Still Life with Monkey

by Katharine Weber

  Gordy does love that ratty little Cape. Buy it and do the renovation and give it to Gordy if he’s willing to take it. Otherwise, please just buy it and do the work and he’ll keep living there. You’ll have to find a temporary place for him and Ferga during the renovation, somewhere near the bookstore. I hope you will figure out a graceful way to check in on him from time to time in the years ahead, to make sure he has heat and lights, and enough to eat. If he agrees to take title to the house, you’ll probably have to help him out with things like property taxes and homeowners insurance. Gordy is never really going to be a grownup. How strange it will be for you to be responsible for this genetic copy of me after I’m gone. The twin who stayed identical. At least with that beard we don’t look much alike, though when we were kids most people couldn’t tell us apart. And unless it is too hard for you to see him wearing my stuff, please do give him any of my clothing he wants.

  Oh, dear Laura whom I love so much. Please forgive me. Nothing is your fault. I should have said that sooner. Nothing has ever been your fault. There is nothing you could possibly have done better than all you did for me.

  So much has been my fault.

  Todd’s death was my fault.

  The spaces between us were certainly more my fault than yours.

  I know how right it is going to be for me to leave this life. This is not a careless fantasy, or an impulse. So many people have assumed that I am grateful to be alive. The truth is, I am grateful that I can make my own choice about being alive, remaining alive. You and I have argued about Primo Levi. You are certain that he clearly had a strong will to live and must have fallen to his death accidentally. I am just as certain that it was no accident.

  How many times, over how many years, did Primo Levi climb that Turin staircase to his third-floor apartment and imagine flinging himself over the banister? At the news of his death, Elie Wiesel said that Primo Levi had died at Auschwitz forty years before that leap. What a comfort that plan must have been to Primo Levi! I am certain of that. Every day he didn’t jump, he knew he could have. Please try to think about my decision this way. Think of me as having died in the accident. I will just be completing what began that day, when the moment is right. My plan has been a comfort to me. I have devoted a lot of time to finding my best opportunity. Unlike Primo Levi, I have not had the easy option of a hand on the rail, a leg over, a shift of weight, done.

  Ottoline has been such good company. That amazing little primate has made a profound difference in my quotidian [a word Bigstick recognition did not understand and I have just spent two minutes on it! Quotidian! Not quote idiot!] existence. She definitely makes each morning a little more pleasant, when I wake up and hear her still snoring that delicate old lady snore she has, or find her already awake and cheeping at me impatiently because she is ready to begin our day together. She never saw me as broken, the way everyone else has. She thought I was in charge of the world!

  I am deeply grateful to you for bringing Ottoline into our lives. And I am grateful to you for all that you have done for her, day in and day out, the baths, the diapers, the food messes, her cage maintenance, keeping in touch with the Institute people—all the monkey-minding! And you have done it all with few complaints, and your complaints were always justified! Ottoline’s hardwired sense of hierarchy has imposed a lot on you. Your graceful acceptance of her imperious rudeness (and occasional nastiness) to you has been an act of love that I have probably not thanked you for sufficiently. She’s an opinionated and high-maintenance little primate! Thank you, thank you, thank you, dear Laura, for bringing our little brown-eyed girl into my life, our life. She has given us some sweet moments.

  And all that you have done for me, all the numberless kindnesses and efforts over these terrible months—of course I am truly grateful to you. You found the best PCAs and you managed their comings and goings. You have kept track of everything, managing so much, slaving over the endless medical and financial paperwork. Above all, as humiliating as many aspects of my daily life have become, you have always done everything you could to help me preserve my dignity.

  I don’t deny that there have been many moments when I was not in hell. Ottoline has of course touched me profoundly in unexpected ways. And I would never deny the ephemeral pleasures of your warm blueberry pie with vanilla ice cream, and late Beethoven quartets, and Lester Young playing “Honeysuckle Rose” (the 1937 Count Basie recording), and don’t forget John O’Hara novels, and the wonderful sentences in Iris Murdoch novels (not counting her last two, and you should be sure to buy all new copies to replace the drowned books because I hope you will re-read Iris Murdoch from time to time, and please never forget her observation that religion is better off without God if anyone tries to console you by imposing religiosity), and of course we have spent some good hours together watching our greatest hits: “Rear Window,” “Dial M For Murder,” “Roman Holiday,” “Bringing Up Baby,” “Two For the Road,” “Sunset Boulevard” (didn’t we see Norma Desmond’s relationship with that chimp differently the last time we watched it, you, me and Ottoline, our tribe, all together on my bed?).

  But of course my deepest feelings for you are not about pie and our shared devotion to Iris Murdoch, and movies. Nevertheless, since the accident, your strategy was a worthy effort, trying to sell me on the goodness of life by producing a touching sequence of my favorite things. Food, music, books on tape, movies, all the gizmos and gadgets and brackets and cuffs and grips and grab bars and the left-handed Easi-Grip scissors and all the other things you researched and obtained to make my life a little easier. The online Hearts game you found for me to play on my own, now that I can’t hold a hand of playing cards to play another round of the eternal Hearts tournament with Gordy, though I do miss our cribbage and gin games. It just isn’t the same if I spread my cards out on the table and you promise not to look. You know you can’t help but look. I would look if I were you, and then I would use the information to win big, sprezzaturistically.

  You invited people into our house even when I didn’t want to see anyone. You encouraged the relationship with the McCarthy children, and you were so sweet and hospitable to them, because you saw how much they intrigued me. I hope you will let them keep coming over to visit Ottoline, and you. I am sorry you never got to be a mother. You would have been a great mother. I hope you have a chance to be a mother in the years that lie ahead. Really! I hope you find someone else. I want you to live a long and wonderful life, with people in it who love you as much as you deserve to be loved. Meanwhile, in the immediate future, I hope you will want to keep Ottoline, in the retirement she deserves at this stage of her life, and I hope the Institute lets you keep her.

  And then there is the Explicated Four-Square House, which now, thanks to you, will be known to the world as the Four-Square Cavendish House. (I like the name. Makes me think of bananas.) You were right to know how much I would want the house built, despite myself, despite my intention not to want anything in this life. It bought some time. It took me out of myself even as it brought me back to myself, and I am touched that you made it happen. I am sorry I won’t see it, and I am proud of that house, probably prouder of it than anything else I ever designed in my career, because it is really mine, every inch of it, the way nothing else ever was or ever will be. (Other than our dovecote toolshed.) It’s a monument to the architect I could have been.

  But I did overhear you telling Gordy about the deal you made to get them to build my Four-Square house—you were washing dishes together and you were talking louder than you might have realized over the clatter—and I felt terrible. What have I become that you would risk so much, not just your job but your reputation in your field, to aid those people by providing false documentation for their fake pair of bowls? You could lose your job, and they may have used you for some kind of insurance fraud, or some other corrupt tax dodge thing they’re going to profit by when they donate those bowls to an institution. It can’t just be an ego trip for them, possessing the only known m
atched pair in the world—though there’s that, too. You allowed yourself to be manipulated by those corrupt people, and you manipulated them, for me. I know you made this deal with your eyes open. And I know too that you never wanted me to comprehend the connection.

  You and I are both fascinated by the story of Edith Wharton inventing that fake literary award to bestow on her friend Henry James near the end of his life when he was pinched for money. She went to great effort, working through lawyers, to remain an anonymous benefactor. She knew how proud he would be, how proud he was, to have won this spurious prize which came with a large sum of much-needed cash. And she knew how devastated and shamed he would have been if he had ever learned the truth about it. And he never did. He would never have forgiven her, either.

  So I wish I had not heard you telling Gordy about your scheme to get my Four-Square house built. I wish I had Henry James’s obliviousness. Of course I am not angry at you. It was clarifying. Once again, after all these years, when I should have known better, I was so easily persuaded to allow myself to feel something about that house, and about myself as the designer of that house, and once again I have found out how foolish that was. The Four-Square Cavendish House was a momentary diversion, a pleasant satisfaction. I thank you for that. But it’s over. My present reality is what remains, and my intention.

  Pepe’s white clam pizza does make life a little better. So does Lester Young. So does rain on the roof. So do the cave paintings in Lascaux. So does a coffee ice cream cone on a hot summer night for you and a vanilla custard cone for me. So does that ineffable unquantifiable smell of soil after rain—the peculiarly harsh word I couldn’t remember the other day when we were having dinner—it’s petrichor. But nothing is enough to keep me here at the sidelines of the banquet, having to be grateful for a few crumbs. Raindrops on roses and what Gordy used to think were whispers on kittens are just not enough. Any joy I feel at being alive is only the flip side of the despair coin. I have hated the sunlight streaming in the window and making a pretty pattern on the carpet, because it doesn’t change anything. That shining sun is a lie. I live in endless night.

  You have tried admirably to persuade me that it is worth my while to make a plan to stick around, to endure this compromised life, trapped in my inert, damaged body that I have come to despise more and more. I am tired of being grateful for this life. I think you have just never really believed me when I said that I just couldn’t live with myself indefinitely. I’ve been keeping an ugly secret: Each good moment you have given me since the accident has only enlarged my sense of everything I have lost. The Four-Square Cavendish House is simply the most concrete example of what has played out in a thousand other, smaller ways. Every pinnacle has given me a view of the abyss. I know how melodramatic that sounds. People call suicide a permanent solution to a temporary problem. My problem isn’t temporary. I will always be crippled in mind and body. Todd Walker will always be dead. I will always be the reason.

  There is no place for me in this world. I have to say it again: It was my fault. The accident that killed Todd Walker and put me in this chair was my fault. Every day I wake up is a day it was my fault.

  When I was in the hospital the second time, for the burn, the same day I refused to talk with that rabbi, a social worker came to see me. Maybe the rabbi sent him. He wasn’t just any social worker, but a really nice guy in a wheelchair. He gave me a pep talk about life with a spinal cord injury. He broke his neck diving into a pool when he was a teenager and he has lived his life in that chair. He went to college and graduate school and he became a social worker to help people like me. He told me that everyone with a spinal cord injury starts out miserable and suicidal. The secret to moving forward, he told me, was to set a goal for myself. When I reach that goal, then I’ll know the accident is in the past. I took his advice to heart, but not in the way he intended. But he did inspire me. Ending my life is the goal I set for myself. When I have succeeded, the accident will indeed be in the past instead of the present, where it lives now, every day.

  Everything I have read about suicide, and I have read a great deal, tells me that I have what it takes. Ability to overcome the instinct to survive? Check. Thwarted belongingness and perceived burdensomeness. (Let’s not argue.) Check. The actual means to take my own life? This is where I have had the greatest challenge. I am marooned by my paralysis. It renovates every moment of the day. I think that’s Blake.

  I miss standing. I miss being taller than most people. I miss walking. I miss going up and down staircases without a moment’s thought. I miss the upstairs of our house. I miss our room. I miss our bed. I miss you in our bed. I miss me in our bed. I miss you and me together in our bed. You are splendid, Lauradora. You will never be unbeautiful. Even when you are a little old lady, you will be beautiful. I have always meant to love you the most, even when I haven’t always succeeded. I haven’t been fair to you. I have held back too much, not let you love me more, not let myself love you more. I’m sorry. You are the love of my life, and I hope you know it and will always know it.

  I miss being able to make numberless small choices every day. I miss scratching my ass. I miss turning my head. I miss drawing, just picking up a pencil and drawing a line and another line. I miss that more than I ever thought I would. The kids use AutoCad, but I have never been able to design with anything other than a pencil. I miss believing that I was ever capable of designing something wholly original and entirely new, but that’s been gone a long while.

  I miss being spontaneous in a million ways. I miss cooking. I miss working in the garden. I miss yoga even though I hardly ever went to the yoga classes I signed up for. I miss signing up for yoga classes and not going to them. I miss riding on trains and planes. I miss shifting gears while accelerating, feeling the gears engage as I shift the stick hard into the top gear and ease off the clutch, timing it perfectly to mesh with the surge of power as I step on the gas. I miss stepping on the gas.

  I miss getting dressed. I miss getting undressed. I miss turning over in bed. I miss using my hands. I miss using my hands to touch you without making an appointment first. (I miss being able to touch each other without first negotiating permission from a bossy little monkey.) I miss peeing on the grass in our yard, the pleasure of taking a piss with a full bladder, the pleasure of having a great bowel movement first thing in the morning. Farting! My body does these things without me now.

  I miss walking. I miss running. I love my dreams of running but then I wake up in despair. Another pinnacle and another abyss. I miss biking and I wish I had biked more. I always meant to. I miss the way it felt to play the piano when I was a kid, and I miss having the option to play the piano again some day, which I always thought I had. I miss coming home from work, kissing you hello in the kitchen if it was a night you were making our dinner, going out the back door with a cold Blue Moon in my hand, walking down the two steps to the terrace, hearing the theme to All Things Considered while you clattered pots and pans. I miss wandering around the late summer garden, drinking my Blue Moon and deadheading the hellebores. I know we may not have been as profoundly connected in certain ways as many couples are (as much as I can ever know about other couples and how they really are), but we were comfortable with what we had together, we loved that life, and it worked for us, didn’t it? It was a good life and I miss it. And it’s gone.

  I have been thinking seriously about murdering myself since last November. It’s been a hell of a project. I agreed to go across the street to Bailey McCarthy’s birthday party in March neither because I wanted to see inside their house—though I win points for predicting that white piano!—nor because I longed for time with the dreadful parents or the dreadful other over-privileged, self-important parents of that rabble of amped-up seven-year-olds. I didn’t go in the hopes of experiencing the undignified spectacle of being fed a few bites of disgusting birthday cake (is there any other kind?). I went because I had reason to hope for a clown with a helium tank. Sure enough, I watched him arrive wi
th it on a hand truck.

  A helium tank and a plastic bag are the optimal equipment for the do-it-yourself suicide kit, ideally but not necessarily along with something sedating. (You can find anything on YouTube.) I wanted to get close to the helium tank and get a good look at the regulator valve, which I did, at the start of the party. It was a huge disappointment when I immediately recognized that I couldn’t manage it. Even if I had somehow been able to come up with a plausible explanation for ordering a helium tank rental from It’s a Gas! without your becoming suspicious (and I never did think of a good way to do that), it was immediately evident to me in the middle of that hullabaloo, while all the screeching children were dueling each other with those idiotic light-sabre things (I vividly recall the moment during our first dinner together when you and I discovered our mutual antipathy for “Star Wars”), that I would not be able to turn the regulator and open the valve by myself. Not only was it out of reach at the top of the cylinder, but also it’s a two-handed job for an able-bodied person, and even then, it requires some dexterity and strength. I really studied that helium tank that afternoon, watching closely each time the clown filled a balloon. So close and yet so far.

  I had begun to imagine the various ways I could command Ottoline to perform tasks she already knew that would assist me in taking my own life. I tried to think through what would be involved to get her to turn the sillcock and flip the lever to start the flow of gas, and then I realized that it was out of the question, even if I solved all the logistical problems, even if I was ready with a plastic bag around my head that could be snugged sufficiently around my neck once the tube was inside the bag, because of the risk of exposing her to the helium, which would kill her along with me. That was when I decided I needed to leave Bailey’s birthday party and asked Darlene to take me home.