New World Monkeys

by Nancy Mauro

  It had taken him two hours in Vietnam to realize he was too old and too sober for the month-long Contiki tour he’d signed up for. Lily hadn’t wanted to go—the ravaged scrap of land wasn’t her thing—but she supported his interest. He was a bit of a war buff and had always admired the resilient country, hankered to write about the slim-hipped race. Duncan thought of Vietnam as the first war of his childhood. Remembered how his father and some of the neighborhood men, other rail workers mostly, could spend hours on the lawn discussing what they’d caught on the news between shifts. He’d told Lily that for reasons rather nostalgic the country had seized his imagination. He had loved this, how free and easy he could be with his thoughts around her. No one else had ever encouraged him to have an interior life, let alone listened attentively to the details. The things he would have gotten whipped for in Minnesota, Lily found artistic and worthy. He could reveal his passions—be run by them from time to time—and she would understand.

  In the beginning he thought this was the reason they worked so well together. She was the historian lining up facts, and he was the writer filling the blanks in between. When other women would have crowed at a month-long absence, Lily planted within him the idea of getting an article out of his trip. In the end what had prevented him from doing this was the tour itself, its boozy orientation and the third-world ruts in the road between Hanoi and Saigon. He could barely hold a pen to paper. He excised the ready availability of alcohol and Australian girls in string bikinis from every phone call he made to Lily. While these things provided him with voyeuristic entertainment during the bus ride south, what he really wanted was to be with her, to hear her pretty laugh. Even while he was carousing around Saigon, or riding the waves at China Beach, or vomiting a gasoline stream of rice wine into the Perfume River in Hue, already he was conscious of doing these things for her, of turning experience into stories that might amuse. As he crawled through the historic Cu Chi tunnels, following the tight, sarong-sheathed ass ahead of him, his biggest desire was that when he returned, Lily would still want to be his wife.

  In the airport he scratched a red welt on his arm and sunk his head between her neck and shoulder. He stuck some of her hair in his mouth.

  “So, what have you learned?” Lily asked.

  “I’ve learned that an overzealous customs agent can change your life in a matter of hours.”

  “Do you still want to write articles?”

  “My notes got napalmed at Immigration. Do you know you’re the first person to ever pick me up at JFK?”

  “Well then,” she pulled back, spread open the palm of his hand, and kissed him there, “it must be love.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Organs of Special Sense: The Tongue

  In the morning, Lily discovers she has a mustache. Jesus, she thinks, backing away from the mirror. How long since she had a close-up look? She kicks open the bathroom door to let the shower fog ease out and can hear Duncan plunking away in the kitchen below. Flipping the toilet lid down and taking a seat, she pulls the bath towel around her in a tight swaddle. It’s clear there’s been a breach of trust, her body has sprouted hair in formal protest, asserting its will through her follicle shafts. How long has it been this way? Lily’s heard of bamboo that can grow twenty-four inches a day, of flesh-eating viruses that claim limbs faster than surgeons can cut away the offense. Maybe the mustache also falls into that category of phenomena, she thinks, stroking the lush patch. It feels like pussy willow. Of course, she’s had to take the occasional tweezers to her upper lip in the past. And while she can’t actually remember the last time that was, how can she not have noticed the dark growth under her nose? Lily unwinds from the towel and stands looking at her naked body in the mirror, something she hardly does anymore. She can’t bear the schism; inside she’s scarlet and alkaline, outside she’s all ridiculous anatomy. This hand, that thigh. The corrugated flare below the ass. She possesses neither impressive heft nor the enviable ribs and twigs of the half starved. Rather, she floats in between with clicking kneecaps and curves that are nothing more than nods to curves. Buttons sit flat over cleavage. Duncan used to look at her with an intensity in his cocked eyebrows that was almost frightening. It thrilled her to be watched that way, as though she could light up everything that was fierce and carnivorous within him. But it’s been ages since he’s even strayed a toe to her side of the bed. Can she blame him? What about her is ravishing, exactly?

  Surely he’s seen the mustache. He’s been in her face and in the house for days, shuffling around; why hasn’t he said anything? Even yesterday, while she railed on about the dead boar, he just looked at her with complete apathy. Lily takes off her glasses and presses her face against the mirror. She feels her anger over the boar percolating again. He practically forced her to kill it. She was holding out the tire iron—it was obvious that someone had to put the squealing horror out of its misery—and he refused to step in, disrupt the flow of his own drama. But wasn’t that classic Duncan? Always floating around the peripheries of emergency. Here was a man who felt at home in the audience with a megaphone. She’s never forgotten how he wanted to write a movie about her parents, The Missionary and the Mogul. The Nun and the Nabob. She had to snuff that project out. And now here he is again, forcing Lily to play the part of the executioner.

  In the mirror she tries spying some Renaissance curve, a Grace perhaps with bundled muscle under rice paper wrappings. Instead she sees the shallow depth of field, the flat unfolding of the thirteenth century. Lily, her mother would say, a man wants a feminine woman to bear his children, a kind hand. A helpmate. It’s not exactly a turn-on, she knows, watching your wife bludgeon a wild boar to death with a tire iron.

  A waft from the kitchen then. She pulls on a T-shirt, pokes her head through, and sniffs. It’s a familiar smell. Bacon. “He’s frying bacon,” she tells the churlish face in the mirror. Once the connection is secure in her head, the odor becomes offensive, triggers a gurgle in her belly, a finger easing open a hair-clogged drain. He is taunting her. Lily feels a suction reversal, and leans into the sink. Bile and orange juice tear a path up into her mouth.

  She’s suddenly glad she didn’t apologize last night. And come to think of it, why not keep the mustache?

  He had spent years trying to be like Hawke and then the past month trying to be anything but. Duncan understands the logic behind the man’s retro-sixties campaign. Those wide, swinging cuffs carried the misguided optimism and hash-stained freight of the entire counterculture movement. But the hippie was a hack idea, stale, something best dragged into the poor quarters and promptly shot.

  What he didn’t foresee was that Hawke’s departure would leave him the unofficial heir to the creative director’s struggling efforts. Duncan waited to be taken aside, to feel the warm breath of the Brass on him: We think you’re the guy to turn this ship around. The one to resurrect dinosaurs. After all, look at what he’d done for laundry detergent. Until Duncan’s repositioning of Tide, the client’s strategy read: Gets Your Whites Whiter. Until Duncan, strategic planners insisted a product could be both new and improved. It was his campaign that had moved the needle on laundry detergent. Won him his gold One Show Pencils and earned him an early reputation as the go-to guy. Man to save sinking ships.

  But reassurance from the Brass never came. Instead in the weeks that followed Hawke’s dismissal he was moved from packaged goods to the seriously listing denim account. And now, after a month of false starts, he still doesn’t have a single viable idea to mount and hump and enjoy. As Duncan walks around the garden, he realizes what he’s doing wrong. He should be writing what he knows. Let’s see: He’s got a finger on the pulse of waning marriages. And getting grease stains out of trousers. And facial hair, the female variety. Yes sir, that’s his specialty. It’s obvious. He should be writing for a woman’s journal. Good Fucking Housekeeping. That’s what the universe is trying to tell him.

  Okay, stop it, he tells himself. Just calm the fuck down.

  He’
s come out to the garden this morning to turn a little soil for inspiration. Rationalizes that this past half hour of manual labor in frying-pan heat (really just making gentle surface wounds to freshen the desiccated soil) might in fact help him muscle out a few concepts to bring back to the office tomorrow. He needs a place to start and some serious traction.

  Duncan uses a spade to expand the tiny garden plot where he will soon plant his tubers. Sweet potatoes, yams, shallots, sunchokes. He slices into the grass and feels some remorse, like he’s scalping the lawn to make room for more garden. He peels away a layer of grass, revealing brown soil below, and sinks his spade into the earth. There’s a feeble underground clunk. The spade stops short; he’s hit a rock. Duncan bends and loosens it from the loam then shovels it onto the grass; it’s the size of a generous fillet of beef and as flat as a skipping stone. He is immediately suspicious—it’s too well proportioned to be indigenous. He nudges it with the spade as if it might dance for him or crawl away. The stone has the smooth contour of a beach pebble, a weary thing worn away by tides. He crouches and scrapes off the dirt. Then, turning it over in his hand, he sees someone has carved an inscription across its backside:

  TINKER, 1902

  Duncan drops the stone as if it has spoken to him. The inscription is not crudely rendered, but engraved with a tool. He kneels then and picks up Tinker with both hands. Maybe it’s the sky clouding over or the raven settling on the clothesline that makes him turn. He looks at the house.

  His wife is missing. Her bicycle is still chained to the porch rail this morning so Duncan can only conclude that she’s been swallowed up by the house. Fallen through some soggy flooring, slipped behind a revolving bookshelf.

  “Hey, Lily?”

  The question goes unanswered through the kitchen, the bathroom, up the staircase and past the open bedroom doors. Her name feels odd in his mouth, fleshy, the pocket of air between the li and ly catching between his tongue and molars. How long has it been since he’s said it out loud? Lily. A name, he realizes, he is not comfortable speaking.

  Duncan stands in the hallway. Holding the rock in both hands, he begins to feel both heat and annoyance spreading across his shoulders again. It’s part of the fabulous absence of harmony between them. Here he is, chasing her down. The one time he has something to show that might appeal to the historian in her, and she’s chosen to disappear.

  Yo, bitch?

  He doesn’t say it out loud, just mutters it in his head, wanting to retard the slow burn of irritation he’s experiencing. Although bitch is one of those words that rockets easily off the tongue, doesn’t get caught in the recesses of his soft palate. Lily is unrelenting, isn’t she? Her rejoinders come at him with the velocity of hubcaps whisking off speeding cars. He thinks again how she couldn’t give him just one bloody minute to gather his wits and kill the hog himself the other night. Yes, bitch seems to fit. And when he hears a shuffling sound from the cedar closet beside him, he wonders if he might have just said it out loud after all.

  He opens the closet door and finds her sitting cross-legged in the dark, wearing her usual khakis. Duncan is angry, suddenly filled with the suspicion that she has been hiding in this closet—and every closet in the house—under every stairwell, behind armchairs and drapery folds, waiting to catch the vocalized bits of his thoughts. Lily is a household spy, squirreled away, desperate to catch evidence as unforgivable as bitch. She’s waiting with restrained pleasure for an excuse to pack up and ride off on her bicycle. To shift the failure of five years onto his shoulders.

  She twists her hair like a length of rope and turns her eyes up toward him. The end of her nose is red as if she’s been crying. Does she know what he’s capable of thinking about her? Duncan’s indignation begins to deflate. A quick leaking hiss.

  “I found it in the garden,” he says, and turns the rock over in his hands.

  She reaches out of the closet and takes it. It is an interest piece, a solid thought, an item free of emotional implication, and her reaching for it as simple as the transfer of a relic from one historian to another. Her finger traces the inscription, Tinker, 1902. Duncan is about to step back and gently close the door when he sees her touch the floor beside her. They look at each other for a moment. He understands this motion, the invitation in it, and so he bends down, squeezes into the space beside her. Their folded legs touch. Lily leans forward, slips her fingers under the cedar door, and draws it shut.

  “What’s this remind you of?” she asks in the darkness.

  “The crypt,” he says. “On Stanton.”

  Her laugh is a small, involuntary burst.

  “We barely got an hour of sunlight in that apartment.”

  “We were translucent.”

  “We slept well.”

  Duncan touches the wooden door, imagines it absorbing the mingled high notes of their laughter, allowing only a bass-heavy grunt to escape into the outside world.

  “Are you okay, Lily?”

  He feels her leg rest against his. “It’s complicated.”

  “Maybe you should come home.”

  She doesn’t answer. Her knee begins to bob anxiously.

  “We can come up on the weekends together.”

  “I can’t—” She stops, swerves. He can hear the smack in her throat as she swallows. “Why don’t you stay? For the meeting tonight?”

  Duncan breathes sharply, the inhaled current making a slicing sound as it parts into the two lanes of his nostrils. “This accident with the pig, Lily. Let it go.”

  Her jittering leg falls still. “Duncan, please stay.”

  “The blown-ball method is ancient history in most places,” Skinner says, flicking an errant peppercorn from the tufting of his deviled egg. “What’s taken over is those computers that call out the bingo for you.”

  Duncan nods. He’s watching his wife across the room as she attempts to shirk off the pair of old women who’ve attached themselves like remoras. On the way over tonight, they’d decided it would be best to divide and conquer. To split the obligatory introductions and handshakes as a way of speeding up the evening and minimizing any chance for error.

  “Thing’s called a random number generator. Ever hear of it?”

  Duncan turns back to the old man. He has a red sty in his eye that is visible with certain turns of the head. “You mean, like a lottery machine?”

  “Instead of numbers bobbing around in a cage there’s this computer that chooses them. Pops them up on a screen so you don’t need people to call bingo anymore.”

  Normally, Duncan would have to probe these Luddite tendencies. But how to be impertinent to an old man whose pig he’s killed?

  “I guess,” he offers weakly, “you still need people for some things.”

  “Well, it don’t matter to me.” Skinner’s red eye roves over the small crowd gathered in the library reading room. “I’ll probably be dead before the thing catches on in Osterhagen.” He coughs and spits into his empty glass. Duncan tries not to look.

  “You drive over?”

  “We walked.”

  “Walked? You a Jew?”

  Duncan arranges his face. “It’s just a nice night,” he says, as if answering a benign question.

  The huddle of river folk surrounding Lily puts Duncan in mind of his family back in St. Paul, an inherently parochial bunch washed soft by the cycle of seasons, planed free of sharp corners, tugged back into place to dry. Here in the country, nature is oversentimentalized. He thinks of the stone he turned up in the garden, the carefully etched headstone for a pet. Or worse, the feral hog festooned with a cape.

  Lily is receiving a similar type of attention. He can sense her discomfort at being led between the yard sale collection of chairs, introduced as the rightful heir of Oster Haus when all she often desires is to sail under the radar. He should have headed back to the city an hour ago, but he couldn’t just let her come here alone.

  “You ever learn to hog-tie, son?”

  Duncan shakes his head, noti
ces how Skinner’s eye keeps returning to Lily. She’s accepting a glass of punch from a man with a thinly knotted ponytail.

  “My boy’s out at the ranch now, while I’m here. From Poughkeepsie but he knows his way round a boar from when we lived in Augusta. Which was before I gave up hunting. Out on the back trails—behind the power station—is where you’d likely spot them. This was fair sport, so no guns. But we’d take dogs, generally. Two per man—one was a bayer—kind of dog trained to bark a hog up against an embankment or tree or whatever. The other’s job was to take nips at it, keep it occupied enough for us guys to come from behind. Once you got practiced enough, you grab up the hind legs and there you go. Hog-tie. When things go right, the pig doesn’t even know what hit it.”

  Must have been in better days, Duncan thinks. Skinner’s cheeks are a lace of veins over sunken bones and blown red by the force of a phlegmy and persistent hack. He’s a small man, hair shorn down to a quarter inch of silver bristle over the ears. But in these remains, a semblance of structural power, a man brought down to basic mechanics. Down to cable rope and wire.

  “Mind you, lost some of my favorite dogs that way,” he says. “To the tusks. But like I said, it was fair game. Nowadays the dogs wear those Kevlar vests. You ever eat dog?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I did. Once when I was serving in Korea. I done some other things at the time too. That your wife?”

  Lily has turned and is watching him from across the room, giving him a look that, in a nautical situation, might read boat in distress. He nods and says, “Yes, it is.”

  “Keep your eye on her,” Skinner says, shifting over to the food table. “Though none of ’em are much better than swine, anyway. I went through two myself before I got Sovereign of the Deep Wood. And I’ve had him longer than both of those put together.”

  There is a minor incident at the punch bowl, an upset glass of pink liquid that has the old library women clucking and futzing about with napkins. Lily takes advantage of this moment of distraction to move across the room toward him. Duncan watches as she approaches, feels a tricky hit of pride; she really is beautiful. Even more beautiful when cornered and anxious. When she reaches his side she takes his hand as naturally as she once did.