning to think it's the growing consensus.”

“I know.”

“So I need to borrow some money until I get out there.”

“You have a lot of friends, William. That party was filled with them. Why don't you ask those people?”

He sucked his cheeks in frustration and cleared his throat.

“I tried. They all said the same thing. ‘Oh, I'd really like to help but I'm low on cash right now.' There are really only a certain number of times you can ask people to lend a hand. But I'm asking you. I'm asking you to help me.”

Del shook her head and stared at him, at this man who repulsed her with his convenient kindness and his dumb, dark eyes opening wide to appear vulnerable and wounded. She could never understand the friendship of Joseph and William, how someone as sure-footed and temperate as her husband made acquaintance with such a messy, unstable person. But she couldn't just let him suffer any more than she would let an animal suffer. He was Joseph's friend.

“Look. I can't leave this spot. I can't get to an ATM until I'm done with work.” She wiped the rain collecting on her eyelids.

“I could wait for you,” he exclaimed, jumping at the offer before it was snatched away. “I'll walk around the park. I'll look at the snakes.”

She checked her wristwatch. She turned around and opened the door to the exhibition hall. Abrams stood just inside and nodded to her. She shut the door and took a breath, the whole while William's eyes widened with more wounded hope. Instinctively, she grabbed for the wallet in her back pocket—more for show because there was no way she would trust him with her bank card and password—and found four twenties in the bill flap.

“This is all I have right now,” she said almost pleadingly. But then she noticed Madi's wedding check for two thousand dollars. Del hadn't cashed it yet because she and Madi hadn't gone shopping together. She could sign it over to him and that would be enough to get rid of him once and for all. It was an investment, she figured, in seeing William out of town. Madi would no doubt scream at her
for re-gifting a present that had already lacked intimate value in the first place. Del and William stared at each other for what felt like too long, and she worried Abrams would catch her in the middle of a personal conversation during her forced exile from the lab.

“Do you have a pen?”

William dug through his raincoat, pulling out a ballpoint. She steadied the check on the stack of brochures, signing her name and adding “I hereby sign this over to . . . ”

“It's Asternathy,” he said, watching her penmanship.

“I know your name,” she grunted. It only now occurred to her that William might not know her own last name, might not know anything beyond Del Guiteau.

“Thank you. I can't tell you what this does.” He examined the amount and opened his mouth in relief. “Who is Madeline Singh?”

“A friend,” she said. “It was her wedding present to me.”

Before Del left for the day, she wandered over to the World of Darkness, which exhibited the Rodriques fruit bats. She had hoped to see them flying in the dark, a furious, black army of beating wings. Animals could still hold up their feral mysteries to her, make her feel like there was a rhythm to the world bigger than the one she knew. A cleaning woman with gray cornrows vacuumed the carpet in her custodian jumpsuit, one shade darker than Del's to identify staff rank. The keepers had already turned on the interior lights to coerce the nocturnal animals into sleep. Del stepped over the extension cord anyway and peered through the glass, her nose fluted against the invisible divider, where hundreds of bats made black icicles in the gnarled plastic branches.

She tried calling Joseph on his cell phone, but it went straight to voicemail.

WILLIAM FELT THE fat of two thousand dollars in his back pocket, along with the $759.61 remaining in his bank account. Thanks to Joseph, thanks to Del, thanks to some phantom moneylender named Madeline Singh, his future was finally looking up. So what if he had stuffed his pride down his throat and begged the last woman in New York who owed him even a second of her time? So what if it he had to prey on the pity of Joseph's wife? He'd be gone in twenty-four hours, driving west, and every state crossing would ease the shame of his last days here. They could devour his memory, dance on his ghost for all he cared, put up warning posters on every construction site with his face crossed out in red. He'd be gone.

When Del gave him the check and he started off through the park, still slightly stoned from the joint he had bought that morning on Christopher Street, he turned around to catch one last look at her. She stood in the pouring rain, watching him go, and he felt sorry for her. She looked more caged than any of the animals. She could leave; technically nothing was barring her way. But Del just stood there, drenched and unsmiling, like a dog left out in a storm. And a thought swam through William like a warm ocean current: no
matter what deceitful things he had to perform to get out of town, he was free, a moving force with no restrictions, and that single thought filled him with tremendous hope.

He unlocked the door off the street to Quinn's place, drifted down the dark tunnel of the apartment building, pried open the steel second door that accessed the garden, and saw the lit windows of the cottage between the dripping trees. Inside he heard the shower running, and, as he closed the door, he nearly barreled into a slim gawky kid, who couldn't be more than eighteen, getting dressed in the living room. The boy was pulling a polo shirt over his hairless torso, his white-blond hair mohawked in sweat, and his invisible white eyebrows lifted in frightened surprise.

“Hey, sorry,” William said. The kid grumbled, quickly reaching to claim a backpack on the floor. A patch sewn on the front flap suggested that MAYBE PARTYING WILL HELP. “Are you guys busy? I can come back.”

The kid shook his head robotically, hugging the bag to his chest as he slid his bare feet into scuffed yellow sneakers. His skin was translucent blue where it wasn't rubbed red, and his jeans bundled together at the waist by a nylon belt to keep them from sliding off his hips.

“You a friend of Quinn's?” William asked, trying to ease the awkwardness, because already he noticed a nest of balled tissues on the sofa. “I can come back.”

“No. I'm leaving.”

The shower turned off. The whip of a towel yanked from the curtain rod competed with Quinn's tuneful humming.

“He's a good guy, you know,” William said.

“Why should I care?”

“Okay. You live around here?”

“Yeah,” the kid sputtered sarcastically. “I own the brownstone across the street.”

William couldn't spot an accent. The words were teenage lazy but they weren't uneducated—not Southern backwater poor or Eastern European desperate. His lack of eyelashes made his eyes appear too big for his face, every glance an uneasy jolt, like a farm animal used
to being around humans but not enough to trust them at close range. William got the sense that this guy didn't like being looked at, which was unfortunate because it was clearly his chief means of earning money. So William tried not to look at him at all. He stepped out of the cottage and into the gray night, leaning against one of the oaks.

In a few minutes, the teenager bolted from the cottage with his backpack straddled on his shoulders, walking fast, focused on turning the first corner. William said good-bye and lifted his hand, but the kid didn't turn around, kicking the steel door open and leaving it to squeal as he disappeared into the tunnel. Quinn stepped out of the cottage in a pair of madras shorts with an orange towel wrapped around his neck. His fat, red belly hung over his buttoned waist.

“Christ, Quinn. That guy was young. Too young.”

“He's legal, so please no guilt routine,” Quinn said with squinting eyes. “It was perfectly soft-core, if you really must know. I didn't even take my clothes off. I'm sure I was the most innocuous valetudinarian he's screwed around with all week.” It was Quinn's habit to disguise his vices in a rich vocabulary.

“But he's a kid.”

“He's an escort who's got to make money. At least that's what his ad said.” Quinn tugged William's sleeve in exasperation, leading him back inside. “Forgive me if I don't want to air-condition all of the West Village. And stop giving me that look. When did you get so prudish about the necessities of sex?”