Still Life with Monkey

by Katharine Weber

  And then came this particular monkey. Since Ottoline’s arrival, a well-meaning acquaintance had sent them an envelope full of photocopied newspaper articles about the chimpanzee that chewed off a woman’s face. Two of Laura’s senior colleagues in the painting conservation lab at the Yale Art Gallery had been frankly and vocally horrified at the news that a potentially violent, potentially disease-carrying primate had come to live with Duncan and Laura, and one of them begged Laura to wear protective gear at all times whenever Ottoline was out of her cage. A friendly graduate student in Art History who overheard this contentious conversation had the next day left in her mailbox a postcard from the Uffizi of a painting by Annebale Caracci of a young man holding a monkey.

  Was it so hard to comprehend the difference between a large and powerful ape with uncontrollable aggression and a thoroughly trained seven-pound capuchin monkey, smaller than most dogs or cats, who can understand dozens of commands and perform all sorts of complex tasks to assist the disabled? Laura felt that she had this conversation over and over with friends and colleagues, and with so many of Duncan’s medical team, too.

  Laws about “exotic pets” (a vast category in most states that included boa constrictors and tigers) meant that any monkey who bites anyone under any circumstance, service animal or not, is a monkey who could be seized by animal control and caged indefinitely, until it sickens and dies, is euthanized, or, occasionally, is placed in a primate sanctuary of one kind or another. Some so-called sanctuaries that gladly took in discarded monkeys and allowed people to believe their unmanageable, cast-off “monkids” were living happy, contented lives in a suitable environment were really fronts for drug- and cosmetic-testing laboratories. For all these risks, especially given the investment and value of years of training, the Institute retained ownership of Ottoline. She had an Institute identification number tattooed on the inside of one of her sinewy, hairy thighs, and she was also micro-chipped.

  From the start, Ottoline demonstrated very clear preferences for some people in the Wheeler household, with cheeping and coy head tilts for two of the PCAs, who soon developed their own vocabulary of gestures with her, and a dislike of a couple of others, which she expressed with open-mouthed scolding and rude shrieking. Her scorn and dismissal were as insulting as her affection was flattering. There was no way to predict whom she would favor, and there was no way to win her favor if she didn’t like someone.

  She had a thing for the UPS man. Ottoline had never even met him face to face, but by the third time he made a delivery in her presence, she alerted with interest at the sound of his truck stopping in front of their house. At the squealing of the brakes, followed by the ticking of the safety blinker lights, and then the metal rasp of the sliding door panel on the truck, she would chatter happily, watching as he emerged from inside his truck with their parcel and hopped down to the pavement. Ottoline would start tilting her head and cheeping and make big smacking air kisses as he walked up their front steps, and she didn’t stop until he had retraced his footsteps, swung himself back up into the truck, and driven away. Laura wondered if this was some atavistic association that had to do with Ottoline’s previous placement. Did the UPS man on that route give her treats? Or maybe there was simply something pleasing about the brown uniform. Ottoline was also endlessly fascinated by Frank and Jesse’s big orange cat, Buster, whom she would observe avidly from the kitchen windowsill when he stalked blue jays in their yard. Frank and Jesse discouraged Buster from killing birds, but they were on sabbatical in Rome for a year. Their housesitter, a graduate student, often left their old yellow Subaru in the shared driveway, blocking Laura, who would then have to knock on the door to ask him to move it, apparently always waking him, no matter the time of day. The graduate student presumably kept the cat food bowl full, but he was indifferent to Buster’s murderous agenda.

  Two of Duncan’s personal care assistants who had recently started working with him had simply quit when Ottoline arrived. The agency found replacements for their shifts, two women in their forties who were eager to take care of a quadriplegic man with a monkey. Darlene and Cathy were cousins who shared a house near the shoreline in West Haven, and they were both relentlessly cheerful and patient. Darlene, who wore pastel scrubs festooned with teddy bears because she worked for a pediatric practice most afternoons, often trailed a faint sillage of cigarette smoke when she came into the house, but she promised she was trying to quit. Smoking was a violation of agency rules, but Laura told her they wouldn’t say anything about it if she really was trying to quit. Cathy had worked in a wound care clinic at Waterbury Hospital, which was particularly useful, given Duncan’s already chronic pressure sores.

  Ida Mae was a massage therapist with crazy red hair and tattooed eyebrows who had moved back to New Haven, after twenty years in Florida, to take care of her father, now that he couldn’t manage on his own. She was full of stories about her hapless ex-boyfriend Floyd, the man of a thousand schemes whom she had left behind in his RV in Pahokee. Before long, Laura and Duncan had a vivid sense of Floyd’s crafty ways and poor judgment, and they often spoke about him familiarly, as if he were a regrettable though colorful relative of their own.

  Floyd was a ticket-taker for boat tours in the Everglades National Park. He had dabbled in breeding exotic pets, and at one time had operated a petting zoo menagerie, which had been closed down after a child was bitten badly by one of his ill-treated, malnourished, captive creatures. He was also a bottom-dealing, hand-mucking poker player who fleeced the bass-fishing anglers in local bars, which is to say every so often he got beaten up pretty badly and was often “laying low.” Ida Mae was already on her last nerve with him when he persuaded her to cash out her modest retirement account so they could invest her money in a chinchilla farm, with a plan to breed chinchillas and harvest the valuable pelts.

  The humid heat on Lake Okeechobee was not very much like the dry, cool air of the Andes, and all 300 sweltering chinchillas stacked in their cages in the repair bays of a vacant muffler shop down at the end of Lemon Street soon developed a condition called “furslip.” (You couldn’t even stuff a little pillow with the fur they let loose, it was so nasty, according to Ida Mae, who had tried.) There was no fortune to be made with naked, listless chinchillas, and it was the end of Ida Mae’s bank account along with her romance, though it wasn’t the last straw, the way Ida Mae told it. (It was the penultimate straw, Duncan suggested, and she latched right onto that word very happily for future tellings.) When Floyd had attempted to pass off stringy chunks of gamey chinchilla meat as nutria in the spicy gumbo he brought to a swap meet to sell by the Styrofoam cup out of his big crockpot, that had been the very last straw for Ida Mae.

  During her first visit to their house to discuss her duties, among the many issues of Duncan’s care was the perpetual risk of his having an autonomic dysreflexia response to a long checklist of potential triggers. Because his body’s thermostat was essentially paralyzed, and he didn’t sweat below his level of injury, one significant worry, once warmer weather arrived, was going to be keeping him indoors and cool on any day air temperatures ever rose above ninety degrees. “Trust me, I’m an expert on the signs of sensitivity to heat and humidity,” Ida Mae assured them unreassuringly.

  Wendell, a confident coffee-colored man who told them he was taking classes to become a Physician’s Assistant, made all the transfers and lifting seem effortless. (Laura and Duncan were curious about his ethnic background but were too polite to come straight out and ask; they would never know that he was from Mauritius, though it was one of Duncan’s guesses.) Laura was always happy to see him, knowing how competently and respectfully he handled Duncan, from the intimacies of his bowel program to bathing to dressing. There was something reassuring about his presence, and she imagined that for Duncan it was nice that at least one of his PCAs was a man.

  Mounika, a small but impressively strong and capable Indian woman with a bindi, told Laura and Duncan on her first shift a few days after Ottolin
e’s arrival that she was honored to be in a house with a monkey. She spoke respectfully in a soft voice to Ottoline whenever she passed by the cage in the kitchen. Ottoline might be playing with her plastic stacking rings and bucket, but when Mounika told her in Hindi each time she greeted Ottoline at the start of her shift that she was fortunate to be fed every day, because there is a Hindu belief that monkeys should be fed only on Tuesdays and Saturdays, which would probably not do at all for Ottoline, the busy monkey would drop her toys and sit up, quiet and alert, tilting her head and gazing at Mounika pensively.

  A total of five personal care assistants did everything for Duncan, with rotating daily morning shifts, which often included giving him breakfast, which he was only ready for after ten in the morning, because his care routine took a minimum of two hours, and end-of-the-day shifts which concluded with his being transferred into his bed for the night. There were sometimes additional shifts at other hours depending on Duncan’s needs and Laura’s work schedule at the art gallery. Now Duncan could spend most afternoons on his own, thanks to Ottoline.

  The annual cost of the PCAs would run beyond $40,000, but Laura and Duncan were better off than most people in their situation, and never had to give a moment’s thought to the hourly cost of scheduling the PCA hours Duncan needed. Not only were they what Duncan’s relatives liked to call “very comfortable,” but also Duncan continued to draw a partner’s salary at Corrigan & Wheeler, though sooner or later there would have to be some negotiations about his future role, and if he was ever going to return to work.

  The combination of a lump sum payment from worker’s compensation, his monthly Social Security disability payment, and a single large payout from a long-term disability insurance policy that Corrigan & Wheeler carried for all the vested employees (Duncan being the prudent son of an insurance man who died young) more than covered the cost of the PCAs. The single large discounted payout on the long-term disability policy was an unusual choice, and all actuarial tables made evident the fact that the better and more prudent option would have been the ten-year payout plan, but as with workers comp, Duncan had been adamant that he wanted the lump sum payment now, instead.

  Laura, Duncan, and Ottoline were in fact adjusting to each other a little more every day as they began to settle into routines. In the time when Duncan was home from the hospital, but before Ottoline, on the afternoons when Laura worked in the conservation lab at the Yale Art Gallery, when she came home at the end of the day, Duncan would be alone in the dim living room, either watching television or staring out the window, the apologetic PCA having been banished to the kitchen, where Laura would find her at the table, leafing through a magazine. Now, with Ottoline, Duncan was able to spend hours without a PCA in the house, from just after lunch until Laura came home between five-thirty and six. He agreed to wear the Able-phone headset whenever he was alone for this much time, so that he could, in an emergency, whistle to initiate a call. His phone was programmed with voice recognition for “call Laura” or “call 911” or “call the Primate Institute.” The evening PCA who managed all the bedtime care usually arrived just as Laura was clearing the table after dinner.

  Duncan didn’t want to give Laura the satisfaction of knowing that he had gotten back in the habit of reading email from the office every afternoon during his solo hours. He used voice recognition software to dictate replies and comments, which kept him more connected with work than he had imagined would be possible. Duncan had been back in the loop for several weeks before Laura caught him one afternoon when she came into the house and heard his voice coming from his room. At first she had thought he was speaking to Ottoline, then she heard him say something about the planning and zoning permits and she thought he was on the phone, which was surprising enough.

  The voice recognition software had been Laura’s idea, years ago, when she got it for him after he broke his wrist skiing a rocky double black diamond run that was well above his level of ability (though Laura had begged him to skip this last reckless run of the day). Duncan had resisted using it, because, he had felt at the time, childishly, that doing so would be a concession to her unspoken told-you-so. Now he was sheepish when she caught him in the act of dictating emails.

  Duncan loved the solitude of those precious afternoon hours, and was disappointed on the days Laura didn’t go to work or arrived home early. He had, at first, been challenged by Ottoline’s cage doors, which fastened with a spring clip barely soft enough for him to operate with his weak grip, but after a struggle, he mastered it, along with managing to clip the leash lead onto the ring on her harness, the other end of which he fastened to the ring loop on his chair. These were necessary tasks to master if he was going to be able to handle Ottoline’s comings and goings from the cage to his chair and back again. He could only manage to do this if he wore the tenodesis splint on his left hand, something he had resisted before. He had felt sorry for himself. It was enough trouble, trying to feed himself with the utensil cuff Velcroed in place on his feeble wrist with its slot to hold a fork or spoon, the only way he could now lift the smallest morsel of food to his own mouth.

  The occupational therapist had come to the house several times to fit the custom-made tenodesis splint and teach him how to adjust it himself with the Velcro straps. He had relatively good wrist flexion and extension, she explained on each occasion. Duncan wasn’t sure if she didn’t remember that she had already told him these things the first time, during the initial evaluation just before he came home, when he had been moved to the rehab wing of the hospital, or if she thought he couldn’t retain the information. His spinal cord injury had left him with a very weak pinch grip.

  Before Ottoline, Duncan had been pessimistic about physical therapy and the concept of making the most of whatever he could do with his left hand. But the practical necessity of being able to get her in and out of the cage and tethered or untethered to his chair without assistance had motivated him. Clipping and unclipping Ottoline’s leash fasteners, opening her cage door fastener and re-latching it—these were the first difficult tasks he had been willing to work for since the accident.

  Increased grip strength and dexterity did make lots of small differences for Duncan, among them an improved ability to hold his binoculars steady. Ottoline loved the binoculars, and he let her look through them, at her insistence, though it wasn’t apparent that she could really see anything at all, and it was unlikely that she understood that she was seeing distant things as if they were much nearer. Ottoline liked to duck under the binocular strap around his neck to tuck herself into a leisurely position on her back. She would lie there against his chest, holding the binoculars in front of her face with her hands and feet, aiming them this way and that. Monkey see, monkey do. She often smeared up the lenses. She liked best to flex the rubber eyecups, and she could happily recline on Duncan as if he were a lounge chair, one leg cocked over the other, flipping the pliable rubber eyecups in and out, in and out, over and over, plip-plap, plip-plap, for very long intervals, if nothing distracted her. At other moments, she had taken to folding down his ears similarly, over and over, as if she was hoping to achieve the same effect.

  “What’s going on with the McCarthy kids, Ottoline?” Laura overheard Duncan murmuring in a confiding tone to the monkey in his lap. It was mid-afternoon, on a day she had finally concluded a painstaking cleaning of one of the Gallery’s treasures (for the two weeks she worked on “Hercules and Deianira” she had perseverated the artist’s name, Pollaiuolo, Pollaiuolo) and headed home from work earlier than usual. The streets in their neighborhood came alive with children each day when all the neighborhood schools let out. Duncan was using a gentle, lilting voice she had only ever before heard from him when he encountered someone’s cat or dog.

  “What do you think, missy? Let’s take a look. No, now it’s my turn. Wait! You had your turn. Thank you, good girl! Now they’re getting out of the car. There’s the older brother, and look, he has a toy helicopter. Here comes the little sister. Ingie
sets her down on the sidewalk and she goes for it! Is she going to get her hands on his helicopter? No, she is not! Is her brother going to put out her eye with the helicopter before Ingie notices? There’s Ingie going for the trash can next door. Wait for it! Here comes the McDonald’s drop, in three … two … one. Okay, now it’s your turn.”

  FIVE

  Lately, after Duncan and Ottoline had each been tucked in for the night

  LATELY, AFTER DUNCAN AND OTTOLINE HAD EACH been tucked in for the night and the evening shift PCA had gone home, when Laura went to bed, upstairs, alone in the room she had shared with Duncan, the room he would never see again, she found herself putting aside her disappointing new novel of the moment (ever since Henry’s Bookshop closed, her reading choices had been hit and miss unless she picked an old favorite off a bookshelf for re-reading), or tried to absorb one of the growing stack of unread issues of the New Yorker, and instead reaching for the dog-eared folder of Primate Institute material and advice. She still slept on her side of the bed, out of habit. She had all the pillows to herself now, and she arranged them just so for reading in bed, with the two that used to be Duncan’s appropriated the way she used to deploy them only when he was away for a night or two on a work trip—one to prop her elbow to facilitate holding her reading material, and the other folded in half under her knees. Capuchin monkeys will respect men before trusting them. They will trust women before respecting them; respect has to be earned.

  There was nobody to tell her how late it was, stop reading about monkey hierarchies, turn off the light, cuddle me. She often stayed up until two or three in the morning reading about the proclivities and training of capuchin monkeys. Tonight as she paged through the familiar advice, she had for company a generous glass of Italian pinot noir, from the last bottle of the last case Duncan had brought home from an office party, and the bowl of leftover Halloween candy (it had dwindled down to a few sad Milky Ways and Butterfingers, but was brimming again, supplemented with the new Say Howdy! miniatures).