New World Monkeys

by Nancy Mauro

  She stops and looks around.

  It’s you, he thinks. You’ve inspired the suicide of an entire orchestra of insects. Duncan is not the hallucinatory sort, and doesn’t need to rub his eyes or pinch flesh. As he watches he can see sparks of ignition in the thicket marking the property line. With the frenzy of dervishes, they’re chirping themselves into self-incineration.

  “You set the crickets on fire.”

  She laughs. Why is she laughing?

  “You are messed up, Duncan.”

  He can only point, with a blistered finger, to the tiny fires where the crickets pop and smolder in the hedge. Sudden death instigated by a set of Circean hips moving across the grass. She follows this path, the extension of finger across the lawn and into the hedge.

  “It’s fireflies,” she says.

  Duncan’s breath flutters and hooks. He steps back from the shrubs. He looks at Lily expecting the dark powers of cloud seeders and shamans. But he sees she’s right. That she is just grass-stained flesh, susceptible and unsure.

  In the shower, the weak dribble of water (too often a shade of russet brown) clatters as it boils up through the original cast-iron piping, so that Lily doesn’t hear the sopping thud when the bathroom ceiling collapses.

  Under hot water that has been forced up two vertiginous floors of derelict plumbing, she lathers out the night’s activity and feels satisfied with the rubble of bones they’ve collected. A cobbler’s pile in just one go. Listening to the grunt and strum and tangy whine of the shower pipes, she realizes—suddenly and miraculously—that all these sounds are coming together to form the basic chords of a musical lament. I still miss you but my aim’s getting better. She’s pleased by the thought, tilts her neck to receive the sweet heartland ballad full in the face. It’s then that she feels the first blast to the cheek.

  Lily opens her eyes and finds a churning cloud in the curtained tub with her. Hovering overhead is a swarm of yellow jackets: hairy, thick-vested, impossible to count, and at this proximity, more black than yellow. Wasps the size of grapes, incongruously suspended one moment, then skidding down at her face, her shoulders, undeterred by the slick runway of her skin or her screams or swatting palms. The yellow jackets’ answer is to peck at these, anything that interrupts their dive-bomb formation.

  Duncan rips away the remaining portion of shower curtain that hasn’t been tangled in her legs and already torn down. Then, by swatting a cluster from her head with a bath towel—roughly, but who knows what kind of force to apply to a swarm of wasps—and wrapping her with the terry-cloth ends, he’s able to lift Lily from the tub and carry her into the hall.

  “Shut the door! The door!” She’s screaming inside the towel. Duncan puts her on the floor (drops her in his haste) and shoves the solid oak hard enough to produce a Richter reading in his molars. A house of lavish appointments, he thinks. Doors that slam, a boneyard out back …

  He’s afraid to remove the towel. Call it the kernel of his failing but this has never been his place. Duncan stands over his wife, one leg on either side of her hips. Years ago, when they divided up all the superpowers, established which heroic qualities belonged to whom, Lily drew Strength. Duncan got Invisibility. He hasn’t been much of a husband, this is clear. But he wanted her to feel somewhat protected with him up here. And now in this way too, he has failed.

  Lily shrugs off the towel herself. He doesn’t move. She lies naked, under and between his legs. The moment doesn’t pass without this thought. Her left eye is inflated, as though a small tulip bulb has been planted just under the skin, just above the lid, on the slope of bone leading to her forehead. These two planes join under the swollen buckle of eyebrow, giving her face a new winking asymmetry. Lily’s hands are pricked and mittenlike; some more at the shoulder, a scarlet horse bite on the cheek.

  She cries without sound, and it dawns on him that instead of succumbing to cowardice he needs to buck up. This is, after all, the exact state of defenselessness he’s been waiting for. Her mouth opens with the thrust of her sobs. Duncan sees the pink honeycomb vault inside and, at the same time, feels his own spine drain of that anxious, stiffening fluid. He bends, gathers her wet and wronged limbs, and carries her to bed.

  Once he’s inspected her under a good light, he counts six stings. Her lips haven’t fattened, her tongue moves freely enough to skip the trip to the emergency room. He’d have to take her by force, anyway. Duncan puts her in bed the way that he found her, naked and limp, and her bath towel he stuffs into the strip of light under the bathroom door.

  Down in the kitchen he gathers the utensils of comfort, the entire time not only aware of but relieved by the changing metallurgy of his blood. It’s that old black magic, the virile components smelting from the skunk, and he is painfully, pleasantly aware of being led by his dick. Minutes ago, carrying Lily into bed, Duncan was careful to keep his groin away from her, a regained instinct reminding him timing was everything. It wasn’t just her nakedness—although, Christ! The sight of her on the floor, slight and peach between his legs, there was no way to negate the effect of her helpless agony. How simple to bend and lift his wife. Why did he fear her under the towel?

  Ice and a washcloth and some bite ointment and he charges back up the stairs, taking a quick whiff of his armpits as he goes. Lily was right about one thing. This business of discovery is the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to them.

  In her bed she allows him to fold the compress over her eye and cheek. She makes the shallow sucking noise of an animal caught in a trap meant for much larger prey. Although he wouldn’t have believed it possible, he’s grown even harder now. A section of mattress sinks with his weight and he makes a sly inventory of the parts of her that roll toward him. To maintain pressure on the compress he’s required to lean over her and brace an arm on the far side of the bed.

  “I look like a monster.”

  “No,” he says, brushing wet hair from her forehead. Her skin feels hot and tender beneath his fingers. “You’re okay now.”

  She reaches for him, catches his fingers in her own. “Thank God you’re here.”

  He swallows. “You were screaming. You scared the shit out of me.”

  She’s squeezing each of his fingers in turn. “It really hurts, Duncan.”

  He considers his erection. “How bad?”

  “Pretty bad.”

  “The ibuprofen will kick in.”

  “I opened my eyes and there they were.” Tears and stings have turned Lily’s face into a scarlet mess. She releases his hand and pats cautiously around her hairline.

  “They probably infested the ceiling joists. The shower softened up the drywall just enough.” He feathers a dire lilt into his sentence. “Here I thought it was the crickets coming back for revenge.”

  Lily looks at him with one eye. “I’ll call someone in the morning.”

  Duncan applies the compress a bit too hard and she winces. Call in the morning? Get out of bed and call someone? He was picturing a lengthy convalescence, the flesh-hued calamine imprints of her body on the sheets. He was not expecting the rational mechanics of the pest-control men.

  “It could take a while.” Duncan sucks his cheek grimly, considers his pacing. “There could be a half dozen nests under the drywall.”

  She nods, pulls the sheets up to her chin. “I’ll handle it tomorrow.”

  Okay, he definitely does not like the way her voice has reshaped itself so quickly. What sort of an ancillary ability is this, to heal herself on command? Duncan lifts the compress. Nope, the bite on her forehead has boiled up to the size of a quail egg.

  “They got you pretty good, Lily,” he tries again. But his voice sounds like a feeble spatter of buckshot as she takes over the cold cloth and applies it herself. Duncan begins to feel an emulsification in his shorts.

  “Maybe I’m depressed,” she says.

  “Depression is just anger without enthusiasm.”

  “So I’m angry, then.” Lily’s sniffles put him in mind of
a pug with a sinus cold. The comparison takes the starch out of him. He stands up and turns off the lamp so that the room is swabbed only by moonlight. Then he comes back, shifts her gently, and lays down next to her on the bed.

  “Lily,” he says in the dark. “Don’t be angry.”

  She doesn’t answer, stares up at the ceiling.

  Duncan keeps to his side of the mattress though he wants to somehow remain just within her reach. Her bedridden shape reminds him of the other rare occasions when she’s shown herself frail, defenseless. “Do you remember the summer I taught you to swim?” he says.

  She nods, adjusts the washcloth over her eyes.

  “You were so angry you couldn’t do it yourself.”

  “I couldn’t float.”

  “You let me teach you. Do you remember? You let me do it for you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Lily.” He takes the compress, smooths her hair. “Let me do this for you.”

  CHAPTER 22

  The Testes

  “Your husband punch you in the face?”

  Lily touches the poached lump on her forehead. The swelling hasn’t diminished as much as it has pooled south over her browbone into the soft pocket of eyelid. With the swelling has come a partial gloam drawn over her vision that she finds somehow comforting. As though her inside and outside perspectives are finally aligned.

  “Piñata accident,” Lily says, hoping that by ratifying the girl’s suspicions she might escape the insolent teenage watchfulness.

  With a slow hand, Kitten tucks the cigarettes back into the waistband of her school uniform and smirks. “Piñata, hey? That’s a good one.”

  The posture of the girl’s craned hip and bent knee in front of the fountain are straight from the pages of some controversial classic. A Go Ask Alice of our times. Lily holds up the silver Zippo that Lloyd gave her. Shakes it a few times either to help eke out a bit of flame or distract the girl’s intense watch by reflecting sunlight in her eyes. Through the oily fingerprints on the metal case, Lily catches a glimpse of her own face, a sizable portion of it red and distended. She’s rather grotesque.

  But there was no staying indoors today.

  She had spread a tarp over the holes in the backyard in case the exterminators happened to wander out back. Duncan had set up his computer in the sunroom and, with a Rachmaninoffian command of keyboard geography, began typing with a furious intensity From every end of the house Lily could hear him pursue his campaign idea through paddy land and DMZ zones, hoarding the advertising campaign around himself as though it might be spoiled by contact with the world. Certainly by contact with her. Of course she’s curious as hell. But Duncan’s not telling and she’s not going to ask.

  Although last night he had been kind to her, boiling tweezers before they realized wasps don’t leave barbs. He lay next to her until she fell asleep—well, until he thought she was asleep. In truth, she couldn’t drift off with him so close. She feared his kindness was scraped together from the odds and ends of the guilt he felt at not feeling. It’s been weeks since they shared a bed in the city, and she can’t even remember the last time she was naked in front of him. Last night, his pity for her body was the organic fiber holding the kindness all together. And so waking up this morning to the distant gunfire of his typing, she realized that his nursing had, if not appeased his guilt, at least equalized the force of its pressure.

  Lily makes her hand into a shield against the breeze and holds out the lighter to Kitten. The girl dips her face into the cup. In this proximity there are new things to notice about her: beyond the modeled cheekbones—as though wadding were quilted into the upper reaches—behind the violet smudges of her eyes, is a rather fetching and inescapable sense of ruin. She touches the end of her cigarette to the lighter.

  “You ever play Uncle?” the girl asks, sliding away from the flame.

  “I guess I have.”

  “Look at my lip.” Kitten tilts her head back. There’s a scrub of whiteheads along her hairline as precise as Braille. Lily could touch and read it. Instead she steps back.

  “Relax,” the girl says, enjoying her discomfort. “I’m not a lesbo or anything. You see the scar?” Points to a white dart through her lip that interrupts the circle of her mouth.

  Lily looks down over the rim of her glasses.

  “We had a bet, me and this guy last summer? Who could bite harder, you know? Take it longer.”

  “That must make it hard to say uncle.”

  “See how my top lip won’t come together exactly? That’s called a crimson line, under where I had the stitches.”

  The girl is nearly impossible to look away from. She is the lip-glossed, shit-talking embodiment of the word taunt. This has been Lloyd’s argument the whole time, that the inherent brand of sexuality among the kilt-and-stocking set is that of overdeveloped, adolescent prey. And now Lily sees it, up close and head-on.

  She thinks of Tinker, who by all estimations was put in the garden by her great-grandfather. How come she can sort out the logic behind the exploitation of someone like Kitten—indeed, could build a fairly solid defense for it—while a scant collection of hundred-year-old bones, with no flesh, no life attached, has already struck her deep sense of indignation?

  Kitten, relaxed against the fountain and smug in her assessment of spousal abuse, has been making a careful study of Lily’s own face. But as intense as the girl’s attention has been, it slips away from her and shifts to the side doors of the library.

  “Your friend is leaving.”

  Lily turns. She’s just in time to see Lloyd, with his plodding cat walk, exit through the cloister arch to the street.

  “That’s the same guy from the Dunkin’ Donuts last year. And the bus too.” Words and smoke coming out of the broken circle of lips.

  “He’s not really my friend.”

  “Sure,” the girl says with a cynicism that Lily, while liking the quality in herself, loathes in others. “He’s the one who asks girls to blow him on the Crosstown. I know it, he sat right behind me once.”

  For one delicious moment she thinks of telling Kitten that Lloyd is much more interested in ravaging her acne-pocked pal, Audiophile.

  “I doubt you’re his type.”

  Kitten laughs with a shameless arpeggio that only a fifteen-year-old would dare inflict on a listener. “Don’t worry, I’m not into charity.”

  Lily feels a reaction in her chest; is once again aware of how the juvenile uplift that tags the end of Kitten’s sentences constantly belies the content.

  “But tell him something, okay?” The girl’s smile reveals the perfect humility of one crooked incisor. “Tell your buddy I’ll do him for three hundred bucks.”

  Lily just looks at her for a moment.

  “You shouldn’t smoke.”

  Kitten doesn’t answer. She takes a haul off the cigarette then snaps it into the fountain. It hits the water with sizzle and triumph.

  On her way out that night, Lily finds Ginger and Persian, brows like cable-knit stitch, crowded behind the reference desk examining something there.

  “Who would do this?”

  “Savages.”

  “Skinheads.”

  Lily must have a peek. Gathering her shoulder bag, she comes at the desk from an oblique angle, preparing evening farewells with her usual disinterest. But she stops short when she sees the object of their attention. The thing is curved like a bugle horn and baked the color of buttered enamel. Lily shuts her pained eye to ensure this is not a result of her own skewed vision.

  “What is it?” she says, only to occupy the tongue, to prevent it from asking, How did you find it? She is startled by the tusk, looks around to see if there’s any more of it.

  “It’s the boar,” Ginger says. “In part.”

  “They found him across the river.” Persian’s voice barely registers. “In a taxidermy shop in Kingston.” Lily notices the root end of the fang is still raw, as though it had been torn by hand from the muzzle.

&nbs
p; “Someone brought him in to get stuffed—imagine Skinner having to buy back his own boar.” Ginger pokes at the tusk; it rattles against the desktop. “He wants us to keep this here, do up a display for posterity.”

  “Why would anyone kill the Sovereign of the Deep Wood?” Persian asks no one in particular.

  “You know, those Chinese eat anything.”

  “I can see why Skinner is on a rampage.” The old woman’s mouth shirrs around the words. She picks up the yolky fang, looks directly at Lily. “Whoever did this, I hope they get what they deserve.”

  The exterminator stands in the front hall, a loping giant in the narrow space. “You know pigs, they decay at the same rate as humans?” he says to Duncan. “I saw it on television—that’s why they use them in those crime labs. Can tell exactly how long a thing’s been dead.” Safety goggles have left an imprint on the man’s face, a red, circular emphasis over the nose and around the eyes, reminding Duncan of the importance of establishing and maintaining neutral eye contact through this seemingly random delivery of news. Apparently the Sovereign of the Deep Wood’s carcass, turgid and firm, has surfaced several miles downstream, expelled onto a bank in Ulster County below the Kingston Rhinebeck Bridge.

  “So it drowned?”

  “Or someone drowned it.” The exterminator looks up the landing. “When did you say you came to town? Three weeks ago?”

  Duncan resists scratching his head furiously. “Three or four. Why?”

  “Your wasp infestation started way before that. Long time before you opened up the house.”

  “Right.” He rakes his hair out from his collar.

  “You got another bathroom down here, don’t you?”

  Duncan finds himself nodding, caught by those circular imprints. “Just down the hall.” But as he says the words he remembers the main-floor bathroom also faces the backyard. Had Lily closed those blinds? “Hold on, my wife was getting ready in there. Let me check if it’s decent.”