New World Monkeys

by Nancy Mauro

  As she walks toward the building she pulls her shoulders out of their cyclist’s hunch. Lily thinks of the schoolgirls, their embellished swaggers and tightly braided abdominals. In comparison she is sag and flesh tone, the pilled acrylic of sweaters, a single gym sock balled onto itself. She has to wonder what significance her body held for Duncan that he would have stepped outside his own character last night and slapped her like that. He hadn’t wanted her body—there was nothing frisky in his action. It was a motion that lacked both genesis and evolution. She swears her ass still holds the shape of his hand. Lily looks down at herself. There’s an odd vigor in her belly, radiating up toward each breast. She feels a measure of twine cording all three points together, traveling through all points. She folds her arms across her nipples, hides the evidence.

  “I need to get out of the city for the summer,” Lily had said near the end of May. They were idle at a stoplight. Across the intersection a cyclist had just been knocked off his bike by a bus. “I was thinking of going upstate. To the house.”

  The cyclist was on his side, moving but still clamped to his bike by the pedals. “You’re going to be late this morning,” Duncan said. A small crowd flowering around the man both shielded him from subsequent knocks and prevented the bus from sliding away into traffic.

  “Not that I’m saying it’ll be much better in Osterhagen. Heat is heat. But the library is quiet. And Bard isn’t far away.”

  The cyclist was trying to unlock his pedal clamps and disengage from the aluminum skeleton. Duncan watched the driver of the bus make his way through the crowd, tugging at bare elbows and T-shirts until a path cleared. He stood over the fallen man; Duncan could see his jaw turning a series of words over and over.

  “The house should probably be condemned,” Lily said, raising her window. “But there it is.”

  Duncan leaned his head out of the car to catch the bus driver’s words. “That’s the angriest human being I’ve ever seen.”

  Later, standing in Anne McPherson’s office, he’d thought, My wife is leaving me.

  “I know this is managerial bullying, Duncan, but what can I do? You think I don’t see how everyone’s distancing themselves? The account’s ruined; they’re calling it Stand and Be Slaughtered.” Anne, a mercurial account director, began her pitch by shoving aside policy and lighting a cigarette right at her desk. “There’s no energy left around here, no more belief. Hawke gets turfed and all we want to know is who’s getting his parking spot. Memories have become vague and unreliable. Who liked this idea? Who counseled for this campaign? Who against? I don’t have a single AE who remembers being in a tissue session. Hell, I don’t remember being in a tissue session.”

  Is Lily leaving me? Duncan wondered. Or does she want me to go with her? She was dexterous this way. Meaning, with her, could be ambiguous and irresolute. And his interpretation of it, he’d come to realize, was often nothing more than a barometer of his own heart.

  “Duncan, they’re coming to you because you can fix this.” A tidy funnel of smoke whisking out each of Anne’s nostrils. “Hawke always breast-stroked against the current. This time around they want a partner. Not a fighter.”

  “A yes man?” He two-stepped on her sisal rug.

  Anne dropped her cigarette through the foam crown of a cappuccino. “What you did for laundry, Duncan, you can do for denim.”

  There before him had been a choice of snares: the summer with his wife or the summer on this miscarriage of an account. He suspected that Lily wanted to be alone up there, practicing the bitter idioms of marital woes: he never did, he never could, he never would. As though he were past tense. Something acquired, inhaled, then crushed into reusable fiber. But he wasn’t about to just roll over and die that easily. He could leave the city with her for a while, leave the crowded sky of the eastern seaboard. The uncharged waters, the thin Atlantic, brackish, a rum and Coke sloshing up against the breakwater. They’d go someplace where things had round edges. A marshy substance in the air muffling what one could smell, what one could see. Cicadas crooning about the night, poplars grasping knuckles across the stretch of road. They would go to the river valley where stray oats and spores mushroomed in the cracks of wood siding, cedar planking, between fingers and toes.

  The pervert is back. Like evolution, Lily thinks, while removing the volume of de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. He has crawled out of the bathroom and climbed his way up to the stacks. She pulls out the copy of Democracy because it’s the only book among the hardcovers that leaves a chunk wide enough to spy through.

  Lily crouches to watch; the man sits at a table, his chair tipped on its hind legs. He’s positioned back to back with one of the young girls at the study carrels so that he’s leaning into her, his crown nearly touching her ponytail.

  Without looking at her he says, “Why don’t you roll down your panties for me?”

  The girl doesn’t turn, doesn’t respond. She’s decorating a textbook with a highlighting pen. Lily, however, feels herself react as she might to a swallow of bad milk, the sensation of dairy flecks left on the tongue.

  The pervert clears his throat. “Go ahead. Roll them right under your skirt.”

  Lily watches the girl’s jaw work away at a tough nougat of gum. She brings a fingernail to her cheek and carefully scrapes around fresh acne sores. Lily recalls her own years at St. Agatha of Catania as loping and feral. Anything but innocent. It was a place where, within a week of arrival, a convent girl would be taught to speak in a pitch just below the hearing range of the nuns.

  The man looks straight ahead, waits, ostensibly, for some sort of rejoinder. He keeps balanced on the two chair legs. As he waits, Lily takes a good look at the unfortunate girth of his thighs. They give him a pitiful sense of sluggishness. Overall, she’d say he’s too chubby to be a pervert. She’s always imagined them a race of rattish men, narrow and buck-toothed. Although his wet comb approximates the image; hair flat and scissored into rectilinear precision. Lily looks between the girl and the man, trying to decide whom she would like to win. Where does her sympathy lie?

  When she can no longer bear to remain concealed between the stacks of nonfiction, Lily comes around the corner, approaches the carrels, and rests the edge of Democracy on the pervert’s table.

  “She can’t hear you.”

  He looks at her. He hiccups, drops his chair down to all fours.

  “What?”

  “She’s wearing earphones.” Lily motions to the girl, whose head and foot are synchronized by either music or a nervous twitch. They both turn to watch as she inflates her gum into a bubble and holds it between her lips. Lily knows he is taking in the girl’s pocked cheek. Something like distaste milks his eye.

  “Christ,” he says and looks back at Lily. “For a second there I thought I was losing my touch.” Then he smiles, bares a mouthful of Chiclets and pearls.

  “This is the thing,” Lloyd says as he shakes out a smoke. “The world’s lost every last bit of grace. In its mad rush it’s become a giant, voyeuristic carnival, right? Get on the computer and there you have it, all the graphic shit you want. Pictures, video, live feed—and if that’s not enough, you got forums to chat about it. Like growing a fucking orchid. A million people out there offering an opinion on sunlight and humidity. Dying to let you know you’re not alone. So you’ve got your furries and forniphiliacs, your trannies and frotteurs, your Japanese buruseras. There’s peeps, necrophiliacs, zoophiles—a list the length of my foot. Point is, whatever your hobby, you’ve got instant how-to access, right? A planet full of deviants ready to dish on gag balls and pony collars and the right amount of torque to apply to surgical tubing. And there’s even diagrams! You do much surfing? There’s diagrams for everything.

  “Somewhere in this shuffle, we lost our imagination, okay? The power of visualization undervalued. Really, I’m an advocate for a gentler, simpler time. Before the gizmo age, best a kid had was a smudged magazine or two. What boy didn’t wait under the neighbor’s window
to catch her undressing? One day she might forget that inch of blind and you’d get her unhooking her bra—that’s natural curiosity, am I right? Mind you, the reality isn’t so pretty. No way. Any woman over fifty unhooking a bra and it’s Look Out Below!”

  Lily thumbs her lighter until it gives up a weak flame. “Is that your real name?”

  “What?”

  “Lloyd? Sounds made up.”

  He gets a shot of smoke in the eye and squints at her through it. “You’re an uptight broad, aren’t you? I can tell.”

  Lily turns away, looks around the shade of the empty library cloisters, the arcade of shrubs stunted to the height of a man’s shoulders. In the center of the garden, the terra-cotta putto spouts a weak drizzle from his privates into a fountain.

  “What’s your story, anyway?” he asks.

  “My story?” She sits down on the edge of the fountain and pulls a stray hair from her tongue. Okay, the man is troubled—this is clear—but she was, for some reason, touched by his failure with the girl in the stacks. And he had cigarettes. Smoking is such a stock tic, he’d said, extending the crushed packet to her. Go on, I don’t bite. You’re not my type, anyway.

  “I’m working on a paper,” she offers finally, assessing the danger of his confidence. “And living up here for the summer.” But the words lack energy and must be persuaded from her. One week in Osterhagen and she’s already shrinking in her skin. A week since the charge of the wild boar that left them grabbing a hoof each and dragging it to the ditch, draping it with loose boughs. She’s still feeling sick about it, more so now that she knows its celebrity status. Of course she can’t express this guilt to Duncan. These details of her conscience are lost on him.

  “And you were impressed with my technique in the stacks? Unimpressed?” Lloyd gestures to the building.

  “Yes.”

  “Which is it? A critical analysis, please.”

  “The heart was there,” Lily says and pinches the cigarette to death against the lip of the fountain. “But your approach could use some work. You know, I saw you the other day. Coming out of the women’s bathroom.” She remembers his thumbs-up—as though she had been sitting there to field prospects for him or to keep watch.

  “An old trick.” He nods. “This might surprise you, Lily, but I’ve been a deviant my entire life.” Lloyd stands up, paces a bit. “I change locations, for sure. Same way a man of the earth approaches his hundred acres. You leave the ground idle one season and it’ll turn up lush wheat the next. Haven’t come around the Osterhagen library since the late nineties. And, Christ, the place is crawling!” He looks through the gate toward the main building, licking his lips as though they were trimmed with honey. “Bad school girls in uniform. Just like MTV.”

  Lily smirks. “You think they’re bad because they roll up their skirts?”

  Lloyd stops his shuffle. “You underestimate me. But whatever, I understand.” He tucks his cigarettes into a shirt pocket. “It’s summer, right?”

  “Barely the cusp of June.”

  “School’s out for the good kids. So who gets stuck behind in summer school?”

  The question’s rhetorical, she doesn’t answer.

  “Bad girls—that’s who. Bad girls just begging for it.”

  “Girls like teenage boys.”

  Lloyd looks around the courtyard, holds up his fat hands. “Do you see any teenage boys? There are no teenage boys at Our Lady of the Apparition, okay? I’m just going to have to do.” He lowers his voice. “Look, I’m not saying I’m the best out there. There are guys who could perv me under the table, I admit. But if you don’t have a skill to improve, what do you have?”

  Lily fakes a yawn. “My husband says all dialogue should lead somewhere.”

  Lloyd pats his back pockets now, takes out a stick of gum. “Husband? Really?”

  “One and only.”

  “I would have guessed girlfriend.”

  She stands, flattens the creases across her thighs a bit too violently.

  “Sometimes I get a sense, is all.” He waves the butt of his palm. “Christ, you got some story to tell me, huh?”

  She looks at him, tries to make sense of his shrewd eyes and baby fat and the blotch of sweat the size of a tortilla beneath each arm.

  “I don’t even know you.”

  “Hey, this isn’t Butch Cassidy and Sundance, okay? This isn’t a lifelong friendship—just tell me your shit if it makes you feel better.”

  “What makes you think I’ve got shit?” Lily tries to uncrank the machine of her jaw.

  “You’re uptight. Don’t get offended, but you’re going to explode.” Lloyd glances back toward the cloister gate. One of the circulation desk workers walks out of the building, lighting a cigarette. She nods at Lily, turns an eye over the lumped edge of Lloyd.

  “I’m supposed to trust you?” For some reason, Lily flashes on the bone that has been secreted in the cellar.

  “Oh, no, you can’t trust me. I am the scorpion.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Os Innominatum (Nameless Bone)

  He wills her home through the afternoon, drawing long strides around the sunroom, imposing pace and measure on her return. It’s because he really wants to dig. Duncan rubs at his eyes; the heat in the house reminds him of hotboxing in his ’82 Datsun. Outside, a hoot that he thinks sounds like an owl, a bark that he knows for sure is a dog.

  This is about slapping your ass, Lily. He sits in front of his computer, starts pecking into the dialogue slug of a TV template. I’m not saying that I liked it, but I’m not going to say that I didn’t like it. Maybe I’m a spanker at heart, maybe I’ve started swinging from the trees.

  When had Lily changed? In the first days he knew her she seemed so alone—as though she’d sprung to earth fully formed or had somehow raised herself. He found the idea incredibly attractive; here was a shadow-less creature that he’d discovered for himself. Once she gave herself to him, the idea became complete. She was smart in a way that he wasn’t, he was creative in a way that she could never be. He had come down the hard road of experience and she roosted under his knowledge. What looked like a charmed life from without was really a great, churning machine of mutual awe. It was not so long ago that they could go entire days with the blinds drawn against everything.

  These days, however, he suspects if he opened her chest he’d find the hum of a carburetor, a twin-valve engine. The night after his talk with Anne he’d confided in Lily, hoping that she would accept the intimate offering of his vulnerability. “They’re setting me up for failure,” he’d said. If he was sacked now, the futility of his career would become apparent. Five years of writing snappy headlines, bones without dangling meat, left Duncan with the impression he’d been living against his fate.

  “They’re clearing out Hawke’s regime,” he told her.

  “Of which you are a decorated officer.”

  “I should have left five years ago when I was hot.”

  Lily was reading the paper, her face firmly in the arts section. “So what, you feared the unknown?”

  “They’re calling the account Stand and Be Slaughtered. And now it’s mine. Basically, this is the kiss of death.”

  Lily hadn’t exactly laughed, but he detected an explicit mirth in her voice that called to mind shaking all his loose coins into Leetower’s coffee filter collection. He immediately regretted confessing these fears to her.

  “‘Kiss of death’ suggests betrayal, Duncan.” She looked at him over a folded corner of paper. “Who exactly is your horse-faced Judas?”

  He hadn’t answered, he’d said too much. Although he suspected Lily knew exactly who the culprit was: it had been five years since he’d hit gold. Between then and now a breadth of years and nothing.

  There’s just no way, he thinks, standing in front of the cold fireplace. The Lily he has now can’t be the same one he started with. Which begs the question: Which is his real wife? He’d like to think that it’s the one he married, but there is evide
nce to suggest the contrary. Her behavior around the Crusaders, for instance. As it happened, Lily did not raise herself. In fact, the idea of her parents fascinated Duncan; her father a coffee importer, her mother a Catholic missionary. They met under the shade of an Ecuadorian banana tree and joined forces to strip the natives of both coffee bean and soul. Independently, each had a justifiable ambition: profit and Jesus. Who could lay blame on either? It was Corporate America and Lily stood to inherit not only a great bundle of cash, but also life everlasting. Her parents were iconic apart. But together they were a marching contradiction. Duncan saw the potential in this situation and even sketched an outline for a screenplay. Lily hadn’t liked the idea. Not at all. Around the wealthy zealots, she toughened, became android leather. Wore things with buttoned collars.

  Duncan thinks about the femur in the garden. Sure, Osterhagen’s a quirky little village, but maybe he’d been too quick with his theory of a nanny-lynching brigade. Most likely it was one of Lily’s ancestors. What undeniable satisfaction it would bring him to drive up to Albany one weekend with news of human remains in the garden. Some families spawn lines of gifted musicians, or athletes, he’ll tell her nabob of a father while feathering his own cap. By the way, have you seen your daughter swing a tire iron? She’s an absolute savant.

  The Crusaders had never liked him. Thought him a Turk or something urban and unsavory for whose sadistic pleasure they had convent-educated their only child. On his part, he was hard-pressed to find a kind word to describe their parenting skills. While Lily hadn’t been neglected exactly, she’d had a less-than-perfect childhood. The Crusaders held fast to some sort of doctrine that children should be neither seen nor heard. Hadn’t their interest in Lily only begun once she’d reached adulthood? Once she’d gained the courage to make the sort of decisions that could be easily criticized?

  For her part, Lily denied wanting a country life with a tennis pro and terraced gardens. But he watched her face after a weekend upstate. He thought that walking back into their apartment, swish as it was, she was struck by all that she’d given up settling for the son of a railyard worker from St. Paul.