Still Life with Monkey

by Katharine Weber

  Dud undid the catch and opened the lid of the box. Nestled inside the padded satin lining was a pair of diminutive blue-green, flower-shaped bowls. “Do you know Ru ware?” Jinxy asked.

  Laura gazed down at the apparently matched set. She was surprised by what she was looking at, and felt very much put on the spot by this request. “Yes, though I’m sure you both probably know a lot more than I do on this subject. Ru ware was made during the Northern Song Dynasty,” she said slowly, trying to think of how to handle this potentially awkward moment. “So these are maybe a thousand years old … if they’re genuine.” There it was.

  “I assure you that we have very high standards for our collection,” Dud said a little frostily.

  “Oh, I think they’re beautiful,” Laura said, backpedaling now, regretting her choice of words. Mustn’t insult the Cavendishes! “Would you take them out so we can look at them together? I was just surprised to see a matching pair. I didn’t think such a thing existed.”

  “Look at the long fractured craze lines they call cicada’s wings,” Jinx instructed, tracing the edge of one of the cups with her fingertip. Laura was intrigued by her ragged cuticles, which made Jinxy a little less intimidating.

  “These were found four years ago at a kiln site in Henan, an excavation in the middle of what is now a wheat field,” Dud said. “They were both broken and somewhat incomplete of course, but we had them beautifully restored, as you can see, at the Fogg.”

  Of course they had.

  “These two bowls were the most intact finds on the site. The Shanghai Museum wanted dibs on that excavation, because all the shards that came out of that kiln were apparently made to an imperial standard, so it’s a very important find, but it was our good fortune that we had funded an independent dig with some Henan archeologists supervised by our own people, so we had an inside track.” Whatever that meant.

  “It’s just that I have always been taught that there was no such thing as a matched pair, only mirrored pairs,” Laura said. “It’s such a beautiful bluey-green glaze. Can you imagine how exquisite and magical this glaze must have seemed to people a thousand years ago?”

  “Of course, we had these very thoroughly tested in a laboratory,” Jinxy said, sounding a little defensive to Laura. “Both of these pieces were definitely authentic. They have the characteristics of high-alumina Ru clay found in the vicinity of that kiln. The thick Ru glaze is exactly as it should be. Look at the adorable little fully-glazed splayed feet. These are exceptionally refined.”

  “Aren’t there only maybe seventy known Ru pieces?” Laura asked, scrambling into safer territory, glad she could remember as much as she did, which she hoped would go a long way with the Cavendishes. She had only ever seen one Ru piece up close before. “Is this the only known matched pair of intact Ru ware bowls?”

  “Exactly so!” Dud said emphatically. “Frankly, strictly between us, this is why we have been very discreet about possessing them. No fanfare, though of course we have been beside ourselves with excitement about them. We didn’t want trouble with the Chinese government. Nobody knows we’ve got them.” Not exactly true—the Fogg people know, and now here they were, asking for a favor at Yale. Why, Laura wondered, did they not ask the Fogg conservator to write this report?

  “They’re really the heart of our collection,” Jinxy added. “But they’re such a secret, we haven’t even dared try to insure them before now.”

  That didn’t sound quite right. Laura turned on her table lamp and swung it over, pulled on a pair of the usual Sure-Grip cotton conservation gloves (they had non-slip vinyl nodules on the palms and fingers), and then she gingerly picked up first one and then the other bowl; each was no more than five inches in diameter. In the raking light and with magnification, she could just barely make out the repaired fractures and in-fills under the glaze, which had been very proficiently in-painted. The crazing helped to hide the repairs. She looked at one, and then the other flower-shaped bowl again. They would have been ceremonial, not for daily tea-drinking. She turned each one over and scrutinized the bottom surfaces with a loupe. Laura began to recognize that what her gut reaction had told her was probably true. Even so, she couldn’t be utterly certain.

  “So, do you have that laboratory report, the testing you mentioned? I could use it as the basis of a condition report,” she said, head still bent over the bowls. Neither Dud nor Jinxy answered her.

  “Or I could just request a copy if you want to give me your contact there,” Laura said, now looking up at them after the silence had gone on a little too long.

  Crickets. Or cicadas. Had they actually named this laboratory? Were they just being coy because they had probably broken several laws in more than one country obtaining the bowls? Maybe this laboratory was in China. Laura was growing more certain that the perfectly matched pair of bowls were in fact genuine shards of one Ru bowl made into two. Perhaps the Fogg had suggested this undesirable possibility. Of course, if the clay was tested in the right places on each, authenticity could easily be established for the Cavendishes’ hoped-for documentation. She wondered if they knew. Had they been swindled, or were they themselves swindlers? Perhaps Dud and Jinxy really didn’t know the truth, and didn’t want to know.

  “Do you think you can write your report this afternoon, while we wait, perhaps while we take a walk around the Gallery and see the permanent collection? We were so rushed when we were given a tour the last time we were here. You probably heard about that?” Jinxy fixed her with a shrewd gaze. She was probably a killer at the poker table. Laura recalled overhearing something about the director being furious with a clueless junior curator who had been insufficiently deferential to them that day. The junior curator did not know who they were, and had erroneously assumed Dud was just another patrician Old Blue. When she asked Dud which Yale college was his—a question Old Blues loved to answer—the Cavendishes had departed abruptly.

  “Why don’t I go get your bowl and let you see that condition report first, okay? Laura said, stalling a commitment to write their damned report. Why was this her responsibility? She left Jinxy and Dud at her worktable for a moment while she went to unlock the secure vitrine and fetch their qingbai bowl in its square padded box (which she realized matched the one they had brought with them today), along with her reports. She wheeled the box across the conservation lab on a cart, the standard procedure for moving precious and fragile objects (though Laura probably would have carried the box in her hands, a violation of protocols, had she been alone and unobserved).

  As she returned, she discovered the Cavendishes looking at Duncan’s Explicated Four-Square House drawings. True to their sense of entitlement, they had picked up and moved the matted drawings from the adjacent flat file countertop, where Laura had been keeping them stacked together in plain sight as a reminder to herself to get one of them framed as a surprise for Duncan. Jinxy was just finishing laying all of them out on Laura’s worktable. The pair of Ru ware bowls had evidently been put back into their box, which was now sitting on the flat file countertop where the architectural drawings had been.

  “What a dear little house,” Jinxy exclaimed, lifting aside the acid-free protective sheets Laura had sandwiched between the mats. “It’s cunning!”

  “Does the Gallery own these?” asked Dud. “Part of some collection, I suppose, or an archive of architectural curiosities of the past?”

  “Actually, it’s a house my husband designed,” Laura said cautiously.

  “Where is this adorable house?” Jinxy asked with animation. “I would love to see it. Dud and I are thinking about building a cottage for guests on our farm in Hallowell. We don’t want anything too modern, but we don’t want to just build something that’s an imitation of the local American vernacular style, and we don’t want to settle for something too ordinary, either.” Laura had seen photographs of their fabulous nineteenth-century dairy barn that had been gutted and turned into a magnificent museum space, a perfectly climate-controlled home for their co
llections.

  “You can’t see it, I mean, of course you’re looking at it, but that’s it, that’s all there is,” Laura said. “It doesn’t exist. It was never built. Not that I know of, anyway.”

  “Do you mean to say someone commissioned this clever house from your evidently very talented architect husband and then changed his mind?” Dud asked, bending down to scrutinize the axonometric drawing over his half glasses. Ottoline knew the command for pushing slipped eyeglasses back up someone’s nose, Laura thought. Push up!

  “No, I think it was a student project, something Duncan did a long time ago. I had never seen these drawings until I found them rolled up and stuffed on the back of a shelf, and I brought them in so I could mat them. I was thinking of framing one or two, to surprise him.”

  “I suppose your husband has designed many such houses in the intervening years that we could go and see?” Jinxy persisted. “Where have they been published?”

  “Actually, no,” Laura said. “Not exactly. He went to work for someone with a very different style, maybe you’ve heard of Billy Corrigan? So all of Duncan’s houses are really Corrigan designs, pretty much. But he’s not practicing right now, anyway.”

  “Has he retired?” Dud asked sharply. “Young men shouldn’t retire when they’re in their prime. They go to seed.”

  “Or is he much older than you, dear?” Jinxy asked in a semi-sweet tone.

  “No, he’s not working right now because he was in an accident.” Laura didn’t want to tell them too much about Duncan. She just didn’t want to give them that information at this moment. “But would you really be interested in building this house?”

  “Perhaps we would,” Jinxy said. “Laura, I have to say I think we’re beginning to understand each other. In fact, I’m sure we would like to build that dear little house. We could use our local architect in consultation with your husband, Duncan, did you call him? Would the fee help you both, if he’s out of work because of an accident? But it does depend. Would you really be able to write that conservation report today?”

  After the Cavendishes had departed with their three bowls and two satisfactory conservation reports, having made a commitment to Laura that they would be in touch within the next two days to come to an agreement about building the Explicated Four-Square House, what remained of Laura’s afternoon had consisted of more ordinary tasks. She finished typing up her documentation notes from the previous week about a small bit of restoration work on a miniature Etruscan marble figure in the collection. Just before her workday ended, Laura got an email from a curator at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, reminding her that she had not yet logged in the objects they had sent over the day before, a group of Pre-Columbian figurines. Laura loved objects from Tlatilco (Nahuatl for “the place where things are hidden”), which was the traditional name of a farming village on the edge of what is now Mexico City. It was only in the 1940s that these ancient representations of the human figure were first harvested from the earth by farmers who believed that they grew in the fertile soil.

  The group of eight-centimeter-high female figurines Laura now had before her were all Tlatilco two-headed women, mysterious, disturbing figures, and Laura was uncommonly nervous about handling the fragile, dusty clay forms. While they were nearly identical at a glance, close inspection made evident the uncannily ferocious individual presence, as if each was a portrait of some specific being who had actually lived.

  Nobody could say for sure why the Tlatilco people seemed to be obsessed with two-headedness or what it meant to them. Laura had seen some Tlatilco two-faced women in the collection as well, both on public exhibition at the Peabody and when they came in for repairs. Were these figures created to ward off birth defects or conjoined twins, or to document them? Laura had read that Tlatilco potters were thought to be women, judging from the size of the three-thousand-year-old fingerprints left in the clay.

  Nine figurines had been sent over so that the conservation lab could fabricate exhibition stands to hold them securely to display them together in a lighted vitrine, and get them out of the drawer storage where they were currently housed. Having put on her Sure-Grip cotton conservation gloves again, Laura set about unwrapping each of the two-headed women, gingerly laying them out on a large velvet artifact tray. This day had grown impossibly long and was taking more time than she had meant to spend away from Duncan, and she was impatient as she began this final task. She had been alone in the lab since the Cavendishes left, and would have to lock up when she was done, a task she hated because there were so many procedures involving a sequence of locks and corresponding keys.

  Eighteen heads stared up at her with grotesque bulging eyes, their paired, tilted heads reminding her faintly of Ottoline’s flirtatious head tilts. Her documentation was nearly complete, each object getting its own page in the log, when Laura picked up the last figurine to confirm the India ink number on the label that was glued to its back by a museum curator fifty years ago, when such labels were routinely affixed to artifacts with no concern for the damaging consequences. She picked it up with one hand, so she could write with the other hand, though protocol required a precise, two-handed light grasp for objects such as this. The figurine slipped from her gloved fingers and hit the edge of the table, where it exploded in mid-air into a shower of clay dirt that scattered across the floor. In an instant, the object had ceased to exist. There wasn’t one recognizable fragment.

  It was smithereens, thought Laura (who often narrated to herself at stressful moments), as she stared at the reddish dust as it settled, from smiddereens, the Irish term for small fragments, which derived from the old Irish, smidirin, a diminutive of smiodar. Laura got a dustpan and a whisk broom and swept up. She removed the last page of the log, tore it to smaller and smaller pieces until it was confetti, bagged the paper bits in a specimen envelope, and tucked them into her purse to scatter in the kitchen trash at home.

  Now just eight Tlatilco figurines had been logged in. Laura signed her name to the summary that documented the arrival conditions of the eight Tlatilco two-headed female figurines sent to the conservation lab in the Yale Art Gallery from the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History so that exhibition stands could be fabricated to hold them securely for display in a museum vitrine case. She had never done anything like this before, not only damaging a work of art but then also covering up the loss. She was shocked at how easy it was to do both. Maybe spending a couple of hours with Jinxy and Dud Cavendish had loosened her sense of right and wrong. Laura thought about the visiting conservator from Florence saying that conservators were like doctors, and everyone murders at least one patient. Here it was at last, her inevitable murder victim. Then she locked up and went home.

  The giraffes were gone, and a show about alligators living in the Everglades had begun. Laura reached for the remote on the blanket next to Duncan and turned off the television. Ottoline was curled asleep on his pillow, cuddled by his left ear, snoring slightly. He shouldn’t sleep too much now or he would have a restless night, Laura knew from experience. But she didn’t want to wake him just yet. She gazed at her unconscious husband for a while, and a wave of grief swept over her. Could she bear this? What else was there to do? She watched Duncan breathe. What if he stopped breathing right now? What if that was his last breath? What would she feel? She studied his face, imagining it in the still repose of death. Laura moved herself to some new place as she gazed at dead Duncan. Was she only shattered by grief or was she also lightened with relief? Ottoline opened her eyes and scratched her hairy inner leg at the junction of her diaper, which rustled, and Laura realized she was overdue for a change. Duncan heaved a deep breath and let it out with a sigh that fluttered his lips a little.

  Laura made kissing sounds to attract Ottoline’s attention, and Ottoline looked up at her, thought about it for a moment, and then accepted the invitation with a big springy leap across Duncan into her lap. They gazed at each other. Laura looked down at the dear wise little face and was moved
by her uncanny near-humanness. What did she know, and how did she know it? Laura grabbed her and turned her onto her back, and began to tickle her while whispering, so as not to wake Duncan, “Who’s my funny little monkey? Who is? You is?”

  Ottoline flung herself back with her mouth wide open, keeping steady eye contact with Laura as she succumbed to her joy at being tickled. When Laura stopped for a moment, Ottoline grabbed her left hand and placed it back on her hairy waist, just above her diaper. Laura tickled her some more, and Ottoline convulsed in open-mouthed silent laughter. Every time Laura stopped, Ottoline demanded more tickles. “Are there enough tickles for Ottoline?” Laura murmured. “You need more tickles? Do you think I can tickle you forever?”

  “She doesn’t let me tickle her,” Duncan whispered.

  “Oh good, you’re awake. That’s because she respects you more than she respects me.” She stopped tickling the monkey in her lap and Ottoline sat up and reached over to the rolling table next to the wheelchair and grabbed her sippy cup. She tilted it nearly straight up as she guzzled the water left in the cup before thrusting it in Laura’s direction.

  “Okay, more water for the monkey. Okeydoke, artichoke. And Dunc, do you want some soup, or maybe a toasted English muffin? Whenever I don’t know what I want, a toasted English muffin is often the answer.”

  “That would be good,” he said in the hoarse whisper that was often the best he could manage for a voice. “With cinnamon. Use the Vietnamese cinnamon on the top shelf, not the Ceylon, please. With sweet butter fully melted into the acclivities and declivities.” Ottoline somersaulted out of Laura’s lap onto the bed and climbed up onto his shoulder. “None of the PCAs know what to do with an English muffin,” he said sadly. “Wendell puts the entire muffin in the toaster. And may I just say that his overcooked scrambled eggs are horrible. I think he uses oil instead of butter, and then he only scrambles the eggs once they’re in the pan, on a very high heat. They’re not scrambled, they’re scried.”