Noah's Wife (3 page)

T
he zookeeper became a zookeeper in the first place because even though he doesn't like animals much at all, he likes people even less.

He finds animals dull and people tiresome and the only person he can bear to be around for more than ten minutes at a time is Mrs. McGinn's daughter. If truth be told (as the zookeeper always believes it should be), she has her faults. For example: she sneezes all the time. Her toes turn slightly in. As an only child she is spoiled and aggressively competitive. She talks with food in her mouth. Finally, and not least, her mother has instilled in her a sense of distrust toward the world in general and lovers in particular that the zookeeper has had to work hard to overcome. If ever he speaks too long to a pretty visitor at the zoo (these are few and far between), to one of his female
neighbors, even to a woman of the McGinns' own clan, he will catch in his fiancée's eye the same fierce gleam that he sees in the eyes of wolves or predatory cats. He is not afraid of much, but sometimes he is afraid of her.

“Don't even think about it,” she'll say to him, her voice needlelike and cold.

“I'm not!” he says. “I'm not thinking about it at all!”

She will then plant a proprietary kiss on his mouth, satisfied. He watches the fluttering of her hair as she stalks away from him, certain that if she ever caught him with someone else, she'd take one of the toothy bread knives from the diner and come after him. He loves how perilous she can be.

Sometimes when she turns up to see him at work they will lounge together on the banks of the silver river where it runs through the zoo. Lately she has taken to bringing an oversized beach umbrella that she stakes into the mud beside them, providing makeshift shelter from the rain. He likes to examine her there, to trace his finger through the red-gold down that runs along her limbs, to watch one of her hands toy with the end of her meager braid while the other rests on the zookeeper's knee or on the knuckle side of his hairy fist. If she is there after hours he will often take her hand and lead her back to the long-abandoned gibbon enclosure, where he will push her up against the hard stucco wall and make love to her right there, the gray wolves howling in the woods and the rain rushing through the eaves above them, her feet off the ground and her legs wrapped halfway around his back, which is as far as she can reach. The
zookeeper is not a small man. He is bulky and muscular and covered in a coarse dark hair. He towers over his neighbors and shows no fear of the animals, not even at feeding time when the wolves lunge toward the buckets of raw red meat that he hangs from thick, fleshy wrists. Mrs. McGinn's daughter licks the ridges of his ear, calls him her grizzly bear.

On his rounds he whistles in the rain and swings a pail of oats and overripe vegetables back and forth through the air. Later on he pushes a wheelbarrow full of hay from the barn to the cattle enclosure, one hand shielded over his face to keep the water from falling into his eyes. He dumps the hay over the fence while the highland cows consider him without fear, their gazes half hidden beneath their shaggy locks, their coats soaked. Behind them the antelope and the gazelle are grazing, their silhouettes soft and gold against the charcoal sky. The reindeer stands stock-still beneath a dogwood tree, his antlers caught once again in the branches. The zookeeper heaves a sigh, straddles the fence, and strides over with his garden rake to untangle the stupid beast. His boots sink several inches in the mud and it requires some effort to lift them. He grunts at the rain, exasperated and disturbed. The zoo was built in the lowest part of town, a piece of ground that used to be marshlands until it was filled in before construction. The triangle-shaped park juts out into the water, bordered on two sides by the river and on the third by a small creek that runs in front of the main entrance. At the time, the city planners believed that the site would attract native waterfowl and that the arching bridge to the entrance would
soon become iconic. Now the zookeeper wonders how many more days he has until the entire zoo sinks back into the swamps from which it rose.

He trudges through the rest of his tasks while he waits for Mrs. McGinn's daughter to join him. As the daylight fades she comes to find him where he stands in the aviary, listening to the parrot and watching the toucan swoop in yellow-green arcs. In the corner is a mesh enclosure filled with butterflies, and on the far side of the room is the pen with the lone eagle. The bird shifts on its perch when she enters, and the zookeeper turns to greet her.

“Adam!” she says. She takes several swift steps forward to embrace him.

He pulls her against his chest, feels her heart hammering through her coat and her breath blowing warm on his neck. She presses her lips briefly to his and then pulls away.

The zookeeper reaches for her hand. Lately, she has been increasingly restless.

“Are you all right, Angie?” he has asked her, five or six times a day for the past week.

She will shrug and tell him she is fine. But a few minutes later she will inevitably ask him: “Adam, do you think it was an accident or not?”

To be honest, the zookeeper does not particularly care. He considers himself something of a fatalist, having shoveled out enough exotic animal carcasses to be more aware than most of the ever-present pressure of mortality.

“We'll all be gone sooner or later, Angie,” he will tell her, “whether we walk into the river or not.”

The zookeeper finds a strange kind of comfort in the thought, but his fiancée has not seemed reassured. Now she extricates her hand from his, stooping down to lift the pail of fish he has set out for her. As he follows her out the door and over the flat wooden footbridge into the simulated savannah, he notes that the water has risen high enough to cover the planks. When he catches up to her on the path he glances sideways at her, nodding without listening to what she is telling him. Like her mother, the girl is a serious talker—and yet he appreciates the simple fact of her presence, loping along at his side with her words running quick as a hummingbird's heart.

Taking a shortcut through the reptile house and the plaster cave for the nocturnal mammals, they head toward the Antarctic zone. Most of the enclosures they pass are empty of animals, choked with drowning weeds and littered with boards that have broken away from fences or feeding troughs. This zoo is becoming as spectral as the town itself. When the place was at its peak the dinnertime rounds would have taken the keepers three times as long, but now the zoo houses only sixty animals in total. Without a steady stream of visitors, the zoo's funds are running dry. The animals that die are not replaced and there are few new births. The zookeeper's home is on the grounds, in a spartan apartment above what used to be the gift shop, and at night he sometimes dreams he hears the hoofbeats and roars of beasts long gone.

At the penguin tank the zookeeper holds the pail while Mrs. McGinn's daughter reaches in to choose a fish from the heap. He looks away as she flings a clammy tail toward the birds. Dead fish make him feel seasick.

Mrs. McGinn's daughter takes great pleasure in feeding the penguins. They are exotic, comically formal, and monogamous. At the tank she remarks upon this fact and her hard face softens, her eyes warming to her favorite subject.

“Tell me the others,” she insists, dipping a hand again into her pail. “You know—the animals who mate for life.”

“Gibbons, swans, bald eagles,” he says automatically, rattling off the list that he has rattled off a hundred times before. “Wolves, termites, beavers, pigeons, prions.”

“Prairie voles, black vultures,” she continues. Her tongue trips lightly over the names, and her tone rises and falls as if in song.

“That's right,” he says.

He doesn't mind these pointed reminders of hers. As the daughter of a revolving set of fathers, perhaps it is only to be expected that she find comfort in stories of successful relationships and in the knowledge that the animal world is not completely devoid of constancy. There is such a thing, he is slowly training her to believe, as fidelity.

When the fish are all gone, she sighs and her head falls to his shoulder. He runs his hand through her wet and tangled hair, watches the rise and fall of her shoulder. The freckles on her face stand in sharp relief to her skin.

“When are we leaving, Adam?” she asks.

His heart thuds a little harder, and he hopes she cannot feel it. “Soon,” he says.

“Have you had any luck finding a replacement?”

“Some,” he replies. He swallows, thickly. “But I haven't found a perfect match yet.”

“All right.” She lifts her head and turns to face him, her green eyes gone suddenly dark. “You haven't forgotten what we talked about, right?” she asks. Her tone is unforgiving. “You haven't forgotten our plans?”

Behind her, two wild boars plod along the cracked and puddled sidewalk, shoving their snouts into the mud. In the distance the zookeeper can see one of the peacocks flaring his tail.

He doesn't know what to tell her. When she agreed to marry him, she did so on the condition that they would not stay here forever, that sooner (rather than later) they would leave her family and his animals behind and they would start over together, somewhere new, preferably in a place where it didn't rain all the time and where she would not be forever trapped under her mother's formidable thumb. That is the plan, and the zookeeper does not have the nerve to tell his fiancée that his heart isn't in it.

The truth is that when no one replied to the job listing he sent out to the newspapers, when not a single person applied for the position or showed up during the week he had set aside for interviews, he found himself unexpectedly relieved. It was then that he realized he has no desire to give up his job. He has
a place here that he understands, a role that only he can fulfill. At the zoo there is a purpose for him.

The zookeeper considers his fiancée. When his gaze falls upon the long arc of her neck he wonders (as he has wondered before) how much of his attraction to her is founded upon this giraffe-like feature, how much upon her willowy silhouette, her long black lashes. Her chin is raised in his direction and she is glaring at him through the rain, blinking at high speed. Her drive to leave this place is instinctive, he knows—to her it seems like a matter of life or death. She will insist (falsely) that he doesn't love her. She does not understand that if he takes off now, if he abandons his post while the rain is still falling, the animals that do not starve will surely drown.

“Of course I remember,” he says. “Patience, Angie. Everything will be fine.”

And will it? He pulls her close again and stares out over her head into the distance, toward the single, crumbling highway that links this town to the rest of the world. There is only one way into this place, and one way out. The zookeeper has no idea what sort of life exists for them beyond these hills, and right now he has no interest in trying to imagine it. So instead he kisses her damp hair and comforts her, making promises he is not certain he can keep.

D
r. Yu had always known that she would be a doctor, and she had chosen long ago to become a heart surgeon specifically because she had wanted to be the kind of doctor who saves lives.

“Anyone can fix broken limbs,” she often declared. “I'm going to save lives.”

She had long, slim fingers with clean nails and a steady hand. She had perfect vision and a level tone, and although her ears were pierced, they were always unadorned.

Her best friend used to remark that perhaps she herself could claim to save lives by association because she was the one who helped the soon-to-be Dr. Yu become Dr. Yu. When other acquaintances marveled at her best friend's dedication, her best friend simply offered her most winsome smile, turned up her palms, and said: “What else is a best friend for?” She quizzed
the soon-to-be Dr. Yu on anatomy diagrams drawn in red ink on the back of white index cards, she knocked on her door on the mornings of exams to make sure that she ate a hearty breakfast of scrambled eggs and toaster waffles, and if they made dinner together at night she asked the soon-to-be Dr. Yu to recount the lectures the medical students attended, and then she exclaimed very appreciatively over the heft of the textbooks and the complexity of the material to be learned by heart.

“It's a funny phrase, isn't it: learn by heart,” her best friend had once observed.

“People don't actually learn by heart,” said the soon-to-be Dr. Yu. “We should really say: to learn by hippocampus. Short-term memories, like names or numbers or insignificant others, we store primarily in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and it's the hippocampus that is responsible for consolidating short-term memories into long-term memories, which are stored by the intensification of synaptic connections throughout the brain.”

“Right,” said her best friend, who had helped the soon-to-be Dr. Yu review notes for the neuroscience exam. “Extra credit: What animal does the hippocampus resemble?”

“A seahorse,” recalled the soon-to-be Dr. Yu.

Her best friend nodded. “From the Greek:
hippos
, the word for ‘horse,' plus
kampos
. Which means ‘sea monster.'” She smiled at the soon-to-be Dr. Yu, who frowned sternly back.

“You're good at this,” she told her best friend, tapping her pencil on the textbook for emphasis. “Why don't you try for an M.D., too?”

Her best friend laughed lightly. “I'm not like you,” she replied. “We can't all save lives.”

What was there to say to that? The soon-to-be Dr. Yu didn't answer, but for some reason the statement stayed with her. She was the only woman in her graduating class. She completed her degree and flew through her residency and now that she has been a practicing doctor for several years, she finds her best friend's statement to be more accurate, more prescient than ever. Although she is proud of what she has accomplished, she must admit that it is difficult to be the rare woman in a field dominated by men; it is exhausting to feel compelled to prove her worth at every step. Although she never says so to anyone—not even to her best friend, who is both impressed by Dr. Yu and baffled by her relentless ambition—lately she has found herself wondering if her decision to become a doctor was the right choice. She is not always happy, and she is rarely at peace. Mostly she is tired: so dead on her feet that there are many days when she steps out of the hospital and stares for several seconds at the pink sky above the parking lot, trying to determine whether it is dawn or dusk.

It is only two weeks since her best friend has been gone from the city, but already Dr. Yu feels her absence. They have known each other since they became roommates ten years ago, when the soon-to-be Dr. Yu placed an ad in the newspaper for someone to share her two-bedroom townhouse while she worked her way through med school. At their first meeting, the soon-to-be Dr. Yu found the young woman to be exactly as she had sounded
on the telephone: soft-spoken, polite, disarming. As a roommate she showed a strong desire to make herself useful, and so Dr. Yu did not shy away from making use of her. By the time that Dr. Yu graduated, she had the feeling that her roommate knew as much about medicine as she did. They had become best friends within the first six months of living together—in large part, perhaps, because neither of them had all that many other friends to choose from—and when Dr. Yu took a job at the hospital nearby, they decided to carry on as roommates.

When Dr. Yu realized that in all their years together they had never once had a fight, she tried to stir something up—just to see what would happen. But her best friend never took the bait. She remained even-keeled, conciliatory. There were a few months when Dr. Yu deliberately stopped doing her share of the housework and waited to see how long it would take her best friend to bring it up. But her best friend never did. She merely redoubled her efforts (uncomplainingly), and if anything, the house was cleaner than it had been before. Cowed into admitting defeat, Dr. Yu finally picked up a sponge and went back to doing dishes. Apparently her best friend was impossible to irritate. Who was Dr. Yu to try to change her?

Dr. Yu became accustomed to her best friend's intuitive loyalty and her unswerving support. It wasn't as though Dr. Yu did nothing for her in return; on the contrary. She took her best friend home for holidays, since she seemed to have no family of her own. She helped her build a darkroom in their extra bathroom so that she could expand her work as a
photographer. When her best friend had her heart broken—which she did, in those early days, quite a few times—it was Dr. Yu who cheered her, who promised that all of this was for the best and soon something better would come along. For all of her general good humor, her best friend was not an optimist by nature. In the darker, sadder moments of her early twenties she could tend toward melancholia, playing up the part with darkened nails and somber lipstick. Somehow she seemed to be constantly moving even when she was sitting still, solemn and straight-backed in a kitchen chair with Dr. Yu's notes splayed open before her. With her monochromatic wardrobe and the insistent fluttering of her hands and her feet, she reminded one of nothing so much as a dark, fretful bird, its wings forever beating against the windowpanes.

Although Dr. Yu doesn't like to admit it to herself, she thrived on her best friend's veneration. Perhaps that is the main reason why they became so close in the first place. It was always clear to Dr. Yu that her best friend was in awe of her, but it wasn't until after Noah came into their lives—and her best friend's full attention was displaced—that Dr. Yu realized how much she depended on her friend, and on that feeling of being admired.

Dr. Yu does not have a problem with Noah in particular. It is true that she is skeptical of Noah's zealousness and universal charm; she does not believe that it is possible to maintain such tenacious faith in a world, a being, an idea for which one has no evidence. Dr. Yu cannot tell, furthermore, if Noah appreciates
her best friend for herself, for things like her clever comebacks or her fierce loyalty, or if he only loves her because she fits so naturally, so willingly, into the role of the minister's wife. In spite of all this, Dr. Yu is practical enough to realize that whomever her best friend married would have fallen short in her estimation. Noah is fine. Anyone would have been fine. The people we love, she believes, will never find matches that we consider worthy of them. This is what love means.

The sheer speed of that relationship and the announcement of the engagement took Dr. Yu by surprise. After eight years of living with her best friend, shouldn't she have seen it coming? Instead, the transformation was sudden: her best friend stopped helping Dr. Yu with her material, forgot to inquire after her patients. She smiled more often, took up cooking, and started going to church.

“Do you even believe in God?” Dr. Yu demanded, stabbing her fork into her best friend's attempt at a very unsophisticated tuna casserole.

“Noah does,” said her best friend with a small smile. “That's good enough for me.”

Dr. Yu had kept her mouth shut. She believes that she knows her best friend better than anyone in the world. Does Noah know, for example, every single one of her habits? The show tunes she hums when she is dusting the blinds? The way that she arranges canned goods in the pantry by color? Perhaps he has already realized that she is a troubled sleeper—she suffers through nightmares, sometimes sleepwalks—but how will he
know to lock the doors and hide the car keys at night so that she will not try to drive while she is dreaming?

Dr. Yu found out later that her worries were nothing but a waste of energy: the sleepwalking stopped when her best friend met Noah. Furthermore, her other physical tics (the nervous movements of her fingers, her knees) also slowed, and trailed away. Something about Noah put her best friend at ease, and if Dr. Yu was sorry to lose her to the marriage, she was sorrier still that she had not been the one to cure her.

In any case, there was little for Dr. Yu to do but offer her support. Her best friend and Noah moved into the parsonage of a church only a half mile down from Dr. Yu, so they wouldn't be far. At the ceremony, Dr. Yu wore a coral-colored dress and stood at attention to one side of her best friend, gripping both their bouquets in her steady hand. She listened to the sound of thunder outside the chapel, saw the lightning illuminate Noah's eyes, and she watched the exchange of rings with resignation. Dr. Yu had given the bride a comb attached to a short veil studded in pearls, and beneath it her face was rosy and full.

The morning after the ceremony Dr. Yu awoke and staggered from her bed while the world outside her bedroom window was still black and solemn. She ate breakfast standing up in the kitchen, leaning her head back against the cabinets, listening to the clink of her spoon against the bowl and the rush of the occasional car passing on the street in front of her building. She took the bus to the hospital and when she arrived at her locker she slipped out of her sneakers and into her clogs and then she
shrugged a white coat—only slightly crumpled—over her shoulders. In the operating room the radio was turned to a low hum and the lights were painful to her eyes. She fixed a mask to her face and took her place beside the attending surgeons.

Coronary bypass surgeries were a relatively new procedure. Dr. Yu had not yet performed one of her own, and so she should have been paying close attention. The patient's chest was spliced open and the surgeons were bent over their work, but she felt distant, drained. What percentage of cells would you need to replace to become someone else? she asked herself. Where does one person end and another begin?

She considered the tangle of organs and the shine of silver surgical clamps in the light over the table and she thought of her best friend asleep beside Noah, dreamless, at peace. Perhaps she never would have made it as a doctor. Dr. Yu has come to learn that working in a hospital means that one sees people when they are at their weakest, their most vulnerable, their most dependent—and although she believes that her best friend would have excelled at the coursework and would never have fainted at the sight of blood, Dr. Yu doesn't believe that she could have borne the sight of so much suffering. The only people who her best friend will allow herself to love are the strong ones: the ones who will never leave her, never let her down.

It is only natural, Dr. Yu supposes, for her best friend's focus to shift now that she has married Noah. She only wishes she had not come to rely on her best friend so; and she wishes that her best friend and Noah had not left the city when they did. With
her mother now gone and her father swept up in his grief, Dr. Yu could really use a best friend. She could use someone to console her, someone to reaffirm her commitment to medicine, someone to remind her that the illness was never her fault, that she could not have done more than she did, that just because she became a doctor to save lives, it does not mean that she can save them all.