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But after watching for a while it became evident that every ten minutes they were doing something else. Racing around the fence, eating, grooming, rocking; eventually it became apparent that they never did anything for more than a few minutes at a time.

Now the younger son caught fire and raced around the top of the fence, then cast himself into space in a seemingly suicidal leap; but he crashed into the canvas loop that crossed the cage just above the tops of the ground shrubs, hitting it with both arms and thus breaking his fall sufficiently to avoid broken bones. Clearly it was a leap he had made hundreds of times before, after which it was his habit to run over and bushwhack his dad.

Wrestling on the grass. Did Bert remember wrestling his elder son on that same spot? Did the younger son remember his brother? Their faces, even as they tussled, were thoughtful and grave. They seemed lost in their thoughts. They looked like animals who had seen a lot. This may have just been an accident of physiognomy. The look of the species.

Some teenagers came by and hooted inexpertly, hoping to set the animals off. “They only do that at dawn,” Nick reminded Frank; despite that, they joined the youths’ effort. The gibbons did not. The teenagers looked a bit surprised at Frank’s expertise. Oooooooooooop! Oop oop ooooop!

Now Bert and May rested on their porch in the sun. Bert sat looking at the empty food basket, one long-fingered thumbless hand idly grooming May’s stomach. She lay flat on her back, looking bored. From time to time she batted Bert’s hand. It looked like the stereotypical dynamic, male groping female who can’t be bothered. But when May got up she suddenly bent and shoved her butt at Bert’s face. He looked for a second, leaned in and licked her; pulled back; smacked his lips like a wine taster. No doubt he could tell exactly where she was in her cycle.

The humans above watched without comment. After a while Nick suggested checking out their tigers, and Frank agreed.

Walking down the path to the big cat island, the image of May grooming Bert stuck in Frank’s mind. White-cheeked gibbons were monogamous. Several primate species were, though far more were not. Bert and May had been a couple for over twenty years, more than half their lives; Bert was thirty-six, May thirty-two. They knew each other.

When a human couple first met, they presented a facade of themselves to the other, a performance of the part of themselves they thought made the best impression. If both fell in love, they entered into a space of mutual regard, affection, lust; they fell in love; it swept them off their feet, yes, so that they walked on air, yes.

But if the couple then moved in together, they quickly saw more than just the performance that up to that point was all they knew. At this point they either both stayed in love, or one did while one didn’t, or they both fell out of love. Because reciprocity was so integral to the feeling, mostly one could say that they either stayed in love or they fell out of it. In fact, Frank wondered, could it even be called love if it were one-sided, or was that just some kind of need, or a fear of being alone, so that the one “still in love” had actually fallen out of love also, into denial of one sort or another. Frank had done that himself. No, true love was a reciprocal thing; one-way love, if it existed at all, was some other emotion, like saintliness or generosity or devotion or goodness or pity or ostentation or virtue or need or fear. Reciprocal love was different from those. So when you fell in love with someone else’s presentation, it was a huge risk, because it was a matter of chance whether on getting to know one another you both would stay in love with the more various characters who now emerged from behind the mask.

Bert and May didn’t have that problem.

The swimming tigers were flaked out in their enclosure, lying like any other cats in the sun. Tigers were not monogamous. They were in effect solitaries, who went