The Informers - Bret Easton Ellis [85]
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? Tapdance? 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