The Bestiary

by Nicholas Christopher

  At twenty-five, she had the same choirgirl face, but her eyes were as fierce as her voice, their deep gray at once more opaque and less mysterious than when she was a girl. Her enviable reserve had been eroded; now she just seemed defensive, wary, coiled at her center. At least, that was the side of herself she was showing me. I hadn’t seen her in three years, and though thinner and paler, she was still beautiful. She wore no makeup. Her blonde hair remained thick, but it was carelessly combed. Her fingernails were bitten down, and she had a bruise on her left forearm. One of her front teeth was chipped.

  “That happened in prison,” she said, catching my glance. “A bull dyke hit on me. That’s what I’ve become, Xeno. What my father used to call ‘the dregs.’ I haven’t fixed the tooth because I don’t want to forget.”

  We stopped at a drab café. There were four metal tables on the sidewalk and we were the only customers. A nearby wall was covered with graffiti in Arabic. Two boys were kicking a ball against it.

  Lena downed her espresso. “So here I am. The French have no problem allowing me to be employed. Their animal rights organizations have real clout. I read about International Refuge in prison. Then I sent them a letter. Looking back, I caught a lucky break when I was busted. Not because I saw the error of my ways,” she added defiantly. “I’ve never regretted that night. I’m still trying to do what I know best, and it’s nice to get results.” She shrugged. “You can’t stop all the suffering, but you also can’t give up.”

  “It sounds like you’re doing a lot of good over here,” I said. “Would you ever want to do it back home?”

  She tilted her empty cup this way and that. “I couldn’t go back if I wanted to. I violated my probation.” She nodded at my surprise. “I’m afraid Bruno doesn’t know that part of the story,” she said drily. “The judge put me on probation for two years. In Portland I was supposed to report in twice a week. Forget it. Even before prison, I’d been itching to leave the country. I took a bus to Vancouver, then flew to Quebec. So now I’m an expat—like you,” she smiled, not pleasantly. “The difference is, I’m also a fugitive. I could be extradited to Oregon from any of the other forty-nine states, and they’d put me back in jail. The FBI isn’t going to come after me here—this isn’t a case for Interpol. Maybe in a few years it will all blow over. Meanwhile, I have a job. A place to live. The French don’t give a damn what you did in America.”

  Her voice was so hard. “Lena, what can I do?”

  “Do? Nothing. You’ve helped me more than enough,” she added with a frown. “You put me through college, remember?”

  “I didn’t just mean money.”

  “What then? Please, don’t tell me you came here to rescue me.”

  “Why would I want to do that? You seem fine.”

  She wagged her finger mockingly. “Maybe this is a bit of a problem—you know, because when you were a kid you wanted someone to rescue you.”

  That smarted, coming from her. “It’s not the worst vice: it’s what you do for a living now, right?”

  “That’s different,” she snapped. “Bruno is into numbers and you’re into magic, but there are animals out there being wiped out. Real animals, not imaginary ones.”

  “Would you tell me, please, why you’re so goddamn pissed at me?”

  “I’m not pissed at you.”

  “Come on, Lena. We’ve known each other too long.”

  She flushed. “Maybe we have.” She pushed her chair back and stood up. “Too long.” And she walked away.

  “Lena!”

  I threw some money on the table and hurried after her, but she had disappeared in a taxi.

  My hands were shaking. My first impulse was to follow her, but I decided it would be better if I waited and called her the next day at International Refuge. It turned out I didn’t have to.

  That night, at two-thirty, I had just fallen asleep when my buzzer rang. She was at the door in her blue raincoat, the collar turned up. Her hair was windblown, her eyes tired. She barely managed a smile.

  “How did you find me?” I said, tying the sash on my bathrobe.

  “You’re in the directory.”

  Ushering her in, I tried to gather my thoughts—and to read hers. But her expression revealed little.

  I took her coat, and she looked around. By now, one wall of my living room was lined floor-to-ceiling with books. Papers were stacked on the desk. Through the window, a blue mist hung over the Square du Temple. The small pond at the end of the park shone like a mirror.

  Lena walked to the window and stared down. I switched on the lamps and waited, but she didn’t move.

  Finally she said, “Have you lived here long?”

  “Less than a year.”

  “I read the plaque across the street that says the Square du Temple was once a separate country.”

  “Yes, a kind of ministate, like Monaco.”

  Beneath her calm I sensed she was nervous, gathering her thoughts before she said what she came to say.

  “It belonged to the Knights Hospitallers,” I continued, trying to give her more time, “and was separated from the rest of the city by a drawbridge. The Knights built a fortress, a church, a hospice, even a prison. The prison lasted up until the Revolution. Louis XVI spent his last night in it, and for a while Marie Antoinette was a prisoner.”

  “They were guillotined here?”

  “No. They were taken to the Place de la Concorde.”

  Only after moving into my apartment did I discover that I had my own connection to the Square du Temple. In 1524, during his triumphal tour of Europe, and after visiting King Francis at Fontainebleau, Antonio Pigafetta was an honored guest of his brethren, the Knights. He regaled them with stories of his great sea adventure. Whether or not he permitted them a look at the Caravan Bestiary, he certainly had it in his possession, just a few hundred yards from my building.

  “Do you want a drink, or coffee?” I asked.

  Lena turned around. “Coffee would be nice.”

  She sat on the sofa and I went into the kitchen to put the kettle on. I nearly poured myself a whisky. Instead, I made the coffee very strong.

  When I rejoined her, she looked me in the eye for the first time. “I’m sorry about this afternoon.”

  I pulled a chair up to the sofa. “Forget it.”

  She let out a long breath and again tried to smile. Then she covered her eyes. “Oh, Xeno.”

  I leaned closer. “Lena, tell me what’s wrong.”

  She shook her head. “Why did you fall so out of touch? Where were you?”

  I hadn’t expected this, and it knocked me off-balance. Since we were children, there had been no one in my life like Lena. I had fallen in and out of love with other women, but I had loved her more than any of them. Even when we were separated by an ocean or a continent, and barely communicating, she had never seemed far from me. She was so much a part of my innermost self that, even if I wanted to dislodge her, I wouldn’t have known how. I wished I could tell her that just then, and break through all the barriers between us. But having been like a brother to her for so long, I had given up on the idea she could also be in love with me. To preserve what we did have, I had remained silent. The truth was, I feared I would push her away if she didn’t feel the same way.

  When she reached out to me, I took her hand, and she pulled me down beside her. “I shouldn’t blame you,” she said. “I’m the one who’s been hiding out.”

  “I’ve done my share. Maybe it’s time to stop hiding.”

  She lowered her eyes and gently took her hand away, ostensibly to lift her coffee cup. “Bruno told you about my mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Sal?”

  I nodded.

  “I bet he didn’t tell you about the photo.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “In the apartment on Staten Island, when she started to isolate, she wouldn’t even answer the phone. Maureen told us the only talking she did was to a photo of my father, taken on h
is last birthday. He’s standing under the big oak where we used to play. Remember?”

  I remembered that the first time I saw Lena she was on a swing suspended from the oak’s lowest bough, holding a white cat her father had rescued from a fire.

  “At night,” Lena went on, “my mother placed the photo on a pillow beside hers. She heard my father’s voice. He told her how to find him when, as she said, I cross over to the other side. And he told her to listen to Camilla, the eighty-year-old woman in the apartment below. Camilla was from the West Indies. A former midwife, she was an herbalist and faith healer. Apparently her favorite herb was marijuana, which she claimed speeded all healing, but only if one believed that Jesus still walked the earth, saving souls. She meant, literally. She gave Mom doctored snapshots that depicted a man who was the image of Jesus: bearded, long-haired, with a thousand-mile stare. He was wearing a white suit at the bazaar in Calcutta, crossing a public park in Berlin, exiting a nightclub in Tangier. Always in a crowd, but anonymous. Jesus in mufti,” she added drily. “Camilla prescribed reefer for my mother’s migraines. And it worked. It didn’t cure the migraines, but it took away her anxiety. Mom was getting high to the very end, and I believe she died happier because of it. Materially she was broke. She left me only one thing.”

  She opened her handbag and fished out the salamander brooch she had shown me years before.

  “It seems it’s easier for you to talk about your mother than yourself.”

  “It is right now,” she said. She was examining the brooch. “I know your grandmother taught you that animals have souls. Do you still believe that?”

  “I do.”

  “Bruno doesn’t.”

  “When it comes to Bruno and animals, what matters is that he has a soul.”

  “That’s true.” She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, her voice softened. “You once told me the book you’re searching for is all about the psyche.”

  “What else could it be about? All our imaginings about animals, the mythmaking, our intense projections into their world. First, we set them up as our gods; then we made ourselves their gods and began treating them badly. Many of the animals I’ve studied were driven to extinction before entering the human imagination.”

  She closed her eyes again, as if she was thinking—and maybe she was—but I soon realized our conversation was over. She tilted her head back and yawned, tucking her legs up under her. “I’m so tired. I should go home.”

  “It’s late. Stay.”

  I didn’t have to ask her again.

  “Go into the bedroom,” I said. “I’ll sleep out here.”

  “No, I like it right here,” she said, stretching out on the sofa.

  I got the quilt off my bed and put it over her. “Good night,” I whispered.

  But she was already asleep.

  I stood in the kitchen and had that whisky. Then I switched off the lights and returned to my bedroom and lay on top of the sheets. Around four o’clock I woke up. A shaft of lamplight was streaming in from the living room.

  Lena was at my desk, poring over a book. She had the quilt wrapped around her. She looked up as if she had been expecting me. “This is amazing,” she murmured.

  Opened before her was a facsimile of the Mortford bestiary, compiled at the monastery of that name in Wales. The illustration she was pointing to was the avasphinx, a sphinx with a bird’s head and a leopard’s body, from the XI Dynasty in Egypt.

  “You were always partial to sphinxes,” I said.

  “Not like this.”

  “All the sphinxes represented sun gods, but this one was also a phoenix. The pharaohs had its statue placed in their burial chambers, to deter the wiliest demons.”

  Under the desk lamp, her hair shone, and I wanted to stroke it.

  “Have you been up long?” I said.

  “Long enough to appreciate the work you’ve done.” She indicated the stacks of notebooks and folders. “It’s incredible.” She looked up at me. “I didn’t really understand.”

  I was touched.

  “I hope you don’t mind that I pried,” she said.

  “Not at all. I’m glad you did.”

  When I woke at dawn, she was gone. The quilt was folded neatly on the couch. There was an envelope beside it on which she had written:

  Xeno, thanks for everything. Bring this tonight…10 o’clock?

  Inside the envelope was the gold locket with her initials that she had worn since she was a girl. I clicked the catch and the front flipped open, revealing a tiny image. It was my face, cut out of a photograph taken in my late teens.

  That night, we met for a drink at a café near her office. At five A.M. she was flying to East Africa on a mission for International Refuge that had been scheduled weeks before. She had to pack and get some sleep, so we only had an hour.

  I took out her locket, and she searched my face, waiting expectantly.

  “You made me so happy,” I said. “All these years I hoped you knew I felt the same way.”

  “I thought I did,” she smiled faintly. “But so many things were in the way.”

  I raised my hands and put the locket around her neck. As I fastened the clasp, she leaned forward and kissed me. We were suspended like that for an instant, before she closed her eyes and I held her close and kissed her again.

  THE NINE DAYS she was in Africa felt interminable. The fact it rained much of the time didn’t help. I threw myself into my work even more than usual. Then, on a brilliant spring afternoon, she was at my door again. She was tanned, and her hair was combed back. She was wearing a trim red jacket and black jeans. Makeup, too, and perfume.

  “I got back this morning,” she said, embracing me. “Sorry I was incommunicado. Mostly I was in the wild.”

  “How did it go?”

  “Fine. After Madagascar, we went to Niger. I was laid up with a fever for a couple of days. I’m okay now.”

  “You look beautiful.”

  She smiled, and between the coral bands of her lipstick, the chipped tooth stood out.

  “So the trip was a success.”

  “You know, we operate in increments. Two steps forward, one step back. Madagascar is an isolated ecosystem. Hundreds of unique species have been jammed into shrinking pockets of rainforest. Some have been reduced to ‘bushmeat.’ Lemurs like the indri—our most direct ancestor—and cats like the fosa are being hunted to extinction. It took years to push through a ban on the hunting. Now we’re trying to get them to enforce it.”

  “Sit down. We’ll have something to drink.”

  “I’ve been cooped up for days. Would you like to go for a walk?”

  We circled around to the river and crossed the Pont d’Arcole to Notre Dame. The usual crowd jammed the plaza. Many cameras taking the same picture. Tour guides with their rote recitations, provincial priests on pilgrimage, beggars. A boy in a wheelchair was selling crucifixes. An African band was playing the Marseillaise on steel drums.

  Lena and I climbed the north tower to the Galerie des Chimères, where the gargoyles, facing outward, protect the cathedral from evil spirits. Claws extended, fangs bared, they were intended to be more fearsome than any beast the mind could conjure.*5 On the parapet to the south tower, between a particularly fierce pair, we gazed over the city: the Hôtel de Ville, the Petit Pont streaming with pedestrians, the gold Dôme des Invalides blazing, and, just below, the Seine green as jade, swollen with rainwater.

  “I missed you,” Lena said.

  “I missed you, too.”

  “But I had time to think.” She leaned back against the wall. “We have so much history together, Xeno. I’ve been asking myself: ‘How do we do this? Where do we start?’”

  I put my arms around her. “How about right here?”

  She smiled. “I knew you’d say that.”

  “This is more than most people ever get.”

  She hesitated. “Sometimes I think if you get too happy, it’s taken away.”

  Her hair was blowin
g. Up there, the din of the city became a low hum. The two gargoyles peered down at us.

  “That’s not going to happen to us,” I said. “We won’t let it.”

  She rose up on her toes and I kissed her.

  A few hours later, as evening fell, we lay in bed in my apartment. On the way there, I bought her a bouquet of white lilies from a vendor. Now they were in a vase by the window. Their scent filled the room. A candle burned beside them, gilding the thick petals. Lena’s head rested on my shoulder, her arm on my chest. I ran my fingers through her hair. I still couldn’t believe she was beside me. We had traveled so many miles and been so far apart.

  After making love, we remained locked together, drenched in sweat, and then eased apart. Her thoughts had obviously been following a parallel path; pressing her palm to my heart, touching my lips and my cheek, she murmured, “Is it really you?”

  I held her into the night, feeling her chest rise and fall as the candle flickered out and the darkness expanded around us. Her body was as beautiful as I’d always imagined: full breasts, small hips, shapely legs. There was a faint hollow between her breasts, a gold shadow. Through all those hours we never said a word. Just when I was certain she had fallen asleep, she slipped from my arms and stood up with a shiver and crossed the room. Her skin shone silver, then white, before she melted into the darkness. There was a long silence. The bathroom door opened and closed. I heard water run in the kitchen. A glass clink. There was another silence. Then a floorboard creaked in the hall.

  I felt a cool rush as the sheet was lifted and she curled in beside me.

  “I was afraid I would never see you again,” I said hoarsely.

  “You were dreaming,” she whispered, kissing my cheek.

  It certainly seemed that way when I closed my eyes and images from the past began flooding my head.

  Steaming avenues bleeding tar. Antennas cluttering rooftops. Ragtag crowds streaming from the subway. I recognized individual faces. The blind man playing a mandolin on his fire escape. His sister from Mexico City selling corn cakes from a cart. The hustlers at the pool hall drinking Cuba Libres at dawn. The seminarian with a glass eye arrested for shoplifting. The Jewish shoemaker’s son selling fire-works. The daughters of a bus driver, murdered on the job, turning tricks. Our mysterious neighbor, the Irish nurse, whom my grandmother claimed to have seen levitating at the Laundromat.