Still Life with Monkey

by Katharine Weber

  Gordon’s tasks of the day included packing up what Roxy called all the Halloween tchotchkes (a word Gordon wouldn’t dream of attempting to utter aloud) to make room for the incoming holiday items that would be arriving in the next few days. The store made its margin on gift items, Roxy often reminded staff, even though we all love books and nobody works in a bookstore out of a love of coffee mugs and calendars, which only made Gordon glad that he didn’t have the responsibility of owning a bookstore.

  The frankly Halloween-themed objects were obvious, but after he had packed up the Virginia Woolf and Mark Twain masks and the Jack o’ Lantern candles, along with the glow-in-the-dark pumpkin buckets and the candy corn note pads, he hesitated over the one remaining pumpkin spice gift box of the thirty-six that he had arranged in a pleasingly perfect spiral on the center table. The gift box consisted of a pumpkin spice muffin mix and two orange coffee mugs with pumpkins on them. This wasn’t literally a Halloween item, but it was Halloweenish.

  He left this one remaining gift box out on the table for the time being, and took the other items down into the basement to enter them into the system for storage or return, depending on the source. Then he either boxed them for shipping and printed out labels accordingly, or shelved them in inventory. By the time he had done this, he had changed his mind, recognizing how needlessly compulsive he was being about this one item, but it was on his mind, so he went back up the stairs and back onto the floor to get the pumpkin spice gift box, but it was gone—a customer had probably picked it up and moved it. He roamed through the store, scanning for the orange mugs with pumpkins on them. He straightened and re-shelved books in proper order as he went, tucking in the shelf talkers that had gone askew. There was the pumpkin spice gift box, at the top of a stack of books that a customer was pushing forward on the counter as her turn came in the queue at the front desk. Sold! What a relief.

  Four days of the week, Gordon’s shift at the bookstore ended at three. As he pedaled past the tea shop that had recently opened a few doors down, he saw a sidewalk sign advertising a tea lecture and tasting that had just begun. Today’s topic was a comparison between the oolongs of Taiwan and China. Wondering how political designation affected the taste of tea, Gordon cocked his leg over his bike to dismount.

  As he dropped into a folding chair in the back row, the speaker was elaborating to an audience of about thirty people the details of the ten steps required to process oolong tea. The plucking of the leaves, by machine or hand, was step one. Gordon settled in his uncomfortable seat and closed his eyes, his favorite way to attend readings in the bookstore, in a semi-dream state. He floated through the selection of the top leaves, the withering in the sun, the indoor withering and oxidation. The ratios of oxidations didn’t interest him as much as did the concept of oxidation as a continuum, ranging in degrees from zero to 100%. But this was actually quite a lot like listening to paint dry. Gordon dozed some more as he half-heard about the fourth step, pan-firing the leaves, and then the oolong leaves are rolled around in a machine, and after that they are separated and dried. Wait, was that the fifth step? Or was it the second part of the fourth step? Was anyone else still awake? Gordon opened one eye and saw that there were attentive souls all around him. A woman in the row ahead of him was taking notes. He still hadn’t heard anything about Taiwan versus the mainland.

  Drying, rolling, baking. Gordon hadn’t eaten lunch, and now the vocabulary of the processing of oolong tea in China made him think of pie and cake and cookies. His stomach rumbled. He stretched out his long legs in front of him and accidentally kicked a chair, causing its occupant to whip around and give him a hard stare. He mouthed “sorry,” and hunched his shoulders in the universal gesture of contrition, and the man turned back, satisfied.

  Now the speaker was talking about China and Taiwan, and Gordon wondered if Chinese people didn’t think Taiwan was Chinese, if a separate political state. In China, the oolongs are oxidized more and baked longer than Taiwan oolongs. Was that the bottom line? And why was this so? He waited to hear more about the reasons for this difference, but the speaker was now describing a rare and inaccessible tea garden on a cliff in the Fujian province (had he been there himself, or was he in effect describing a description?) where an exceptionally rare tea is made from the leaves of one ancient tree. People go to such trouble!

  The talk was drawing to a close. The speaker pronounced the tea they were about to taste both mellow and rich, with the aroma of orchids and an aftertaste reminiscent of peach pits. Everyone stood up and milled around, and samples of the first oolong were poured into short white paper cups.

  Gordon stood with his paper cup, sipping delicately, trying not to burn his mouth. His mouth burned very easily. The tea was partly strained through his mustache, so the aftertaste was probably reminiscent not only of peach pits, which he tried to detect, but also the crumbs of the blueberry muffin Roxy had left him on the shipping and receiving desk that morning.

  “What do you think?” A teenaged girl sipping from her cup was speaking to him. She was short, and Gordon was tall, and he had an uncomfortable sense of looming over her.

  “Some have an almost woody flavor, while others may be slightly bitter or astringent on the first infusion,” Gordon heard the man whose chair he had kicked informing the note-taking woman, who looked trapped. He was clearly one of those people—Gordon encountered them at the bookstore each time he was responsible for setting up for readings in the upstairs space because they were usually first to arrive—who love to show up at readings and lectures on topics about which they feel vastly more informed than the speaker at the front of the room.

  Gordon smiled and the short girl grinned back, sharing amusement over the adjacent expertise. “It has a note of pocket lint and candy corn, don’t you think?” Gordon said.

  “But with a tobacco finish,” she replied, raising her paper cup with her pinkie lifted. They touched cups and swigged down the remains of their tea. The expert glared at both of them angrily. The Taiwan oolong was now being poured. People hushed one another so the speaker could tell the milling group that in Taiwan, the oolong leaves harvested in spring and winter are superior to the leaves picked in the summer and fall. Everyone was fascinated. Was this not also true in China, Gordon wondered? Why, or why not? He would never dream of asking a question. Anyway, he had to pee and was tired of standing around. He didn’t want more tea. He wasn’t sure if he was the kind of person who could make the subtle distinctions. Or care about them. It was getting late and Ferga was waiting for him.

  “I have to go. I hope the angry tea expert guy doesn’t zap you with his laser eye beams,” he leaned over and whispered.

  “Thanks,” the girl whispered back. “He’s my dad.”

  As he pedaled home, Gordon thought about how he would describe the tea tasting to Duncan at his next visit. He would not mention the girl because Duncan perked up too much when he mentioned girls, or teased him, and then he would have to explain that this one was about fifteen for god’s sake and he wasn’t interested in her that way, she was just a nice kid who was easier to talk to than anyone else there.

  Gordon just wasn’t very interested in girls, or boys, or in getting close to anybody. He knew this about himself, but Laura and Duncan never gave up, and each of them had talked with him at different times about meeting just the right person, how it would happen if he wanted it to. Laura had always been so careful to keep the “right person” conversation in a gender-neutral zone before that night. Then came those ugly, relentless questions. It was hard for other people to understand how Gordon could be content to draw a very small circle around himself and live inside it. He was content with his life just the way it was. Ferga was good company. He didn’t need more than he had.

  At certain sharp and unexpected moments he did miss his mother, maybe more than most men his age ordinarily would. He knew that. He was okay with himself being one of those men whose mother remained very important in his daily thoughts. Now that she wa
s gone, he often imagined conversations with her. He would have told her about the tea tasting. He would have bought some oolong tea for her, too, some from China and some from Taiwan, and he would have brewed two pots of tea and poured four cups, and then they would have tasted them together. For fun, he might have put a peach pit on a saucer, too, for comparison to the aftertaste of the tea he had tasted today.

  Among Helen Wheeler’s many habitual little expressions was that she wouldn’t do something, or go somewhere, or eat something for all the tea in China. Or she would give all the tea in China if only something impossible would happen or she could find out something unknowable. As he stood on his pedals to make the one hill on his way home without slowing down, Gordon felt with all his heart that he would very much like to be biking home after speech therapy, turning down Broadfield Road on a darkening Wednesday afternoon like this, coasting the last gently sloping block, knowing that his brother would be home from his piano lesson by now and would be hitting a tennis ball over the chalked net line on the garage door, over and over and over, counting to see how many times he could do it without error, so he could be a natural who never practiced, and their father would be coming home from the office soon and Gordon would wait for him, sitting on the big wicker swing that hung on the front porch and reading, moving the swing just a little bit, back and forth, back and forth, with one foot tucked under him and the other on the gray painted boards, while he waited for his father to come home.

  While his father parked the car in the driveway, Gordon would keep his head down, still reading his book and swinging back and forth just a little bit, and the car door would slam, and his father would cut across the lawn, and now Gordon would listen to the familiar thumping footsteps on the hollow wood steps to the porch, where he would pass by Gordon, bent over his book, not looking up, though not really reading either, and his father would call him Chief and grab the back of his neck in the rough but nice way nobody else ever did, before going in the front door, declaring that he was home while unbuttoning his shirt collar and loosening his necktie as he dropped his keys and change on the front hall table, and Gordon’s mother would answer from the kitchen where she would be making dinner, her roast chicken with mashed potatoes or her pot roast, and Gordon knew just how the house would smell, either way, and how cozy and warm the house would feel when he got off the swing and went inside, and he would give all the tea in China to go home to that house again.

  ELEVEN

  Primate Institute of New England

  Progress Report

  Placement Date: 10.22.14

  Name: NORMA JEAN, A.K.A. OTTOLINE

  Tufted capuchin # PI06131028

  D.O.B.: unknown

  Gender: F

  Spayed/neutered: YES (date unknown)

  Age: unknown, approximately 24–26 y.o.

  Prior Placement: YES

  Placement Trainer: Martha Peterson

  Recipient: Duncan Wheeler, age 37, C6 spinal cord injury, complete

  127 Lawrence Street, New Haven, CT 06511

  60 Day Update: 12.21.14

  Ottoline has settled in well with her recipient and the two of them have already developed a wonderfully bonded relationship. The initial need and personality assessment of both Ottoline and Duncan Wheeler accurately predicted that this would be a very good match between monkey and recipient. The Wheelers are still struggling with some of Ottoline’s quirks, and we have had frequent telephone check-ins, often several a day. Food and diaper routines have been established. Ottoline willingly goes into her cage at night and tucks herself in with fleece blankets. She sleeps until 8 a.m. without difficulty. (This was noted at her prior placement, as there is a marginal note in a Progress Report dated October 2001 that states: “Ottoline is not a morning monkey.”) Ottoline’s aversion to being immersed in water in a tub or sink was the most significant ongoing source of adjustment anxiety for the Wheelers. After several frantic calls about this, on our advice Laura has stopped trying to give Ottoline a bath and instead has developed the necessary bathing routine using the sprayer in their kitchen sink. This is acceptable to Ottoline, who enjoys running water but has a fear of standing water that may be a consequence of some unknown prior incident such as falling into a full bathtub or being roughly handled around water at some point in her life. As tasks have been introduced, once comfort levels were established and the tribal hierarchy seemed stable, the Wheelers have become even more aware of the ways that Ottoline is both very smart and also quite opinionated. As their Primary Advisor, I note that both Wheelers are too indulgent and lenient with Ottoline when she refuses a task or steals food. They were reminded of the need to stay within guidelines in order for Ottoline to perform her tasks as well as for the protection of her health. We will need to reinforce with them on a regular basis in order to keep the placement functioning optimally.

  This is a very successful placement. MP

  TWELVE

  Duncan rolled out the front door

  DUNCAN ROLLED OUT THE FRONT DOOR AND PAUSED on the porch. It was well above freezing, and the accumulated snow had melted quickly, leaving the sidewalks bare. It was one of those herald-of-spring April days that had lost its place in the calendar and arrived out of sequence here at the end of January. Duncan hadn’t been outside in three weeks. He waited in the watery sunlight at the top of the ramp for Ida Mae, who had sat down heavily on the bench beside their front door to finish jamming her “poor feet” into her unnecessary snow boots. The clear, wet sidewalks gave Duncan a chance to navigate around the block, if no further. Slushy puddles of uncertain depth flooded the curb ramps on the corners and made crossing the street in his motorized chair a risky endeavor.

  He tried to look up to see how the porch ceiling paint was holding up. Three years ago he had caulked and repainted that ceiling a lovely pale blue with a hint of green (Benjamin Moore called it Palladian Blue). Duncan had always loved projects like this, and he particularly missed the satisfaction of methodically brushing paint onto wood, like spreading jam on toast, all the way to the edges. He had meant to hang the old porch swing from the house on Broadfield Road. It was down in the basement where he had sanded it and applied a base coat of paint, but then he had never finished the job. He wanted to replace the rusted chains, but hadn’t gotten around to it.

  Ida Mae had informed them during her first week on the job that Floyd would have approved of the Wheelers’ haint blue front-porch ceiling color, because its resemblance to water tricks the haints, the dead, and prevents them from coming into the house. The dead can’t cross water, Ida Mae explained. Floyd had told her so. (Crossing water probably wouldn’t be your chief ambition if you were dead, Laura pointed out to Duncan when they discussed this revelation later.) Duncan couldn’t raise his chin sufficiently to see anything directly overhead (looking up was one of many ordinary abilities he had never valued until he lost it), and had to make do with a glimpse of the haint blue-painted tongue and groove ceiling boards at either end of the porch. Would the dead really be that gullible? What about the dead already in the house, would this mean they couldn’t leave?

  Several times during the first weeks of this exceptionally snowy winter, their roof had been blanketed with inches of snow sandwiched by layers of the heavy ice that formed during ice storms. Before now, Duncan had always loved snow; the smooth contours of snow drifts made him crave vanilla custard ice cream. He couldn’t understand why most people, Laura among them, thought ice cream was a summer treat. On hot summer nights, when they drove up Whitney Avenue to Wentworth’s in Hamden for ice cream, Laura always chose the same thing, a single scoop of coffee ice cream on a sugar cone.

  This icy winter, with the thermostat set a few degrees warmer than ever before because his injury made him nearly as susceptible to dangerous chills as he was at risk for overheating into dysreflexia, the warm air escaping from their inadequately-insulated attic had melted the innermost layer of snow on the roof trapped under the ice, which had led to the melt water seep
ing under their roof shingles. Water traveling down the rafters had caused some ominous stains to appear up near the ceiling in two corners of their upstairs front rooms, Laura had reported. The box room was one, and their bedroom was the other.

  Some books on the top bookshelves in their bedroom were ruined, having sponged up the water as it seeped down the wall for quite a while before Laura heard a telltale dripping in the night. The books in their house were shelved by category in alphabetical order from one room to the next, all through the house. The drowned books were novels by Thomas Mann, J. P. Marquand, W. Somerset Maugham, William Maxwell, Carson McCullers, Alice McDermott, Herman Melville, Steven Millhauser, and Iris Murdoch.

  Duncan had made Laura give him a Skype tour of the damage, using her iPad. On his desktop computer screen, the upstairs rooms looked dark and ordinary, like rooms in anyone’s house, familiar but very far away. It was like seeing old snapshots taken in half-forgotten houses of distant relatives visited in childhood. The roofer Laura phoned had made the inevitable remark every roofing contractor makes about how the roof of a house is not constructed like the bottom of a swimming pool. Nothing could be done about the leaks caused by ice damming until spring.

  The inimical water had also penetrated the gable roof over their front porch, thus Duncan’s concern about possible damage. Icicles had formed, dripped from the cracks between the porch ceiling boards, lethal stalactites that grew heavier and longer until they fell at odd moments with a startling crash, leaving broken ice scattered across the porch like the broken glass that marks the scene of an accident. Duncan recalled ice lance jousting with Gordy, when huge icicles dripped from the clogged gutters of their house one very snowy winter. Their lances had shattered, but then Duncan stabbed Gordy with a dagger-like shard, and by dinnertime a deep red bruise had bloomed and spread across Gordy’s neck. It’s a wonder most children don’t kill themselves or each other.