New World Monkeys

by Nancy Mauro

  CHAPTER 29

  Common Characters of the Ribs

  Lily of the Rooftops,

  Have you heard? Made the leap the other day and am now officially a Man of Action. Got the flower-print panties to prove it! Our little friend (you remember Audiophile?) won’t be using the Dewey Decimal System again without thinking of Yrs. Truly … I’d say I took it a step or two beyond the frott, Lily. Got her up against the Great American Classics before she squared me in the nuts. Nearly hammered them flat, but that’s an occupational hazard, right?

  Anyway, you won’t be seeing me around—gotta lay low since the heat is on, baby! I know you’ll miss me, but where I’m going, you just can’t follow. I don’t usually say thanks. But the upshot is, I couldn’t have done it without you and your spectacular intolerance of weakness, Lily. Hope that one day I can bring you the same measure of freedom. Repay the favor in kind.

  Until then, keep your curtains open and a song in your heart, darling!

  Frotteurly Yrs,

  Lloyd

  The note is written on the front of an envelope and carries over to the backside. Lily’s found it stuffed under her bicycle seat, the unsealed flap poking out from the padding. Inside the envelope are three gently squashed cigarettes.

  Lily sits on the grassy slope of library lawn. She has collected her books, cleaned out her carrel. Courage hadn’t come; she did nothing to help the girl. She has associated with a felon, aided and abetted a crime, watched it happen. Perpetrated several punishable offenses herself. It all just sounded so right at the time. Now she wonders to what other dark places has she followed her head. With Duncan, in particular. Or rather, away from him.

  Last night she had gathered the gown around herself and felt her way back to her room. She lay naked in the dank night, her head full of dissonance. Was this Duncan’s final gesture toward her? If she’s ever to think of his hands again, will they always be initiating this violence on her? Will they ever complete it? It seems to her that she had lain there last night welcoming it. Even his violence—anything that resembled a follow-through. What was it that had driven her to his room in the first place? The way he held her while the cop stood at the door? They looked so united, couldn’t there be some truth behind it still? And she felt safe. Of course, this she didn’t realize until later. There was something lit inside of her, a charge in her belly, binding each breast. She had gone to him, knelt on his bed in order to give herself over. Hadn’t he understood? It was quite possible he just didn’t want her. But she didn’t believe in such decisive endings. Even after he’d torn the gown, she still thought he might come to her. Slide on top of her finally, a hand on her forehead, the other between her legs. Come to finish what he started.

  He never came. She woke up alone, soggy, naked. She woke up rejected. The charge in her stomach was dim and distant.

  Lily rolls one of the flat cigarettes between her fingers to plump it and pats down the corners of her bag. Her lighter is missing. She lies back in the grass. Reminds herself that at the very least she’s made Lloyd happy. The pervert has cocked his ear to the sky so that his particular vocation might be whispered down. People are getting on with their lives. Seems she’s the only one who can’t pick her thread loose from the knot.

  They keep low in the shallow tub of garden. Duncan would rather crouch and dig, but the shovel requires leverage and so he stands. Lily kneels and shifts soil from the plot into mounds along the lip of grass. The breeze tonight snaps the barley heads around, forcing him to listen through this for the sound of gravel crunching in the drive. Although they haven’t talked about the cop’s visit last night, Duncan believes there is a new, intuitive drill in place for the safe recovery of Tinker’s unsheathed frame. In case of unexpected visitors, they will drop their tools, snake through the switchback territory that is now the backyard, knock out the porch light, and get down to the cellar through the basement door. Duncan will use an old chair back to buttress the door in addition to the lock. He imagines he might even be forced to rip off his T-shirt and use it as a mitt to knock out the hot lightbulb. An unnecessary action, but one he likes.

  This reminds him that Lily hasn’t said a word about the torn nightgown. He wishes she would because he has no clue how to approach the topic himself. Instead, here they are, digging a dead body out of the garden like it was any old Friday night. She’s probably avoiding the topic for a reason. And while it irritates him, it strikes him as some sort of intuitive desire. The need to remain the injured party sends Lily scrambling into the upper story of the trees to suck her opposable thumb.

  “This reminds me of those pictures you took in Vietnam,” Lily says. “Of the Viet Cong tunnels.”

  Duncan grunts, doesn’t tell her he’s already worked this parallel. She sifts dirt with her fingers; they have created a system whereby he boxes out a chunk of dirt and she sorts through it for smaller bones.

  Lily stops, looks up at the trees. “Did you see that?”

  He wipes his forehead, sees nothing but branches.

  “A bat,” she says and then surveys the entire sky. “I hate bats.”

  “They eat insects.”

  “How’s it coming anyway?”

  “What?”

  “The campaign, Duncan.” There is a metallic pitch in her voice that he dislikes.

  “Right now? It’s heading into the jungle of the Tay Ninh province.”

  “Right.” There it is again, shovel against rock.

  “We present to the client on Tuesday,” he says, trying to infuse a sense of conclusion here. It’s times like these—when Lily’s at her most metallic—that he’s reminded of her Crusader lineage. She’d deny the heredity, but a thousand years of the jeweled and brilliant history of burning masjids and chasing heretics on horseback through desert wadis isn’t just going to come to an end with one woman.

  “If you want to run it by me, like a focus group or whatever, I’d be happy to listen.”

  He rubs the scruff of his chin. “Thanks. I don’t want to talk about it now.”

  “Oh. That’s all right.”

  “I mean, it’s hard to explain without the visuals. You don’t show that kind of thing until it’s ready.”

  “That’s okay,” she says again, rising and stretching her legs. But it’s clear he’s hurt her feelings.

  “Besides, it’s your turn,” he says to lighten the nick. “You want, I can read your dissertation.”

  Instead of declining him outright, she laughs, squats in another quadrant of the garden.

  “I guess I wouldn’t understand any of that, huh?”

  “That’s not it,” she says.

  Duncan starts nosing through some soil with the tip of the shovel. He wants to move away from these interior rooms of their life. Tries for something with greater exposure. “That’s bad news about the girl at the library.”

  Lily shrugs.

  “Listen. Maybe you should take a few days off from that place,” he says.

  She stops, picks up a spade, and looks at him. “Why?”

  Because I don’t want some pervert touching you inappropriately, for fuck’s sake! But he’s afraid of these words at this stage of their relationship, afraid of her derision; that he should express concern about this, but nothing else.

  “Well, if you’re here, we can dig during the day.”

  She looks away from him to make small cuts in the soil and he knows he’s said the wrong thing. She keeps her jaw balled like a fist and her eyes on the ground but her head is nodding. Is this agreement or outrage? He plunges the shovel into the new northern soil and it stops against something. He taps the edge and knows it’s the clink of bone.

  They put their tools down. One thing they are coming to love with anguish—if not each other—is Tinker. They put down shovel and spade and bend over new bones.

  These are the first that seem to have been buried with any logic. They unearth the grouping from the sides as if excavating along the perimeters of an ancient building. The
y dig around the cage of bones, leaving the structure intact in the ground. Tinker’s chest appears in the soil. So narrow and white Duncan feels his own chest constrict. The ribs rise like a domed ceiling over some sacred place.

  Lily kneels by the rib cage. “There is a reason why you can’t read it,” she says to him, then looks away over the field. “I haven’t done anything.”

  He doesn’t understand. “Haven’t done what?”

  “Work.” She sits up suddenly, as though she might stop herself. As though she may still tip truth and logic to one side of her tongue. Duncan doesn’t grasp her meaning but feels a tight binding under his arms. Lily’s watching his face and an awareness falls over him. Before he understands her words, there is this awareness.

  “There is no dissertation, Duncan.”

  Of course.

  Lily, perhaps realizing it’s too late to go back, goes forward. “Since we came up here. No, even before that—I haven’t touched it.” It’s a series of streams she’s jumping here, all with the same momentum, so that he sees she can’t stop even if she wanted to. “Do you understand? Not a single page. And I don’t care if I never write another word again.”

  He can feel the pulsing of his throat, blood circling through a cone. “You’ve been here an entire month, Lily. We’ve been living apart an entire month.”

  She looks down at the bones.

  “What the fuck have you been doing then?”

  Lily lifts her shoulders, says nothing.

  “Is there someone else?”

  “No.”

  “Are we separated? Is that it? Is that why you came up here in the first place?”

  “I don’t know,” she whispers.

  “You don’t know! Jesus Christ, Lily. You don’t know if we’re separated?” Duncan is not surprised by his anger or by the swift current of his blood. He kicks over his staked shovel. Lily recoils against the sound. He wishes for nothing more but her words to come and cut him free. And still, he is conscious of even this—of having to persuade his wife to cut him free.

  “Every weekend I follow you up here like an asshole. And the whole time you’re trying to tell me we’re separated.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “What is true?”

  She doesn’t answer but sits for long minutes at his feet, her hands in the soil. They’re waiting perhaps, both of them, for the blood to slow.

  Lily presses each of her fingers gently between Tinker’s ribs. “Do you realize,” she says after several long minutes, “that this is where the heart goes?”

  Duncan looks. The soil under the dome leaves no trace of the heart it used to shelter.

  “The heart turned to mulch.”

  At first he thinks she’s laughing at this observation, but when she turns her head he realizes she’s gagging. Lily pushes to her feet and runs toward the barley. Then, bent at the waist, she vomits into the grain. Duncan comes up behind her, gathers up her hair until she’s done. She sinks to the ground and cries after she vomits, or perhaps she cries partway through.

  He kneels beside her and slides his hand down Lily’s back, between the sharp angles of her shoulders. There is a new frailness there that frightens him. She is all brittle and spindle, mismatched chairs pulled up to the fire. He wants to pick her up and carry her through the grain. Hide her away somewhere safe.

  “Lily, I want you to know—” He stops, tucks a wet strand of hair behind her ear. “My God.”

  She rubs her hand across her mouth, looks at him.

  “I killed that dog.”

  For a moment she doesn’t move. Not even a blink. Then something sparks in her face, a swift understanding passes between them. A distant language is recalled, each verb brilliant, chipped from stasis. She sits back, presses his hand. Lily is illuminated.

  CHAPTER 30

  Connective Tissue

  There are two hundred and six bones in the human body. They are missing nearly one hundred of them. It rains all day Saturday and Lily worries about the grave they have opened and left exposed.

  “Not much we can do,” Duncan had said this morning, leaning against the porch rail under the cover of the eaves.

  “We could tarp it again.”

  “Yeah.” He tossed a cigarette into the soil. “But it’s been coming down for hours.” There had existed between them all day a vibrant solidarity that neither dared acknowledge for fear that it would vaporize. Last night’s confessions may have seemed lurid and crude, but they were secrets exchanged as offerings—the dog was his offering. Not the muscle and guts of it, but the knowledge. He had eliminated that which he detested the most: a man standing impotent at the side of the road.

  Now in the cellar it’s the small bones after all that drive her to pieces. She has accumulated a gym sock full of what are either hand bones or foot bones or, quite possibly, both. Proximal, middle, and distal phalanges, she has poured them out on a sheet of cardboard and tries arranging them according to the illustrations in Gray’s Anatomy. She holds a woman’s fingers and toes, but all these bits feel foreign, without context. Trinkets. It’s like imposing curatorial order on a collection of cupboard knobs, kitchen fuses, buttons, misshapen chocolate truffles.

  She looks at long bones on the table. “What do you think?” she asks, holding a cylindrical phalange. “Hand or foot?”

  Tinker is silent on this one. “How would you know? You have no head.” Lily shifts the sole remaining tibia and the fibula (of what they believe is the right leg) and sits on the edge of the table. Until yesterday they had confused the narrow fibula with the radius bone of the forearm. But after finding its illustrated counterpart in the osteology section of Gray’s, Duncan had moved it down to the leg.

  “Don’t worry,” she says, picking up Tinker’s femur by the knobby head and placing it over her own thigh. “We’re going to get all of you out of the ground.”

  Tinker’s femur is shorter than her own. Lily lies back so that the two women are side by side. She places the humerus over her upper arm, hooks a fifth rib around her own chest, the shallow pan of the scapula under her shoulder and the clavicle in front.

  “You were just a little thing, weren’t you?”

  The official version of her grandfather’s kidnapping did not begin, or end, or linger on the nanny since she would, early into the tale, disappear from the storyteller’s lips and into the alternating flow of the Hudson. Instead, once Lily’s mother had drawn an audience, she would start with the boy, Luis Junior, whose naughtiness at the dining room table prompted his abduction. By launching this narrative with conflict, the young protagonist was given a role in his own demise. The nanny was to take him to his room where he would finish his meal alone. Later, when mother and father went up to say good night, they found both his dinner tray and his bed empty. The nanny was gone as well.

  Oster, to the requisite sound of female wailing and grief, made a quick search of the house and land. Those days, the Hudson was a main transportation artery and, on account of the sawmill, Osterhagen boasted a sizable landing. It was thought that the woman and child may have caught a steamer for the city. Oster took a couple of men with him and set out for the river, only to return a few hours later, empty-handed.

  Here is where the official version skips to daylight: a stable hand discovers the child out by the barn, shaken, sticky with tears, flecked with hay and full of remorse for his behavior at dinner. It was decided that the nanny—lacking corporeal presence and still in need of punishment—had been washed away in the tidal flow.

  Yes, her mother’s version flattens the nanny to villainous dimensionality. She was an antagonist with neither name nor motivation beyond fulfilling her typecast. The crone who, unable to have her own child, settled on abducting one from the manor house.

  Who really was this Tinker when she was clothed in muscle and skin? Why did she give the boy to the Osters if he belonged to her? Lily strokes the rib that has lodged between her own. And if he didn’t belong to her, why would she stay,
knowing what would come scratching at her door each night?

  There is one motivation, but it is so visceral that Lily had nearly blinked it away until recently. She had been without desire herself for so long, she’d forgotten that it ever existed. Lily holds up the curved rib bone; all the while she’s been waiting for the pointed arch to come and save her when she’s had this round arch inside the whole time. Sure, the acute angle was superior for bearing loads, but the barrel vault crowned some of the strongest walls ever built. Wasn’t there valor in this, that a simple curve could hold up stone and cast iron and the ceiling over a heart?

  Maybe there is one final turn in this theory. Maybe Tinker was grateful to Luis Oster, lumber baron. Grateful for the touch, for the unlacing, the stripping of the corset. Down to the flesh and she could breathe, finally. Maybe he had placed his mouth over hers and blown. Done the kind thing and raised those flattened ribs. Why had it been so hard to believe this—what a woman would do for touch? Lily stares up at the beams that run across the ceiling, that keep the parlor and the sunroom, the kitchen, Duncan and the Viet Cong, from collapsing in on her.

  Yes, this is how the story goes. Tinker was just a nanny, with nothing to recommend her. But he had come to her in the night. It was her wish. He touched her so that her skin fell away. Just here—his hand against the sternum, between the elastic arches of bone, he had bent his dark head and licked fat from the furrows of her heart.

  Lily watches as the woman on the table beside her sits up, nudges each wedge of vertebrae into alignment. She begins to count the collected parts of her body. The last part of this story is a sad one, all right? As you know, the casting aside of bones always begins as the touch of love. That’s how it is in the beginning. But the truth always shakes out in time: some of us are just too feeble to illuminate a face for long. We’re left behind. A slow abandonment, but there it is. We’re alone as we were before, only worse. The muscle has memory. Takes up space inside.