New World Monkeys

by Nancy Mauro

  As if you’re writing the next Pulitzer, she’d like to say to him.

  He moves to the refrigerator. Opens a carton of eggs and inspects for cracks. “Just try to keep clear of those guys, all right? Skinner and the Clan.”

  Jesus, is that a drawl in his voice? She goes to the sink, nudges dishes around to make room for her saucepan.

  “Although, I think we handled things pretty well last night. And they seem to like you at the library, right?”

  Lily watches the bowls capsize in the suds. “I’m there to work,” she says, “not socialize.”

  Duncan starts to say something, but she cranks the faucet over his response. It’s horrible, this sudden and insincere interest in her well-being. If he truly cared he wouldn’t be pulling a runner twelve hours into the weekend. As the dishwater begins to lap at the brim of the sink she turns around to face him. He’s standing in the same position, still watching her.

  “You know, Duncan,” she says, looking him in the eye, “they are offering a reward for the pig. I’m thinking of turning you in.”

  “It’s my day off.”

  “And?”

  “Give me something to go on. I’m watching Bob Hope reruns.”

  “What about you get to keep your job for another week?” Duncan closes the kitchen door behind him, stands barefoot on the porch.

  “Kooch is in Jersey.” Leetower yawns violently into the phone, adenoids vibrating like a tuning fork. “He was a prick on stilts yesterday. I was looking forward to a day away from him.”

  “We’ll do it ourselves,” Duncan says quickly. He’s pleased at the thought of evolving the campaign in Kooch’s absence. “I think I’ve got a way to work in the other jeans.”

  “Fuck, you’re fast.”

  “The American Grunt Girls wear the flare legs, right? So we put the Viet Cong girls in the skinny jeans. Whatever your preference, we’ve got it—we’re sympathetic to both sides.”

  “Girl-on-girl engagement? Are you serious?”

  “Dead.”

  “It’ll never make it out the door.”

  “You need to start thinking one-eighty on this, LT. I guarantee, there will always be someone to bring you back to zero.”

  “You’re an inspiration to the red-blooded.”

  “Go with God. I’ll be in by noon.”

  Lloyd says he’s trying to sort out what type of pervert he would like to be. Until now he’s been a dabbler. Crossing forms with the freedom of a student not yet decided on acrylics or oils, poetry or fiction. Certainly there are no absolutes, no hard-and-fast rules dividing the flashers from the frotteurs from the Peeping Toms. “But as it stands,” he says, “I’m just a dilettante skittering across the surface of true talent.”

  When Lily left the house this morning, Duncan was still packing up for the city. Bon voyage, she thought, letting the screen door crack back against its frame. Now she follows the pervert between parked cars in the lot behind the library and is cheered by the fact that there is someone who looks forward to her company. She says nothing about the encounter with the townsfolk last night, abides by some intuitive precaution to keep such scenes on a separate grid.

  Still, she feels a sting of pity for Lloyd’s pear-shaped frame. He taps the bonnet of a Lincoln while telling her there’s purity in choosing a single perversion, devoting one’s life to it. This only reminds her of the pointed arch that she has somewhat abandoned in the library.

  “You’re boring when you think too much,” she says and follows him into a lane that runs the ten blocks of Osterhagen. Lloyd holds out a fresh cigarette.

  “Fire, Lily. Fire!” He snaps his fingers.

  She comes up alongside him, sparks the silver lighter while they walk in gravel tire ruts. “You should just make the jump,” she says, reminding herself to focus on his problems for a change. “Exist in a realm of action—reach out and touch someone.”

  “I just don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.”

  When Lily suggests he compile a short list, draw up pros and cons for each, his features pinch in toward the center of his face. “Draw one up yourself. You sure waste a lot of time with me.”

  It’s true. She should be sorting out the various abandoned approaches to her dissertation, the tumble of papers, the small mountain of books she dragged from the city. But all she can muster is a casual and scattered interest, the same clinical detachment she had experienced years ago toward the end of her undergraduate study in Italy. It was a weariness, she thought back then, of a hot Italian summer and a rambling life of scholastic ambiguities. She’d gone to Italy hoping the snug little boot would kick up a squall in her soul, but she was knotted down tight. What was the point of her work? Lily had succeeded on paper but that was just cheap ballpoint. She understood the technical phenomena of building a cathedral with only compass, string, and a straight edge. But she simply couldn’t feel it. Her professor had pointed out Brunelleschi’s Renaissance discovery of linear perspective construction; how for the first time in the fifteenth century the eye of the viewer could finally be brought into mathematical integration with a painting. Yes, she nodded. The Gothic was positively brilliant for all it just barely accomplished before it was handed over, before it ushered in the Renaissance.

  Four blocks in and the lane gives way to yards strung with clotheslines, the chewed lace of fencing. Lloyd ducks beneath a sugar maple, holds apart a bracket of chicken wire. She has to crouch on all fours to pass through the snag into the backyard. Lily thinks, the Pied Piper is leading me through the lanes of Osterhagen. And I follow happily. There’s something compelling about this fat little man; he advocates deviancy with a brand of reasoning she can get behind.

  “We’re going to have to climb the roof of that garage.” Lloyd points across the yard. “Get up there, darling, and you’ll have earned your bum fluff.”

  Lily wipes her forehead, pushes her glasses up her nose. “That’s at least nine feet.” She hears complaint in her voice, the old worry returning. The lot is wild with shrubbery, the untrimmed arms of several bushy trees. But they might make it, she thinks. If they stick to the peripheries, skulk along the narrows between fence and maple trunk, they might reach the garage. Then climb the rain barrel to the corrugated-tin and tar-paper roof that leans in toward the second-story window of the house.

  They wind through the clotheslines and bird calls, the grass and petrol-scented mysteries of garden sheds. While her heart is beating faster Lily is aware of the life around her. Somewhere the hum of morning television, the ratchet and whirl of sprinkler heads, a child or a cat mewing beyond a fence. There is a palatable pleasure in these things and she would like to stick out her tongue to gather them.

  “You go first.” He nods up at the roof.

  “What?”

  “Hurry up, Lily. The key is to not stand still.”

  Knowing her forehead must resemble crinkled foil wrap, she takes a few quick breaths and attempts to smooth it out. She hates that so many moments in her life seem to come down to this pressure—a chance to act or fail and no space in between.

  “Okay,” she says, ignoring the bleating of her heart. “But don’t look up my skirt.”

  “You’re wearing pants.”

  Lily allows him to boost her to the top of the rain barrel. From there she snatches at the lip of the eaves and pulls herself up. It’s a messy scramble, craning each leg over onto the safety of the roof. When she gets both knees up and tucked under her, she begins to feel the metal structure bending under her weight. She has to shift and slot her legs between the ripples of the shingles to stop the buckling.

  “Get under the gable,” he calls up. She wonders how long he’s been waiting to use that tremolo stage whisper. Lloyd is already climbing the barrel, his tongue thrust between his lips with the effort. Maybe she should look away. She can’t bear to watch what can only be the sloppy acrobatics of ascent.

  To her surprise, Lloyd scales the garage wall with ease. While she watches, he hoists his
lumbersome body over the eaves as though maneuvering a lithe frame. He may as well have been trained on parallel bars. Lloyd executes a fluid tilt and swing and lands on the sheet metal without a sound. And then it strikes her. All this time she’s been humoring him—his romantic notion of cross-genre perversion, his blundered attempts with the schoolgirls—when, in truth, he really is a professional. There’s fear in Lily’s heart suddenly; it clicks to life with the speed of fuel on fire. Could it be vertigo? The fear of uniformed officers? The understanding that Lloyd has done this many, many times? That’s my problem, Lily thinks. I never take anyone seriously until it’s too late.

  Lloyd crawls between the ridges until he’s beside her in the groove of the false gable window. She reminds herself that she’s not trapped, that she can lower herself back down the other side of the garage, that she can drop to the grass and roll as though she’d been dumped from the sky. It’s dogs and perverts that can smell fear from great distances, so she’d like to say something impertinent, show him she’s not afraid. But Lloyd’s not even looking at her. He runs the back of his hand over his mouth. She follows his gaze and realizes that by leaning forward they have a view into a window ten feet away.

  Inside is the kind of bedroom shambles that’s best kept behind closed doors: a fitted sheet scrolled off the corners of a mattress, an old vacuum-tube television with a coat hanger receiver, a carpet mottled by dropped cigarettes. Everywhere, clothing as drapery.

  Lloyd settles on his knees. “Check it out, hey?”

  She forgets her fear of him in this abstraction of a room. This is orchestrated chaos, Lily thinks. Someone has caught wind of their plans and sent a crew ahead to disarrange, to tease filmy underwear from a drawer, to knock a stack of paperbacks off the nightstand. To not only rummage through the closet but to slide the closet door off its track and lean it there against the wall.

  Lily begins to suspect she’s part of a live studio audience, that applause will be cued and laughter expected. That she is not, after all, the only disaster waiting to happen. And if there are secret lives to be lived and phone conversations to overhear and boxes in closets through which to snoop, then let these things be plotted and beautiful. Let the ugly truths be beautiful.

  “It’s perfect,” she breathes.

  “It gets better,” he says.

  The car makes its displeasure evident halfway down the curved drive. The sound of polymer grading against hard rubber, a synthetic competition that vibrates in each nail bed and ignites a pilot light of anxiety in his belly. This wasn’t happening on Thursday. Then again, he hadn’t put the car in reverse on Thursday.

  Duncan brakes slowly, lets the complaint die away, then puts the vehicle in drive. He inches back up toward the lean-to without a single tick from the front end and considers the feasibility of driving without shifting into reverse. His own father, regardless of the season, would let vehicles idle for a minute or two before setting off; a quirk he called “letting the juices flow,” or “letting the kinks sort out,” but that Duncan suspected had more to do with a lifetime of Minnesota winters than combustion systems.

  He opts to let the car idle for a minute, hoping the rumbles will whisper out on their own, all the while ignoring a suspicion that some sort of Masonic will is behind this latest hiccup. Either that or his own agnostic punishment for fleeing from his wife this morning. It is not the goal of his summer to race back to the city with unhealthy thoughts of Lily multiplying by the mile, but there is a dissonance between her and his work that he just can’t reconcile.

  Last year, he’d been surprised to discover his One Show Award Pencils in the linen closet—the linen closet where Lily had shelved them beside the box of vacuum filters. Looking back he’d say this was the beginning of their mutual resentment. The moment after which their actions toward one another felt perfunctory and insincere. He brought the trophies back to his office, as though returning them to an environment of respect. But Lily’s action had scarred him and he began to think that displaying them again after five years was the mark of a floundering hack. He locked them in the desk instead. This way he could open the drawer and pretend to fish for a marker while really just teasing them out of their velvet sacks for a quick fondle.

  Truth was, the damage was done. Hadn’t Lily made her position clear? His chosen life lacked the heft and gravity she required. It was something to be borne, like termites or chronic disease. Lily had evolved as a species. While he remained terrestrial and not quite upright she had entered the order of new world monkeys, was afforded a superior position among the trees. They could no longer recognize each other from these two different vantage points. It was really always a matter of time; she had been abroad, received a classical education. He’d sold out to commercial enterprise. With that single closet discovery last year, his path lost its luster. The haste and immediacy of this change frightened him; that one action from Lily could create such a profound change frightened him. So he devoted his days to reasoning his way back into a sort of love for his work. And if not love, then at least interest. And when interest failed, tolerance. But tolerance went away too. He was left with only an incipient motivation in which he could find nothing honorable or worthy: fear.

  Duncan punches down the clutch and wiggles the stick into reverse, taps in enough gas to ease into motion. As he negotiates the curved lip of the drive the grind starts up again, this time the sound of teaspoons caught in the garbage disposal. It’s a sharp turn of the wheel to the right while in reverse that’s doing it. Duncan gets out and crouches by the left wheel. He runs his hand along the top of the tire but stops short at a section of the fender skirt that’s crushed inward and then folded over like a flipped eyelid. He switches to his other knee and eases his hand, palm up, under the lip of molded plastic, pulling gently to snap it back into place.

  The fender resists, but then begins to bend for him. He draws a portion of it back over the tire and then makes to slide his hand out. Only thing, his hand won’t move. He presses it down into the tire and shifts it sideways, but the damaged fender has no more give. It’s locked his wrist down in a polymer cuff. Duncan feels a tick in his throat, swallows against it twice, and sweats through his shirt. He tries pulling his hand forward; there’s an inch of release until the ridge of his knuckles blocks the way. A trail of blood then, and shavings of skin that look like curled mozzarella. As it becomes clear that he’s trapped, his humiliation is gently underscored by panic. He’s been so caught up in his campaign, could he have inadvertently conjured an eerie form of Southeast Asian torture? His body temperature fluctuates, he begins to shiver in his own sweat. While he keeps absolutely still, there is no pain. Duncan leans against the tire, counts the hidden bolts on the rim, and waits.

  CHAPTER 15

  Temporary or Milk Teeth

  Lloyd is the Magellan of rooftops.

  “I think you’ve found your calling,” Lily says.

  He taps his lips. “Focus the mind, Lily.”

  She’s not sure how long they’ve been crouched waiting for something to happen. The sun has slid out of its aggressive position, and in their pocket under the gable window both Lily and the pervert vanish with their separate thoughts.

  This Peeping Tom undertaking is tough, requires a combination of stamina and luck beyond the pure gymnastics of scoring a decent vantage point. Lloyd, she realizes, is the cartographer of Osterhagen. His geography is the rooftops and alleys of the small town. She imagines he possesses encyclopedic knowledge of windows, alcoves, and terraces, the shelter of overhangs, all things scalable, the cover of shrubs at ground level, the slats of space between fence boards, the location of notches in these boards, the few remaining unstuffed keyholes, the sag spots where drawn curtains refuse to join. She has softened toward Lloyd, like butter in the sun. Wants to offer him something in return, if only as a reward for this adventure, or to fill the space of waiting between them.

  “I killed the wild boar, Lloyd.”

  He turns to her. �
�The what?”

  “The pig. You know, the mascot.” Saws an edge of tooth into bottom lip. “It ran out in the middle of the road.”

  He shuts his left eye. Absorbs her better, perhaps, under single focus.

  “It didn’t exactly die. I had to sort of beat it to death.”

  “The pig is dead?”

  Lily nods.

  “The Sovereign of the Deep Wood? At your hands?”

  “With a tire iron.” Scratches her mouth.

  “Jesus Christ, you’re not even lying.” Lloyd leans back and looks at her. “They’ve been searching for that thing for weeks.”

  “It was dark. It charged from the bushes.”

  “They’ve sent out search parties—hogs are a bitch to trap, you know.”

  “We hit it with the car.”

  “But why?”

  “It was an accident.”

  “I mean, why didn’t you tell anyone?”

  “I didn’t know it belonged to someone,” she says. “And then it was too late.”

  Lloyd waits for more.

  “So we left it in the ditch.”

  His face breaks open then with a sudden appreciation. “Oh, sweetie.” He knocks her thigh. “I get it—you’re a little thug.”

  She feels her forehead bunch. “This isn’t good. It’s just rotting away.”

  “Come on now,” he says. “You’re acting like this is the first bad thing you’ve done. But let me tell you how it is.”

  “Cue the music.”

  “These are peccadilloes. Misdemeanors. They help shape the character.” He taps the back of her hand. “What was it like, anyway?”

  “It was making this sound, you can’t even imagine.”

  “You’re not the first Colonialist to like a good pigsticking. When in India, hey?”