Still Life with Monkey

by Katharine Weber

  It was apparent that Professor Morris let Ottoline take her own helpings of whatever he was eating throughout the day, a nutritional disaster for her. He appeared to subsist on smoked salmon, scrambled eggs, and junk food. In addition to being allowed to snatch food from his hands or plate, Ottoline was not required to follow many assistance requests and she was not corrected when she ignored commands or otherwise behaved badly. Notes indicate that her regular diet from 2009 through 2012 included unregulated quantities of Professor Morris’s Mint Milano cookies, Krispy Kreme donuts, gummy bears, Cheez Doodles, Pop Tarts, and both peanut butter and Nutella directly from the jar (Ottoline had skillfully adapted to using a pencil as a tool for scooping Nutella and peanut butter from the jar), along with daily portions of her nutritionally balanced monkey chow supplied by the Institute.

  Professor Morris died at the end of January, 2013. As had been the case during Professor Morris’s previous hospitalizations in 2007 and 2009, Ottoline had come back to the Institute to board when he was hospitalized with what turned out to be his final pulmonary infection in the first week of January. When she arrived at the Institute, her intake assessment showed that she was obese (5.8 kilograms) and diabetic. Three months of proper nutrition reduced her weight to an optimal range (3–4 kilograms), and by the end of six months her blood sugar had returned to normal range and she was no longer diabetic. Her training reinforcement that had begun in this time period was completed in twelve months. (She is very bright and receptive to training, but she is also stubborn, and she had many bad habits to unlearn.) Ottoline has been a candidate for placement since the middle of this year. Given her successful bond with Professor Morris, it was noted that priority should be given to an older male recipient if possible.

  Second/New Placement

  The Recipient, Duncan Wheeler, age 37, suffered a C6 complete spinal cord injury in July of this year (car accident in July on Interstate 95 with a passenger fatality). Mr. Wheeler is an architect who heads his own firm. His wife, Laura, an assistant painting conservation technician at the Yale University Art Gallery, has reduced her work commitments and will be Ottoline’s primary caretaker. They do not have children or household pets. They live in a well-maintained three-story home on Lawrence Street in New Haven. Mr. Wheeler’s home office on the ground floor has been converted into a bedroom which will easily accommodate Ottoline’s nighttime cage adjacent to his hospital bed without compromising access with the transfer equipment. There is a second cage for Ottoline in the large kitchen.

  Our placement policy usually requires that our recipients be stable and fully adapted to their activities of daily living in their circumstances, e.g., life in a wheelchair. Whether the disability has been caused by a sudden or gradual loss of lower body function, it is essential that our recipients have a baseline “new normal” as a basis for assessing the best options for a successful placement, which is why we usually require that placements only be considered after twelve months of living in a wheelchair.

  Mr. Wheeler’s situation warrants an exception. Although his spinal cord injury occurred only four months ago, his physical health is stable and the household has been well adapted for his needs. Mrs. Wheeler is knowledgeable and highly competent. It is she who initiated contact with the Institute, with concerns about her husband’s depression and lack of engagement with his surroundings since the accident. She informed us that he has stated the possibility that he will choose to end his life rather than live as a quadriplegic. Waiting eight months to begin a placement match might mean that it would be too late for him to be able to respond positively to a monkey helper and accept an active role in the mutual bonding process. In order to take the first step in considering whether it would be reasonable to make an exception to our policy, I scheduled, with authorization from our placement review committee, a home visit at the Wheeler residence with Ottoline. This was of course another exception to our usual protocol. But as we know, Ottoline is not a standard helper monkey, so it is fitting that her next placement would (like Ottoline herself) bend a number of rules.

  The first placement home visit to the Wheeler residence on 10.21.14 was very successful. Ottoline responded well in a potentially stressful and unfamiliar setting and remained organized. Seeing Mr. Wheeler in a motorized wheelchair, she seemed to recognize him almost instantly as the alpha in her new situation. Though it had seemed likely that Mr. Wheeler would not readily agree to the application for a service monkey, he did not resist the introductory meeting with Ottoline and at the end of that meeting he agreed to accept Ottoline as his Helper Monkey. Plans were made to initiate all set-up and support, to begin the placement the next day, on 10.22.14. M.P.

  FOUR

  “I couldn’t help myself!”

  “I COULDN’T HELP MYSELF!” LAURA DROPPED HER KEYS in the bowl on the table in the foyer, set down her big canvas tote, and threw off her jacket, which she draped on the newel post at the bottom of the stairs. “The entire block of James Street was an intoxicating cloud of chocolate wafting from the exhaust blowers at Zip’s Candies. Oh my god! I don’t know how your staff can work next door to a candy factory. It’s dangerous!”

  “Sorry, what’s dangerous?” Duncan said over his shoulder. He was in the living room, where he had been attempting to read a British architecture journal which lay open on a rolling elevated table in front of him. Ottoline was helping. He had kept forgetting that the command for turning the page was Page! and instead had kept saying Turn!, which caused obedient, literal-minded Ottoline, poised on his shoulder for his next request, to hop down and turn the entire magazine ninety degrees each time he said this. Page, damn it! resulted in her turning a page of the now-sideways magazine backwards, so first he had to request two more Turn!s, then two more Page!s, and after that a final Turn! in order to find his place and read the rest of the article on uses of daylight in sustainable buildings. The piece was not really interesting enough for all this effort, though Duncan had amused himself noting the occurrences of “fenestration” where “windows” would have been less pretentious. He had just given up and let Ottoline scribble energetically all over the Architects Journal with the drawing pen that she had snatched from his desk earlier.

  One lens of his reading glasses was smeared with peanut butter, the consequence of having Ottoline fetch them from the kitchen counter, where Laura had put them when she cleaned up after breakfast. He had rolled into the kitchen, remembering that he had his glasses at breakfast, but they weren’t on the table. There they were, on the counter, back beyond Duncan’s reach. Ottoline had eagerly responded to his Fetch! command, bounding from his shoulder to the countertop to grab them, stopping on the way to fling open the cupboard above her head to forage hopefully for any accessible treat. Ignoring Duncan’s Uh-Uh, Ottoline, Down, Ottoline! commands, she had stopped to unscrew the lid off a jar of peanut butter and scoop out a handful before bounding from the counter back to Duncan with his glasses while greedily chomping down the treat she had awarded herself.

  Now as he rolled his chair back from the table and toggled the control to turn around so he could face Laura squarely, he repeated, “What’s dangerous?”

  “These!”

  “I don’t know what ‘these’ are,” Duncan said irritably as he swiveled. Ottoline hopped from the table as he turned, gathering with her tail the slack leash that tethered her to his chair as she landed on the head support. She snuggled down to her favorite spot by his left ear.

  “Nothing. The chocolate smell billowing out of Zip’s, that’s all I meant,” Laura said, holding up a bag of miniature Say Howdy! candies. “It inspired me to stop at the market for these on the way back from your office, after breathing those chocolate vapors, and look, way marked down Halloween candy.”

  “My mother used to buy Halloween candy for next year right about now, just before Christmas, when it was cheap. Gordy and I used to know all her hiding places. We would devour those little Baby Ruths and Butterfingers, and then Halloween would roll arou
nd and she would go nuts trying to remember where she had stashed that cheap candy we had eaten months before.”

  “Look, miniature fun bars, or whatever they call them.” Laura rummaged in the bag. “I think they were new this year for Halloween. I ate three in the car. They’re just smaller versions of the regular big ones—they come in adorable little dark and white chocolate pairs the size of a gummy bear.”

  “So you’re saying you ate six.”

  “I don’t agree! A single Say Howdy! is a pair. They’re like little black and white twins. I had three pairs.”

  “Whatever. Just make sure you put those where she can’t get them this time, please,” Duncan said. Ottoline was crouching on his shoulder, with both hands in his hair, which she had been busily grooming, but now she tilted inquisitively toward the bag of candy in Laura’s hand. “They are tempting,” Duncan added, hearing his own dismissive tone. “You should probably put them where I can’t get them, either.” As if she didn’t put things out of his reach every day.

  “Want one?” Laura held out the bag, and Ottoline hooted and clambered down from his shoulder, drawn warily by the sweets but also ready to defend him from his wife’s ordinary gesture. When Laura lowered her arm, Ottoline hopped back up to her perch on Duncan’s shoulder again, wrapping her arms around his neck. She clung to him, cheeping anxiously, as was her disconcerting habit whenever Laura came close or moved too abruptly near Duncan. Laura stood still, not meeting Ottoline’s gaze, and tilted her head in friendly submission the way Martha had shown her.

  “Not now. No thanks.” He couldn’t help his impatience. “Ottoline didn’t like that. So were all the latest revised Steiner schematics ready?”

  “I don’t know, Dunc. Whatever they gave me is all in there,” Laura said, gesturing furtively, with her arm close in by her body so as not to re-upset the monkey, in the direction of the big thick envelopes sticking out of the grubby canvas beach tote she had left at the foot of the stairs. He had to turn his chair a few degrees so his gaze could follow her pointing finger. Laura crossed the room and dropped down onto the sofa, put her feet up on the coffee table, and hugged a throw pillow in her lap. “Just give me a moment. I’ll start dinner in a minute.”

  Duncan swiveled back to face her. Was she going to wait for him to ask her specifically to put the envelopes on the rolling adjustable table and bend open the brass clasps? While nobody could forget for a moment that Duncan had lost his mobility, his loss of hand function was subtler. He hated having to ask for help. Each of them so polite with the other. The envelopes were too heavy and bulky for Ottoline to fetch them. Once they were on the table, Ottoline could no doubt pry the clasps up together, but he wasn’t sure how to ask her to do it without being able to demonstrate the task so she could copy it. It wasn’t like pointing at a Fetch! Ottoline! Fetch! object with the red laser dot pointer that clipped to the brace on the back of his left hand. Maybe she could learn how to open and close the clasps from watching Laura, though she might be too distracted by Laura as a potential invader of her space. Everything was a negotiation, and he just wanted to open the damned envelopes.

  Brass clasp, brass clasp, exactly the sort of consonant cluster poor Gordy had spent his Wednesday afternoons attempting to master. Duncan often imagined Gordy trying to pronounce words with sibilant alliterations. He made a mental note (the only kind of note he could easily make) to ask Martha at the next check-in how to go about introducing new tasks like this to Ottoline. In addition to the brass clasps there were some other activities beyond his compromised reach and dexterity that Duncan hoped to add to her repertoire.

  “I’d like to take a look, now, while you’re making dinner,” Duncan said after a long moment. He waited. Laura was slumped in a posture of exhaustion. When she dropped her relentless attempts to engage him in trivial chat, when he caught her staring into the middle distance this way, with a slack, vacant gaze, Duncan felt that he was glimpsing her otherwise well-hidden despair about him. About his despair. After another moment, Laura set the throw pillow aside, combed her hair back out of her face with her fingers, and got up to fetch the tote full of this week’s Corrigan & Wheeler materials for him. She laid the bag on the table and drew out the big, heavy, stuffed envelopes.

  When she was at the office picking up these documents to deliver to Duncan, something she did at least once each week in their new routine, Laura had wondered if his colleagues actually genuinely needed his response to anything, or if they had assembled this bundle of bid documents and reports and drawings simply out of respect for Duncan. Or maybe they were testing him.

  Dave Halloran, the oldest of the partners, had assured her they were ticking along and didn’t want to put any pressure on Duncan, but of course they would welcome and value his feedback, and they wanted to keep him informed about all bids, project reports, change orders, and of course any news about new clients, or old clients, and of course they would all be thrilled to see him again whenever he wanted to come in, or if he wanted to have any meetings at the house, and they would give him whatever amount of work he could handle in the future, of course, but right now but there was no reason for him to take on anything he wasn’t ready for yet. The accident was only what, a little more than four months ago? Duncan should take all the time he needed.

  He and Jack Simon and Austin Bartlett had divided up the major projects, and assigned the rest to the associates, with their close supervision, of course. It was important that the clients felt taken care of, Halloran told Laura, not for the first time, with perhaps a hint of condescension, as if she didn’t understand such things. The firm had lost two jobs that were Duncan’s projects since his accident, perhaps three if one of the farthest out in the pipeline, a pavilion behind an early Corrigan house on Monhegan Island, ended up going to one of Billy Corrigan’s former partners, Arthur Hughes. Hughes, who was based in Boston, was not the only architect actively trying to poach Corrigan & Wheeler clients since Duncan’s accident, only the most blatant.

  The Steiner House was on schedule, Halloran assured her, changing the subject abruptly. Duncan should be glad to know this. If the weather held, now that they had moved inside, they should be able to get the last of the HVAC, plumbing, and electrical done well before spring, and move on to sheetrock and tape, and all the elaborate tile work, that is, if the subs were cooperative about making themselves available to get out there on the days the winter tides allowed them to dock on Biscuit Island. Too bad a site visit was out of the question for Duncan, of course.

  In her half hour there, Laura just couldn’t parse what was really going on at Corrigan & Wheeler. She knew most of the players, but few of them very well. Jack Simon was very corporate and always seemed to her more like a lawyer or banker than an architect, but he was apparently a brilliant managing partner. Austin Bartlett was well-liked by the associates, and she had never heard Duncan say anything negative about him. He and Simon had been partners in a small firm without enough work to keep going before they joined Corrigan & Wheeler.

  Laura had never liked Halloran. Everything she knew and felt about him added to her mistrust of the man. He was always very friendly and deferential toward her, in an irritating courtly way, but he was much too handsomely craggy and outdoorsy. Whenever she was with him, Laura got the feeling that he was secretly convinced of his own superiority to her, to most people, certainly to all women. His shock of unruly white hair gave him a boyish yet distinguished air. He always looked as if he had just returned from a safari or an ice-climbing expedition.

  Halloran had left his devoted wife for a graduate student only a few years older than his two angry teenaged daughters. This had all happened quite a few years ago, but ever since then, any time Laura crossed paths with Dave Halloran or even if Duncan just mentioned his name in passing, that betrayal was the first thing that came to her mind. Wendy Halloran now lived in Brooklyn Heights, where she taught improvisational musical theater. The daughters, who both lived somewhere in California, were not in tou
ch with their father, who had married the graduate student. That’s how Laura thought of her, “the graduate student,” though Lisa Halloran had never finished her dissertation, something to do with Romanesque architecture, and was now the stay-at-home mother of two little boys, Dave Halloran’s do-over family. So Laura held that against him too, the way he had derailed his pretty young wife’s scholarly career (her husband-stealing notwithstanding).

  Duncan liked Halloran’s work. He brought some valuable institutional clients in the door, and headed the commercial side, working primarily on projects for several New England schools and other institutional facilities. But Duncan also had some serious misgivings about Halloran that he had confided to Laura, starting with questions about the way he had finessed some contractual payment agreements with a lucrative country club project in Greenwich. Then there had been something just last year about a possible outright kickback—an elegant standing seam copper roof that appeared on Halloran’s colonial revival house in Guilford, supplied by the same roofing company that won the bid on the new library and classroom quad at Choate.

  When Halloran asked solicitously for Duncan, for how he was really doing, Laura gave him vague, peppy, upbeat answers. Of course the partners would have to take care of business, she didn’t have to be told that. Since the accident she could well imagine all the scrambling, all the anxious client maintenance lunches and dinners. No doubt there had been lots of frantic partner meetings among Dave Halloran, Jack Simon, and Austin Bartlett to discuss all the contingencies, all the possible scenarios depending on whether Duncan would or could ever return to the office.