Still Life with Monkey

by Katharine Weber

  “Is this island house famous or culturally important?” the husband tourist asked, pausing his picture-taking.

  “Eh,” Duncan said, the verbal equivalent of the shrug he couldn’t achieve.

  “It’s a Duncan Wheeler house,” Gordon told them. “He’s an important architect of the Rock Paper Scissors period. Note the full fenestration.”

  Ah. They both nodded eagerly. They took more photographs.

  “What is full fenestration, anyway?” asked Gordon.

  “Sounds pornographic, doesn’t it? Just a window thing.” Duncan looked at his hands that would never again win a round of rock paper scissors. He had always been able to tell Gordon’s choice just a fraction ahead of the draw.

  The boat floated past the Steiners’ dock.

  “That fucking gazebo,” Duncan said.

  “What’s wrong with it?” Gordon asked.

  “It’s a piece of shit readymade crap fucking shit, that’s all. Can’t you see how crude and shoddy it is? It makes the cheapest Ikea flat pack look like Nakashima. The proportion is horrible. It’s as well-designed as something built out of marshmallows by blindfolded toddlers. Would you serve a microwaved pizza in the middle of a three-star meal?”

  “I would eat a marshmallow gazebo,” said Gordon, after giving it a moment’s consideration.

  “If the clients had eyes or taste they would see how vulgar it is, but instead, it’s probably the single thing they love most about Spartina, and it probably always will be. Christ, Gordy, don’t get me started!”

  “I think you’ve already started,” Gordon said.

  “I wish somebody would just burn down that eyesore.”

  The house itself was utterly enchanting from the water. The deep porches on every side seemed bare, but would look marvelous when populated by painted rockers and wicker settees and chaise longues. The external detail changes that had been made to Duncan’s design for the subtle additions to the house were evident to his eyes, but the truth was that nobody else would ever know or care about the difference. His meticulous, painstaking attention to every detail of the plans had never really mattered. All the gingerbread trim—the pierced frieze boards, the scrolled brackets—and the six chimneys, the four bay windows, the three towers, the famously haunted widow’s walk, the oriel windows embellishing every side of the house—that’s all that most people would ever see when they looked at Spartina.

  The trip back was uneventful. The ferry passed half a dozen more islands, with commentary, among them Governor. The excited tourists took turns posing for pictures of each other as they sped by. They searched with their binoculars in the hope of spotting Garry Trudeau or Jane Pauley in their natural habitat, but nobody was home.

  “How’s that doggess of yours, Madam Ferga?”

  “She’s fine.” Gordon didn’t want to cry.

  “Good. How’s the bookstore?” Duncan asked his brother, trying to defer, for now, his attention from the cold black lump of sorrow that was flourishing in his chest. He felt like cargo, strapped in this way, having the last boat ride of his life. He felt like crap from too much sun. He longed to be at home, in his room. As they neared the shore the sun shone on the rolling advertisement of a chronic medical emergency that was his white van, parked on Indian Point Road. He realized he had half-expected to see his old Volvo wagon. Where was it now? Compressed into a cube in some scrap-yard, probably, with the last of Todd’s blood anywhere on this earth.

  “The bookstore’s fine.” Gordon looked sadly at Duncan. He could feel Duncan’s energy receding, ebbing out of his reach. “Hey, Hot Wheels.”

  “Hey, Gords.”

  “The past, the present, and the future walked into a bar. It was tense.”

  “Nice. Hey, don’t worry about me, Gordy.”

  The ferry slowed and then reversed with a roaring burst of diesel, and backed into its berth at the town dock.

  “There’s a red tide right now, you know that?” Gordon said, leaning over the side. “You could get paralytic shellfish poisoning if you eat any of those mussels down there.”

  After they docked, while the captain was hauling the footway with the handrail in place, Gordon undid the bungee cords lashing Duncan’s chair to the wheelchair anchor points. As the last one was released, Duncan toggled the control to turn his chair. The tourists were going over the footway, apparently happy about their excursion. Duncan carefully motored up the ramp inside the lip of the boat and then onto the footway, which was just wide enough for his chair. He pondered the possibility of obtaining some of those poison mussels.

  As he bumped down onto the dock, with Gordon following behind him, he saw that the cargo barge that had been moored at the open end of the dock an hour ago, loaded with plywood and sheetrock for the Steiner house, was gone. Presumably it was on its way out to Biscuit. The forklift that the building supply company used to unload materials from delivery trucks and deposit them onto the barge was gone too, on its way to Biscuit with the construction materials for the laborious process of unloading. His Corrigan & Wheeler team—Halloran’s team—would be out there later today; a meeting with the clerk of the works would surely be on the agenda for discussion of all the change orders.

  Instead of turning his chair to the left, to roll toward the street and the little village of Stony Creek in order to find Wendell wherever he was waiting for them, Duncan toggled the control to turn to the right, facing the empty end of the concrete pier, looking out toward Burr Island. He was just fifteen feet from the unprotected edge. The tide was going out. His splinted hand hovered over the toggle control, cupping it. It felt warm from the sun. Rock paper scissors.

  Please don’t. Please. Don’t. Don’t do it, thought Gordon, behind him. Please. Not yet. Don’t go. Not yet. Too soon.

  Rock. Duncan knew he would sink like a rock. Even though the water was probably no more than eight or nine feet deep, it was enough. He was strapped into the chair. The combined weight was probably more than three hundred pounds.

  “Sometimes I let you take all the hearts on purpose,” Gordon said, standing right behind him, bending down to talk into his ear, “because I know you want to shoot the moon. You’re supposed to avoid hearts, you’re always supposed to go low, but when you go high and start collecting hearts you think I don’t notice. But I do. I let you shoot the moon.”

  Duncan rotated his chair to face Gordon. “Gordo, you know why I always beat you at gin rummy? You always go for the runs instead of sets, beyond all reason or logic.”

  “I like runs better,” Gordon said. “They’re nicer.”

  “I understand.”

  The brothers gazed at each other, each wanting to hold the moment.

  “I’m sorry I’ve been so unpleasant today, Gordo. You’re a good brother.”

  “So are you.”

  They looked at each other for a long moment. “Let’s get out of the sun,” Duncan said, finally. “I have reason to believe the ice cream at Thimbleberries is worth our while. You can treat, and when you pay, be sure to check that all the presidents are being dignified in your wallet.”

  SIXTEEN

  May 25, 2015

  Dear Laura,

  If you are reading this, I’ve died. You have found this document on the desktop of my computer saved as DEAR LAURA PLEASE READ THIS. We both know an infection could kill me easily at any point. But if my death has been caused by my actions, or if my actions have been contributing factors in my life ending, then I hope this will help you understand. Voice recognition software has made it possible to say much more to you than what would otherwise have been a few inadequate words laboriously pecked out with the stylus on the keyboard. I should have thanked you more for setting me up with Bigstick voice recognition software nine years ago when I broke my right wrist skiing. I was only grumpy and irritable with you, as I usually am with anything to do with technology, and for reasons of pride I didn’t tell you how much I have continued to depend on voice recognition software ever since, for generating dr
afts of work correspondence and memos to myself while driving or when I’m on a job site.

  Since the accident, though, you had to catch me using it because I was such a child about not wanting to admit you had been right, Bigstick has been an essential tool that has allowed me to respond to work email without sounding like a feebleminded toddler, and it has kept my emails from looking like archy & mehitabel poems. This made my final efforts at Corrigan & Wheeler a little more graceful and a lot less pitiful than they might have been otherwise. Thank you.

  Let me begin again, dear Laura. A week has passed since I wrote these first pages. I have become incapable of many things. Among them is my own distress. By this I mean I have been keeping company with my death for a long while now. The prospect of no longer existing doesn’t distress me. It comforts me. It’s staying alive that distresses me. I want you to understand how much I have looked forward to ending my life. This has become more than ambivalence. I am not as afraid of dying as I am of continuing to live this way indefinitely. Knowledge of my certainty about this, along with determination to find my way out, this has been like having gold coins jingling in my pocket, and has allowed me to endure life more easily these past few months.

  Of course, I do recognize that you will have your own distress after my death, and I am truly sorry about that. Surely my consistent feelings do not come as a complete surprise to you. You know how despairing I have been since the accident. I hit rock bottom when I was back in the hospital because of that stupid burn. I told myself at the time that I would give it six months. In these six months, which were up a while ago, you and I have talked about, and have argued about, my reluctance to make the best of my new circumstance. You have insisted that I am depressed, and my faltering will to live is the depression talking. You have told me how lucky I am that I am not in any significant physical pain. We both know that many people with complete C6 injuries suffer terrible phantom pain below the level of injury—burning, stabbing, crawling pain. I have been spared that torment.

  In certain ways, I envy the realness of pain like that. Am I lucky? I have been tempted to lie about this, to claim this agony was mine, knowing that if I was in excruciating physical pain then probably you would not have fought me so hard. I didn’t lie about it mainly because pain meds might have put me into a fog that would have made it impossible to think and act clearly. The Elavil in my rice pudding you thought I didn’t know about has been dizzying enough. And yet the antidepressant effect on me, if there has been any that signifies, has not altered my sense of the rational rightness of my choice to end my life now rather than wait. Perhaps I am less depressed, yet more certain. This should be proof enough to you that my death really isn’t the ultimate depression symptom.

  I am repeating myself when I say again that most people would understand my desire to end my life if they thought it was driven by unbearable physical pain, rather than unbearable mental anguish. Somehow that’s harder for people to understand. My suffering is very small in the larger scheme of all the pain that all of humanity has endured through history, but it is suffering nonetheless, and it is mine.

  But if it’s easier for you, if it lets you off the hook and helps end intrusive, well-meaning speculative discussion, then please do feel free to tell people that I have had to endure terrible physical pain. They’ll believe you, and it could ease a lot of minds. I mean that. If it’s helpful, don’t hesitate, without feeling for a moment that you are being in any way disloyal to me. People love a logical explanation for something that feels to them profoundly illogical. If someone tries to tell you that my choice was selfish or cowardly, please don’t argue. You know me. You know that I may have many failings, but I am not making this decision out of cowardice, and I can only hope it doesn’t leave you feeling that I have been selfish.

  Ultimately, no matter how much love there is, each of us is alone inside our only body, and nobody can ever really know another person completely.

  Last summer, when you were on a campaign to make me love my life, you also tried to make me feel that I owed it to you, and to Gordy, if not to myself, to stay alive. I said this then, and it upset you terribly, which is why I haven’t tried to tell you again, but I will say it here, now: I believe with all my heart that you will have a better life without me. The first months after I die, whenever that is, will be terribly hard, but after that—a year after I’m gone, five years, ten years? I will be a sad story in your past. You can live a far more fulfilling life without me dragging you down. Surely you have allowed yourself to imagine your future without me? Haven’t we both been imagining my death since the accident? When Robin Williams killed himself while I was still in the hospital, when I heard about it, I understood his choice in an instant. I know he had lots of issues, but if he was facing a life diminished by Parkinson’s, and by encroaching dementia, how could he contemplate living in an increasingly un-agile body along with a diminishment of that frantic, agile mind?

  Gordy will be okay. I know he’ll have a hard time at first. But he’ll manage. He does what he wants to do, he has Ferga (for now anyway, if only she were immortal), and I think he can keep living his life the way it is, though I worry about the bookstore staying in business, since it’s his center of gravity. My Will, as you know, establishes a Trust for Gordy, with you and Sam Cooper as co-trustees. If the bookstore closes, if there is a way to buy some small, suitable business and install Gordy there on staff, with a sensitive manager to keep it all going, please feel free to do just that, even if it means going into capital.

  Sam will help you sort out all the financial and legal stuff. I have tried to keep everything in order. Of course everything else I own in the world goes to you. On top of my life insurance, which will really set you up for life, you will have my pension fund, Social Security, and of course, our investments. The lump sum discounted payouts on workers’ comp and the long-term disability insurance were a better plan for taking care of you, under these circumstances.

  The mortgage is nearly paid off. Please stop fussing with endless repairs on our damned roof, though you have handled them so efficiently and (nearly) without complaint, and just replace the roof on our house before another winter comes. Ask the office for the best roofer in New Haven.

  You should sell my share of Corrigan & Wheeler to the equity partners. I am sure Dave Halloran already has a precise structured plan in mind for just that eventuality. Don’t let him railroad you. Let Sam negotiate terms.

  You will only have to work as much as it suits you, perhaps just taking on a few of the more interesting conservation projects they offer you at the Gallery. Or maybe you will stop working, or do conservation work on your own. You have the skills. But I don’t know if that’s what you want. I am not sure I know what you will want to do with the rest of your life. I don’t see you as a big world traveler.

  Gordy is pretty isolated out there, especially in the winter, and I worry about how he’ll manage in the future, as he ages to the point of not being able to just hop on his bike the way he does now. Who knows, maybe Gordy is finally ready to learn how to drive. After all, he didn’t live on his own until our mother sold the house and moved to a condo when he was twenty-eight. I have never understood why he was content to live at home and sleep in that twin bed in our old room.

  When I was a kid, I thought we had twin beds because we were twins, and I was disconcerted when I discovered that other children, even only children, slept in twin beds too. When I went off to college, I certainly never wanted to live at home again, even though I spent some summers there to save money. But he just didn’t leave, until he had to. He doesn’t have momentum. There’s no name for whatever he’s got, or hasn’t got. Gordy Wheeler Syndrome. Of course our mother was partly to blame for Gordy’s lack of development as a grownup. In her final years, I discovered that she had concealed from me how often she gave him money. More recently, in relation to my brother, you have called me an enabler. You’re right.

  When I’m gone, you will be all
he has.

  Please buy Gordy’s cottage from his landlord. (I trust you to trust me that this is a good investment. I promise, I’m not doing a Floyd here!) The office can get you an honest and reliable contractor. They do exist. Please use all the resources of Corrigan & Wheeler for this project. I am sure they will take care of you. Have it winterized. Replace all the windows and doors with triple-glazing. Vertical cedar siding, rough side out, should wrap the house. Put a standing seam metal roof on it. That should solve the upstairs leaks from ice dams, and should also eliminate the source of the mold problems. Also, the knob & tube wiring desperately needs to be replaced and brought up to code. It’s a firetrap right now. And the horrible galvanized pipes have to be replaced altogether. So this will be a gut reno. That furnace needs to be replaced, and you should switch from oil to propane. You may have to spend some serious money on remediation if the old buried oil tank under the front lawn has started to leak.

  When I spoke with Mrs. Anastasio a few months ago about the roof problems, after her delinquent son had gone up there to fix the leaks with duct tape, it was clear that she didn’t want to spend a nickel because she was getting ready to cash in and sell her family’s property so she could move to Florida, and you should be able to persuade her to let it go for a good price if you point out that you would be willing to pay cash and close without the oil tank inspection that would be required for any kind of financing. I know you’ll be able to handle this. You did a terrific job getting the work done to solve our roof leak this past winter (you know I am obsessive about roof issues), even though until now I have always taken care of everything like that over all our years together. I just always took over everything when it came to dealing with our house, making all the decisions without a second thought. But you have been in charge of just about everything since the accident. You’ll be fine. I have faith in you.