Still Life with Monkey

by Katharine Weber

  When Duncan was in his first year as an architecture student, he became intrigued by the subtle distinctions between a hip roof and a pyramidal roof. He adored the pyramidal roof. Of course he did. He had grown up under the generous pyramidal roof that graced his childhood home—that boxy, ordinary, American Four-Square house on Broadfield Road where his mother and brother still lived. Nothing remotely like that house had ever come up for discussion in any of his classes until a guest lecturer from Chicago devoted a few minutes of a Frank Lloyd Wright lecture to the popularity of Sears Roebuck Catalogue kit houses in the early decades of the twentieth century. There on the screen were a series of Midwestern streetscapes with rows of houses that looked exactly like Duncan’s childhood home.

  The American Four-Square was summarized and dismissed in a few minutes. The lecturer’s reason for the digression was to make the point that even if the profoundly original and brilliant work of Frank Lloyd Wright did influence the popularity of these instant Prairie Box homes, he certainly shouldn’t be held directly responsible for either their unremarkableness or their proliferation. More than a hundred thousand Sears kit homes were built across the country between 1908 and 1940. They were shipped in boxcars as complete bundles of some thirty thousand elements or more, depending on the style of the house, with everything from roof shingles to foundation bricks. Sears marked the framing members with numbers so builders could assemble them with ease. Sears even sold the mortgages for these houses. Bland, undistinguished, and built rather than designed, was how the lecturer dismissively characterized the Four-Square.

  Near the end of his second year at Yale, Duncan found himself a day away from a deadline on an important assignment for an advanced design class that he was supposed to have been working on all semester. Not one of the dozen canonical twentieth-century houses he had been assigned to emulate or oppose had sparked a single worthwhile idea. He had over a period of weeks put hundreds of hours into five different false starts that each deteriorated into an ugly mess of meaningless gestures. When the fifth design failed to come to life, Duncan seized the entire roll of drawings and stomped on it before stuffing the whole thing, weeks of mediocre work, into a recycling bin.

  Now, with the presentation a day away, he couldn’t even pull out the best of the worst and rework it to make it look like something. He had nothing. He was literally back to the drawing board. The eminent and terrifying Peter Eisenman was that semester’s visiting critic, and tomorrow afternoon was the make-or-break for this semester’s grade. Without something to put up, Duncan would fail the class and maybe even wash out of the program. Stupid, stupid, stupid!

  Beyond panic at this point, Duncan had drawn a square, which he labeled “Square One.” And then, without really thinking about it, he started sketching it into a Four-Square house, idly at first, just to give himself something to do, but as it took shape on the paper under his pencil, he had a revelation. This was it. Now, for the first time in months, he was genuinely inspired and eager to work. He set aside the first sketch and started again, with purpose.

  Duncan stayed up all night drawing an elaboration on the classic Four-Square house he knew so well. As he bent over his drafting table, alone in the studio (with the exception of occasional rustling in the overflowing trash bin in the corner that attracted mice who lived on pizza crusts and sandwich leftovers), he had no awareness of the hours passing. He was in a trance of invention. Duncan was delighted by this house as it materialized on the paper before him. He loved it with a surge of feeling that he had never before experienced for any of the hundreds of building designs he had conjured and sketched before this. It wasn’t an ego trip; he wasn’t enthralled by his own brilliance so much as he was captivated by what he found himself revealing and discovering with every stroke of his pencil on the big sheets of drawing paper clipped to his drafting table.

  When he had completed the floor plans and the elevations, though he had been drawing for hours, Duncan went on to draw the axonometrics, though they were not required for the assignment. Nothing he had ever designed before this moment had made him feel such urgency and visceral certainty. He was consumed by his desire to render this sublime house with exquisite clarity. The world was sleeping, and he was wider awake than he had ever been before.

  The sun was coming up as he swept away the last of the pounce powder with his horsehair desk brush so he could clean up the last stray pencil marks before the final step, inking the plan drawings for what he had decided to call an Explicated Four-Square House. Then he was done. It was a recognizable Four-Square, but his surpassing design made it into something much more than a Four-Square, the way when Lester Young played “All of Me” with Teddy Wilson in 1956 it became something new, much more than just another rendition of the song. This, this—the joyful, soaring feeling of culmination, now that he had conjured and rendered this singular, pleasing house into existence—this was why Duncan Wheeler was an architect.

  Everyone was nervous going into the crit. Some of the other architecture students at the nearest drafting tables had laughed out loud as Duncan unrolled his elevations and bulldog-clipped the corners to his drafting table. Some of them had crowded around him as he laid everything out.

  “Whoa! Axonometrics!” someone exclaimed, peering over his shoulder. “I admire your nerve, man.”

  “Did you draw the box it comes in, too?” asked a condescending girl named Sandra who always wore white painter’s pants. She had a boyfriend named Cotton who also wore white painter’s pants. Duncan never really understood her minimal plans for houses that didn’t seem to be three-dimensional.

  “Prairie Box, you mean?” added someone else Duncan had liked until that moment.

  The Explicated Four-Square House drew quizzical looks from Peter Eisenman, who stood and stared at each element wordlessly for a good five minutes before moving on to look for another victim. Duncan’s project wasn’t one of the six selected for scrutiny and evisceration during the crit. Anything Eisenman didn’t single out for discussion was considered to be tacitly approved. So he had passed. Once it was evident that his work wasn’t going to be discussed, Duncan retreated inside himself, sitting perfectly still on his stool, oblivious to the anxious colloquy around him.

  There was a lot of apprehension in the room, manifest in frequent bursts of nervous laughter whenever Eisenman said anything halfway witty, even though his cleverest remarks were usually at someone’s expense. Someone suddenly got up and fled the room, brushing by Duncan with a suppressed sob, though Duncan hardly noticed. What he had thought he felt, profound joy at this discovery of something truly marvelous in himself, had been nothing more than the deluded self-congratulation of a fool. Or a child. Lesson learned. To succeed as an architect in this world is to sacrifice vision to reality. The field of architecture pretends to be art, and sometimes a house design that is real and true gets recognition, but in reality, success is more often a business. A little seed of brilliance that had germinated and begun to sprout deep inside Duncan withered and died that afternoon.

  His sincerely intended Explicated Four-Square House, assumed by everyone to be a witty parody, gave Duncan an erroneous reputation among his peers as both a dark horse and a risk-taker. He was neither. He completed his training by sticking to his former propensity for doing highly adequate and entirely unremarkable work in response to each assignment, neither distinguishing nor disgracing himself. He would never take such a painful chance again. At the end of the semester, when Duncan moved out of his dark ground-floor sublet studio apartment in the building everyone called Trumbull Dungeons near the highway ramp at the corner of Orange and Trumbull, he rolled up all the Explicated Four-Square House material and put it in a tube, which he stored next to the old school papers and notebooks he kept in an old file cabinet in the attic of his mother’s house, where he was staying for the summer in order to economize. It was too easy, living there, and he didn’t really like waking up in his single bed in his childhood room, across from his snoring
brother, though Gordon was delighted to have him back.

  While he was up in the attic, Duncan looked for and found stamped numbers on the sides of several rafters. Remembering what he had learned at the Frank Lloyd Wright lecture, he next went down to the cellar and checked under the stairs, where he found, glued to one of the risers, the remnants of a red and gold shipping label with a faint return address on Homan Avenue in Chicago. So it was true—he had grown up in a Sears kit house.

  The small mystery of the inexplicable plinth block at the bottom of the staircase in the front hall made sense at last. Though framing members were delivered pre-cut, some of the moldings and baseboard trim were not, because of variations in plaster wall thickness. Sears kit houses came with simplified construction plans that provided the option of a block form at points where complex joints met, so that even an inexperienced carpenter could finish a house neatly.

  As a child, Duncan had studied this odd feature with fascination. He had loved to run his Hot Wheels and Match-box cars along the baseboard moldings all the way down the stairs, as he bumped along on the carpeted steps on his bottom, and each time, when he had reached this block at the bottom of the stairs, he would slam on the imaginary brakes, with screechy sound effects that annoyed his mother, in order not to crash.

  The demand for a Corrigan & Wheeler house was apparently impervious to economic downturns (Billy always called their prosperous clients “recession-proof”), and had continued unabated since Billy’s death. Duncan had never imagined having the kind of money that now flowed his way reliably, in a steady stream, month after month. His money earned a living of its own. He had become one of those people his mother used to call “rich from having money.” But it had never occurred to Duncan to move to a bigger house, or design and build a house of his own (which would raise expectations impossibly). He liked everything the way it was. Laura didn’t want a bigger or different house either. Neither of them aspired to drive an expensive car. Nevertheless, it felt good, being rewarded with so much money for his work, and being rich was surely an important measure of success.

  “That’s money in the bank,” Billy Corrigan used to say of prime gossip about potential clients, or an A-list weekend invitation in the Hamptons, or a feature in the New York Times Home section. But Duncan thought that there was something even better than that kind of money in the bank—actual money in the bank.

  At the last partners meeting before the accident, there had been at least three years of contracted projects in the pipeline, providing more than enough work for Duncan, his three partners, and the six associates, along with another dozen employees, from the shop drawing staff and model builder to the office manager. There were five associates now. Todd Walker had not been replaced.

  Todd’s drafting table by the windows in the stylish Corrigan & Wheeler offices that occupied an old brick ladder factory on River Street had not been touched, Duncan had noted the previous week, on the one occasion when he had let Laura persuade him to make a pitiful visit he didn’t think he could bear to repeat for a long time. The office had gone quiet when he rolled off the elevator for the first time since the accident, and everyone had stopped working, and the staff had all been too respectful and cheerful, greeting him warmly but with nervous eye contact that didn’t last.

  As Duncan motored down the middle aisle of the big central work space, his chair bumping over the scarred floor-boards that bore the outlined grooves of the machinery on the ghost assembly line that once filled the space of the ladder factory, he could see, down the row of work stations on the window side, the end drafting table and desk that Todd had inhabited. There was Todd’s copper-shaded drafting lamp that had been his grandfather’s, and the stool he had made out of a bicycle seat, and his cobalt glass jar of pens and pencils. There were his beautiful stainless steel helical gears that he used to weigh down the curling edges of blueprints, and on the sill, his idiotic collection of wind-up toys—all of it was just sitting there, neatly blank, waiting for Todd, having not got the news that he wasn’t coming back.

  At their last birthday, when Duncan and Gordon blew out thirty-seven birthday candles together, Duncan had suddenly wished for piano lessons. It just came into his head and he wished for it. He hadn’t played since he left home to go to Hotchkiss. This was supposed to have been the year he would take up piano again. That was back in April, a million years ago. He had been so full of resolve and intention, he had even looked up the phone number for a piano teacher one of the associates mentioned when he was raving about his kid’s recital, but Duncan had never gotten around to calling her. Too late now. What can you play with two weak fingers of your left hand? Okay, The Happy Farmer had a left-handed melody. Didn’t Schumann have something wrong with his right hand? And Scriabin did too, but he was also short and crazy. And Django Reinhardt had a couple of missing fingers, blah blah, triumph over adversity, lemonade out of lemons. Not really.

  Ottoline, comfortably perched on his shoulder, sighed contentedly and tugged at his ear as she peered inside, probing delicately, as if the state of his ears was her responsibility. With his head turned slightly, which was as far as it would turn, Duncan could just glimpse down the block where the dark green Subaru wagon was parked slightly nearer to the hydrant than was probably legal. It belonged to the couple next door, Frank and Jesse, who both taught in the Yale English Department. Frank was the Victorianist, while Jesse was the post-Colonialist. Duncan could never quite retain what that actually meant, post-Colonialist, though it had been explained to him pretty thoroughly over dinner when Frank and Jesse first moved in (they called each other “my husband”) and Laura invited them over one night for Duncan’s grilled butterflied leg of lamb, his perfect summer dinner party specialty he would never cook again.

  Sure, he could talk Laura through it step by step, from the butterflying of the whole leg on the big chopping block they had brought back from a Vermont ski trip (no more ski trips), through the marinating with garlic and rosemary from the garden (the herb beds along the wall were overrun by mint and myrtle) and just the right red wine. Roast lamb being very rich and robust, Duncan always used an earthy Australian Syrah, both for the marinade and at the table. This was Duncan’s genius theory, that Syrah, earthy and complex, is the lamb of wines. True charcoal, never briquettes, the timing of the coals for perfect grilling—he had all the elements down to a science. How could it possibly be worth the effort that would be required now to reconstitute the kind of careless, easy summer night they used to have? Just getting through each day (never mind grilling a leg of lamb!) required careful planning and timing, with the myriad details of Duncan’s needs anticipated thoroughly, and even then, so many things could and did go wrong, all the time. Every day. This was no way to live.

  Jesse and Frank parked their second car, an old Subaru, down the street to avoid the paint-damaging sap from the silver maple tree that shaded this part of the block. Duncan and Laura used to deplore the sap stains eating the paint of their stately gray toboggan of a Volvo wagon, the car that had saved Duncan’s life. The car that had not saved Todd Walker’s life. Their ugly new hospital-looking van, equipped with a wheelchair lift and a raised roof, now occupied the space directly out front, in the newly-designated handicapped parking space, with the sign reserving it that announced to the world a cripple lived here.

  A lucky cripple. Duncan had come to despise that word, lucky, a word many people uttered carelessly in the days after the accident, each one of them certain that this line of reasoning was helpful to Duncan. He should be ecstatic and grateful that he was alive! And that other than having a C6 spinal cord injury, he survived the accident with hardly a scratch! Gosh, he hadn’t thought about it that way! Absolutely! Thank you so much!

  Good bad luck, Jack Wheeler used to say, when selling comprehensive insurance policies to his clients, is an accident you walk away from, though of course, you might not want to say that to Duncan. His bitterly sarcastic expressions of gratitude for the wise reminders about
his wonderful luck for having survived the wreck had not been taken personally by anyone. He was fogged by drugs. He didn’t know what he was saying. (He knew exactly what he was saying.) Define luck. Is it an absolute certainty that Duncan Wheeler (why yes, he had indeed become aware of the irony of his last name, but thanks for pointing it out) was luckier than Todd Walker (who had not walked away)?

  Ottoline went back to grooming Duncan’s hair, sifting her way around the back of his head, pausing from time to time to nibble some invisible particle with dainty concentration, which made him wonder if on top of everything else he had developed some kind of quadriplegic dandruff. Why not? The back of his head was nearly always pressed against a pillow or support of some kind. She tightened her grip on his shoulder and rebalanced as he toggled an adjustment of his chair, tilting himself a little bit further back. Duncan was supposed to change his position often, to ease the perpetual stress on his hips and back, though he also simply liked the way the tiniest pressure on the toggle with one finger made the chair move. It was one of the few things he could do for himself, one of the few satisfactions in his day.

  Duncan rotated the chair away from the window, and Ottoline slid down from his shoulder to his lap, where she settled in contentedly, holding onto his curled right wrist with one of her cool little hands. He petted her again, tentatively, with the edge of his left hand, and she seemed to like it. The coffee maker beeped completion in the empty kitchen. Duncan wanted to roll into the kitchen to help himself to coffee (the most ordinary small activity of daily living a man should be able to do in his own house!), but he had made a promise not to try lifting a full carafe of hot coffee ever again, not after the catastrophic incident the previous month which had burned him badly across his thighs, though neither he nor Laura had realized the extent of the burn until many hours after the broken glass had been swept away and his coffee-soaked lap had been blotted. Of course he had not felt it.