Still Life with Monkey

by Katharine Weber

  Whenever they were together, Laura could see something of the boys they once were. After their mother’s death, once he had settled Gordy in an apartment on Whitney Avenue and closed up her house, Duncan filled a shelf in his study with the family photo albums. Laura had pored over snapshots of the Wheeler boys as they grew up. As babies they really were truly identical. But soon enough, by toddlerhood, confident, straightforward Duncan seemed easy to identify, to Laura’s eye, even though they were towheads dressed alike, with identically regrettable pudding-bowl haircuts. In her painting conservation studies she had learned ways of spotting the discrepancies that revealed the forger’s hand rather than the hand of the original artist; making the distinction between the Wheeler brothers required the same eye. Duncan had the aura of the authentic, the original.

  In recent years, though, the casual observer would have hardly noticed their twin-ness. Grown-up Duncan was always clean-shaven and wore his hair trimmed very close, while Gordon had his unruly beard and only got a haircut when he thought about it, which was only a couple of times a year; he alternated between looking like a mountain man and a monk. Whenever Gordon came to the house for dinner, Laura was always freshly surprised, observing the two of them together, how despite the way time had effaced some of their identicalness, despite how different they were in countless ways, they did still share most features.

  An English teacher in junior high school once gave her a memorable homework assignment requiring sentences illustrating the distinctions among the words “same,” “identical,” and “similar.” When the brothers sat hunched intently over their after-dinner card games in matching poses, like bookends, they were similar. Gordon and Duncan had touchingly identical bald spots and receding hairlines. They walked with the same loose gait. There was a remarkably similar timbre in their voices, but they were never, to Laura, identical. One June night, the last time they played Hearts while she did the dinner dishes, hearing them quibble over the rank of suits as they cut the deck, Laura had realized that she thought of Gordon as the lowly Jack of Clubs, while Duncan was the powerful Jack of Spades. Similar, but not identical, and not the same. Nevertheless, in high-stakes poker, you need a pair of Jacks to stay in the game.

  Standing at the foot of Duncan’s awkwardly-angled bed on this fifth morning after the accident, looking at the Wheeler brothers as they slept, seeing Gordon’s face jammed up against Duncan’s inert, sheeted thigh on the tilted mattress, Laura had a tiny pang of envy for their twin-ness. Neither of them had ever known what it was to be alone in the world, truly alone, a lonely only whom nobody matched. Even here in this circumstance, the two of them together made her feel like the outsider. Laura could imagine them as twin fetuses, clinging to each other in their watery dark, their umbilical cords tangled through their entwined limbs.

  “Hey Gordy,” she whispered, touching his shoulder lightly. He stirred, and then sat up, realizing where he was. He scrubbed his knuckles into his face.

  “Dunc okay?” he asked anxiously, looking around. A nurse swooped back the slithery curtain and scowled at them, not expecting visitors at this early hour.

  “Family, family,” Laura declared, pointing first to herself and then to Gordon. The nurse shrugged and carried on monitoring and adjusting Duncan’s various clicking and beeping machines and monitors. When she bent to check the fluid level of the catheter bag hanging at the side of the bed, Laura followed her gaze and could see that the contents were still a murky dark red. She put her hand on Duncan’s leg, knowing but not yet really accepting that he couldn’t feel her comforting touch. It made her more aware of how instantaneously Gordy had responded to her soft tap on his shoulder.

  Gordon had arrived at the hospital a little after two, he said, which meant he must have been chaining his bike at the front entrance only minutes after she had gone home so reluctantly. Laura was glad to know that Duncan, though unconscious and oblivious, hadn’t been alone after all while she was at the house. It hadn’t occurred to her to ask him to spell her at that hour. What a strange yet Gordy-like thing to do. “You biked all the way to downtown from Madison at two in the morning?”

  “The Shoreline train wasn’t running. There’s not much traffic on the back roads.”

  They talked about nothings for a few moments: weather (such a hot and beautiful summer after the cold wet spring), Ferga (a neighbor boy whose company she enjoyed was going to be walking and feeding her today), the bookstore (he had asked for some days off). Gordy looked seedier than usual. He was grimy and a bit ripe.

  “Gordy, hey, here’s my key—why don’t you go to the house and take a shower,” Laura said, rummaging in her bag after they had lapsed into a long silence. “You could take my car, oh, right, well, you’ll bike, it’s not too far.” That was brilliant, offering her car to the oddball who can’t or won’t drive. “The alarm’s not set. You can find all clean stuff of Duncan’s, and then just leave everything you’re wearing on top of the washer and I’ll run your stuff with our wash, my wash. You know what I mean. Okay?”

  Laura didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but he really was pungent in this small space. His hands didn’t look particularly clean where they lay on Duncan’s bleached white covers. Did he pare his nails with a pocket knife? Though the invisible germs in hospitals were the ones to worry about, not honest, ordinary, Gordy-type grubbiness. Probably. He nodded in agreement, in any case. Duncan’s pneumatic compression leg wraps under the sheet suddenly inflated with a sibilant swish and they both reacted with a start, because, not for the first time, it had seemed for a brief misleading instant as if Duncan had moved his legs.

  “I’ll be right here with him, so he won’t be alone if he wakes up,” Laura said as Gordy bent over his scuffed work boots and re-tied a floppy lace in preparation for getting on his bicycle. “Take as much time as you want. There’s shampoo in the shower in our room, and also in the hallway bathroom you use when you stay over, so feel free to use either. Okay, sweetie? Gordy?” She was talking too much. She hoped she wasn’t insulting him.

  “Then when you come back, we’ll go for lunch,” she continued in too loud and bright a voice, as if speaking to a special needs child, but somehow she couldn’t shut herself up. “Maybe just down in the coffee shop or something.” Gordy stayed bent over, not moving, just gazing down at his shoes, clearly waiting for her to finish what she was saying. “Or we could get something from the food trucks. Do you want to do that? Everyone says they’re terrific, but I’m never over here by the hospital, and the parking is such a drag, but here we are. Maybe we can find a bench outside in the shade.” Now she was just babbling.

  Gordy straightened up in the chair and then rose to his feet, looking down at her across his unconscious brother, their eyes meeting for a long moment. “I know,” he said softly, his lisp clinging to his sibilants the way crumbs often stuck in his beard. “How hard this is. But please don’t talk to me so much.”

  When Gordon returned a couple of hours later, Laura was the one dozing in the chair with her head in her arms on the tilted mattress beside Duncan’s leg. (The cot they brought out for her at night was always folded up and rolled away in the daytime.) Somehow she had been able to drop into a deeper sleep here, next to Duncan, despite her awkward position, the blare of incessant pages and codes, the rising and falling voices of passing nurses, the squeaking of equipment and food carts, and the frequent bedside check-ins by a variety of nurses and residents and technicians whose duties Laura couldn’t identify before they had concluded their business with Duncan and flitted out past the curtain on their rounds. The whooshing, beeping monitors and other devices that had at first seemed so nettlesome had become, at moments, a comfort to her, each beep, beep, beep, beep heartbeat signifying that he was alive, alive, alive, alive.

  Laura was asleep with her head in her arms and then she woke at the sound of his accustomed footfalls coming near, and then for a moment it was Duncan sliding back the cubicle curtain and walking toward her, here he came at last
(how long had she been waiting?), the familiar mass of him, wearing his favorite tattersall-checked blue and white shirt, the one with the subtle red stripe, the shirt he had left draped over the back of the chair in their bedroom only a few days ago so she would remember to sew on a new button to replace one that had been cracked in half by the shirt laundry. She had not yet sewed the button. But this was not Duncan, of course not, here was bearded Gordy in Duncan’s clothing, Gordy with his hair still wet, Gordy wearing Duncan’s blue-checked shirt and a pair of his khakis, without a belt, and as he came closer and Laura sat up and tried to clear her head, she could see, just above his bellybutton, a gap in the shirt placket where the cracked half button had not stayed buttoned. A glimpse of his bare stomach. A little whorl of crinkly hair exactly, unbearably like Duncan’s.

  Every molecule of air in the room hurtled away from her and nothing was left around her but nothingness as she re-felt and re-knew everything all over again and all that had happened slammed back into her consciousness with full force. She gazed at Gordy as he stood there unhappily at Duncan’s bedside, seeing him with a new, sharp clarity, that sudden kind of seeing that is the opposite of blindness.

  Gordon carried in a chair from an unoccupied cubicle and parked himself in the corner beside the crash cart. They sat without talking, just keeping each other and Duncan company. The medical personnel came and went. The sun kept shining on the nothing new. Laura closed her eyes and put her head down on her arms, but it was impossible to re-enter the dream. Without opening her eyes, she reached out and tried to put her hand into Duncan’s hand, but it was taped into a padded splint to prevent it curling into a claw. She settled for just holding his wrist awkwardly and tried again to let herself slip back into that dream state, but she just couldn’t find the way. She tried to match her breathing to the slow, steady rhythm of Duncan’s ventilator, but she couldn’t do it without needing to draw extra shallow breaths.

  She sat up and looked over at Gordy, who was dozing in his chair, his chin on his Duncan-shirted chest. She noticed then that she had been almost panting with the exertion of trying through sheer force of will to hold back the inevitability of what was coming next. She tried to rearrange the immediate future with all her heart, even as she surrendered to the awareness that for a couple of hours now she had been feeling that familiar ache, that approaching cramp, that familiar blood-dimmed tidal shift of something loosed once again.

  No, no, no, no. Please, no. Now she felt the trickle, the need for a pad. She put her head down on the bed beside Duncan’s leg and refused to open her eyes for just a little while longer. No, no, not this lucky baby, this magical last-chance baby, conceived just in time. Can’t we at least have that? She listened to the beeps and whooshes of the ventilator pushing air and oxygen into Duncan’s lungs through his endotracheal tube, followed by the whoosh of carbon dioxide leaving his lungs, and finally she was able to relax into the rhythm and match her breathing to the steady rise and fall of his chest. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

  On day eight, the State Police accident investigator was eager to question Duncan about the accident, and there was some urgency about it because a death had occurred. This was the same day the ventilator had been removed and Duncan was successfully breathing on his own, and the investigator arrived on the ward during rounds, while the team of doctors was still telling Duncan about his complete C6 spinal cord injury and what this meant for him.

  He would never walk again. He would never feel anything below his level of injury. He would require perpetual bowel care. He would need to undergo a surgical procedure to install an indwelling catheter. He would need to avoid extreme temperatures, heat especially, or his blood pressure could rocket and he could all too easily slip into a dangerous state of dysreflexia. Personal care assistants would have to assist him with nearly all activities of daily living. His caregivers would need to be vigilant about pressure sores. They enumerated this horrific catalogue in a practiced chorus until one of them, a haggard neurology fellow, the only woman in the quintet of doctors surrounding the foot of Duncan’s bed, interrupted the litany to say that life could be lived this way.

  As the rest of the team closed their files and clicked their pens, she spoke about the range of wonderful assistive devices, the variety of ways of adapting. The others didn’t wait for her to finish, three of them using the moment to check their phones as they headed for the door. As a matter of fact, she added, her hand on the door lever, the last of the procession to file out of Duncan’s room, he might well live out his full ordinary lifespan with this complete C6 injury, if he followed medical advice and had good support.

  Duncan had just lain there blinking, making no eye contact, staring straight up from some depth Laura felt that only she could see. He was like an underwater floating corpse, his face just barely breaking the surface. His head was completely immobilized by a cervical collar and a halo crown. A neurology resident had told Laura the day before that he would probably have very little neck mobility from now on, and would probably only ever be able to turn his head a few degrees.

  As the doctors had rattled off the news, as she held Duncan’s rigid clammy hand, still encased in the padded splint, Laura wondered if he was really taking in all the devastating information being dumped on him, or if he was only semi-conscious. Maybe what filtered through felt like a bad dream. She wished she could let him drift away. Why today, why right now? Just because the respirator was gone and the room was quiet and technically Duncan could now speak? She had only heard him croak a few syllables at their request. Did this team of doctors simply need a data purge so they could re-set for the next unfortunate soul with a devastating spinal cord injury? Surely, there was no big rush. He had the rest of his life to know about everything he had lost.

  And she couldn’t let him float away right then. It wasn’t clear what, if anything, Duncan remembered about the accident. Presumably he didn’t know that Todd Walker had died. Conor Flahavan was a former state trooper who had made sergeant before he transferred to accident investigation (a credential he emphasized to Laura for no obvious reason when he introduced himself, but once he said it she could picture him in the snappy Connecticut state trooper’s uniform instead of his khaki pants and synthetic-looking, short-sleeved white office shirt, and wondered if he missed wearing it). Sergeant Flahavan insisted that he needed this brief interview now, today, having been informed by the hospital that Mr. Wheeler was able to speak.

  There were questions for Duncan about the accident, questions the driver was legally required to answer, given that there had been a fatality, and it was imperative that the report be completed so the file could be closed. Sergeant Flahavan wouldn’t agree to come back another day, as this interview was already one day later than the timetable of ordinary protocols, but he was sympathetic, and said he would wait out in the hallway with Gordon, who had just arrived (a little breathless and very sweaty as usual), so Laura could first break the news about Todd’s death to Duncan, alone, just the two of them, so that Duncan wouldn’t be learning about it for the first time in the course of the interview.

  Laura had met Todd a few times, but only in passing. She gathered from various remarks Duncan had made in recent months that Todd was a particularly appealing and inventive young architect who had been very helpful on a number of projects, most recently the Steiner house. Duncan always had a Todd, a favorite apprentice. They came and they went. Laura thought there was something marvelously generous about the way Duncan gave so much time and attention to cultivating the talents of these young men, granting each of them the valuable experience of working closely with him. After a year or two developing their abilities and gaining experience under Duncan’s avuncular guidance, each of them would be well prepared to take the next step in a bright career, with offers in New York, or from one of the bigger firms in town with more opportunities for advancement, like Pelli Clarke Pelli or Roche-Dinkeloo. One by one, Duncan’s young men of the moment moved on after a year or
two, to be replaced by the next protégé, the next Todd.

  When she told him, very simply, very gently, that Todd had died in the crash, Duncan, still staring vacantly at the ceiling as he had during the visit from the cluster of doctors, had closed his eyes for a long moment. Then he opened them and whispered his first words to Laura since the accident, a hoarse, rasping, “I missed the funeral?”

  There had been a memorial service in New York five days after the accident, Laura told him, in the Great Hall at Cooper Union. A lot of the Corrigan & Wheeler staff had attended. She heard that Dave Halloran had given one of the eulogies, along with Todd’s brother who lived in New Hampshire, who was so undone by grief that his voice kept breaking and he had been unable to finish his remarks. Two of Todd’s teachers—Ricardo Scofidio from Cooper Union and Peter Farbrecher from Yale—also spoke. Todd’s friends had been galled by Farbrecher’s fulsome remarks about the tragic loss to the world of Todd’s remarkable talents as an architect. It was known that Farbrecher had been so dismissive of Todd’s sectional elevation drawings for the class project, a Habitat house, that Todd had cried during the crit.

  Duncan remained silent, only blinking occasionally as Laura held his splinted hand and described what she knew of Todd’s memorial service. She couldn’t tell if he was still listening, but she didn’t know what else he would want to know, so she began to enumerate the specifics of Farbrecher’s self-serving eulogy that had outraged various people who were there, until he interrupted her in a barely audible whisper to say, “Stop, what about our baby? Are you okay?”