Sylvia wonders if Ted fed the lions when he worked at the zoo. Before they were married, before they ever met. He wouldn’t have thought twice, she thinks. He was a hunter, a country boy. The deaths of things were not strange to him. She wants to see the rabbit’s eyes, but by some arbitrary hiccup of chance it has never turned in the right direction. She sees the lion’s; it stares kohl-eyed and unmoved at her, at everyone. It licks its bunny in long, rasping strokes. With each lick the rabbit shunts by degrees across the slick cold floor, its dirty feet to the crowd.

4. “Thalidomide”

CHAPTER FOUR

“Thalidomide”

DECEMBER 12, 1962

NIGHT

LONDON

A woman is crossing the moon.

The midnight sky has bled itself completely onto the darkened rooftops, erasing the houses and the black trees and everything else outside. Except for the lopsided moon: it pulses in its aperture, shrunken from its full luminous ripeness of three nights ago when Sylvia watched it from this same window in her new parlor. It’s since been halved, funereally shadowed by the excruciating drag of the planets. Draped like a mirror after death, or like Sylvia’s cheap new furniture, shrouded with old sheets as in an abandoned house. Though Sylvia’s not giving up. She’s been pacing the silent flat for focusless hours, jumping at the intermittent clank of the electric heater, watching the moon like a trapped fox. But she’s pulling herself together, and she’s got the paint can out, the brushes and the broom-handled roller. Newspapers on the floor, a tarp covering the just-delivered wicker armchairs that will masquerade, for the time being, as a sofa. Newspapers spread on the glass-topped coffee table pushed out of the way, to the wall. She’s set the raw pine bookcases on newspaper also; she’ll paint them while she’s working on the parlor walls and get this one room completed.

It’s bad luck to look at the moon through glass, according to medieval superstition. Sylvia’s done that before; she’ll take no more chances. The parlor’s quarter-paned windows rattle on their cords, hauled up with a screech against paint fumes. The cold rushes in, instantly dropping the temperature in the room. She looks to the homely electric grate on the parlor’s far wall, the flat’s only built-in source of heat. Some fanciful former tenant has framed it with an ornate carpentered mantelpiece to match the Georgian moldings; Sylvia’s holly is stiff on its shelf. Trying to keep warm with the windows open wide is futile. She shuts the heater down.