She signaled him to come in. “Hello, Douglas.”
He stood until she motioned him to sit down. She looked at his face several seconds. “This is difficult for me,” she said.
She’s discovered me, he thought. But he put that aside, figuring it was a paranoia that made him worry. There’s no way. No way. I have to calm down or I’ll show it.
She held up a photograph.
There it was—a dispassionate and cold document of that one moment in his life. She held it up to him like an accusation. It shocked him as if it hadn’t been himself.
Defiance forced him to stare at the picture instead of looking for compassion in Dr. Morris’s eyes. He knew exactly where the picture had come from.
Vernon and his new telephoto lens.
He imagined the image of his act rising up in a tray of chemicals. Slowly, he looked away from it. Dr. Morris could not know how he had changed since that moment. He could make no protest or denial.
“I have no choice,” Dr. Morris said flatly. “I’d always thought that even if you weren’t good with people, at least you worked well with the apes. Thank God Henry, who does Vernon’s dark-room work, has promised not to say anything.”
Douglas was rising from the chair. He wanted to tear the picture out of her hands because she still held it up to him. He didn’t want to see it. He wanted her to ask him if he had changed, that it would never happen again, that he understood he’d been wrong.
But her eyes were flat and shuttered against him. “We’ll send your things,” she said.
He paused at his car and saw two big red shapes—one coppery orange, one chocolate red—sitting in the trees. Vernon bellowed out a groan that ended with an alien burbling. It was a wild sound full of the jungle and steaming rain.
Douglas watched Annie scratch herself and look toward chimps walking the land beyond their boundary fence. As she started to turn her gaze in his direction, he ducked into his car.
Angrily driving away, Douglas thought, why should an ape understand me any better than a human?
About “Her Furry Face”: I had been interested in chimpanzees after reading Jane Goodall’s books, and this carried over to an interest in language-using apes such as Lucy and Koko. My first glimmering of the story was to write something funny and satirical about an orangutan who became a celebrity best-selling author. As with many stories, two ideas collided and made something more complete. I had a character in mind whose roaming lover found everything about her irritating and everyone else wonderful. However, I couldn’t quite grip the point of it all. So Douglas became a bridge between the two characters, but in my view the most interesting because of his tragic inability to love in a real way.
