While she was talking with Halloran, she had looked for Owen Whitlock, the nearly elderly associate (and her favorite person in the office) who had for decades crafted Billy Corrigan’s striking and elaborate architectural models that beguiled clients and helped win projects. His work area was bare and neat, and his drafting lamp was off. He was part-time these days, in a phased retirement, and when he did come in to the office, his role was to mentor and instruct the couple of eager young kids on staff who now did most of the model work, the plans for which were now almost entirely computer-generated. But Owen had gone to the Cape with his family over Thanksgiving and had stayed up there to spend time with the grandchildren who lived in Boston, Halloran told her. He wouldn’t be back in the office until the start of the new year. Owen Whitlock was the Corrigan & Wheeler employee she trusted the most, and if he had been the one asking her how Duncan was really doing, she would probably have given him a less sanguine reply.
Also missing from the office these days was Wendy Lewis, the recently-retired office manager who had kept Billy Corrigan’s offices under efficient control for decades. Nobody knew how old she was, and there were rumors that she was Billy Corrigan’s aunt, or cousin, but nobody was sure where she came from or what her connection was. Lewis, as everyone called her, knew everything about everyone. Though she frightened the interns, she was fantastically diplomatic with cranky, demanding clients, most of whom confided usefully to her about their concerns, which she could then relay to the architects before small problems blossomed into larger issues. Since Billy’s death she had been openly mother-hennish about Duncan while cold-shouldering the other partners; Duncan was the only partner who was sorry when she retired. She had been replaced by Jeffrey Marks, a young and obsequious bow-tied modern design monster who, even after six months, persisted in asking Laura if he could inform Duncan what her call was in reference to before he would put her through. Did he really not recognize her name, if not her voice, after all this time? Or did he just hate her for his own reasons?
“It’s about shipping the dozen giraffe saddles,” Laura would reply. Or, “There’s an urgent matter concerning Mr. Wheeler’s toaster warranty. Is he there?”
“Please undo all the brass clasps on the envelopes,” Duncan said. “Slow, please, do you mind doing that more slowly, so Ottoline can watch how those work? Wait, also would you unroll those roughs—don’t tear them! And stick them down with drafting dots, or weight them at the corners with something? Carefully, please.”
“Don’t be so irritable! Is everything okay, Duncan?”
“Everything is perfect. Beyond perfect. Life is beautiful. Never better. ”
As she slid the thick bundled documents from the first big envelope, being careful to make no sudden movements that might stir up Miss FussyMonkey, Laura tried again. “No, really, Dunc, how are you? Seriously. How was your day?”
“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”
“Thank you, Mr. Beckett. Okay, don’t talk to me. Dinner will be in about half an hour. Do you mean to let her scribble all over the Steiner electricals?”
Did some of Duncan’s remoteness begin before the accident? Was it entirely about his paralysis? There had certainly been a subtle shift, a distancing, since the spring, something that had gone unacknowledged between them. They still laughed together at the absurdities of the world, they were friendly and supportive of each other, they each had interesting work they cared about, they were both serious readers with overlapping preferences, they enjoyed watching some television shows together, they shared a taste for certain old movies, they both loved the choices they had made in their house, they collaborated on elaborate dinners from time to time, with Duncan doing most of the cooking and Laura prepping and cleaning up. Duncan loved to work in the garden, something that originated with a powerful recollection of helping his father prune an arbor laden with fragrant, climbing old roses. Laura really didn’t love the toil of gardening, but she admired Duncan’s fantastically composed flowerbeds. It was another piece of their shared identity; their garden was famous in the neighborhood, and they both took pleasure in the details of their house on Lawrence Street.
Above all, until now, they had shared the hovering possibility of a baby. Each of them had been secretly optimistic and then secretly pessimistic at different moments. Laura reminded herself when Duncan seemed disconcertingly distant in some unquantifiable way that he might have been anxious about the possibility they would never conceive. The enervating urgency of fruitless procreative sex had made Laura and Duncan’s love life increasingly less romantic in recent months. Sometimes it had felt like an obligation, a chore like any other necessary calisthenic that must be performed in order to achieve a goal. Had all the “trying,” how Laura hated that word, “trying,” had all that effort to conceive actually pushed them farther apart? Sometimes in recent months they still had that erotic purposeful charge, but not always. And now all that was in the past. What would their marriage be like, without their lovemaking to keep them close, like a re-set on the entropy and drift of each day? It would have happened sooner or later anyway. Maybe. They were older now. Laura wondered if this coolness was simply where everyone ended up sooner or later. After all, her breasts sagged a bit, they had both developed crows’ feet, Duncan’s hairline was receding, and he had a definite bald spot. Why would their sex life not also start to sag over time? Change was inevitable, even if it wasn’t desirable.
But Laura was bothered by those muted moments of lying under Duncan while he charged over her energetically and intently with a disconcerting detachment that had become increasingly evident to her in recent months. Though they were trying to conceive a baby, something they both wanted, she had begun to feel at times as if Duncan had little idea that she was there with him. She had just about decided to call a marriage counselor in the fall, if things hadn’t improved between them by the end of the summer.
Laura had witnessed some of their long-married friends go through these flat spells and then come back together stronger than ever, better than ever. She had made a note a while ago of someone who sounded good, and she had even looked up her phone number and address (it was one of several Victorian houses on Bradley Street that now contained therapist offices in what had once been bedrooms and parlors and dining rooms).
Laura was full of resolve and intention about keeping the long view in their marriage. She read every magazine article and advice website she could find about couples and relationships, and was reassured by all the recapitulation that no matter how faithful and devoted a couple might be to one another, every marriage went through these low periods, these rough patches. Especially when the question started to feel as if it was changing from when they would have their first baby to if they would have a baby at all, life in the present moment had started to feel like a holding pattern, a long pause when fate was going to take them in one direction or the other. Surely this should have made them feel closer than ever, in it together. But it didn’t.
One article made the point that partners sometimes took turns carrying the marriage along—you carry, I’ll rest; you rest, I’ll carry. This was comforting, yet at the same time, considering this model made Laura realize that she had been the one carrying them for a while. That was okay, an investment in their future. It felt right. The long view was what had always mattered. Everything they had and everything they hoped for, this life of theirs, Laura reassured herself, was itself enough to keep them going with sheer momentum through the uncertain times.
Laura and Duncan were well-matched, in their way. She had married him because he was a little cold and distant, and she knew he wouldn’t notice or mind her own deficiencies. Duncan had married her, she knew, in her heart, because he recognized in her a kindred spirit, someone who burned on an equally low flame. She had once read (in a mildewed English novel she had found on a shelf at a B&B one rainy weekend in Maine), and never forgot, a theory that men with “something wrong” tend to marry
foreign women “because they can’t tell.” Whatever is missing or inadequate will get lost in translation and won’t be missed. The title, author, and plot of the novel were long gone from her memory, but this one wise epigrammatic remark surfaced in Laura’s thoughts from time to time.
She had always imagined that when they had children they would grow closer, the gap between them closing inevitably once they shared a genetic throw of the dice. Instead, the children they didn’t have had not only led to a subtle tension and wary space between them, but had also led to the diminution of most of their local friendships, as one by one all the young couples they knew from work or through one of the many other webs of connections that linked people in New Haven—Yale events, museum openings, concerts, theater, tennis—started to have babies and became families. Most of their friends were young married couples their own age, so this progressive shift had left them weirdly nearly friendless.
Even faraway friends, like Laura’s University of Connecticut college roommate Ann, who had been a real confidante for years (and had essentially masterminded their wedding party at the New Haven Lawn Club), had become remote. After a few years working in New York at a brokerage firm, Ann met and quickly married a prosperous English banker and moved to Tokyo, then Geneva; they had two adorable children who called her Mummy and a nanny who called her Mrs. Blackstone. The annual Blackstone family Christmas card and newsletter was the only communication from Ann at this point, and the confiding, stay-up-all-night-with-their-wine-and-coffee-and-wine conversations of years past were long gone.
Laura not only missed Ann Conklin, she missed Ann’s mother, Louise, who had been a funny, caring woman who would often chat with Laura if Ann wasn’t there when she phoned. Her obituary had caught Laura’s eye a couple of years back, and reading the details of the private funeral for Mrs. Conklin made Laura realize that Ann, her only child, must have traveled to Greenwich, must be there right now, but she hesitated to call her, after all this time. When a week had passed, and Laura had not heard from Ann, she looked on Facebook (where she had an account that she rarely checked), and easily found Ann’s page, which had pictures posted the day before of her children sitting on the Torosaurus sculpture in front of the Peabody Museum, not four blocks from her house, an apparent part of a day trip to see the sights of New Haven that also included a stop at Pepe’s for pizza. That was some four years ago, and there had been no communication between them since.
When they were at a dinner party with people they had known for years, and Laura was invariably nominated to go read a bedtime story to someone else’s toddler, she experienced a raw grief. She was a terrific reader-aloud, but kissing other people’s babies goodnight on the tops of their downy heads, tucking them with the requisite special stuffed animal under the covers of their cozy little beds, leaving the door to the room open just the right negotiated amount, with a jolly twirling nightlight lamp casting a pretty parade of pastel shadows across the ceiling and walls, saying goodnight, sleep tight, one last time, and then another last time, and then a final last time, good night, sleep tight! she felt such sorrow and anguish that she could hardly gather herself back together to return to the grown-up company at the table, knowing she wouldn’t be able to bear seeing these people again.
She missed some of them now. Once genuinely close, these friends with whom Laura had shared the smallest details of her family history and her daily life were now preoccupied with their hectic families, and they had all easily filled in the friend spot formerly occupied by Laura and Duncan with other couples who had children and shared all the myriad daily joys and stresses of family life. Added to this was what Duncan dubbed “the New Haven problem,” which was the reality that a college town packed with people who had come for medical or architecture or law schools and then ended up staying and putting down roots, was a town full of mid-career professionals who weren’t all going to make partner or get tenure.
They lost a number of good friends over the years, and potential good friends, too, all the doctors and lawyers and professors of economics, who took offers in Denver and Seattle and Chicago. All the promises about keeping in touch had been sincere, but email and a phone call every few months dwindled inevitably over time, especially once those friends found new sustaining connections and started to develop friendships with other families with children. The friends with children who hadn’t left New Haven hardly noticed that Laura and Duncan hadn’t been free for dinner, didn’t call them back quickly, and gradually stopped asking them over. Without schism or rupture, those relationships had all been gently set down.
None of their friends had noticed this deliberate withdrawal, it seemed to Laura, who had done too good a job offering plausible excuses to avoid making plans with any of them. She had promised herself that if she and Duncan had a baby—when they had a baby—those friendships would be easily revived.
The New Haven people in their life with whom Laura still remained in touch had become friendly acquaintances who had each made a single visit to the hospital after the accident. Duncan’s grim mood had not rewarded them for their efforts, and even the parking at Yale-New Haven Hospital was an arduous, time-consuming pursuit for busy young parents. None of them had tried to renew the friendship or make a plan to get together with Laura on her own. Duncan’s accident was like cancer—everyone they knew was grateful and relieved it had not happened to them. It’s a universal response to accidents, to cancer, to all calamity and misfortune. Each of these acquaintances had made their dutiful visits and had then moved on. Some had brought small gifts: books Duncan couldn’t hold to read and CDs he had no means of playing. (And when would he ever have wanted to listen to and benefit from the alleged healing properties of an Echinacea Serenade, for god’s sake?) It wasn’t deliberate callousness or cruelty when anyone failed to keep in touch, it was just the way life aims people in different directions.
In the first weeks of their life with a monkey, Laura had learned the hard way that when Ottoline was perched on Duncan it wasn’t a good idea to reach out to touch him, or extend a hand in his direction to give him something, let alone try to kiss him or hug him, when coming or going. Ottoline had lunged at her a couple of times while scolding her shrilly, and once had snatched her glasses off her face, scratching Laura’s nose with a sharp fingernail. The Institute people had walked them through (an unfortunate choice of terms, but those were, in fact, Martha’s exact words) these early stages of settling in with Ottoline. Laura understood all the reasons why Ottoline’s primary bond was with Duncan, her alpha. It was all hierarchical, and she was at the bottom, the odd man out in this little tribal triangle. It made sense, but she hadn’t anticipated what it would feel like.
Laura had carefully studied all the Institute materials before they met Ottoline. Sometimes, despite her thorough understanding of the principles of bonding and hierarchy that made the relationship succeed, she really felt left out. Whenever Laura walked into the room where they were, or even passed by in the hallway on her way from the kitchen to the stairs, there was a chance Ottoline would react by changing her position and chattering at Laura to stay away, stay away, stay away or else! If Laura moved toward Duncan too abruptly, even now, Ottoline would start shrieking at her with anxious open-mouthed squeals, He’s mine! He’s mine! He’s mine! while bobbing up and down aggressively. It was unnerving. When Laura backed away, Ottoline would pull herself up tall in his lap, holding Duncan’s chest strap with one hand, as if claiming ownership, scolding her and repeatedly wiping the back of the other hand down her fuzzy front in a dismissive, brushing-off gesture. Away with you, begone! Are you still here? Take a hint! Take a hike! We don’t need you! I brush you off!
Laura could feel that Duncan enjoyed these moments. He smiled and petted her reassuringly. Talk about being in ecstatic cahoots! Each time Ottoline bristled at her defensively and clung to him, and Laura retreated, Duncan seemed both amused and also more concerned about Ottoline’s delicate feelings than about Laura’s reaction to
the insulting scolding by the zealous guardian on his shoulder. His acceptance of this pattern could be reinforcing it, Martha had told her, and she promised she would work with Duncan to encourage him to be the one to make the disapproving Uh-Uh correction to remind her that this was rude.
Despite this behavior, Ottoline clearly felt settled and more confident, and had begun to trust Laura. Away from Duncan, she changed her tune, and had become increasingly playful and affectionate with Laura. Sometimes, while Duncan was in his room being put through all the laborious steps in his daily care routine by one of the personal care assistants who came to the house each day, Laura took Ottoline upstairs to the bedroom, where they played and cuddled on the bed.
The first week of Ottoline’s placement with them, a team of Institute trainers had occupied the house for several long hours of each day, helping them all find their way. The diaper lessons had been strenuous for Laura and for Ottoline. Step One: Cut hole in center of diaper for the tail. Step Two: Thread diaper all the way down the tail. Step Three: Win argument with Ottoline about the whole enterprise and immobilize her on her back with a bribe (a blueberry) long enough to tape diaper in place, with tapes in the back where they would be less tempting to remove.
The second week, they were on their own, with phone support. Laura had observed a monkey bath at the Institute, and had studied all the steps in her handbook, but since Ottoline’s placement, the team had suggested not even attempting a bath in those first days on their own, simply to avoid stressing Ottoline. Giving her the first overdue bath at the end of that second week had been a small crisis for Laura, who had phoned the Institute in tears to ask for emergency trainer support when it was over, after she and Ottoline had exhausted each other in a battle of wills, and a wet, soapy, shivering monkey had retreated to her cage, pulling the cage door shut behind her with something like a slam even before Laura could say Door!
Still Life with Monkey Page 8