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By Root 2335 0

impressed by my cognitive faculties. In one of the more telling segments of this film, there was footage of me sitting at a table in the lab, sorting photographs at Norm’s request. I remember the experiment. Norm handed me a stack of photographs. There were about twenty glossy five-by-three-inch photos. About half of them were pictures of people—some of whom I knew (Lydia, Norm, Prasad, Tal—this footage was shot before the finger-biting incident), some of whom I did not (random idiots off the street), and half of them were pictures of chimpanzees. One of the pictures was of me. Norm asked me to sort the photographs into two categories. At first I thought maybe he was asking me to sort them into two piles, one for men and one for women. So I assorted them accordingly, putting all the human women in with the female chimps. Norm then took back the photos and scrambled their order again. I received no reward, so I knew I must have been sorting the pictures in a way that did not accord with Norm’s taste. The deck reshuffled, Norm handed me back the stack of photos and asked me again to order them into two categories, like with like. Then I realized that of course he wanted me to divide the pictures into a human pile and a chimp pile. I included my own picture in the human pile. I am sure that at this moment in the film, a collective moan of compassionate heartbreak rose up in the audience.

I was not watching the film because I was with Lydia, getting ready for my first big introduction into society. My cotillion. In a small murky bathroom somewhere in the building, Lydia prepared me for the evening. All afternoon we had been bustling around in the gallery, making sure everything was just so: assuring that all the paintings had been hung properly, that all the lighting was just right, not too dim, not too glaring. Lydia was wearing a beautiful black dress. She had been romping around the gallery in bare feet all afternoon, the bottoms of her feet sticking to and unpeeling from the hard waxy floor, because she had worn pretty but locomotionally impractical high-heeled shoes for the occasion, and was uncomfortable in them—they “killed” her, she said. Planning to put her shoes on only at the last possible minute, she secreted them in her purse and had gone barefoot (like Tal) until now. In the little bathroom where we were preparing for the gallery opening, I stood before the mirror, Lydia standing behind me, her head more than a full two feet above mine in our reflected image, and she brushed the unruly fur on the top of my head. She kept twisting the knob of the sink faucet to dribble warm water over her fingers, then smoothing my fur out with her hand and straightening it with her hairbrush, her movements made savage and jerky by her nervousness. I wore a small gray suit, with my stubby legs sheathed in a pair of pants selected by necessity from the Marshall Field’s boys’ department, and a matching suit jacket selected from the men’s. Lydia tucked, tugged, buttoned, zipped, prodded and pulled my Sunday-bests into place, knotting the verdant lime-green tie that I myself had selected, pulling my socks over my feet and lacing my smart tan shoes.

She sat on the closed lid of the toilet, opened her purse, and rooted around among its contents. She found her pantyhose. She hiked her dress above her waist. I hurriedly sucked in the smell of her feet and bare legs and crotch. She slipped her slender bare feet into the translucent and weightless bags of the black nylon pantyhose, and tugged on them until they melded to the contours of her feet. Then she pulled the hosiery up until it conformed to the contours of her legs and enveloped her thighs and waist, and the hose became a thin protective membrane clinging to her skin. There may still be nothing, nothing I love to watch more than a beautiful woman rolling on or peeling off a pair of nylon pantyhose. Then she shimmied her dress back into position—good-bye, Lydia’s vagina!—and she took her shoes out of her purse. Lydia almost never wore shoes that were anything other than principally