by Nancy Mauro
“I just wanted it to stop.”
“Would have been brilliant if you used a spear. Sharpens the savage instinct—let’s see your teeth.”
She turns, resists punching him in the shoulder. “I’m not a brute.”
“Suit yourself.” Lloyd shrugs. “Just don’t flake out on me now.” And he nods to the window below. There’s a woman in the room.
Lily flattens herself behind the gable ledge. Her heart is in her mouth suddenly and she’s careful to purse her lips in case it should slip out. She has missed the woman’s entrance, has caught her in the middle of a sequence of events that just might lead to an undressing. Like modernist theater, she thinks. The disrobing has begun somewhere offstage, continues as the character crosses from stage left to right, will conclude as she moves off into the wings. Arrive late and leave early, force the audience to engage, to draw in the missing strokes.
She hears Lloyd swallow, from his throat the familiar smack of stuck oxygen bubbles. She sneaks a look at him and thinks his eyes have lost their shrewd perspective. They seem to slide an inch or so apart from their usual position at the foothills of his nose. He’s enchanted.
The woman below is much older than Lily expected, maybe a senior. Her hair has grayed—it has the wiry determination of a second-growth forest—but is rinsed the color of stewed carrots. She was expecting younger. A young, careless woman to take ownership of the snow-shaker state of the room, the plastic jewelry, the tatty novels. The woman’s caramel hose are rolled down the calves, housecoat unzipped to the belly. Her breasts are loose under there, and as she moves about the room they seem to take turns peering from between the flaps. When she sits on her bed to pull up her stockings Lily is struck by the portrait: the Degas poignancy of the subject’s unawareness, the soft humiliation of the body. Just like Tinker. A woman made to give her body up to strangers, in death and now again in resurrection. The old woman below is covered in flesh that is only loosely tacked to the bone here and there, at the elbows and temple and knees. Elsewhere, on the planes and round surfaces, it has lost its grip. Lily notices that a gully has sunk between the split of her breasts, that her belly has risen like a hill. A tangle of veins decorates her thighs, blue tinsel wrapped indiscriminately around a tree.
Lloyd starts fishing around in his pocket. Lily finds the motion distracting and turns to look at him. His breathing seems to have changed, his face is a new, muddy pink. She stops, holds her own breath. Oh my God. She curses her simplicity. He’s doing what perverts do when they climb rooftops to watch women undress. This Peeping Tom business does not exist in isolation! It’s foreplay. A pearl on the string of continuum. Only she’d assumed he’d go offstage to handle the last part. There’s no question: his tongue has slipped out a bit between his lips; he looks oddly healthy. How could she have overlooked the fact that this would culminate in a sexual act? This is what she does. Again and again she underestimates the intentions of those around her, adulterates real-life urges. She has taken Lloyd and made him into a Disney version of himself. Hadn’t she realized that by accepting this mission she would witness not only the intimacy of a woman unfurled, but also that of a man taking pleasure in this privacy? She looks from the woman to the crouched pervert. He is fixed on the window, his hand continues to rummage. Nothing else exists.
Nevertheless, she can’t just sit here. “Jesus Christ,” she whispers at him. “What are you doing?”
Lloyd looks at her. He breaks from the woman and stockings to look at Lily. His eyes saddle back up against either side of his nose. Lloyd follows her eyes down to his pocket. He draws out an unwrapped stick of gum, tucks it in his mouth.
Humped up against the wheel well Duncan has fallen into a lull, similar to sleep, but lacking in restful properties. As a result, his dreams are not really dreams, but scrappy re-creations of syndicated television programming from his youth: exhortative, musically overwrought, and of questionable production values. Through it all Duncan has kept one eye on the sun, aware that its position might give him an indication of the time. But he’s spent too many years in the shadows of skyscrapers, intuitive sense has left him, the tradition of the sundial has been corrupted. All light is artificial light; it is the good grace of a corporation to be dispensed and recalled at random.
Hadn’t he first felt its addiction years ago? Riding the elevator down the shank of the Proctor & Gamble building. Trying hard to gnaw back smiles, but the glint of Hawke’s large teeth refracted in the mirrored paneling was blinding. The Tide client had fallen hard and fast for their new concept, Laundry Elves. That was tight work, Chief. The older man’s breath a sour knot of color between them. You can keep your job for three more weeks.
Duncan had no other desire then; didn’t want to write a book, didn’t want to direct film. He thought, if he knew anything after years of fretting, it was that life didn’t leave you with much space in which to stuff dreams. You got a block the size of a glove compartment if you were lucky. He had chiseled his dream down to one.
How remote and unessential that all seems now, sprawled on his back and pinned to a car. In his previous incarnation he may have lived as a man, but there is no denying that he has returned as a beast. Reduced to animal instinct. Once he lost sensation in his fingers—how long ago? one hour, two?—he began to feel a detached pity for the hand, similar to the way he felt as Lily took up the bones of Tinker’s scrolled pelvis. His hand is no longer a blood member, but an appendage. Paw. He could chew it off if necessary. But when will it be necessary? When will Lily come home? If she does, in fact, come home. She may not; the library could very well be a screen to shade some seedy liaison, an affair, a lover following her up from the city. Just his luck. To be trapped, forced to bite off his left hand, only to discover the unsavory details of an infidelity he had, until now, never considered. Why else was she so adamant about staying up here alone? And how did she really spend her time during the week? She has barely mentioned the dissertation. The thought makes him angry and exhausted. He looks at the caged hand, remembers how it reached out to slap Lily’s ass. It was the hand that performed the action and he could do nothing but watch.
Lily chatters the entire walk back to the library, hides her embarrassment in bubbles and yips. Lloyd doesn’t engage. Has no interest in holding back shorn fence wire or taking cover behind the maples. His silence is so complete eventually Lily is sucked dry of dialogue.
“That was a disappointment,” he says finally.
She is about to apologize, explain the shriveled prude of her soul.
“She wasn’t what you’d call a looker,” he says with remorse. “She was a turnoff, in fact.”
Lily stops walking. Is struck by this indignation.
“I mean, I had that window scouted out.”
“Well, I enjoyed it,” she says, brighter than sunshine. “I had fun. It was great.”
“Yeah, right,” he sneers, his face a swill of vinegar.
“Besides.” Lily starts walking again, wants to clear out of the lane in case there were any witnesses to their gangly drop from the rooftop. “Doesn’t the, uh, gratification reside in the act of watching?” She adjusts her glasses. “Not necessarily in the subject?”
“You’re talking big words now, Lily.” Lloyd walks ahead into the library parking lot, slaps his palms against the hood of two cars. He turns to her one last time before hunching away. “If I’m gonna pull a stunt that could land me in jail,” he says, “the least I want is a decent set of tits to look at.”
She knows something’s wrong when she sees the car in the driveway. Lily is off her bike before coming to a full stop in front of the house, wedges the front tire into the shaggy skirt of a boxwood tree. While it does occur to her that Duncan may have changed his mind, that he stayed behind to excavate Tinker’s remains, the thought is so brief she snuffs it between two fingers before it has a chance to illuminate.
How deceptive angle and perspective can be, Lily thinks as she approaches the rear of the vehicle.
A handsome woman from behind who, in turning, reveals a ruined face. She looks through the passenger window: an overnight bag, keys in the ignition. Her watch shows she’s been gone for hours, more than enough time for him to leave.
None of it hangs well in her belly. Spying on the old woman now seems a dark and dirty business, knowing Duncan was just a few miles away the entire time. She starts toward the front door. Then stops. There is a sound ranging over the scrape of her sneakers in the gravel. Lily moves back to the car. She walks around to the driver’s side where her husband is flat on his back, eyes shut.
She has neither the time nor ability to string together a sequence of words before Duncan opens his eyes.
“Finally,” he says.
She has to lie on the hood of the car for leverage, reach over and into the wheel well, and force back the cracked plastic before Duncan can pry himself loose. He pulls hard from a crouched position so that when the car gives, he stumbles backward and has to fight for balance. Lily slides off the hood, making a move to help him, but he catches himself in time.
“Can you feel it? Are you all right?”
He holds the injured hand at an awkward angle, as though it were a prosthetic he was just learning to use. “I dreamt that I was buried to my neck in the desert,” he says, testing each swollen finger. “In every direction, Lily, a blanket of sand. My head—for some reason it was smeared with honey. The sky went dark then, and the wind kicked up a cloud of sand. Like a big storm coming. The honey dripped into my eyes. The cloud got closer and I realized it wasn’t sand, but a scourge of locusts.”
She looks at him. “That wasn’t a dream. It was an episode of Kung Fu.”
He nods, looks at his fist again. The knuckles are drizzled with dried blood. Lily touches his arm.
“Come inside. We need to clean this.”
He reaches for her then. At first she thinks he’s trying to steady himself with his good arm, but the reach is slow, and when his fingers come to rest, they are on her cheek.
“Your skin, Lily,” he says, “is the most beautiful skin.”
Her heart is in her throat again, so visible and obstructive these days. She has to lower her eyes. How can a moment be like this—both sudden and slow? When Duncan begins to stroke her cheek she bites her lip to keep from talking. To keep from asking questions. It seems to her that they have wasted an eternity holding each other at arm’s length. And all she wants is to feel inseparable again. Without thinking, she reaches up and touches his fingers on her cheek. Thinks she might read his meaning this way. An answer through her own skin.
“You saved me.”
Lily reaches for his injured hand then. He lets her turn the fingers gently for inspection. “That’s what I do.” She wants him to take her upstairs.
“Lucky it’s not my writing hand.”
“Yes,” she says. “The literary world can sleep soundly tonight.”
He stops stroking her. His fingers drop away. With his drowsy smile extinguished, Duncan pulls back as though she were a careless splash of iodine.
“I have to go.”
“What?”
“Go. I have to.”
Duncan moves to the car. Lily watches him negotiate the door handle with his left hand, then, once inside, the ignition. The damaged wing he keeps to his chest. She knocks on his window as the engine starts up.
“Duncan, I was kidding!” she says through the glass. But he’s already backing away from her, the groan of cleaving plastic his only response.
CHAPTER 16
Optic Nerve
Girls dot the grassy downhill spur between the library doors and the sidewalk. With the dolce far niente of a Saturday, they cluster in pairs, parties of three. A group of six shares bits of food from cellophane bags. To the untrained observer there is no pattern to these aggregations: the groups and subgroups, the laggards, those shearing from the flock, the casual cluck from one pair to another. All these things, indiscriminate and random.
But to Lily, her behaviorist eye glancing over the top of a battered copy of Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, there is nothing arbitrary or incidental about the formations of girls. Their patterns of separation, alignment, and cohesion mark a complex social arrangement developed over the long days of summer term. On the lawn she recognizes the earphoned girl who was the victim of Lloyd’s botched lechery attempt. With her is a kitten-faced blonde, her eyes colored up, lashes webbed and frosted. A cosmetic project of the Fauves, Lily thinks.
A breeze snaps through Osterhagen like a shuttlecock and people dither over office locks and shop alarms before turning for home. Lily too, her helmet beside her on the library steps, lingers over the Gothic and prepares for her bike ride. It took her several hours after the driveway incident yesterday to realize Duncan was really not coming back. That his temper, in addition to the horseshit about being called into the office, had given him the green light to flee until next Thursday. Well, that and her big mouth.
Last night she went to the cellar and sat with Tinker’s meager collection of bones. And while she had been turning the story of the burial around in her mind—it just didn’t sit straight, the lack of corporal integrity, the random scatter of her remains—what she was hoping for really was sympathy in the nanny’s presence. A dense humility for all that the woman had suffered and that she herself lacked. She was trying to craft an apology to Duncan for her thoughtless crack. She wanted to focus on the long moment when he stood stroking her cheek. But her mind kept returning to the idea that he’d only snared himself in the wheel trying to escape her. And the apology dissolved then, quick and bitter under the tongue.
Down on the lawn Kitten and Audiophile are winching the waistbands of their skirts, each revolution hoisting hemlines up thighs. There’s a self-possession about these girls that Lily has never experienced. As if their young bodies are piloted not so much by the brain, but rather by nervous tissue, the deep lymphatics, by fluid running alongside the spine, a stone lodged in the epigastric region, thirty slick feet of the alimentary canal.
And here she is, yards away and a different species entirely. One with no intuition, no gut instinct. It seems that all she can do is think. Think of how it is still only Saturday. Still half the weekend to go until Monday. Then the weekday stretch until Thursday. Thursday if he comes. The idea has surfaced—of course it has, a thought coughed into a fist—that one day Thursday will turn into Friday without him. This pledge that she’s enacted, that they only dig in the garden when both are present, is quite specious. She’s a Scheherazade, she realizes. Conducting a serial exhumation to ensure her husband’s return.
In the staff kitchen Duncan empties out a filter of used grinds from the coffee machine. It’s Monday and his humiliation at being trapped in the wheel well of his own car and then rescued by his wife has eased somewhat. He’s left with only a few scratches as a reminder. But the very best remedy, he knows, is work. Arriving early, digging in, leaving late.
He spent most of his weekend locked in the apartment, icing his hand and watching an old bootleg copy of Apocalypse Now (the last forty minutes of which had accidentally been taped over with Super Bowl XXVIII). He was full of dread and wonder at the thought that a contorting river might hold such power over a man and couldn’t help but make the connection to his own travels along the Hudson each weekend, the push and pull of a body of water changing direction with the tides. Leetower eventually sent over a sketch for a magazine ad. The marker rendering was a simple cross section of the Cu Chi tunnel network, but in each of the underground chambers, LT had drawn a girl soldier in Stand and Be Counted jeans. The drawings were preliminary, but Duncan could pick out the Viet Cong girls for their wispy eyes and tight ankles. In some rooms they were depicted demonstrating the mysteries of the Orient: punches, kicks, lethal jabs at the jugular. In others they lounged in hammocks strung from one clay wall to the other, sucking the starch from bamboo shoots. In narrow, scorpion-infested passages, Leetower drew Grunt Girls crawling
in their wide-cuffed denim. In the war rooms they rifled through vital documents by the light of a Zippo, or went M-16 to AK-47 with their commie counterparts. The tagline ran across the top of the ad, History Repeating, each letter cut from jungle leaf. Leetower had taken his advice and created a sexually charged ant farm of women. Duncan was pleased. The idea has legs, he told the young art director over the phone, and regained a measure of confidence in the campaign.
As the fresh coffee brews, he walks over to the intern’s desk, the poorest real estate on the block, wedged on the landfill between toilet and photocopier. Maybe it’s the dead morning hour, but he’s only just noticed the startling parallels between the cubicle landscape surrounding him and the underground miles at Cu Chi. The lack of natural light and privacy, the totalitarian functionality of such spaces. The North Vietnamese Army carved surgical operatories from the earth, war rooms, mess halls, everything necessary for a comrade to be born, serve, and expire. He considers the sallow, subterranean faces around the department. Could it be when the Viet Cong died, they were reborn as his colleagues? Duncan gives the intern’s chair a kick that leaves the dusty imprint of his foot. He feels a sudden disdain for the time-honored tradition of climbing the rungs. It’s been years since he’d scrambled his own way up from the slums, the cubicle ghetto, but the very same taste of anxiety persists in his mouth. What was it that Hawke once said to him? One of those occasional pearls that fell from his mouth among the turds. Remember, you’re only as good as your last campaign. He must remain vigilant. Especially now as Stand and Be Counted sprouts wings. Isn’t it true that throughout his career, a man will do well to stop occasionally and remind himself to regard those around him with a suspicious eye? During prosperous times, rather than relaxing this code, efforts should be redoubled, as passivity and comfort are, for a man, akin to the polyp preceding the cancer. Duncan moves on to the next desk, positions the chair and boots the backrest.
