His blistered flesh had healed very slowly (there were still dressings that had to be changed daily), because the deep, oozing wounds had developed a vicious infection, which had led to a devastating gut infection which knocked him flat, and it was all a clusterfuck, an avoidable and utterly discouraging setback that had landed him in the hospital again, for ten days. A hospital rabbi had come to call on him one afternoon, because Laura had thoughtlessly ticked the box on the hospital admission form identifying Duncan as Jewish. The wisdom of the Torah has been given to us by God, the rabbi told him, settling in beside the bed for a chat. The only religion that could possibly interest me is one without God, Duncan told the rabbi, before closing his eyes and keeping them closed until he heard the rabbi’s departing footsteps. Lying there, developing a pressure sore that was still a problem, smelling the foulness that ran out of his wrecked body, he had made the decision. Six months. He would give it six months.
Duncan wanted his iced coffee. Laura would prepare it for him the way he liked it: fresh, strong coffee poured over lots of ice, with a swirl of milk and a tiny splash of maple syrup. Preferably Grade B maple syrup. He was impatient for Laura to finish her garden tour or whatever it was they were up to out there in the crisp autumn sunshine without him. Didn’t they want to see how well he was doing with Ottoline? Surely Martha should be observing their bonding. Was it even safe to leave them alone this way? Didn’t Laura want see what was going on so she could be right about one more thing, so she could hoist her invisible flag of moral superiority just a little higher?
Since he had been home from this last hospitalization, she had got into this habit of taking visitors, even, at times, his personal care assistants when they arrived for or departed from their shifts, “to see the garden,” which was clearly a ploy to have conversations he couldn’t overhear. Was she complaining to Martha about his unpleasantness and gloom? Or was she having one of her noble days, soaking up sympathy and praise for her patience and fortitude in this disastrous situation? She had never before spent so much time in their backyard, except when they had people over, and on those occasions she would always accept praise graciously for the exuberant perennial borders. It was all Duncan’s vision, she would demur, which implied, falsely, though she never literally claimed it, that she did in fact have a hand in the hours of planting and weeding and deadheading in the garden.
“What are they doing out there, Ottoline?” he asked experimentally. She cheeped, responding to her name, and hopped from his lap up onto his shoulder, lifting her lead with her tail gracefully, the better to check through his hair some more. He cheeped back, imitating her noises, and she made a clicking, purring sound. Duncan willed Laura to come back in the house and make his iced coffee, and bring it to him with a long flexible straw, and place it on the tray she would clip to his chair. If he was having a clumsy day with his one partially useful claw of a hand, which he was, despite the daily tenodesis grip exercises that were supposed to help, Laura would guide the straw to his mouth and he would sip gratefully and resentfully, because every moment of every waking hour had these patience-requiring complications and compromises. Maybe it was possible Ottoline could make this different, maybe she really could do things for Duncan that he couldn’t do for himself. All kinds of things.
He badly wanted Laura back in the kitchen right now, available to fulfill his needs, even as he relished rare moments in a day, like this one, when he was alone in the house and he could just exist without accepting ministrations, without having to ask someone for something he wanted or needed. There were five different strangers who came and went on a schedule that Laura managed skillfully. From one day to the next these personal care assistants—PCAs—each took care of him. Hours of every day were devoted to hygiene, maintenance of his bowel program, the assisted coughing regimen, catheter changes, clothing changes, all the careful, patient maneuvers, the transfers in and out of his bed and wheelchair. Four women and a man, each of them kind and capable. Laura had started saying that thing people say, that Cathy and Darlene and Mounika and Ida Mae and Wendell had each become “just like family.”
But what does that mean, just like family? Laura herself was an only child of a single mother who apparently had no relatives she cared to know. Laura had never met a single blood relation other than her mother’s father, whom she met once, and he was now long dead. She wouldn’t know where to begin to look for her father. Between them, their only living parent was Laura’s poor demented mother, who now lived in a nursing home. Other than his weird, semi-functional twin brother, the only family Duncan could claim were a few distant aunts and great-aunts and great-uncles in places like Florida and Myrtle Beach, and a few cousins—their children—dull, unimaginative people who lived their boring, contented lives in Hoboken and Great Neck. Just like family as in just like tedious people with whom you have nothing in common at all, beyond a genetic bond? Just like all the relatives you only ever see at funerals and you don’t care if you ever see again? Just like family except pleasant and steadily employed taking care of a smashed, helpless cripple?
Even with the personal care assistants present at crucial intervals each day, Duncan felt that he was perpetually asking Laura for something. She was perfectly willing to do whatever he asked, as she so often reminded him, but even so, he minded the small deprivations of minor comforts and adjustments he didn’t feel he had the right to demand continually. She never ground enough pepper onto his food. For some reason she just twisted the small blue pepper grinder (they had bought it years ago at an outdoor market in the Périgord, to take on a memorable picnic hike to see Roman ruins, along with two blue-checked napkins, a jar of duck confit, a local runny cheese in wax paper, a crusty baguette, and a slightly sweet Bergerac they had to drink from the bottle, having made no provision for glasses) a couple of times and then set it down, even though she ought to realize that Duncan had always been a vigorous grinder of pepper at nearly every meal. It was a small thing, but every day was now a broken series of unsuccessful gestures, and there was something ugly about this life that had once been so rich in small quotidian pleasures. What could they still be looking at in the backyard? What kind of conversation were they having so deliberately out of earshot?
He hit the control again and tilted himself a little more upright before rolling over to the side window. Ottoline scrambled across his chest onto his other shoulder, lifting the leash behind her delicately with her tail, like a lady raising her skirts to step over a puddle. They gazed out at the world together. Here they were, the two of them. This is what it would be like. Suddenly, Ottoline uncoiled herself from her perch by his left ear and extended one arm with the expertise of an infielder reaching for an easy line drive, snatching the fly that had been buzzing and bumping fitfully on the window. She hopped down into his lap and pinched the fly between two fingers skillfully to kill it, before rolling it between her palms into a ball—precisely the way Duncan remembered rolling dough balls out of sandwich bread at overnight camp—and then she popped it into her mouth.
As she chewed her pulverized morsel, Ottoline gazed up at Duncan. He praised her softly, Good girl! imitating Martha’s nursery school tone, though he wasn’t certain if devouring flies skillfully qualified as praiseworthy behavior by Institute standards, and she reached up with one hand and patted his face, chirping softly and looking him in the eye, meeting his gaze, holding his gaze. Duncan was flooded with intense feeling he didn’t understand. As tears began to brim in his eyes, Ottoline chirped and touched his face again. She stroked his stubble and then she put her forefinger against his upper lip, as if hushing him, soothing him the way his grandmother had when he was a little boy, when she would come into their room at bedtime and tell her grandsons her Talmudic story about the angels sent by God to every baby.
First the angel teaches each baby the entire Torah, Grandma Rose would say, then the angel hushes the learned baby with a finger pressed right here on the baby’s upper lip, right under that little nose, a
nd here she would press her finger first on Duncan’s upper lip and then on Gordon’s, and in this way the angel would make this indentation we all have, shushing each baby so he will keep his knowledge secret. Ottoline stroked his upper lip again with that gentle and familiar gesture, gazing up at him lovingly, not minding his secrets.
TWO
Todd Walker’s gentle touch on Duncan’s neck
TODD WALKER’S GENTLE TOUCH ON DUNCAN’S NECK was a startling and soothing blip of kindness against the hateful burn of the hornet sting just above his Adam’s apple. The bold viciousness of the sting shocked Duncan. A moment before, he and Todd had been depositing their armloads of drawings and blueprints, along with job binders stuffed with work orders and town permits, into the oven-like cargo space in the back of Duncan’s Volvo wagon after their site visit. Then came the sudden violent injection of fire into his neck.
The car had been parked for nearly four hours in the fifteen-minute zone along Indian Point Road at the top of the Stony Creek town dock, the usual parking ticket tucked under a wiper blade. Duncan got a ticket each time he made a site visit to the Steiner house on Biscuit Island, not only because wherever he went he was always running a few minutes late, but also because of the added complications on this project of the fifteen-minute boat ride to the job site, and the waits on either side of that.
On every site visit, Duncan was inevitably in too much of a hurry to park somewhere a little farther away in a valid street space or in the municipal lot, no matter how often he meant to leave the office early enough to park the car legally. It wasn’t clear if racking up parking fines by hogging a fifteen-minute space for several hours a couple of times a week was a positive or negative for his firm’s relationship with the village. Found money for the village, yes, but also arrogant flatlander behavior that was probably resented. The firm should probably make some donations to the town library or the athletic association, and any other civic association they could support, in order to stay in the good graces of residents who frequently sat on multiple town boards.
If pushed, in Duncan’s experience, some small town commissions in Connecticut would play the ace—the possibility of a Native American burial mound on the land. Waiting for a state archeologist to inspect the site and research the town records and write an authorizing report before a teaspoon of soil could be shifted could delay a project for a year. As it was, obtaining all the permits and approvals required to start the job had made abundantly evident to everyone working on the Steiner House at Corrigan & Wheeler just how unsympathetic Stony Creekers were to the Steiner family’s desire to treat themselves to a home gym, wine cellar, screening room, and poolside entertainment pavilion.
As he shoved the parking ticket into the Steiner job binder already stuffed with an accumulation of older parking tickets and other miscellaneous billable receipts, Duncan was still feeling lightheaded and slightly queasy from the diesel fumes and the choppy ride back from Biscuit Island on the ferry, one of two commercial boats piloted by loquacious captains who provided commentary for tourists about each of the islands as they meandered from one to the next. In the morning they had taken the more efficient charter ferry directly to Biscuit Island, but instead of waiting for the ferry to come chugging back for them, nearly an hour after it had failed to appear at the agreed-upon time, which had happened before (because so many Thimble Islanders used the ferry in season to make grocery and liquor store deliveries as well as haul supplies, which included, for several houses, enormous multiple drums of potable water), they had hailed the next passing tour boat, which was occupied by about a dozen tourists, most of them older couples, sitting complacently in the shade enjoying their five-dollar excursion. The unscheduled Biscuit Island stop was an adventure in itself for the tourists, and several of them took photographs. Duncan and Todd had stood together at the aft railing most of the way back to the Stony Creek marina.
Todd had seemed to enjoy the motion of the boat, standing squarely with his hands clasped behind his neck, balancing effortlessly, staring out into the blue day in a reverie as the sun glimmered in the down on the back of his hands, his half-buttoned white shirt fluttering around him like a topsail.
Duncan had tried to match Todd’s precision and grace. He had once skied flawlessly down an entire run in Killington behind an exceptionally beautiful skier, a local guy in his twenties who worked Ski Patrol shifts in the winter and took construction jobs in the summer. They had shared the chairlift to the top of the mountain, and Duncan had skied behind him all the way down, staying in his swooping tracks, following the lovely rhythm of his sweeping turns, exhilarated by this borrowed agility. Now Duncan stood beside Todd, mirroring his insouciance: standing tall, riding the swells, balancing without touching the railing, his hands clasped behind his head. But Duncan couldn’t match his equipoise and kept staggering against the railing, knocked off-kilter by the way the ferry bumped over the irregular swells, a losing struggle with awkwardness and nausea. Failed sprezzatura.
Finally Duncan dropped his hands to his sides and turned away, unsteadily seeking a bench in the shade with the tourists, hating the glare, the diesel stink, and the engine din. Todd was endlessly adaptable, it seemed. Duncan was just not made of the same stuff as the prosperous denizens of the Thimbles, who took pride in all the complexities and discomforts of daily living in their little New England archipelago.
He never saw the hornet, but Todd, the possessor of a varied collection of delicate, papery shards of honeycombed hornet nests, caught a glimpse as it helicoptered away.
“Big, bad motherfucker of a Vespa.”
“Like the scooter? What?” Duncan couldn’t think at all for a moment as the bomb of venom burned hotter at his throat. He realized he was crying. He swallowed a sob as he took an unsteady step in no direction, and then another, going in a small circle behind the car, clenching his fists and trying not to panic about the possibility of his throat closing. He heard himself emitting a grunting pant like an animal caught in a trap. His heart was galloping. He had never felt anything like this.
Duncan was known at Corrigan & Wheeler for his reserve and his calm demeanor. He knew his employees liked to imitate certain hesitations in his speech, the vestiges of his childhood stutter, a pause between words and sentences that evinced his thoughtful pursuit of clarity and precision in language as in his architectural designs. (He once overheard bursts of laughter from the copy room accompanying an associate’s flawlessly intoned, “I … will … have … a … chicken … salad sandwich … on … rye . . . . . . . . . . . toast.”)
Duncan enjoyed site visit days like this with Todd. He liked the feeling of being in charge, the wise senior architect, mentor to the ambitious, deferential apprentice. Now, in an instant, Duncan felt helpless in front of this twenty-five-year-old junior draftsman who was always trying to impress him.
Todd was a bustling, carelessly graceful young man who moved through every minute of his life as if he was on the verge of careening down a mountain or diving under a wave. He possessed an innate competence and openness that made people like him. He was unabashed in his desire for Duncan’s approval of his work. Duncan was reserved and measured in his approbation, though he secretly indulged himself by being a little more fascinated by Todd Walker than he felt he ought to be or would ever want anyone to recognize. There was nothing more to it. The famous Duncan Wheeler hesitation and reserve created a useful distance. Now, in this moment, he was helpless as he let Todd take him by the arm and steer him a few cautious steps over to the low blocks of Portland brownstone that bordered the little park adjacent to the marina.
Todd pushed Duncan’s shoulders gently downward until he was sitting on the seawall, and then he bent over solicitously, carefully tracing the swollen zone around the sting with a delicate touch, just grazing the side of Duncan’s neck lightly with his fingers. Duncan sat still with his eyes closed, his hurtling heart insisting and insisting. He tried to remember the correct word for this. Tachycardia. Fibrillation
. Arrhythmia. Surely, one of those. His mother’s heart condition in her final years had expanded his cardiac vocabulary. A-fib? Not a lion heart but a lying heart. He opened his eyes. Todd was gone.
He was over at the nearby ice locker across from Thimble Marine Service. Duncan watched as Todd fished deep inside along the front edge for something. Oh, clever lad, he was feeling for the inevitable loose ice on the bottom that had escaped from broken bags. Todd grabbed a couple of handfuls of ice and placed them on the grass, no, he was bundling the ice into that big white old man’s handkerchief he always carried. Like his pocket watch and his winter galoshes that buckled, the handkerchief was one of Todd Walker’s carefully curated details that Duncan found endearing yet also just a little irritating. As was true of so many of his generation, Todd thought he was entirely original in all of his gentleman hobo hipster choices. His architectural design work, the few times he was given opportunities to be wholly original, was actually far more inventive than his personal style, which included mitten-knitting and cigar-box-banjo strumming. In winter there were dizzying combinations of plaid flannel and touching quarts of bizarrely-flavored rhubarb chutney (made with spices brought back from his trip to India). This homemade tracklement, in pale blue antique canning jars with zinc lids, had been placed on every desk or drafting table at Corrigan & Wheeler at Christmas. The previous snowy winter, Todd had arrived more than once on wooden snowshoes; when he walked around the office in his vintage corduroy knickers and woolen leggings, he squeaked. Did he compete in hoop-trundling tourneys on the weekend? Duncan’s secret mental nickname for Todd Walker was Penrod.
Still Life with Monkey Page 4