ARCHIE TRIED TO HOLD Anna’s hand. He’d never done that before and the awkwardness of the attempt startled Anna, and so she let him hold it, albeit limply. Barely a minute passed before she wrangled it free. It had felt wrong and his palms were damp.
They walked around the zoo for a quarter of an hour and said nothing to each other.
In the rainforest reserve they stared at lizards sleeping in trees and dodged the birds that hopped freely down the paths. Anna looked at all the placards but recognized neither the German nor the English names for these exotic animals. At the South African habitat they leaned against a rail and watched a mountain goat preside over a congregation of baboons on jagged, beige rocks. The largest of the baboons, a male, stood on his legs, turned to face Anna and Archie directly, and presented his red, erect penis as he hissed and sneered. “Okay, Archie,” Anna said. “It’s time to talk.”
Anna couldn’t remember the last time she’d broken up with anyone. Is ending an affair the same as breaking up? Anna decided it was close enough and told him as much: “Archie, I am breaking up with you.”
Archie stared past the baboons. “So that’s how it is.” She hadn’t expected him to be devastated and he didn’t seem to be. “Yes,” Anna said. “This is how it is.” He didn’t ask why, though Anna would have told him if he had. “I need to go, Archie.” Anna hiked her book bag back up her shoulder. She’d been carrying it around the whole time. She looked once more into his eyes and turned to leave.
Archie grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her back toward him. “Not without a goodbye kiss,” he said as he laid his lips to hers and held her tight against her own protestations. Anna struggled briefly against his mouth and his arms but then relented, for there was no real harm in a goodbye kiss and she was too emotionally weak to fight him. So in the middle of the Zürich Zoo and on her thirty-eighth birthday, Anna let the Scotsman search her mouth with his tongue and her breasts with his hands for what would be the last, passive time.
Public displays of affection always draw attention; Archie and Anna made an obvious pair. They were the only adults in the entire zoo unaccompanied by toddlers in strollers or schoolchildren on a class trip, like the group who walked up to the South African habitat in the middle of the pair’s final kiss. Children around the world are all alike. At a certain age, the sight of two people kissing will invariably invoke giggles and “ewwwww”s and “oooohhh”s and every available finger will point in the couple’s direction. This is what happened to Archie and Anna. And yet, they kissed through it. It was a moment. Anna let the moment have its gravity. A last kiss, she thought, is an occasion.
The kiss was on its downslope. Anna was ending it. She drew a breath, then licked her lips then made one, two motions to pull away before finally wrenching her mouth loose from his. “Well,” she said, “I guess that’s it.”
But it wasn’t.
A singular thin, tinny voice rose above the chorus of whooping children. “Mami?”
Anna whipped around to look. It was Charles.
She had forgotten. It had been planned for weeks. Anna had been so wrapped up in her private, secret life that she’d forgotten.
Charles’s class had taken a field trip to the zoo.
Anna had been caught.
16
“IT’S QUITE COMMON FOR THE SUBCONSCIOUS TO CREATE INTENTIONAL scenarios that force you to face something you’ve been ignoring. Your dreams might get louder and more violent. You may become forgetful or accident-prone. Psyche will do anything to get your attention. She will sabotage your consciousness if she must.”
“What do you mean?”
“Think of an abscess. Untreated, the wound swells and causes pain and eventually ruptures.”
“That’s revolting.”
“It is. Infections are. This is an infection. Of the soul.”
ANNA DID NOT IMMEDIATELY know what to do and so she did nothing. That was a crucial moment of composure. She didn’t look back at Archie but she didn’t have to. “Get lost,” she said through the smile she’d put on in order to face Charles. Anna stepped toward her son.
“Hey, Schatz, my love!” Anna’s voice oscillated as she bent down and wrapped her arms around Charles and drew him into her so that her body blocked his line of vision and he couldn’t see Archie as he slipped away. Charles’s teacher seemed to understand what the class had just interrupted. Frau Kopp was young and savvy and European and she knew the difference between Herr Benz and the man Anna had just been kissing. Her eyes were sympathetic, continental.