Still Life with Monkey

by Katharine Weber

  Now Todd was standing over him, holding the swaddled ice in his two hands. He gently placed the cold bundle against Duncan’s neck and held it there. The beginning of relief, or at least the idea of it. After a moment, he switched to one hand in order to pick up one of Duncan’s hands from his lap and guide it gently in place so Duncan could take over holding the ice pack himself. Duncan could feel his heart slow down.

  “Better?”

  Duncan looked for the horizon to anchor himself, but the harsh glare of sunlight sparkling off the choppy water tilted him back and made him feel as if he were still bobbing on the nauseating Thimble Islands ferry. Did he feel better or worse? He nodded anyway, trying to surf the vertiginous sensations and hoping that he was in fact sensing a slight dimming of the nearly electrical pain current glowing down his neck.

  Twenty minutes later, the ice had melted, though Duncan continued to hold Todd’s wadded, dripping handkerchief against his neck. He had tried to stay focused on observing the plovers picking their way through the marsh grass at the water’s edge, while circling gulls occasionally let out raucous cries and dropped down into the water and disappeared, popping up moments later to bob on the swells. His heart rate had returned to normal and now he had started to shiver, even in the baking sun, suddenly feeling drenched in his own cooling sweat. Watching over him, Todd had devoured a coffee ice cream cone from Thimbleberry in precise clockwise bites with a deft turn-bite-turn-bite system.

  On their way to Stony Creek that morning, as they passed a Branford farm stand with a big CORN sign out front, just before the turn for the marina, they had chatted desultorily about family food traditions, and had agreed on the best way to butter an ear of corn—namely, a two-handed twirling rotation of a steaming (boiled for no more than four minutes!) ear of corn directly on a concaved stick of butter dedicated to this function.

  Duncan’s Hoboken cousins made a barbaric practice of rubbing a pat of butter onto the corn with a folded slice of sandwich bread, without apparent sensitivity to the egregious crumb factor. Laura did this too. It drove him nuts. His twin brother didn’t like butter on his corn at all, which was probably just as well, since when Gordon had bicycled on back roads from Madison to New Haven in time for dinner a few days earlier, they had had the first local corn of the season, and when Duncan drove him home (it had gotten late, and it was raining), with the bike stowed in the back of the Volvo, he had noticed multiple stray kernels in his brother’s beard, which was also startlingly threaded with gray, which had made Duncan realize that his own chin whiskers, if he ever let them grow for more than a weekend, would look exactly the same (minus the corn).

  Todd had then told Duncan about his older brother’s wife from Kennebunkport, whose family sliced the kernels off the cobs in a crazy synchronized ritual involving heirloom silver fish knives and cobalt finger bowls, and they had laughed together about that. As he continued to hold the melting ice against his neck, Duncan watched Todd unroll the last furl of dunce cap paper from the pointed cone end, which he popped into his mouth and crunched down in a final perfect, disciplined, precise bite.

  The elegant Corrigan & Wheeler addition and renovation to the Steiner house, which was called Spartina, were finally underway, despite so many delays and problems that it had seemed an unbuildable, hopeless project more than once. One of three houses on Biscuit, this Victorian wedding cake of a cottage had long ago been the summer home of a minor Jazz Age movie star few people could remember, though she was once famous for the way she wiggled her bottom when she sang, and was said to have been the inspiration for Betty Boop. The house sat squarely in the middle of a granite outcropping punctuated by tufty clumps of the Spartina grass for which the cottage had been named in 1897 by the first owner, an amateur marine biologist who drowned beside his rowboat under mysterious circumstances, at low tide, a stone’s throw from the town dock, just before his house was finished. Spartina occupied the better, seaward half of Biscuit Island and was the grandest of the three houses on the two-acre island. The other two simpler little Capes had been built in the 1920’s by the forgotten movie star to house her summer staff. Her legendary weekend house parties were mentioned in several memoirs of the era.

  Spartina was ornamented with Corinthian columns supporting the deep porches on every side. The majestic white house was replete with gingerbread trim—pierced frieze boards, scrolled brackets, sawn balusters, and braced arches—and the inventory of Victorian un-subtlety included six chimneys, four bay windows, three towers (one surmounted by a widow’s walk that was said to be haunted by the ghost of the drowned biologist’s spinster sister), two turrets, and oriel windows galore.

  The small patch of mowed lawn beside the house was actually a three-hole putting green, and there was a saltwater swimming pool tucked artfully into a rockery at the edge of the leeward side of the island, below which a swathe of rugosa roses sloped down to the seawall constructed of massive gray blocks of Stony Creek granite. An oversized octagonal gazebo squatted on the end of the floating dock.

  Duncan loathed that gazebo, which had clearly come from a catalogue of Amish ready-mades. He thought it was inelegant and disproportionate, a real eyesore, but the Steiners adored it. At their first Corrigan & Wheeler meeting, nearly three years ago (when it was known that Centerbrook was also in a final audition for this plum job), Mimi and Bob Steiner had each told him, in nearly identical words (it was clearly a cherished story they liked to tell about themselves), how a glimpse of the romantic gazebo from the Thimble Island Ferry as they passed by on their way to visit friends on Davis Island for a Fourth of July weekend was one of the reasons they had fallen in love with Spartina before they even set foot on the island. He certainly had no intention of touching it, not now, anyway, though its egregiousness pained him every time he saw it from the water, long before he clambered off the boat onto the pristine, weather-scoured dock where it perched.

  “Never shame your client,” Billy Corrigan admonished Duncan long ago, when he had been employed as a junior draftsman only a few weeks, after his first disastrous meeting with Meg and Hank Waxman. “Always make the client feel smart and creative. Let the client think he is a design partner whose ideas fascinate and inspire you.”

  The Waxman Pavilion had been built on the lawn in the backyard behind the Waxmans’ original Cos Cob house. The initial commission was for a simple guest cottage, but as the project progressed, it had metamorphosed into an award-winning two-story structure twice the size of the original design. The Waxmans slept in the Pavilion when they felt like it, while retaining their stately, traditional main house as a place to keep all but a few of their possessions, do their laundry, and cook most of their meals. When the many Waxman children and grandchildren visited, they all stayed in the main house, while Meg and Hank slept in the Pavilion, like happy children camping in a pup tent in their backyard.

  Within months of its completion, the Waxman Pavilion appeared in various publications (Billy Corrigan employed a great publicist), and it went on to win several design awards. Corrigan’s generous yet intimately-scaled spaces were more than a hat-tip to the American vernacular of his miserable childhood in Nebraska. His essential and abiding mission as an architect was to deliberately evoke the barns, detached kitchens, and smokehouses of rural America for his demanding, rich clients who had never forked hay into a loft or butchered a hog and smoked a ham in their privileged lives, though they loved the architectural gestures and references. His clients were oblivious to the deeply cynical sensibility of his work. Before Billy grew fatigued and declared a moratorium on backyard pavilions, nine other Corrigan clients had commissioned similar elegant play houses so they could escape the formal constraints of their main houses, an impulse Marie Antoinette understood perfectly.

  The reason for that first regrettable visit to the Waxmen (as they were known around the office) in those early days of Duncan’s employment in Billy Corrigan’s office was to show preliminary designs addressing Meg and Hank’s newfound desire
for a dovecote. A dovecote! Duncan had spoken a little too forcefully, almost scornfully, when Meg and Hank Waxman hesitated to accept his elegant plan for a pergola on the west side of the Pavilion that would echo the details of the proposed hexagonal dovecote, thus linking the disparate forms of the two structures. He had spent most of his weekend on the simple elevation drawing. The detail work on this project was Duncan’s first significant assignment in the office that was more than rote drafting, and he was anxious to make the most of it and impress Billy Corrigan. It simply hadn’t occurred to him that, above all, he needed to please Meg and Hank Waxman, whose fortune derived from a vast institutional food service business that specialized in prisons and hospitals across the country. They were dull, friendly people who depended on artists like Billy Corrigan to make them interesting. They seemed to Duncan more like sturdy public school gym teachers than rich design aficionados.

  In that meeting, with his splendid and underappreciated drawing in the center of their original Hans Wegner dining table, Duncan was so eager to make his presentation that he had interrupted Hank and contradicted Meg. By the time they left the meeting, Duncan, as naïve as he was arrogant, was certain that reason had prevailed and aesthetic judgment had carried the day. Billy Corrigan took Duncan off the Waxman Dovecote within hours, a shaming rebuke he never forgot, though in the end, a modified version of his pergola design made them happy, and the Waxman Dovecote became known as a classic Billy Corrigan gesture. Architecture students still studied it avidly.

  At Billy’s funeral, Duncan felt a rogue wave of that old ignominy wash over him when he saw the Waxmans—the Waxmen—both of them now hollowed out by age and startlingly desiccated and spotted and bleached. They had become relics of themselves. Though they still owned and loved their Cos Cob property, they told him ruefully, their accountant insisted, for tax reasons, that they now spend at least a hundred and ninety nights of each year in Boca Raton, in their spectacular new Hugh Newell Jacobsen house. It was scheduled to be on the cover of the June issue of Architectural Digest.

  “We really loved working with Hugh!” Meg told him emphatically. “He was inspired by all of our ideas!” Billy Corrigan was right. Never shame your client.

  Duncan had made a mistake, remaining out in the blazing sun on the return ferry ride for as long as he did, too long, standing there at the railing with Todd. He hated making mistakes. He had left behind, somewhere at the site, his favorite old Panama hat, one of several brimmed hats he wore prudently outdoors to protect his tender bald spot. Another mistake. He had taken it off to swap it for the borrowed, legally required hard hat when they arrived on the site. Todd had brought along in his canvas rucksack his own vintage coal miner’s helmet, complete with a working brass headlamp.

  As the ferry chugged a meandering course from one island to another, while the captain name-dropped both past and current owners, Duncan had tried to breathe normally and keep his gaze on the horizon as he fought his rising seasickness. It was so easy for Todd, standing beside him in his beautiful, confident way. Next time they would have to get more of a commitment from Mr. D, the water taxi captain, about their pickup. Or maybe the office should just buy a damned dinghy and outboard to use for the duration of the job, though there were probably all kinds of mooring requirements and permits and fees and rules about the town dock that would tangle them up, plus it would be a disaster on rainy days. As he gave up and staggered over to a seat, Duncan had been irked with himself for being so susceptible to the rise and fall of the swells on this first sublime day of July. It had been an almost perfect moment.

  Duncan first encountered Todd when he was in the final weeks of his final semester at the Yale School of Architecture, where Duncan lectured and was a visiting critic from time to time. Todd’s prodigious talent dazzled Duncan, though he was measured in his observations of the work during the crit. But he invited him for coffee after class. The invitation did not go unnoticed by nearby architecture students zipping up their portfolios.

  Duncan maintained his impassive demeanor, asking just a few questions while Todd did most of the talking as they sat at an outside table in front of the coffee shop in the bottom of Rudolph Hall. Duncan had a pang of missing the crowded little café with a spectacular view of New Haven that in his student days used to be on the top floor of what was then called the Art & Architecture Building, before the most recent blanding renovation by Gwathmey Siegel of Paul Rudolph’s brutal concrete monument to himself. But it was nice to be outside. There was something about the spring afternoon on York Street that day which gave it the fresh, optimistic air of a drawing for a presentation of a beautifully successful urban streetscape. Time seemed to slow. He could sit there all day, thought Duncan, as he settled into the spindly folding chair and stretched his long legs out in front of him while he gazed across the street at the tidy west facade of the Yale Art Gallery, mapping Louis Kahn’s elegant structure as if he were looking at an axonometric drawing, mentally following the route through the maze of galleries to the conservation lab where Laura was probably working at that very moment.

  For more than an hour, long after their coffee was finished, while each of them kept setting aside awareness of impending lateness to afternoon obligations, Todd had rambled from one topic to the next, almost puppyish in his effort to please and impress Duncan, who occasionally prompted him to keep talking. In fact, Duncan was impressed.

  He offered Todd a position with Corrigan & Wheeler just a few days later. Just as Duncan had been brought in by Billy Corrigan when he was green and inexperienced, stirring jealousies and raising eyebrows among the other architects in the practice, Todd came in as a junior associate, leapfrogging over the usual internship and probationary apprentice slots where he would have worked under one of the senior associates for six months, as was the customary practice. Within a few months Todd had become Duncan’s right hand, his sidekick, his protégé, his lightfoot lad, his acolyte, his scrivener, his amanuensis, as one of the older Corrigan partners, Jack Simon, had once sardonically dubbed Duncan himself, behind his back. But there was a significant difference: Todd Walker was clearly a wonderfully bright and ambitious young architect who would have done well anywhere. It was Duncan who might never have risen to the top in any firm if he had not been chosen and anointed by Billy Corrigan. He never knew that Peter Eisenman had named him to Billy Corrigan and suggested that he hire him, specifically because of that brilliant parody of a Four-Square House. It was a calculated and cynical recommendation on Eisenman’s part, because he recognized his old friend and rival’s narcissistic hunger for just the right reasonably attractive and talented young architect to be his heir apparent. Eisenman saw in Duncan someone who could be content mimicking the Corrigan style flawlessly and perpetually, someone with the necessary talent and polish who could be willing to abrogate his own creative ambitions.

  Duncan had tried to ignore his escalating queasiness with each speeding up and slowing down on the swells as the ferry wove through the outer islands and then circled around for the concluding narration of the history of Sheep Nose, Kettle Rock, Butternut, Bean Stack, Big Dipper, Little Dipper, and then finally Little Hodgson, the nearest island to the town dock.

  Some of the large islands were dotted with little villages of a dozen or more houses, while others were much grander, with just one or two imposing houses. Three of the inhabited Thimbles near Biscuit were very small, each with just a single house perched on a partly-submerged dome of seamed basalt. The siting of those lone houses made Duncan uneasy. He tried to imagine how it could possibly have seemed like a good idea a hundred years ago to row out into Long Island Sound and erect stately homes in such precarious settings. Didn’t anyone recognize that the existence of those dwellings would appear as purposeless and temporary as a dragonfly on a rock?

  Duncan was surprised that Todd didn’t know how to drive stick shift. He was a New York City kid (Dalton, then five years in the architecture program at Cooper Union), and when he was at Yale for h
is graduate degree in architecture he had finally gotten a driver’s license, but Todd had never owned a car. Todd seemed near tears as he admitted that he had simply never learned how to shift gears and use a clutch. They debated whether to call and ask Lloyd, the summer intern who possessed a ratty MGB convertible he had restored himself (Todd had helped him sew a patch on the mossy soft top), to drive out to Stony Creek in somebody’s borrowed car with an automatic transmission so they could swap for the drive back. Was it really necessary? Duncan’s head was clearing, the formerly tilting horizon was now staying appropriately level, and he could no longer feel his heart galloping under his shirt. He swallowed experimentally. The welt just above his Adam’s apple was still quite painful, but it was no longer charged. Partly out of a desire to protect Todd’s pride, and partly out of a desire to enjoy a tiny competitive spark of triumph over this imperfection in his protégé, Duncan decided he was okay to get behind the wheel of the Volvo and make the short drive back into New Haven. The interior of the car was still baking hot. They let the air conditioning run full throttle for a few minutes with all the doors open.

  Duncan stood beside the open driver’s door for a last moment in the fresh air, looking out over the roof of the car to the shimmering blur of horizon where the sea met the sky, out beyond the hazy contours of Potato, Governor, and Cut-in-Two that punctuated the outer harbor. He watched two Thomas Eakins boys loading a skiff with old rope lobster pots at the town dock. He could smell his own sweat in an unusual way. The back of his shirt was still soaked unpleasantly. Duncan stretched to relieve his tight lower back. He ached all over, as if his entire body had been clenched. He rocked his hips forward and back a couple of times the way Laura had shown him, tilting his pelvis, feeling the stretch, feeling his hip bones connecting to his thigh bones, the longest bones in his body—standing independently with his weight on those long bones for the last time.