The Informers

by Bret Easton Ellis

  13

  AT THE ZOO WITH BRUCE

  I'm at the zoo with Bruce today and right now we are staring at dirty-pink flamingos, some standing on one leg beneath a hot November sun. Last night I drove past his house in Studio City and saw the silhouette of Grace glide by the giant video screen that is placed in front of the futon in the upstairs bedroom. Bruce's car was not in the driveway, though I'm not sure what that means since Grace's car wasn't there either. Bruce and I met at the studio my father is currently running. Bruce writes for "Miami Vice" and I am now a fifth-year junior at UCLA. Bruce was supposed to leave Grace last night and it's obvious today, right now, that he hasn't made the move. We drove over the hill to the zoo pretty much in complete silence except for the new salsa band on the tape deck and Bruce's comments about the quality of the sound accompanying the silence between songs. Bruce is two years older than me. I am twenty-three.

  It's a weekday, late on Thursday morning. Schoolchildren walk by, forming crooked lines, while we stare at the flamingos. Bruce is chain-smoking. Mexicans with the day off drink cans of beer concealed in paper bags, stop, stare, mumble things, giggle drunkenly, point at benches. I pull Bruce closer to me and tell him I need a diet Coke.

  "They sleep like women," Bruce says, about the flamingos.

  "I can't explain it."

  I notice that there are literally hundreds of elementary-school children, holding hands in pairs, passing by us. I nudge Bruce and he turns away from the birds and I'm laughing at the size of the mass of children. Bruce loses interest in the confused, smiling faces and points at a sign:

  REFRESHMENTS.

  Once the children are out of my range of vision the zoo seems deserted. The only person I see on our walk to the refreshment stand is Bruce, up ahead of me. It is so empty in the zoo that someone could get murdered and no one would notice. Bruce is not the kind of man I usually go out with. He's married, not tall, when I reach him he pays for my diet Coke with the change he kept from me for parking. He complains about how we can't find the gibbons, something about how the gibbons have got to be around here somewhere. This means that we aren't talking about Grace but I'm hoping that he will surprise me. I'm not asking anything because of how disappointed he seems about not finding the gibbons. We pass more animals. Hot, miserable-looking penguins. A crocodile moves slowly toward its water, avoiding a large dead tumbleweed.

  "That crocodile's looking at you, baby," Bruce says, lighting another cigarette. "That crocodile's thinking: mmmm."

  "I bet these animals aren't exactly what you could call happy," I tell him as we watch a polar bear, patches of its fur stained blue from chlorine, drag itself toward a shallow pool, a fake glacier.

  "Oh come on," Bruce disagrees. "Sure they're happy."

  "I can't see how," I say.

  "What do you want them to do? Light sparklers? Tap-dance? Tell you how nice that blouse looks on you?"

  A keg is actually floating in the piss-yellow water and the polar bear avoids the water, pacing around it instead. Bruce moves on. I follow. He's now looking for the snow leopard, which is high on his list of must-sees. We find where the snow leopards are supposed to be but they're hiding. Bruce lights another cigarette and stares at me.

  "Don't worry," he says.

  "I'm not worrying," I say. "Aren't you hot?"

  "No," he says. "The jacket's linen."

  "What is that?" I ask, staring at a big, strange-looking bird. "Ostrich?"

  "No," he sighs. "I don't know."

  "Is it an . . . emu?" I ask.

  "I've never seen one before," he says. "So how would I know?"

  My eye starts twitching and I throw the rest of the drink into a nearby trash can. I find a rest room while Bruce watches the polar bears some more. In the rest room I splash warm water on my face, willing myself out of an anxiety attack. A black woman is helping a little boy sit on the toilet without falling in. It's cooler here, the air sweet, unpleasant. I fix my contacts quickly and leave to rejoin Bruce, who points out to me a huge red scar crisscrossed with massive black stitches that runs across the back of one of the polar bears.

  Bruce watches a kangaroo hop worriedly toward a zookeeper, but it won't let the zookeeper pick it up. It reaches out a tentative paw and hisses, a horrible sound coming from a kangaroo, and the zookeeper grabs it by its tail and drags the animal away. Another kangaroo watches, backed into a corner, terrified, munching nervously on brown leaves. The remaining kangaroo squeals and hops around in circles, then stops with a sudden jerk. We move on.

  I'm still thirsty but all the refreshment stands we pass are closed and I cannot seem to find a water fountain. The last time Bruce and I saw each other had been on Monday. He picked me up in a green Porsche and we went to a screening at the studio of the new teenage sex comedy, then dinner, Tex Mex in Malibu. As he was leaving my apartment that night he discussed with me his plans for leaving Grace, who has become one of my father's favorite young actresses and who Bruce tells me he never really was in love with but married anyway, for reasons "still unknown," a year ago. I know he hasn't left Grace and I am ninety-nine percent sure he will explain it all to me later but I am also hoping he has made the move and that this is the reason why he is so silent right now, because he will offer it as a surprise later, after lunch. He smokes cigarette after cigarette.

  Although Bruce is twenty-five he looks younger and this is mostly due to his boyish height, his unblemished, consistently hairless, stubble-free face, his crop of thickish, fashionably cut blond hair, and since he does a lot of drugs he's thinner than he probably should be but in a good way and he has a dignity that most of the men I know don't have, will never have. He disappears up ahead. I follow him into some new world now: cactus, elephants, more strange birds, huge reptiles, rocks, Africa. A gang of Hispanic boys roams aimlessly, following us, playing hooky but probably not and I check my watch to verify that I will be missing my one o'clock class.

  We met at a wrap party at the studio. Bruce came up to where I was standing, offered me a glass of ice and said, "You look like Nastassja Kinski." I stood there, mute, made a concentrated effort that lasted nine seconds to decode this gesture. Three weeks into the affair I found out he was married and I cursed myself miserably that whole afternoon and night after he told me this at Trumps one Friday before he had to fly to Florida for the weekend. I didn't recognize the signs that accompany an affair with a married man since basically in L.A. there aren't any. After I found out, it made sense and things totally came together but by then it was "too late." A gorilla is lying on its back, playing with a branch. We are standing far away yet I can smell it. Bruce moves on to a rhinoceros.

  "They like to be here," he says, staring at a rhinoceros that lies immobile, on its side, and that I'm pretty sure is not alive. "Why wouldn't they like it?"

  "They were captured," I say. "They were put into cages."

  By the giraffes, lighting another cigarette, making a wisecrack about Michael Jackson, Bruce says, "Don't leave me."

  This is what he said when British Vogue offered me a ridiculously well-paying job that I was not capable of doing and that my stepmother arranged and that, in retrospect, I should have taken and he said it again before he left me that weekend for Florida, he said "Don't leave me" and if he hadn't made the request I would have left but since he did, I stayed, both times.

  "Well," I murmur, carefully rubbing an eye.

  All the animals look sad to me, especially the monkeys, who mill around unenthusiastically, and Bruce makes a comparison between the gorillas and Patti LaBelle and we find another refreshment stand. I pay for his hamburger because he doesn't carry cash. We got into the zoo today because of a friend's membership Bruce had borrowed. When I asked him what kind of person would have a membership to the zoo, Bruce silenced me with a soft kiss, a touch, a small squeeze on the back of my neck, offered me a Marlboro Light. Bruce hands me a receipt. I pocket it. A newly married couple with an infant sit at a table next to ours. The couple make me nerv
ous because my parents never took me to a zoo. The baby grabs at a french fry. I shudder.

  Bruce takes the meat patty off the bun and eats it, ignoring the bread since he considers it unhealthy, "bad for me."

  Bruce never eats breakfast, not even on days he works out, and he's hungry now and he chews loudly, gratefully. I nibble on an onion ring, giggling to myself, and he will not talk about us today. It crosses my mind, stays, starts melting, that there is no impending divorce from Grace.

  "Let's go," I say. "See more animals." "Mellow out," he says.

  We move past uselessly proud llamas, a tiger we can't see, an elephant that looks as if it has been beaten. This is a description hanging by the side of the cage of something called a bongo: "They are seldom seen because of their extreme shyness and the markings on their sides and back make them blend into the shadows." Baboons strut around, acting macho, scratching themselves brazenly. Females pick pathetically at the males' fur, cleaning them.

  "What are we doing here?" I ask. "Bruce?"

  At some point Bruce says, "Are we as far back as we can get?"

  I'm staring at what I think are ostriches. "I don't know if we are," I say. "Yes."

  "No, we're not," he calls out, walking ahead.

  I follow him to where he stops, staring at a zebra.

  " 'The zebra is truly a magnificent-looking animal,' " he reads from a description hanging next to the habitat.

  "It looks very . . . Melrose," I say.

  "I get the feeling an adjective just escaped you, baby," he says.

  A child suddenly appears at my side and waves at the zebra.

  "Bruce," I start. "Did you tell her?"

  We move to a bench. It has become overcast but it's still hot and windy and Bruce smokes another cigarette and says nothing.

  "I want to talk to you," I say, grabbing his hands, squeezing them, but they lie there limply, lifeless in his lap.

  "Why do they give some animals big cages and some not?" he wonders.

  "Bruce. Please." I start crying. The bench has suddenly become the center of the universe.

  "The animals remind me of things I can't explain," he says.

  "Bruce." I choke.

  I swiftly move a hand up to his face, touching his cheek gently, pressing.

  He takes my hand and pulls it away from him and holds it between us on the bench and he quickly tells me, "Listen—my name is Yocnor and I am from the planet Arachanoid and it is located in a galaxy that Earth has not yet discovered and probably never will. I have been on your planet according to your time for the past four hundred thousand years and I was sent here to collect behavioral data which will enable us to eventually take over and destroy all other existing galaxies, including yours. It will be a horrible month, since Earth will be destroyed in increments and there will be suffering and pain on a level your mind will never be able to understand. But you will not experience this demise firsthand because it will occur in Earth's twenty-fourth century and you will be dead long before that. I know you will find this hard to believe but for once I am telling you the truth. We will never speak of this again." He kisses my hand, then looks back at the zebra and at the child wearing a CALIFORNIA T-shirt, still standing there, waving at the animal.

  On the way out we find the gibbons. It's as if they appear from nowhere, materializing for Bruce only. I have never seen a gibbon before and I don't particularly want to see one now, so it's basically a rather unilluminating experience. I sit on another bench and wait for Bruce, the sun beating down through haze, breaking it up, swirling it around, and it dawns on me that Bruce might not leave Grace and it also dawns on me that I might fall in love with someone else and I might even leave college and head for England or at least the East Coast. A lot of things might keep me away from Bruce. In fact, the odds look pretty good that something will. But I can't help it, I think to myself as we leave the zoo and get back into my red BMW and he starts it up, I have faith in this man.

  The End