ALSO BY KATHARINE WEBER
The Memory of All That: George Gershwin, Kay Swift, and My Family’s Legacy of Infidelities
True Confections
Triangle
The Little Women
The Music Lesson
Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear
An excerpt of this novel appeared in somewhat different form in Boulevard Magenta Issue #5.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to W.W. Norton for permission to quote from the Stanley Kunitz poems “The Testing-Tree” (from The Testing-Tree, 1971) and “Touch Me” (from Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected, by Stanley Kunitz, 1995)
First Paul Dry Books Edition, 2018
Paul Dry Books, Inc.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
www.pauldrybooks.com
Copyright © 2018 Katharine Weber
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018939679
ISBN 978-1-58988-129-7
eISBN 978-1-58988-328-4
For Andrew Zerman
AND
Kent and Nancy Converse
AND
Farah
Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark
palaces of both our hearts:
secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants
willing to be dethroned.
—James Joyce, Ulysses
Contents
One Her long fingers caressed his cheek
Two Todd Walker’s gentle touch on Duncan’s neck
Three Primate Institute of New England
Four “I couldn’t help myself!”
Five Lately, after Duncan and Ottoline had each been tucked in for the night
Six Laura missed her mother in a new way since the accident
Seven Every day at the hospital Laura had updated Duncan
Eight In those first blurry days at the hospital
Nine Laura enjoyed her work in the conservation lab
Ten Gordon Wheeler admired the gorgons, beasts, and owls that came to his door
Eleven Primate Institute of New England
Twelve Duncan rolled out the front door
Thirteen Ottoline yanked the plastic bag
Fourteen After lunch, Laura set Duncan up in the living room
Fifteen “The blood of horseshoe crabs is blue”
Sixteen
Seventeen Thirteen blue tablets of pharmaceutical sprezzatura
Eighteen Primate Institute of New England
Nineteen A bony, hairy little hand with long fingers
A Note to the Reader about Monkey Helpers
ONE
Her long fingers caressed his cheek
HER LONG FINGERS CARESSED HIS CHEEK FOR A MOMENT, as she traced her way down to his jaw, her cool touch just grazing the stubble of Duncan’s five-day beard. She studied his face, seeking his gaze. He met her eyes for an instant before looking away, strangely embarrassed by his inability to match the intensity of her insistent stare. Ottoline smacked little air kisses as she reached up to touch his face again, and he was surprised by the gentle precision of her tiny fingernails sorting through his whiskers as she investigated up the contour of his cheek from jaw to upper lip. She pressed two fingers to his lips, and he nearly kissed them, but he didn’t, and then she contemplated her fingertips, sticking out her tongue daintily for the tiny flake of something she had found on his lip. She nibbled at it contentedly while continuing to stare up at him, making a sweet, soft, peeping sound. She repositioned her springy little body constantly, and now she shifted again, peering up at his chin, plucking with fascination at the bristles that speckled his face. They had been alone together for five minutes.
Ignore her, her trainer Martha had advised, before leaving them alone. Act as if you’ve seen a million monkeys and you’re bored by her. Let her be curious about you. Stay very still. Make no sudden movements. Duncan was very good at sitting still, and he was pretty much the master of being bored, too.
Re-settling herself on his chest, Ottoline began to unfasten the buttons of his cotton shirt, the tufty top of her head brushing under his chin while she dedicated herself to the apparently familiar task of unbuttoning. Top button, done. Next button, done. She breathed out a little sigh of concentration as she undid one more button, but now she was stymied by the padded chest strap of the harness that kept Duncan from flopping forward. She stroked the placket edge of his open shirt and then she touched his exposed chest. She slid her hand into the gap of his unbuttoned shirt and rummaged under the fabric very slowly, moving her hand tentatively, feeling for something, stroking his chest hair, now threading her fingers through it, and Duncan squeezed his closed eyes even more tightly shut as he felt himself moved inexplicably. Her careful, exquisite touch was disturbingly unlike the respectful and routine handling by the various people whose task it was to bathe him and dress him and manage his body. She rotated her fingertip in a tiny circle, gently centering on his left nipple, before moving on to twine her fingers in the surrounding hairs, searching the surface of his body, right there at the equator of his sensory level, delineating the edge of feeling and not feeling. How did she know to trace this line?
She continued her tender exploration, mapping his skin with those careful little fingers. He was barely breathing, but he could feel his heart jumping under her hand. He stayed very still, with his eyes half-closed, feeling her cool, questioning hands on his skin. She had a distinctive, salty tang that was quite pleasant, and as he breathed it in, there was something nearly familiar, yet new. Ah, Milly. Her fur always had a sweet, sunshiny smell when she had been outdoors. This was muskier.
Milly and Molly were the grey tiger sister cats of Duncan’s childhood, seventh birthday surprises for Duncan and Gordon, his twin. Molly, Gordon’s cat, was a hard-luck puss. She had somehow lost most of her tail in her earliest days. Gordon told everyone she was a Manx (which he pronounced “mankth”), but she was really just a cat without a tail. Milly had an elegant, expressive tail, tipped in white. Molly, always timid and fearful, had a short life; she was hit by a car during the twins’ tenth birthday party. But Milly lived nearly twenty years, and died, by then a tiny husk of tigery dignity who spent most of her days sleeping in the middle of the big old dictionary which lay open on a stand next to Duncan’s desk, only a few months before Duncan met Laura during intermission in the lobby of Long Wharf Theater, introduced by a client of Duncan’s who had chatted with Laura at a previous play, because their season ticket seats were in the same row. The client, a banker who was forever renovating his vast Italian Renaissance-style villa on the waterfront in Sachem’s Head, had offered Duncan his wife’s ticket at the last minute when their sitter cancelled. (Neither Laura nor Duncan could remember the name of the play that night, a tedious modern interpretation of a Greek drama that got terrible reviews.)
When she was young, on hot summer nights, done with her roaming, Milly often came to the twins’ bedroom window, leaping onto the shingled front porch roof under their pair of windows from the adjacent maple tree. When she mewed and scraped at the screen, Duncan would tiptoe across the room while Gordon slept, and, despite their mother’s admonitions, he would unhook the bottom of the wooden screen frame to push it out so she could slip inside with a grateful chirp. When Milly sprawled purring at the foot of his bed, Duncan liked to flop over beside her, his face pressed into the fur on the back of her neck, so he could breathe in her sweet grassy aroma. He had loved her very much.
Their mother often found him in the morning that way, sleeping on top of his sheets at the foot of his bed with his feet on his pillow, but she never understood why. Identical or not, her bo
ys were quite different from each other. Gordon slept like a stone, and she hardly had to make his bed from one day to the next. Not Duncan, as their mother often complained while she tucked his wildly disheveled bedding together into smooth order. (For thirty-five years, until the day she died, Helen Wheeler was never able to keep herself from making comparisons, and any complaint or praise of one of her sons was inevitably at the expense of the other. Everyone and everything had to be more than or less than someone or something else in Helen’s world.) Even when Duncan stayed all night under the covers where he belonged, he twisted his bedclothes into a chaotic vortex. Duncan slept like a windmill, she liked to say. Gordon slept like a stone, but Duncan slept like a windmill.
Not these days.
His eyes still nearly closed, Duncan could see Ottoline’s inquisitive gaze through the fringe of his eyelashes. She was done investigating his chest hairs, and now she sat back and reached up to touch his cheek again, peeping softly as she cupped his chin with both hands, turning and angling his face with an insistent pressure until he opened his eyes all the way. She was only inches from his nose, staring at him intently with those pellucid brown eyes. What? She smacked her lips expectantly and tilted her head. He imitated her peeping sound and tilted his head as best he could, and then he smacked his own lips back at her in an exaggerated kiss-kiss, the way he would play with a baby. Ottoline cheeped delightedly, a shrill, joyful sound that nearly hurt his ears, and then suddenly, as if she had just realized who he was—Oh, it’s you!—she launched herself against him and hugged him fiercely, burrowing close, her warm body pressed tight against his clavicles, her little fingernails digging into the back of his neck with a pulsing grip. It was oddly thrilling, and flattering, if a little incommodious. He closed his eyes again, feeling strangely peaceful and relaxed. Everything was perfectly still. He hadn’t thought about death for at least ten minutes.
This encounter had been billed as an experiment, and Duncan had reluctantly agreed to the visit, though really he had no choice. Laura had been relentless. At first he refused absolutely. He snickered at the bizarre notion of bringing a monkey helper into the house when she first raised it. Why not? How about a mongoose to do the vacuuming, a cockatoo to answer the phone, and perhaps a helper wombat to assist with paperwork? When he realized she was serious, he dismissed the idea as beyond consideration. That, he had thought, was that.
Duncan was angry when Laura admitted she had gone ahead and scheduled a series of interviews behind his back. How long had this been going on? She had been at the Primate Institute three times in two weeks! But even after Laura won, even after he said Okay, fine, I’ll do it, I’ll meet it, they can bring the damn thing here any time, it’s not like I have anything else to do, plan whatever you want, she had continued to sell him on the concept, emphasizing all the tasks the capuchin monkey—the one the Institute thought would be a good match, the monkey absurdly called Ottoline—would be able to perform for him: lights switched on and off, CDs inserted, buttons pushed, pages turned, dropped items retrieved. Wouldn’t he like to have this little helper right there to pick up the television remote, or his cell phone, which so often slipped from his grasp? Wouldn’t that be fantastic? Yes, fantastic. Whatever. Wouldn’t he enjoy having her turn the pages of a book or magazine for him? Sure, why not. Duncan had finally reminded Laura somewhat unpleasantly about the wisdom of his great-uncle Fred, the one with the furniture store in West Hartford, a real holder-forther on a range of topics, who used to say the key to selling is to know when to stop selling.
But now here she was. They had been left together after two hours spent settling in with Martha, the cheerful placement trainer from the Institute who had arrived with Ottoline stuffed inside an incongruous plaid zippered traveling case meant for a cat. Ottoline first explored the room thoroughly. When Martha set up Duncan with a plastic cup, into which she smeared a glob of peanut butter, and a chopstick, Ottoline sprang onto his lap from the coffee table and adroitly seized the chopstick from his loose grasp to dig out her own little helpings.
As Martha clipped the coupling link of the long lead attached to Ottoline’s harness to a ring loop on the side of his chair, she reiterated the strategy: Ignore Ottoline. Let her be challenged by his inertness. She might choose to ignore him for a while. Don’t force it. Duncan should just let her be curious about him at her own pace. Ottoline had not been very interested in Laura, except when Martha had provided her with some blueberries, which Ottoline snatched immediately from Laura’s outstretched palm.
“She’s already got it worked out that Duncan is the alpha male in this tribe,” Martha murmured. Laura took Martha’s cue to sit still on the other side of the room, watching and jotting occasional notes about commands and rules and monkey management strategies, though everything was spelled out clearly in the binder provided by the Institute, and Martha was just reiterating what Laura had already read more than once. After a while, with Ottoline and Duncan engrossed in each other, Martha and Laura had withdrawn to the kitchen, leaving Ottoline alone with Duncan, to whom she was now clinging contentedly, her puppyish warm belly against his chest.
Laura’s allergies had kept them from having a cat, though Duncan longed for one and had for years continued to see Milly out of the corner of his eye when he entered a room, only to discover that it was a shadow or a sweater over the arm of a chair. He had never told Laura how often in the night he still felt the phantom weight of a ghost cat jumping up on the bed and settling at his feet. Even since the accident. Especially since the accident.
Now Duncan wondered if Laura’s eyes would itch and redden around Ottoline. That would be an easy out right there, putting the whole nutty enterprise beyond further discussion. Keeping Ottoline would already be asking a lot of Laura, not just cleaning the cage and the diaper changes, and the inevitable messes, which were challenging enough, but all the constant maintenance issues, from managing her food to giving her baths, for God’s sake. It would be like adopting an ersatz baby, now, after all their hopes.
At the start of the year Laura had begun taking clomiphene every third cycle, and when she began, at the same medical appointment a lifetime ago back in January, they had also scheduled an IUI—intrauterine insemination—for September. If three cycles of IUI failed, they had agreed they would then escalate to IVF—in vitro fertilization—the following spring. And meanwhile, because they had been trying for a pregnancy for more than two years at this point, and because Laura was now thirty-six, Duncan and Laura had been slowly proceeding through all the complicated steps to complete the application materials to meet requirements for approval to adopt a Chinese baby.
Laura had been uncharacteristically superstitious that it would somehow hex their chances of conceiving a baby to apply for a match to a “waiting child,” one who would have special needs of some kind, which were the only Chinese adoptions genuinely available in recent years. She knew it wasn’t logical, or even nice, but she could hardly bear to contemplate children with cleft palates or missing limbs or cerebral palsy or albinism, while hoping to grow a perfect baby of her own. She was ashamed of her illogical secret fear that being open to adopting one of these imperfect children could invite a defective embryo of her own into existence.
The waiting list for healthy Chinese babies had such a slow clearance rate that approved families now at the top of the list had been waiting since 2007. Laura and Duncan knew several families in New Haven with wonderful, thriving Chinese babies. Well before they had started trying to conceive, the clever Chinese baby girl option had always seemed like their fallback. But now Duncan and Laura tried to persuade themselves that a special needs baby wasn’t necessarily one who would be damaged for life. Optimally, her surgery to repair a club foot or cleft palate would be a soon-to-be-forgotten experience of infancy. Two of the adopted Chinese babies in families with whom they were acquainted had undergone such corrective operations successfully.
Well before the accident, they had stopped making casual,
optimistic references to their imaginary future twins, or their imaginary future Chinese daughter. And if they were serious about adoption, then it was already getting late to look into adoption possibilities in other countries, though neither of them was quite ready to let go of that phantom Chinese daughter they had kept on reserve all these years, even if she came with a congenital talipes equinovarus.
And now the accident had erased the Chinese adoption possibility. China’s requirements for foreign adoptive parents not only included strictures about parental body mass index and use of antidepressants, but also forbade a parent in a wheelchair. And there had been so many occasions when they hoped for success, hoped that Laura was pregnant at last; each time those hopes had been dashed, most cruelly the final time. Instead of the baby girl who might have been theirs, if Ottoline came to stay, Laura would be encumbered with the perpetual care of a grotesque, uncanny, permanently diapered homunculus.
If Ottoline didn’t work out, he might actually regret it. Duncan had not expected to care one way or the other. Ending Laura’s obsession about the practical possibilities of a monkey helper had been the reason he agreed to the home visit. He wanted to prove her wrong, punish her for having a shred of optimism about the unmitigated disaster of his situation, drag her down into his despair. Duncan had certainly not anticipated Ottoline’s complexity. He had not dreamed of her singular presence or how it would feel to be the object of her compelling gaze.
Ottoline began to squirm, and then she clambered up across his collarbone to perch on his shoulder, lifting her leash with her tail as she crossed his body, her diaper rustling. What was she doing now? Make yourself at home, Ottoline. Her breath was warm on his face as she rummaged avidly in his hair. Her attention really was so oddly flattering. Duncan could hear Laura’s voice in the kitchen. The coffee grinder whirred and stopped. Martha said something in the chirpy voice she had used when praising Ottoline, which made Laura laugh. The screen door to the back porch banged and the house went quiet. It was an unusually warm October day, but they would need to find someone to come and switch out the screens for glass storm panels on the front and back doors, something Duncan had always enjoyed doing to mark the changing seasons. He would have to explain the way to distinguish the front and back door storm windows. The doors were technically identical, but experience had taught Duncan that the pressure catches didn’t line up identically on the panel inserts.
Still Life with Monkey Page 1
