Chapter 24 #3
I saw it in the shift of her body when we stepped onto the platform, the way her head turned and her ears came forward, the particular alertness of an animal encountering someone who is filed in her memory under a specific category.
She approached the platform with a directness that was different from her usual public-encounter behavior, bypassing the lettuce station entirely and stopping in front of me with her face at my shoulder height, her enormous brown eyes level with mine.
“Hey, Makena,” I said.
She huffed, a warm, hay-scented exhalation that ruffled my hair.
“She knows you,” Benji said. “Peter, she knows you.”
“I spent fourteen hours operating on her daughter. Animals remember the people who touch their offspring—especially the mothers.”
“That’s . . .” Benji gaped. “That’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.”
“She’s just recognizing a familiar person.”
“She’s greeting you. She walked past the food and came straight to you. That’s not recognition; that’s a relationship.”
He wasn’t wrong.
Makena stood at the platform’s edge, her neck curved toward me. When I raised my hand and placed it on the flat plane of her face, she closed her eyes and leaned into the pressure. Seventeen feet of living scaffolding was somehow trusting the weight of her head to a hand she remembered.
“You can touch her,” I told Benji. “Flat hand, slow approach, the side of her neck.”
Benji stepped forward.
His hand shook slightly as he raised it, though I suspected less from fear than from the particular tremor of a person in the presence of something they found overwhelming.
He placed his palm against Makena’s neck, and the giraffe turned her head to examine him with one enormous eye.
A heartbeat passed, then she returned to leaning against my hand, which was her way of saying to Benji, “You’re fine. You’re with him. I’ll allow it.”
“Did she just approve of me?” Benji whispered, hushed awe coating his tone.
“She tolerated you. There’s a difference.”
“She approved me because I’m with you. I just got vetted by a giraffe.”
Makena extended her tongue, the eighteen-inch, dark purple-blue appendage that giraffes use as a primary prehensile instrument, and wrapped it around Benji’s hand and the lettuce he’d grabbed from the station in a single, dexterous motion.
Benji’s face went transcendent.
“She held my hand,” he whispered. “Peter. She held my hand with her tongue.”
“Giraffes use their tongues as primary prehensile instruments. The contact with your hand was incidental to the feeding behavior.”
“It was not incidental. It was deliberate. She chose my hand. She lingered. We had a moment.”
“You had a feeding interaction.”
“We had a moment, Peter, and you’re not going to science it away from me.”
I looked at him on the giraffe platform with his hand still extended and his face bright with uncomplicated joy.
I thought about how David used to look at me exactly that way when I dismissed something he found beautiful, with fond exasperation and the unshakable confidence that I was wrong and would eventually come around.
“You had a moment,” I conceded, allowing a small smile to part my lips.
“Thank you.”
“The tongue is still a prehensile instrument.”
“Both things can be true. I accept your admission of incorrect emotional interpretation.”
I snorted and shook my head.
We spent twenty minutes on the platform.
Benji talked to Makena the way he talked to every animal he met, a running stream of affection and observation that the giraffe received with the dignified patience of a creature who had been alive long enough to understand that some humans expressed love through volume.
He fed her lettuce piece by piece. Each time her tongue wrapped around his fingers, his face did the same thing.
Each time I saw it, I felt the same thing.
The feeling was getting harder to file away in a drawer and easier to just hold.
We walked the public grounds after Bill returned to his office, having extracted a promise that I’d review the elephant panels by Monday and having shaken Benji’s hand one more time.
“I like him,” Benji said as we walked toward the Africa section.
“He likes you.”
“He told me you slept in a chair next to a baby giraffe for fourteen hours.”
“I was monitoring post-operative stability.”
“You were sleeping next to a baby giraffe because you needed her to be okay,” Benji said, repeating Bill’s words almost exactly.
“Both things can be true.”
“When was this? The surgery.”
“Two years ago. In January.”
I felt Benji do the math.
January, two years ago.
David had been in the hospital, and I’d driven to the zoo at 2 a.m. on a Sunday and spent fourteen hours repairing a giraffe’s leg because the giraffe’s leg was something I could fix.
David was something I couldn’t.
“Peter,” Benji said.
“I know.”
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“David was in the hospital. It had been a bad week. Bill called about the giraffe, and I went because the giraffe needed surgery, and I needed something to do with my hands that wasn’t sitting in a waiting room.”
Benji waited in silence. It took me a long time to set my next words free.
“I operated on a baby giraffe because I couldn’t operate on David. The math works out close enough.”
The sentence arrived from somewhere deep and old. I recognized it as David’s. He’d said it to me once, about why I brought every stray home and why I couldn’t pass a shelter without stopping.
“You can’t fix the world, but you can fix a kitten. The math works out close enough,” he’d said.
I’d carried the phrase with me since.
Benji’s hand found mine. His fingers laced through mine and held on while we walked through the Africa section of a zoo on a Saturday morning.
I let us be seen, two men holding hands in public in the middle of the day, and the letting was another door I walked through that day, quietly and without ceremony, but with my head high and heart full.
Lunch was at the zoo café, which was not a culinary destination but served a reasonable grilled chicken sandwich. Benji ordered without looking at the menu.
“I’m having the Flamingo Wrap,” he announced.
“The Flamingo Wrap is turkey and avocado in a pink tortilla. The pink is food coloring.”
“The pink is branding. I’m at a zoo. I want my food to acknowledge where I am,” he said, using Benji logic, which means little to none.
“Your food’s color is not a meaningful indicator of its quality.”
“Everything’s color is a meaningful indicator of its quality. This is why your wardrobe is ninety percent gray and navy, and this is the conversation we’re going to have next.”
“My wardrobe is functional.”
“Your wardrobe is sad, Peter. Your wardrobe is appropriate for a man who has given up on joy and replaced it with fabrics that don’t wrinkle.”
“Fabrics that don’t wrinkle are practical. I save on fabric softener.”
Benji actually barked a laugh. A woman pushing a stroller turned and grinned.
He then said, “Fabrics that don’t wrinkle are the sartorial equivalent of your old fragrance-free conditioner. They work, technically, but they’ve surrendered to a philosophy of minimum viable aesthetics.”
“You’re critiquing my clothes at a zoo café.”
“I’m critiquing your clothes because I care about you and because someone needs to tell you that you own four identical gray T-shirts. That, in any gay world, is a cry for help.”
“I own four identical gray T-shirts because when I find a shirt that fits, I buy multiples. It’s efficient.”
“It’s a uniform. You’re one step from a capsule wardrobe TED talk.”
“Capsule wardrobes are perfectly rational.”
“I’m taking you shopping,” Benji said between bites of his wrap.
“You are not taking me shopping.”
“I’m taking you shopping, and you’re going to buy one shirt that has a color on it. I require only one at this juncture. We’ll ease into quantities later. You must agree to a hue that exists outside the spectrum between concrete and midnight, and I must approve prior to final purchase.”
“You’re asking me to change a system that has worked for years.”
“I’m asking you to own one shirt that doesn’t make you look like you’re attending your own funeral.”
I looked at him across the table with his Flamingo Wrap and his green T-shirt and his face animated with the passionate conviction of a man who believed that a gray T-shirt was a moral failing.
“One,” I said.
“One shirt. In a color that isn’t navy. And for the record, navy is gray with mild ambition but without a will to live. It doesn’t count.”
“Navy doesn’t count?” I asked, suddenly feeling very uncomfortable with the status of our negotiations.
“Navy does not count.” He punctuated each word.
“Fine. One shirt. You get to approve. No navy or gray.”
“Or navy or gray adjacent.”
“Fine.”
“I accept your terms,” he said, tossing back the last bite of wrap with more satisfaction than the act warranted.
As I finished my sandwich, he told me about the giraffe and her tongue-hand connection again.
I told him about the potassium protocol again, offering a few more details than before, which he pretended to find interesting but I suspected he found boring as hell.
We talked about the clinic and the bar and Clementine, the new foster who was hiding under the bathroom sink.
“She’ll come around,” Benji said. “She just needs to know the room is safe.”
“Most of them do.”
“Most of us do,” he said lightly.
Still, those four words carried the weight of everything underneath them.
I reached across the table and put my hand over his.
In a zoo café, in the middle of the day, surrounded by families and a man in a flamingo costume who appeared to be having a difficult afternoon.
I put my hand over his, and it was the first time I’d voluntarily touched another person in public since David.
Benji looked at our hands, then looked at me.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
“We’re holding hands at the zoo.”
“We are,” I confirmed.
“Was this on the itinerary?”
“This is an unscheduled addition,” I said.
“The itinerary has room for unscheduled additions?” he asked.
“The itinerary has always had room. I just haven’t used it.”
He turned his hand under mine and laced our fingers together. We sat at a zoo café holding hands over the crumbs from a Flamingo Wrap and half a grilled chicken sandwich while a man in a flamingo costume waved at passing children. It wasn’t elegant or cinematic.
It was so much better than that.
We left the zoo at 1:20, five minutes behind schedule, because Benji insisted on reviewing every item in the gift shop, and the gift shop produced a twenty-minute negotiation over a stuffed manatee (“It looks like Potato.”) and a giraffe keychain that he attached to his car keys with ceremonial gravity.
“For Makena,” he said, holding up the keychain.
“Makena doesn’t know you exist.”
“Makena and I have a bond that transcends human understanding. This keychain is a physical manifestation of that bond. Also, she approved me . . . with her tongue. That’s binding.”
I drove us home. Benji sat in the passenger seat with his stuffed manatee (I’d bought it while he was in the bathroom, and the look on his face when I handed it to him in the parking lot was something I was going to carry for a long time) and his giraffe keychain and a contentment that I could feel from the driver’s seat.
“Peter,” he said as I pulled into the complex.
“Yeah.”
“Thank you for today.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I mean it,” he said. “Not just for the zoo, but for calling Bill and for getting us backstage and for taking me into the water room with the manatees and onto the platform with Makena and into the parts of your world that you don’t show people. Thank you . . . for all of it.”
“It was a date. Dates involve planning and sharing.”
“Dates involve trying, and you tried in the most Peter way possible. The result was the best morning I’ve had in a very long time, possibly ever.”
I parked and turned off the engine.
We sat in the quiet cab with the photo of David on the visor and the man beside me holding a stuffed manatee.
“David used to say I planned the spontaneity out of things,” I said. “He said I’d schedule a sunset if I could figure out who to call.”
“David sounds like he was right about a lot of things.”
“He was right about that. I do plan the spontaneity out. I can’t help it.”
“Peter.” Benji unbuckled his seat belt and turned in his seat, the manatee in his lap, his face serious.
“You planned a date that included a private veterinary tour, a personal introduction to your giraffe surgeon colleague, hand-feeding a giraffe who recognizes you because you saved her child, and holding a manatee’s face in a room that the public doesn’t even know exists.
That’s not planning the spontaneity out.
That’s making the spontaneity specific. It’s curated spontaneity.
It’s spontaneity with a whiteboard, and .
. . it was perfect, because it was you.”
He leaned across the console and kissed me.
It was longer than the quick one this morning.
His hand rested on the back of my neck, warm and grounding.
I leaned into it, which was new, the opposite of the flinch.
When he pulled back, the stuffed manatee was wedged between us, and we both looked down at it.
Benji said, “He’s chaperoning,” and I laughed, the real one, and the sound filled the cab and settled into the quiet that followed.
“Go get ready for work,” I said.
“I’m going.”
“You have two hours and thirty-seven minutes.”
“You timed it?”
I smiled. “I always time it.”
He grabbed his manatee, his giraffe keychain, the remnants of his dignity, and climbed out. At the door, he turned and waved the manatee’s flipper at me.
I shook my head.
He grinned and went inside.
I don’t know why I sat in the truck, but the photo of David caught the light.
“I went to the zoo,” I told his photo. “I called Bill and arranged the whole thing on a Post-it note. You would have made fun of me.”
David smiled from the photo the way he’d always smiled, with his whole face.
“I think you’d like Benji,” I said. “I think you’d like him a lot.”
I reached up and took the photo from the visor and went inside. I fed the animals, made tea, sat at my desk, and opened my laptop.
The cursor blinked from a new page, blank and waiting.
My fingers flew across the keyboard.