Still Life with Monkey

by Katharine Weber

  Martha (what would they do without Martha?) had come over that night after dinner to soothe both of them and work out a solution for Ottoline’s objection to being immersed, which was to start in an empty, towel-lined sink rather than try to plunge Ottoline into a full sink of warm soapy water, and to use the sprayer attachment rather than the faucet for a gentle rain of water that would be less upsetting than the noisy gushing column of water that Ottoline disliked.

  Laura looked forward to bath times now that she and Ottoline were over the crisis. Ottoline had begun to take pleasure in her kitchen sink shower baths, cooperating like a lamb, as if it were some other monkey altogether who had been so difficult. When she went too many days between baths, Ottoline developed a ripe, pungent, oily aroma, but when she had been gently lathered with baby shampoo and rinsed (while she cheeped happily and tried to scoop the soap-suds into her mouth as if they were cotton candy), as she air-dried, and her soft fur fluffed out again, she had an appealing spicy fragrance that reminded Laura of the sweet burlap taste of the sorghum syrup her mother had poured on her pancakes when she was little. One of Laura’s few memories of Ohio was sitting in a booster seat at their blue and white enamel-topped kitchen table eating those pancakes with that strange brown syrup. She and her mother had moved to Connecticut when she was six.

  Laura had never given anyone or anything a bath before Ottoline. She grew up without pets, because of her allergies, and she and her mother had lived in a series of rented apartments where pets were discouraged. Her few babysitting experience in her teenaged years had consisted of watching television while doing her homework, eating snacks, and snooping in the desk drawers of the neighbors who employed her to sit around this way so they could go out to dinner while the babysat child slept. She couldn’t recall ever having to deal with a child waking up and needing one thing from her.

  After the first successful monkey ablution, Laura kept replaying the kitchen sink moments in her mind with a certain kind of joy she had never really known before. The long, wiry, dignified body, one moment like that of an agreeable toddler, with that soft, round belly, but in the next instant like a diminutive, plucky little old lady. The way Ottoline had sat still and let her squeeze a sponge over her to rinse the soapy water off her head, her tongue sticking out to catch the stream of water that ran down her face. The way Ottoline had let herself be bundled up in a towel and gently dried all over. Ottoline had quietly gazed up into her face the whole time Laura rubbed her down.

  Whenever a personal care assistant was in the house, Ottoline was locked in one of her two big, roomy cages, usually the one in the kitchen, where she couldn’t see the various ministrations performed by the PCAs on Duncan, either in his room or in the bathroom, from bathing to managing his bowel program and catheter maintenance, to dressing and undressing, the transfers achieved with the brilliantly designed Hoyer lift—a rolling single boom lifter equipped with step-on, lockable brakes. Laura was learning how to do a transfer on her own, from bed to wheelchair and back again, but so far, not that they admitted this to each other, neither Duncan nor Laura felt completely safe when she executed one of these maneuvers without a PCA present.

  Seeing any handling of Duncan made Ottoline go berserk. The quad cough technique, a vital part of Duncan’s routine to keep his compromised lungs clear, was especially upsetting. Every day, usually in the morning when he had the most energy, Duncan would be placed flat on his back on his bed while his PCA performed the rhythmic compressions on his abdomen that helped him to cough more productively. It was a collaborative effort, as he tried to cough on the beat of the compressions. The first few times she watched this being performed, observing helplessly from the doorway, Laura thought it seemed like an attempt by two people to approximate the act of sexual intercourse, which they had only ever overheard. Ottoline was kept well away from these treatments, given how, if from her cage she saw a PCA putting a dressing on Duncan’s perpetual, raw pressure sore at the base of his left hamstring insertion, or simply rubbing moisturizer on Duncan’s increasingly spindly legs, she might shrill and shriek and rattle the door to her cage in an elaborate show of frustration at being thwarted from claiming him, taking care of him, defending him, doing her job.

  Ottoline had no front teeth, only her back molars. This was a necessity the Institute called her life insurance policy, because if one of their helper monkeys were to bite someone who had made a startling arm movement or laughed loudly, or if a person simply seemed too close to the monkey’s alpha person, no matter how understanding the bite recipient might be, no matter how justified the defensive aggression might have felt from the monkey’s point of view, then despite all the years spent on socializing and training, despite the Primate Institute’s significant investment in this monkey, it could all be over. There would be a very real possibility that the monkey could be taken away, treated as just another out-of-control exotic pet that people should know better than to have in the house.

  Laura was taken aback when this was first explained to her. It felt wrong. Pulling the front teeth of a creature designed by nature to forage for her food in the wild seemed unbearably cruel. But it wasn’t up for discussion or debate, and the truth was that countless tense moments had already occurred when Ottoline’s angry, open-mouthed grimacing and chattering had unnerved Laura. It was so clearly in her wiring to display the four large, sharp canine teeth she would have possessed in the wild.

  At those moments, when Laura glimpsed a vestige of the wild animal who ought to be living in the tree canopy of Costa Rica in a merry tribe of tufted capuchins, she was grateful (despite her guilt about it) that Ottoline didn’t have those front teeth. In her natural habitat, Ottoline would have had mates, and babies. She would not have survived twenty-five years. If she lived among her kind in a tribe in a cloud forest, she would hunt insects and grubs and worms all day long, but she would not have a passion for peanut butter, and she would not know about how many good things there are in a refrigerator, the door to which she would surely not know how to open. She would not know that when someone said Sun! this meant it was time to switch on or off an electric light. She would not know how, in response to Foot!, to safely lift and replace a lifeless foot that had slipped off its footrest and was now dangling precariously. She would not know exactly what to do whenever asked for Fetch! Page! Bucket! Turn! Change! Push! Itch! Open! Close! Slide! Straw! Living her natural, violent, giddy, tribal life among her own kind, roaming kilometers each day, swinging from tree to tree, resting, playing, sleeping as she pleased—living her life as it was meant to be lived—this had not been her fate.

  Knowing that Ottoline had no bite power made it easier to dismiss the terrible stories in the news about chimpanzee violence that were so upsetting and confusing to many people. It was startling to Laura when she discovered in their first weeks with Ottoline how many otherwise intelligent and informed people apparently didn’t understand the difference between New World monkeys and Old World apes. Some of Duncan’s doctors and their staff had actually rolled their eyes when she first brought up the possibility of a monkey helper for Duncan, as if she were out of her mind.

  Laura had never heard of monkey helpers until she picked up a Primate Institute brochure in a waiting area at the hospital, on a day when Duncan was being evaluated in order to develop a physical therapy and health maintenance plan. She had nothing to read and her phone got no signal in this part of the hospital, so she had started rummaging through the pamphlets in a rack on the wall, passing over brochures for hospital bed rentals, rehabilitation facilities, and custom orthotics. The single copy of a Primate Institute brochure was, compared to the other options, intoxicating reading, and the notion of helper monkeys for the disabled was intriguing. Could this really work for Duncan? He met the criteria for being a recipient. He was in a wheelchair, he was mostly at home, he was capable of communicating directly with a monkey helper, and there was someone else in the household—Laura realized this would be her role—to be the mo
nkey’s caretaker. Nobody she spoke with at the hospital that day knew anything about the Institute, which, she discovered when she mapped the address on the brochure, was surprisingly located in an imposing castle-like house on Forest Road.

  Hundreds of people passed by the Institute every day on busy Forest Road. Laura had taken this route from Whalley Avenue to get to Route 34 on countless occasions, and had never particularly noticed or thought about this grand exemplar of Tudor Revival excess at the corner where Chapel Street ended. There was no sign, and other than a paved parking area that would ordinarily have been grassed on which were parked five or six cars, nothing distinguished the house from the other imposing brick and stone residences that lined the south side of the busy street, facing a steep wooded area that belonged to a nearby private school. There was no giveaway out front that under this slate gambrel roof dwelled some fifty capuchin monkeys at various stages of training as assistance animals to help people confined to wheelchairs by injury or illness with activities of daily living.

  The idea of all those monkeys in there being trained to work as monkey helpers seemed fanciful and unreal, like something you would see on the internet after you had watched the Japanese cat jumping out of the cardboard box. Laura kept the Primate Institute brochure by the bed, and sometimes in the middle of the night during those early days she would read it aloud to herself, the way she might, in another life, have read a fairy tale to a restless child who couldn’t sleep.

  When Duncan was released from the hospital, Laura had hoped his despair would dissipate and he would abandon his certainty that he didn’t want to live like this. Walt, a wheelchair-bound hospital social worker, had met with her privately. He encouraged her to count on Duncan’s adjusting to his new limitations. He assured her that most people struggle with depression at the start of their adjustment to life as a quadriplegic. It was, after all, profoundly life-altering. He would come around; he would learn how to make the most of his new, post-accident way of life. Many people led happy, fulfilling, productive lives after this kind of catastrophic accident. There were many people living their lives with C6 injuries. The hospital had a program. Duncan could meet some of these inspiring individuals. He could find a role model, a mentor who would help him discover all the ways that his life could continue.

  But this is not what happened. In the weeks after the accident, in the hospital and then at home, Duncan had only retreated further into himself. He refused to see most people, starting with these inspiring paragons of quadriplegic life on wheels. He said he really didn’t think he could live this life.

  Laura went to the hospital one morning on the sly, to meet with Walt again to talk about this lack of progress. What was she supposed to say or do when Duncan spoke about not wanting to live? He advised her to use an animal training technique developed by people working with orca whales called “least reinforcing scenario,” or LRS. The theory of LRS, Walt explained, is that any reaction to the unwanted behavior is more interesting to the creature in question than no reaction. So if your response to the unwanted behavior is absolutely nothing, the behavior will fade away. Duncan was using the energy of her response to fuel his morbid remarks. Take away that energy and he won’t be able to use it.

  This didn’t sound useful to Laura. Wouldn’t that be like the deliberately provocative and frustrating silence of a Freudian analyst, and meanwhile, didn’t some of those orca whales kill their trainers? Maybe the trainers should have been a lot more responsive to the unwanted behaviors, not less. She tried it anyway, going poker-faced and silent whenever Duncan mentioned his wish to end his life, but it didn’t seem to have any effect. How could her stony silence change his feelings about wanting to end his life? He wasn’t saying these things in order to get a rise out of her. It was simply how he felt.

  Duncan didn’t respond to calls or emails from friends who were eager to visit or at least hear his voice, and for the first time since childhood he started spending hours in front of the television, a habit he had developed in the hospital. He could stare bleakly at mindless daytime programs without apparent preference for Fox News, Days of Our Lives, Judge Judy, Animal Planet, or Everybody Loves Raymond. He gazed with equal inattention at commercials for drugs with names suited to distant planets in science fiction, like Pradaxa, Viagra, Crestor, Cymbalta, Xarelto, and at the ominous, fast-talking advertisements for law firms inviting viewers to sue drug companies for injuries or deaths caused by the same medications.

  He would allow only his brother Gordon to visit with any frequency. Gordon didn’t ask stupid questions or try to cheer him up. Sometimes when Gordon came to keep him company, the two of them simply sat together like a matched pair of mute children, Duncan in his wheelchair and Gordon beside him in a ladder-back chair brought in from the kitchen, watching television, with no words between them from one hour to the next.

  When Laura insisted on turning the television off, Duncan would sit in his chair in front of the big front windows in their living room, gazing out at the daily life of Lawrence Street with at least a flicker of interest, which was better than the zombie television stare. Laura had no idea what could possibly hold his attention for so many hours. Their neighbors’ activities had never before fascinated Duncan in the nine years they had lived on this block. The comings and goings of the children across the street, almost always herded by their au pair and not their parents, held his attention for a few moments, but sometimes, when Duncan had stared out the window all afternoon, barely answering any of her attempts at conversation with more than a syllable or two, Laura felt herself on the edge of panic. How could this go on? His point exactly. She had bought him a pair of lightweight binoculars that he seemed willing to wear around his neck, and she saw him gazing through them quite a bit, though there really wasn’t much to look at out there, not for someone who had never before seemed constitutionally capable of just sitting blankly from one day to the next.

  Desperate to do something, anything, Laura had made an appointment at the Primate Institute. The people there were kind, and they understood her situation. They helped her begin to believe, in a series of conversations, both at the Institute and on the phone, that a monkey helper really might make the difference for Duncan. Though there was usually a requirement that the recipient be at least a year into life in a wheelchair, this might be a case for an exception. They assured her that they would provide ongoing support. If it took days, if it took weeks, they would be there to make the adjustment work for Duncan, for Laura, and for the monkey. They would select just the right monkey for Duncan, matching their temperaments and personalities (this made Laura laugh out loud when Martha said it to her in all seriousness). The Institute always not only carried all costs of training their helper monkeys over several years, but also would provide all food, cages, and other equipment for the duration of the placement (Laura hated to think about the implications of that phrase), and they would also take care of any health concerns or treatment, with a specialized veterinarian always on call.

  One afternoon during these interviews (as Laura came to recognize them for what they were, a two-way assessment process), Laura was invited to take a little tour of the monkey training area. At that point she had not yet been in a room with a monkey, because they were very excitable, she had been warned, and interacting with one of these capuchins was not a casual thing like meeting a dog or a cat. They would regard her as a potential threat. When she did see any monkeys, before a monkey was selected for Duncan, it was going to be at a distance.

  As she followed Zoe (a junior trainer who dressed, like all the trainers, in nursing scrubs) down the hall to the Household Classroom where the monkeys learned to integrate in a realistic setting the tasks they had mastered, a door opened and a trainer came out of a room with three leashed and diapered monkeys clinging to her shoulders, two on one side and one on the other. Instantly all three monkeys began screeching and bobbing up and down urgently while clinging to the trainer, making a deafening ruckus in the nar
row hallway. Stranger! Stranger! Danger! Stranger! Who? Who? Who? Laura remained motionless. The trainer mouthed “sorry” and took a step back into the room from which they had come, to let them pass. The monkey scolding continued to reverberate down the hallway until Zoe and Laura had passed through a heavy door that muffled the sound.

  “Was that upsetting to you?” Zoe asked Laura as she held a door open that led to the Household Classroom, which she had first made sure was unoccupied.

  “No, it was fascinating!” Laura said. “I kind of loved it!”

  “Good,” said Zoe, and the way she grinned when she said it made Laura wonder if it had been a planned test. “Those smaller two are a pair of white-faced capuchin girls who are new to us. They’re young, but I’m going to see if I can do some training for a few months before they go out for fostering and socializing. They’re such cooperative creatures by nature, as well as hierarchical. We know that in the wild they can learn from each other, and they can work together. So I want to see if some of our training is more effective if they’re taught the tasks and rewarded for reaching goals in front of each other.”

  “Monkey see, monkey do?” asked Laura

  “Exactly!”

  The fleeting burst of happiness Laura felt just then was like a gift. She could stay here at the Primate Institute of New England all day. She wanted a job here! Laura realized how much she had invested in wanting the monkey helper to work out for Duncan, for all the manifest reasons, but also simply because with the monkey helper, she would have a team and would not be in this alone. What a relief it had already been to be able to speak frankly with Lynette, the placement coordinator, about Duncan’s lack of will to live, his talk of suicide. Now Laura began to worry that Duncan would reject the monkey and she would lose all these terrific new people in her life, having just discovered them in this big house on Forest Road that was secretly full of monkeys.