Here in the living room, the faint breeze coming in the open windows lifted the sheer curtains into brief billows and dropped them again. It was getting cooler, and soon someone with ordinary upper body strength and dexterity would have to close the windows. There might not be that many more open window afternoons. The days were noticeably shorter.
If he wanted to, Duncan knew he could roll his chair over to the side bay window and watch the two women walking around the garden. His garden. It was brimming with weeds now. He was the gardener, not Laura, and he had been the last person to prune and weed and mulch, in the middle of June. He had gotten a late start because it was such a cold and rainy spring, and then he had been exceptionally busy with work. The accident was just a couple of weeks after that, when the delayed spring weather had suddenly kicked into a breathtakingly perfect series of hot summer days.
Nothing out there had been touched in four months, except the little patches of grass in front and back which got mowed too short by the indifferent lawn care jockey who came too often and charged too much. Duncan’s gardening tools were untouched in the pretty little hexagonal tool shed he had built. Now the leaves had all turned and some of their trees were half bare. Soon enough (Duncan had always liked the satisfying task of raking leaves), the lawn guy would charge them a fortune for the noisy hour he would spend blasting them with a powerful leaf blower into a submissive heap on a big blue tarp.
Duncan’s cherished pulmonaria had been ravaged by woodchucks and the feathery pink astilbe was choked with milkweed and goldenrod. The herb beds were overrun by quackgrass and dandelions. Everything had bolted or gone to seed or shriveled. Only the scarlet bells of his penstemon were holding their own, attracting the occasional hummingbird, along with some opportunistic wild blue phlox that had muscled in everywhere. They really should hire someone to tend the flowerbeds. Or, hell with it, they could just pave and gravel, with a few beds of pachysandra. Or forget about it altogether and just leave it decaying and wrecked, a disaster like him. What difference did it make? He toggled the control roughly and turned the chair around with a jerk, and Ottoline automatically tightened her grip to cling to him. He soothed her tentatively, stroking her silky back with the clawed fingers on his left hand, the hand he could use. She was about the same size as a small cat, but without the bonelessness of a cat, more like a coiled spring.
He couldn’t bear to watch Laura showing Martha the ruined garden. Duncan hated the way he felt like an abandoned child at these moments, left out, spying pathetically on the grown-ups he depended on for everything. How could anyone expect him to get used to living this way? Who would be satisfied, who would think this was enough of a life?
Ottoline swiveled around toward the open windows that fronted on the street, a questioning click in her throat, suddenly wary of the thudding bass of somebody’s music, which swelled louder, the herald of a meandering Toyota moving slowly down Lawrence Street. Duncan toggled the control to turn his chair around in a practiced three-point move and rolled towards the front windows, and Ottoline gripped his shoulder like a seasoned subway rider leaning into a curve. He stared out the window until the source of the booming music came into his line of vision. Would he ever get used to not being able to turn his head more than a couple of inches in any direction?
Michigan plates. Blonde driver, sunglasses, young, yakking on her cell phone. As she rolled by, Duncan observed that the car’s rear windows were dark, with what looked like quilts pressing against the glass. A Yale graduate student with all her worldly possessions in the back seat, alive with the drama of this important moment in her special snowflake unicorn life. Every day of the year, somewhere in New Haven a graduate student was moving in or out. Good luck finding a long-term parking spot on this block without a permit, and meanwhile, put down your damned phone and just drive, honey. Both hands on the fucking wheel.
In recent weeks, in his new captivity, Duncan had become an expert on the life of their street. Before the accident, though they had spent the last eight of their nine years of married life in their pleasingly renovated Victorian house on Lawrence Street, he had never bothered to notice much about their neighbors, who didn’t interest him unless they made too much noise or parked stupidly, but now he gazed out the window all day long at their quiet block, taking in everything there was to see. When Laura handed Duncan the ratty old bird-watching binoculars that had been her mother’s, the better to spy on all the neighbors, she had called him Jimmy Stewart.
Trying to adjust the focus on the heavy, clouded lenses, his weak hand trembling so badly he could barely manage to hold the binoculars steady without dropping them or knocking the eyepieces against his face, Duncan hadn’t wanted Laura to see his struggle, and he retorted in irritation that she was no Grace Kelly. He felt bad about saying that when she walked out of the room, hurt. A few days later, the old binoculars were gone from the windowsill, replaced with a new pair of compact, lightweight Nikons that were easier to adjust and handle, with a simple zoom-control focus lever he could manage. Unlike the telephone headset Laura rigged up for him, which he could activate with a whistled note, and which was in its way satisfying, but he refused it anyway—why would he want to have any more of those fakely optimistic, desperately awkward telephone conversations with well-meaning people?—he was willing to wear the binoculars, on a strap around his neck.
Duncan had come to know every car on the street. The dented silver Toyota Camry belonged to the biographer Debby Applegate, who, with her husband, had moved into the tall white house with the steep brick stoop after the elderly retired anthropologist who had lived there for decades moved to assisted living following a bad fall on his own icy steps. The black Audi with the ski rack belonged to Stan Weinberg, the endocrinologist on the corner whose wild beds of cleome going to seed were a visual amenity in Duncan’s limited view, though the friendly wife who had tended their flowers year after year, the wife who had traded plants a few times with Duncan—what was her name? Sandy, Sandra?—had been replaced recently by a spoiled-looking young girlfriend, and the cleome had been neither staked nor weeded all summer.
The classic old red Saab in need of a new muffler, usually parked mid-block, was driven by the stunningly beautiful, nearly transparently pale Scandinavian au pair employed to mind the three hectic McCarthy children across the street. She always struggled to extricate them from the car, the baby girl balanced on her hip while she leaned in to unfasten the younger boy from his car seat, while the older boy opened his door on the street side. The au pair would shout Jackson, do not go out your door into the road! while Jackson, who looked to be seven or eight, sauntered to the curb. The parents were self-important criminal defense attorneys whose clients, most of them armed robbers, murderers, and rapists, were often the subject of screaming headlines. Who would defend such people? Dennis McCarthy and Irene Jackson, that’s who.
McCarthy & Jackson, Attorneys at Law (their cheesy infomercials that featured them pretending they were stars of a courtroom drama series ran on the local cable channels and had only recently become familiar to Duncan) kept long and erratic hours. Why did they even have children? Duncan had never paid any notice to their comings and goings before now, though Laura had reported to him that their postal carrier was aggrieved by the intermittent sacks of hate mail generated by some of their more notorious cases.
Did McCarthy & Jackson, Attorneys at Law, know or care that nearly every afternoon, when she brought their children home from the progressive day school that was favored by prosperous Yale families and the upper echelon of New Haven doctors and lawyers, Ingrid or Ingvold or Ingeborg or whatever the hell her name was—the boys could often be heard shouting for Ingie—collected McDonald’s detritus from the car and dropped it carefully into the next door neighbor’s trash can that was tucked behind a side porch before going in the house?
Duncan was concerned about the middle child. He loped after his older brother awkwardly in a way that reminded Duncan of Gordy when they were b
oys. He was convinced there was something just a little bit off about that kid, though Laura didn’t see it. What did Duncan mean, he was like a little professor? He looked like a regular five-year-old kid to Laura. She doubted that Duncan could diagnose from across the street a child with whom he had never even talked. And meanwhile, since his expertise was based on a lifetime with his oddball brother, what exactly was wrong with Gordy? Bartleby Syndrome? Apparently the Wheelers had never been given a specific diagnosis for whatever it was that limited Gordon.
Duncan was the original and his brother was the copy, Duncan, doing his homework at the dining room table, once overheard their mother tell a neighbor over coffee. He had kept this secret knowledge to himself. He never used it, never once in their entire childhood or adolescence did he blurt out the truth to his twin Gordon, no matter how mad his lisping, tentative, unambitious copy of a brother made him. Poor Gordon. Those eight minutes made all the difference.
Starting when the Wheeler boys were seven, about the age of the oldest McCarthy kid, Gordon stayed after school once a week to pwactice his consonants with Miss Wyan (Duncan hadn’t understood for years that her name was actually Miss Ryan), the thpeech thewapist, while Duncan, his fluctuating stutter having eluded the cursory classroom screening, had been taken for piano lessons on those afternoons. While Gordon hissed like a snake and buzzed like a bee, a futile endeavor that did not end his dentalizing of S’s and Z’s, Duncan mastered “The Happy Farmer.” Gordon did tongue exercises that failed to alter his inability to pronounce his r’s, while Duncan learned some of the simpler Bach minuets. His piano study was under the tutelage of sweet, rabbitty Mr. Baner, who was, according to Helen Wheeler, a little light in the loafers, whatever that meant (Mr. Baner kept time by tapping the toe of a sturdy brown laced shoe).
Duncan always did his best to conceal how hard he worked. This preoccupation had begun when he first learned that he was the original brother, while Gordy was the copy. It was a distinction that felt important, one he wanted to maintain and expand. What if his mother was wrong? What if he was the copy, and there had been some error giving Gordy the problems that were meant to be his? And so Duncan never wanted anyone to know how many hours he practiced piano, or how much time he spent studying for spelling tests. All through school, he hid or minimized how much time he devoted to memorizing, rehearsing, practicing his tennis serve, studying for French tests, learning lines for a play, writing papers. It was always more thrilling, somehow, if his accomplishments seemed to have occurred by sheer force of innate talent.
There was a word for this false carelessness, this studied nonchalance, Laura had told Duncan the first time he admitted to her this chronic habit of his, when they had been together for about a month. When he revealed the way he concealed his efforts because he wanted everyone to believe that his brilliant work and accomplishments flowed naturally from a wellspring of genius, she had nodded and simply replied, sprezzatura. He didn’t know there was a word for this, that it was not solely his invention and experience. When he looked it up, Duncan discovered that Laura was more than exactly right. Sprezzatura can also describe a form of defensive irony, the disguising behind a mask of apparent indifference what one really desires, feels, thinks, or intends. That too.
Whenever Duncan played a new piano piece flawlessly all the way through, the payoff for weeks of diligent practice, Mr. Baner would clasp his hands together prayerfully and tell Duncan that he had a gift. The first time he said it, Duncan had taken him literally and had expected a tangible reward at the end of the lesson, perhaps candy, or a book, but it was just another one of those remarks adults made all the time that didn’t really mean what the words meant.
Duncan and Gordon’s father Jack Wheeler died unexpectedly when they were eleven, but their world was remarkably little transformed. During the strange week of covered mirrors and no shoes and unshaven Wallerstein uncles from the side of the family that hadn’t changed the name, and a grandfather wearing the same torn shirt every day, Duncan overheard grownups repeating certain phrases the way the rabbi had chanted in Hebrew during the funeral service. Helen and the boys have been taken care of very well. Such a good term life policy, the best. Tragic, but Jack certainly did leave his family in a very comfortable situation. Very comfortable. Jack Wheeler knew term life like nobody’s business. For something that was nobody’s business, they sure were all talking about it.
Sitting dutifully beside his brother in their dress-up clothes, their hands clasped tightly in their laps as they perched on the plump sofa cushions, wedged between two equally well-upholstered, talkative great-aunts from Hoboken and Great Neck, Duncan listened. At least Rose didn’t live to see this day, said the one from Great Neck. The one from Hoboken, who agreed with her, had tusk-like front teeth that reminded Duncan of the genuine ivory keys on the Steinway baby grand piano in Mr. Baner’s living room. Duncan was still waiting for the moment he thought the family was going to sit and shiver.
Were they very comfortable? They had been given plates with cookies and little sandwiches all mixed together in a jumble, and it wasn’t even lunchtime. A label in Duncan’s jacket collar itched the back of his neck. He was not comfortable. Gordy kept swinging his feet, bouncing his heels off the bottom edge of the sofa harder and harder, faster and faster. Nobody stopped him the way they would have on an ordinary day, until Duncan reached over and held Gordy’s legs still.
Duncan went to Hotchkiss, where he achieved high grades and played varsity tennis. Gordon went to Wilbur Cross High School, where he missed so many classes he nearly failed to graduate. Duncan went to Yale and Gordon went to the movies. Duncan studied architecture in Florence for a year and then went to graduate school at the Yale School of Architecture, after which he went directly to work for William Corrigan, the brilliant, crotchety architect famous not only for his elegant shingle-style houses that dotted the New England coastline from Cos Cob to Bar Harbor, but also for his bow ties, his outrageously reactionary politics, and his legendary romances with clients (and architecture critics) of all genders.
In those years Gordon lived at home with their mother, where he had lived all his life, and worked happily in a video rental store in Hamden, where he developed a loyal following among customers who enjoyed his encyclopedic knowledge of movies. Before everyone depended on the Internet Movie Database, there was Gordon Wheeler to tell you in a heartbeat the name of that Howard Hawks movie with Joel McCrea and Edward G. Robinson (Barbary Coast). He became an assistant manager, and then weekend manager, and he would have happily worked there forever, but we all know what happened to video rental stores.
Ever since Movie House folded, Gordon had worked loyally, if part-time, at Roxy’s Books in Madison, a shoreline suburb of New Haven, where one of his tasks was writing out in his neatest possible handwriting (which was a quirky mix of upper and lowercase letters) all the shelf-talkers, the little folded pieces of paper hanging down from the shelves all over the store with appealing and personal encomia from the staff captioning favorite books. Gordon lived in a rented house in walking distance to Roxy’s Books (he didn’t own a car), with Ferga, his Border collie, who loved him very much. His mildewed beach cottage had never been intended for year-round occupation, and its charms included insufficient insulation, a deteriorating roof, flapping aluminum siding, and a crumbling front porch. It was perhaps the least nice dwelling in town.
Gordon wore overalls and flannel shirts year round, over red long johns in the winter months. He bicycled everywhere, and otherwise loved to go for long, loping walks with Ferga very early every morning along the beach, which was just two blocks away, down at the end of his dead-end street. Sometimes after a walk they would sit together on their front steps for a while, Ferga leaning against Gordon’s leg while he stroked her neck and whispered his devotion into her cocked, trembling ear. The two of them lived on brown rice mixed with stew that simmered intermittently in a big speckled pot on the stove, plus the leftover muffins and bagels Roxy saved for
him from the coffee counter in the back of the store. Gordon still had trouble with his r’s and his s’s, but his overgrown beard and mustache muffled his speech impediments and gave him an old-fashioned air of formal solemnity. There were bookstore customers who thought Gordon might be Amish.
It was now two years since Duncan had taken over Corrigan & Wheeler after Billy Corrigan’s death. Duncan was young to have reached this level of achievement and acclaim as an architect, yet all along he had been quite aware that despite having credit on dozens of award-winning projects, despite being a name partner, he had never truly distinguished himself with any recognizable design style of his own. He had developed his identity as an architect dedicating himself entirely to work on houses and additions that perpetuated all the classic Billy Corrigan gestures—the signature grandeur and large-scale intimacy and gables and ladi-da elegance. Did Duncan even really have an architectural style of his own? What exactly would distinguish a true Duncan Wheeler house, unconstrained by all the familiar Corrigan hallmarks? There was exactly one such house, and it had never been built.
Duncan grew up in an undistinguished house on an ordinary suburban street in Hamden, Connecticut, but something about his house had nevertheless always felt just right to him, unlike the houses of many of his friends, which even as a child he had judged for being ill-proportioned or out of balance, with their boring fronts and narrow hallways and disappointing picture windows with fake, stuck-on muntins inside and fake, mis-proportioned shutters outside. Whenever he gazed out his bedroom window at the Band-Aid colored neo-Colonial house across the street, he was made uneasy by the shallow pitch of its gabled roof, which ended without any overhang at all, like fingernails that have been clipped down to the quick. Duncan loved the generous overhanging roofline on all four sides of his own blocky house with its deep front porch, where he felt sheltered and safe.
Still Life with Monkey Page 2