Still Life with Monkey

by Katharine Weber

  A steel, tiered trolley (better suited to the icy, soulless gleam of a Richard Meier interior) was stacked with the ubiquitous folded blue disposable underpads and stocked with catheter tubing, irrigation trays, syringes, drainage bags, boxes of disposable gloves, basins filled with bowel care items (do you laugh or cry when you depend on something in your daily life called Enemeez?), a stack of blue plastic kidney dishes, tubes of lubricant, a blood pressure kit, Nitro paste, swabs, alcohol wipes, gauze, tape, and all the other paraphernalia required for the new regimen of maintaining the functional workings of Duncan’s inert yet all too organic body. The worst of it for Duncan was the sight of the commode squatting on its rubber-tipped feet on the lovely spalted maple floorboards (he had refinished them himself over a long weekend), which glowed like honey in the late summer sunlight filtering through branches of the overgrown rhododendron outside.

  His blood pressure had soared within minutes after he rolled in the door. A headache suddenly pinballed from temple to temple as he looked around his reorganized study. He felt the room growing dark. “They must work hard to make all this shit as ugly as possible!” Duncan exclaimed.

  One of the transport techs hovered over Duncan with the Nitro paste, ready to open his shirt and smear the paste on his bare skin to bring him out of dysreflexia, but his blood pressure subsided and it wasn’t necessary. After the moment passed, Duncan was transferred into the bed from the transport wheelchair by the techs and Oliver, the very agreeable and competent PCA on this inaugural shift. Oliver was a medical student from Taiwan. (He was one of the two PCAs who would soon quit over the arrival of a monkey. Duncan was very sorry to see him go. The other PCA who would leave because of Ottoline was the sweet and devout Natalie, whose relentless chitchat about the Holy Spirit and His plans for Duncan in those early weeks at home made her departure a relief.)

  Duncan was anguished over the reality of his new living arrangements. But where the hell had he thought he would sleep? How the hell had he thought he would live? Did he expect that as soon as he was in his house he would jump up out of the chair, race upstairs, empty his pockets into the dish on his dresser, change out of his work clothes into a comfortable sweater, and then go down to the kitchen to make himself a gin and tonic before starting to prepare dinner just as he used to do? He simply hadn’t allowed himself to understand that daily life as he had known it was over. He simply had not begun to imagine what it was really going to be like to live this new, constricted life in his own house. And now here he was. How could anyone live this way?

  “Maybe this is my chance to one-up Michael Graves in the category of over-designed objects for the home—the Duncan Wheeler Home Hospital Furniture System,” Duncan proclaimed with the counterfeit enthusiasm of a radio announcer. “The ultimate in modular modern classics, designed for the home-bound cripple.”

  “So why don’t you do it?” Laura asked.

  “I’m joking.”

  “But why not?” she persisted. “It’s a good idea! You could design a line of household objects for—”

  “For rich cripples? For prosperous, tasteful gimps and quads?”

  “Yes! Damn it, yes! Duncan, you know you could actually do it if you wanted to.”

  Why was she arguing with him? Laura couldn’t stop herself, though she knew it was futile trying to persuade him about anything these days. In the hospital, every optimistic thought or hope she had launched was just something for him to shoot down, with deadly aim, another clay pigeon arcing across the sky for him, a target he could blow to smithereens in an instant. Now that he was home he was even more obdurate.

  Laura had not been careless or hasty as she had gone about setting up Duncan’s room. It was the only reasonable arrangement if he was going to live in this house. The downstairs bathroom was too small to accommodate a commode and still allow an adequate angle for the Hoyer lift. As it was, the lift just fit, barely, with careful maneuvers, to position him for bathing in the shower stall on a high-backed plastic chair fitted with a webbed chest restraint.

  It took skill to roll Duncan’s inert body this way and that, in order to situate him in the center of the sling where it lay opened flat on his bed, then hook him in, and then lift him and move him into the bathroom as he dangled like a prize grabbed up from the pile in an arcade claw machine. Duncan was nearly six feet tall, and even though his body had dwindled considerably since the accident, lost muscle mass he would never get back, he was still a large, solid dead weight. It would take weeks before Laura felt confident making a transfer without one of the PCAs talking her through each step. As she grew more dexterous at operating the lift, it never stopped feeling to her that every moment of the maneuver, from bed to bathroom for showering and then back again for dressing, was a potential humiliation for Duncan. Who would want to be handled this way by his wife, like cargo, like a permanent giant damaged baby, like the dependent, diminished quadriplegic husband he had become?

  A small painted chest of drawers moved down from the attic (it had been there when they bought the house, filled with somebody’s dead grandmother’s moldy dinner napkins and tablecloths) held the limited selection of his clothes in which he could be most easily dressed. Laura had simply left everything else upstairs in Duncan’s bureau drawers and closet. His new room was set up, she assured him, with enough clearance so that he could maneuver his wheelchair to sit at his desk to work.

  Duncan had built the desk himself, before he met Laura, out of layered wafers of Baltic birch plywood salvaged from a kitchen renovation he helped a classmate build one summer during college. He was particularly proud of the pin and cove dovetailing in the three drawers. Laura had pushed it back against the wall of bookshelves but had not otherwise touched anything on or in the desk, and it was just the way Duncan had left it in July.

  A flimsy cardboard tube of architectural drawings had fallen onto the floor from a lower shelf, out of sight behind the desk. Duncan had shoved it there carelessly a long while ago, when he had brought home several boxes of books and papers from his mother’s attic after she died. When Laura nudged the desk right against the bookshelves, she had accidentally squashed the tube, and it was with trepidation that she tugged out the flattened roll of papers inside to see if she had damaged something precious.

  The faintly pleated architectural drawings she unfurled on the floor of Duncan’s study were puzzling to Laura. She had never seen anything in Duncan’s work remotely like these elevations and plans for an utterly charming house. Was it some architectural curiosity he had found somewhere? Was she failing to recognize a famous house by Frank Lloyd Wright? But if Duncan possessed original Wright drawings they would be a proud possession, not hidden away out of sight. Laura knew to look for Wright’s little red chop mark. None of the drawings had any kind of signature.

  For a minute Laura wondered if these were the plans for the house Duncan grew up in, which made sense if they came out of that attic. But when Laura studied the details of the front elevation she could see that the windows on the center dormer were entirely different, and there were rounded columns running along the front porch that weren’t a match for the square columns on the house on Broadfield Road. This house seemed more expansive, somehow a little grander in proportion. She could easily picture Duncan’s old front porch not only because she had been in that house countless times when Helen and Gordon lived there, but also because on a May evening just a few months ago when she and Duncan were a little early on their way to a nearby dinner for some new associates, hosted by one of the partners who lived on Underhill Road, they had detoured a couple of blocks in order to drive slowly past his childhood home. It had been a mistake. Duncan was not only appalled that all the rhododendron bushes were gone, but also by the discovery that the original wooden front steps had been replaced by a mean little set of concrete steps in front of the generous porch that spanned the front of the house, flanked by cheap readymade steel handrails made to look like wrought iron. This change to the Broadfield Road
house had really bothered him. Later that night, Duncan had fretted over telling Gordon about this act of desecration and had decided to keep it from him.

  Gazing at the mysterious drawings, Laura realized that the blocky architect’s lettering on the plans with the words “Explicated Four-Square House” was Duncan’s handwriting. These were his drawings. This winsome house was his design. The front elevation with its deep inviting porch was particularly appealing. She smoothed it out. The creases in the architectural vellum weren’t too bad. All of these drawings could be flattened in the paper conservation lab. She flattened out another sheet, this one showing the house with a strange perspective. She recognized it as an axonometric rendering.

  Duncan had once tried to explain the principles of axonometric rendering to her, but she had gotten lost somewhere between the x and y axis set at 45 degrees to the picture plane and the reason they are orthogonal to each other. Why not just say ninety degrees? Laura thought orthogonal sounded contraceptive. Duncan had tried to explain the lack of vanishing point, but she had only grasped the sense of what he was telling her for a fleeting moment.

  Laura studied the drawings some more. She loved this house. Why had Duncan kept it a secret? Was it very early work, some failed project before they met? She wished he designed more houses like this, so different from the usual Corrigan & Wheeler domestic confections for the rich. He must have done it when he was a student. Though the firm designed houses for clients who came to them for the Billy Corrigan style, surely there were other sorts of people in the world who would choose to build Duncan Wheeler’s Explicated Four-Square House if given the opportunity to know that such a thing was possible. Laura rolled the vellum sheets carefully and reinserted them into the tube. She would take them to the conservation lab and flatten them. She would surprise Duncan by matting them, and maybe framing the front elevation, too. It could go in the dining room on the wall now occupied by a large poster for an Italian cherry festival that was a wedding present from an architecture school friend of Duncan’s who had taken it off a wall in a small village near a Palladian villa to which he had made a pilgrimage.

  Though Duncan recognized how thoughtfully Laura had set up his room, on that first afternoon at home he felt himself plummeting into despair over his hideous surroundings. The commode especially was a chronic reminder of the way he would be forever dependent on another human being to assist him with a basic biological function that should be a man’s most private and independent act—taking a shit. By God, he missed the simple pleasure of having a good, leisurely bowel movement first thing in the morning, alone, comfortably ensconced in the downstairs bathroom, with a cup of coffee and good reading material for company.

  “It’s not Ipe,” said Duncan vehemently.

  “What?”

  “The ramp out front, the wood.”

  “We’re still talking about that?”

  “Learn how to pronounce it, for Christ’s sake, now that the curb view of our house looks like I’m trying to compete with Tom Luckey—poor bastard may have broken his neck and ended up a quad, but by God he designed the most wonderful climbers! The late, great Tom Luckey is my new role model, right? Anyway, it’s a fucking expensive, dense timber from South America, and it’s pronounced Ee-pay.”

  “Okey-dokey. Like pig Latin?”

  “No, like the right way to pronounce it.”

  “With humor, my dear Zilkov, always with a little humor.”

  “Not today.”

  Duncan’s routine required him to endure daily procedures involving the use of enemas and suppositories that took at least half an hour on each occasion. The alternative to being hoisted onto the commode and parked there (with neither his reading glasses nor an ability to hold anything, and so nothing to read!) was the even more un-private and mortifying experience of lying flat on his bed, on his side, on a waterproof pad, while one of the PCAs inserted a gloved finger in his rectum for stimulation, in order to induce what was so politely called evacuation. At times, when things weren’t optimal, the PCA would have to perform manual extraction to avoid, or solve, fecal impaction. At these moments Duncan would remind himself that he could be dignified in undignified circumstances, something his mother used to say to Gordy when he had been teased and shamed at school. But this whole process was humiliating, and there was no dignified way around it. You lose mobility, and you give up privacy and dignity because your body keeps living. There was no dignified or undignified way around any of this.

  Each morning as Duncan lay in the hospital bed (its only saving grace being that this unaesthetic object wasn’t in his view, as Billy Corrigan often remarked about the best reason to rent space in the MetLife Building), trapped in his CPAP mask until someone came in with a lot of cheery morning chat and took it off, he was infuriated and devastated that this was his life now. True, once she arrived, Ottoline’s sturdy little presence, tucked under her blanket in her cage by the window, gave him some small pleasure when he awoke. But the first thing that met his gaze each morning was his $9,000 motorized wheelchair, a model pathetically called “The Gladiator,” as if enough robust, combative nomenclature could somehow empower the enfeebled occupant. It was parked each night with its back to his desk, cocked like a dentist’s chair for easy transfers in and out, his padded harness and chest strap dangling, another day done, another day ahead.

  EIGHT

  In those first blurry days at the hospital

  IN THOSE FIRST BLURRY DAYS AT THE HOSPITAL FOLLOWING the accident, once Duncan was no longer “critical and unstable,” Laura alternated nights when she slept on a cot beside him and nights when she went home for a few hours. She had almost forgotten that she might be pregnant, but she knew she needed to take care of herself, and that meant eating and sleeping, even when she could barely manage either. He was still heavily sedated and drifting, with very few moments of clarity. Even when he appeared to be conscious, he was unable to speak that first week because he was on a ventilator. His bed was positioned so that he was hinged at the hips and tilted back in a semi-upright slant, while the lower portion of the hospital bed was tented in a hump under his knees.

  In all the movie and television shows she had ever seen, when someone has survived a bad accident and is in a hospital bed on life support, there is always a tranquility and peacefulness to the patient’s supine repose, like a figure on a sarcophagus. But there was nothing tranquil about the array of clacking and humming and beeping machines clustered on either side of Duncan’s bed. Every so often, pneumatic compression leg wraps filled with air and tightened around his legs to prevent blood clots, as if there were small restive animals under the covers resettling themselves. There was nothing peaceful about the constant background sounds of footsteps, wheeled carts clanking in the hall, loose threads of conversations passing by, constant announcements and pages, all punctuated by the scarred swinging door at the near end of the hall banging open repeatedly by gurneys or equipment coming into and going out of the Critical Care unit.

  Laura worried that Duncan’s canted physical position seemed weirdly haphazard and precarious, though none of the hospital staff who swarmed his bedside seemed concerned. He didn’t look remotely comfortable to her. When she asked a nurse if there was any risk that Duncan would slump further sideways, and what if he slid any further down in the bed, and shouldn’t they do something to straighten him up more, the nurse answered without looking up from the chart she was notating to reassure her, honey, we’re doing our best—believe me, we don’t like to lose them.

  In the middle of one of those first nights, momentarily alone with Duncan in his deep, drugged state amid all the chugging, clicking, beeping machinery, Laura pulled down the sheet and cotton blanket that covered him and touched his chest lightly, rotating her fingertip in a tiny circle, gently centering over his heart, moving outward while avoiding the sticky heart monitor electrodes, tracing the cool surface of his body, skimming all five fingers of her hand across his rib cage and sternum the way he alw
ays loved, mapping the equator of his sensory level, delineating what she had been told by one of the nurses was the edge of his feeling and not feeling. She had secretly hoped he would wake at her touch, but he did not. The edge of feeling and not feeling—that was her own address these days.

  Gordon was at the hospital nearly every day from the start. Usually, he took the Shoreline commuter train into New Haven with his bicycle, and then rode over to the hospital from Union Station. Somehow he was able to linger in Duncan’s vicinity on the Critical Care floor before and after visiting hours, and nobody objected to his quiet presence. He had offered to give blood, but a directed donation wasn’t necessary, the doctors told him, though a blood donation was always welcome. Gordon was disappointed. They had the same blood type, and he didn’t understand why his blood wouldn’t be better for Duncan than any other blood if his twin needed a transfusion. Fortunately, other than two units in the first hour when Duncan arrived at the hospital in the Lifestar helicopter, he had not suffered significant blood loss. His spleen had not ruptured. But wouldn’t giving Duncan some of Gordon’s blood be a good thing anyway? Apparently not.

  On the fifth morning after the accident, when Laura had gone home very late, finally exhausted enough for a few hours of fitful sleep and a shower and change of clothes, she returned to Duncan’s curtained corner of the unit, just as the sun was rising, to find Gordon there, asleep on the single visitor’s chair allotted to the cubicle, which he had pulled up to the side of the bed, his woolly head on his arms beside Duncan’s inanimate legs. His snore rose above the beeping and clicking machines that sustained Duncan. It was a soothingly familiar sound to Laura’s ears. Finding him there, Laura felt something almost maternal as she gazed at the Wheeler twins, the pair of them, sleeping contiguously as they had all through their childhood.