These days a meal out of the house involved finding a handicapped parking spot, getting out of the van and into the restaurant, situating Duncan at a table in the best spot for his chair, getting him out of his jacket if it was cold weather, figuring out what he could eat, setting him up with the long bendy straw, strapping on the utensil cuff and inserting the fork or spoon, clipping the dinner napkin onto his front with the bib clips—and then hoping that Duncan would last the entire meal without getting too tired, developing a headache, or going into dysreflexia, before it was time to reverse all these steps and get him home.
Cooking for Duncan at home was at times a pretty thankless task. Laura struggled to live up to Duncan’s culinary standards, laboring with precision over dishes he would have thrown together casually with better results. On her own, she would have been content with a microwaved whatever. But having to cook for Duncan had led to Laura beginning to find pleasure in cooking, and she did like having more time in the kitchen on weekends.
Sometimes Laura just felt blank and out of ideas. But it was getting easier as she expanded her repertoire and confidence. Quinoa or orecchiette with the chicken tonight? Quinoa reminded her of miniature condoms. But then orecchiette looked like doll diaphragms. What was the matter with her, seeing tiny contraceptives in innocent carbohydrates? Some days everything seemed to have a sexual glimmer.
Duncan opened Ottoline’s cage door and she leaped out onto his shoulder with a chirp that Laura thought of as her “ta da!” sound. Laura clipped one end of her lead onto her waist collar and said Ring! Ottoline, Ring! Ottoline nimbly grabbed the end of her lead and clipped it to the ring loop on the side of the wheelchair. Ottoline had developed a bad habit of seizing opportunities whenever she could to bolt up the stairs to roam around unfettered. She had done this a few times, after first slyly undoing the carabiner clip that linked her lead to the ring on Duncan’s wheelchair, which she knew perfectly well was naughty behavior. Thus unhitched, she would wait for an opportunity and then suddenly make a run for it.
She chose her moments—afternoons when Duncan was alone in the house with her. Ottoline took her time obeying Duncan’s instructions to come back down, too, though she always did mosey back downstairs, sometimes carrying a prize, such as Laura’s toothbrush, or the gnawed remains of a miniature Say Howdy! still in its wrapper.
Duncan turned and rolled into the living room with Ottoline on his shoulder. Laura listened for the sound of excitement when the boys saw Ottoline. She heard both boys exclaim as Ottoline appeared; apparently Scout was still asleep. This was a nice change of pace from the quotidian woe around here. She really liked the gentle and funny way Duncan spoke to the McCarthy children. It was a side of him she rarely saw. He would have been a great father.
Though Laura’s sense of her own possible babies had begun to recede, taking their Keller curly hair and Wheeler dimples with them, somehow their phantom Chinese daughter still hovered. She was real, of course, she had been born and she lived and breathed, only now she belonged to another family and had another life altogether, a life Laura had imagined so thoroughly, starting with the weeks of bonding in a room at the White Swan Hotel in Guangzho, where all the adoptive families stayed with their new Chinese babies for the nerve-wracking final days and sometimes weeks while the adoption approvals were processed through the Chinese courts. They had spoken of naming her Clementine. Clem, Clemmie. Did you finish your homework, Clemmie? Did those boys say you had cooties? Boys are the ones with cooties! Laura could hear shrieks of laughter from the McCarthy brothers, and some hoots and shrieks from Ottoline, too, sounds that were halfway between distress and excitement.
When Laura went into the living room, Ottoline was roaming across the coffee table, taking blueberries from the boys, who squealed with delight when she rudely grabbed a blueberry and shoved it in her mouth before sticking out her hand to demand another. She probably had three or four blueberries in her cheeks (more than were good for her in one day, but oh well), as it took her a long while to gum up a blueberry and swallow it down. Duncan looked amused.
Ingie, in the armchair, was oblivious, her attention entirely focused down on her phone.
She didn’t notice when Ottoline, aware of Ingie’s focus, hopped off the coffee table and proceeded to ransack her bag, which was on the floor beside her chair. First the monkey took a car key on a lanyard and flung it on the rug. Laura held her finger to her lips to hush the boys and Duncan so they could all play Let’s see how many things Ottoline can remove from Ingie’s bag before Ingie notices! Ottoline pulled out another key, this one on a ring along with a Stop & Shop bar code tag. Next came a little plastic pot of lip gloss with a clear lid, a wallet, a comb, a lipstick, an unopened bag of gummy bears Ottoline couldn’t penetrate (though she tried for a moment), followed by a pen, a quarter, a mascara tube, a pony tail elastic, a Metro North train schedule, and a partly-empty pack of Nicorette gum. Ottoline seized a pair of sunglasses from the bag, which she held up to peer through, while Jackson and Bailey gurgled with glee. Next came a folding hairbrush that momentarily intrigued the monkey, who unfolded it thoughtfully and stroked it across her tail while the boys convulsed in silent giggles. She had fantastic deadpan timing.
Ingie continued to read something on her phone, and then she began to compose a reply, thumbs hurtling over her keyboard. Ottoline reached into the bag again and this time she pulled out a tube of moisturizer, a small bottle of hand sanitizer, a heavy, zippered, embroidered makeup pouch, a packet of tissues, an empty cardboard sleeve that had held sugarless gum, and, then, with a flourish, Ottoline extracted a pregnancy test kit. She gnawed on one end of the box for a moment before flinging it down onto the rug with the rest of her booty.
As the McCarthy children went out the door with their positively Delphic au pair (Laura and Duncan had been impressed with her placid and unchanged demeanor when she had looked up, discovered the monkeyshines, and had simply swept all her belongings back into her bag without a word of acknowledgment or explanation), Duncan said, “What did the crocodile say to the alligator?”
“See you later!” shouted Bailey.
“And what did the alligator say to the crocodile?” Duncan prompted.
“After a while!” Jackson supplied.
“After a while,” echoed Scout, who was being lugged by Ingie. She had been woken when it was time to leave, and was not willing to walk the short distance home.
“Are alligators and crocodiles the same thing?” Bailey wondered.
“No,” Duncan said. “They’re not.” The children and Ingie were halfway down the ramp, the zig-zag of which was one more attraction of the monkey house. They stopped and turned around. Duncan’s soft voice didn’t carry far. “They’re similar, but not identical.”
“What’s the difference?” asked Laura, who was standing behind Duncan at the open door, intrigued that he knew something like this. (Duncan and Ottoline watched a great deal of Animal Planet.) With the little klepto primate stashed in her cage in Duncan’s room, it was safe for her to put her hands on his shoulders, which she did, enjoying an Ottoline-free opportunity to touch him casually.
“Crocodiles are meaner,” Duncan said. “And they have bigger heads. They live all around the world, while alligators are a little nicer, and they only live in the U.S. and in China.”
“That’s weird!” shouted Jackson from the sidewalk.
“I’m going as an American crocodile next Halloween,” Bailey announced, before turning to his brother with a crocodile roar.
“I’ll be a Chinese alligator!” shouted Jackson, roaring back at him.
Next October was a very long way from now, thought Duncan.
Duncan went to his room. He knew Laura wouldn’t disturb him while she was making dinner. She hated being distracted or interrupted, as she was both insecure and not an intuitive cook, so she needed to follow recipes precisely. The radio was turned up loud so she could hear it over the gray buzz of the stove exhaust fan. The opening ch
ords of the theme music for All Things Considered began. Ottoline was content in her cage, idly manipulating her colored plastic rings. He rolled over to his desk, and slid open the middle drawer. He fumbled for the polished mahogany cigar box which was pushed all the way to the back.
The box had once held fancy cigars from the Dominican Republic, and there was still a faint tobacco odor when you opened the lid. Owen Whitlock had given it to him a long while ago when Duncan admired the dovetailing when he saw the box on a bookshelf in Owen’s office. Owen had kept drawing pens in the box, but he tipped them out and handed the box to Duncan on the spot, explaining that he had plenty more at home piled on a shelf in his garage. His brother had been a cigar smoker for many years, and the boxes were handy for nuts and bolts and picture hooks, but how many did a person need?
It was challenging for Duncan to get a grip on the polished wood. He managed to pull it forward in the drawer and then he raised the lid on his stash. Underneath the camouflage layer of several folded sheets of postage stamps were tucked: five twenty-one-milligram NicoDerm patches Ottoline had filched from Darlene’s bag in recent weeks, a cylindrical prescription vial containing four thirty-milligram Adderall capsules that Ottoline had removed from Wendell’s gym bag, a large plastic spring-loaded hair clip Ottoline had taken from Cathy’s pocketbook, a prescription vial with three two-milli-gram Xanax tablets Ottoline had taken from the pocket of Ida Mae’s jacket which she had left hanging on the kitchen doorknob when she was down in the cellar doing laundry, a nearly full tube of Nitro paste, six five-hundred-milligram Vicodin tablets saved from the final days of Duncan’s burn treatment when he was first back home last October, five blue and yellow capsules of Fiorinal with codeine taken from the meds on the cart across the room (these were used judiciously to treat Duncan’s headaches), and an Altoids tin holding thirteen little blue fifty-milligram Viagra tablets.
Laura had not known that Duncan had begun to use Viagra when they were trying to have a baby. He always filled the Viagra prescriptions at out-of-the-way chain pharmacies where he wasn’t known, and he paid cash, so there was no medical insurance paper trail. Each time, he imagined that this must be how people who abuse prescription drugs operate.
Duncan would empty the blue tablets into the Altoids tin and dispose of the plastic prescription container before coming home with them. Once he started using it, Duncan had become fearful of going without Viagra, even as he felt increasingly guilty about concealing from Laura his dependence on the medication. They were supposed to be in this, in everything, together. But the longer he went without telling her, the more difficult it had become to imagine broaching the subject. He was embarrassed that he needed this chemical assistance when he wasn’t even forty. But he did need the boost, just as he had become reliant on conjuring up mental pictures at those moments that had nothing at all to do with anything he had ever actually experienced. Duncan had only ever allowed himself in carefully controlled ways to long for those thrilling, tantalizing connections.
Laura would be hurt that he had kept the Viagra a secret all this time. Shortly before the accident, they had laughed together over a news article reporting that many people had started to spell Niagara Falls incorrectly, omitting the second a, because of the ubiquity of Viagra. They had relished the irony, given that the name Viagra had been derived from Niagara, invoking the classic honeymoon destination, not to mention the mental picture of gushing torrents pouring over the edge of the falls, combined with something that suggested vigor. That’s when he should have told her. Instead, he quoted Oscar Wilde on Niagara Falls—“the American bride’s second biggest disappointment.”
They thought they had finally done it, last July. Duncan had been willing to let the realness of this baby be the turning point. He had sincerely hoped its birth would tip the balance—tip his balance—toward Laura. Toward the family they would become. If being a father shifted something fundamental inside him, it would be a relief. And then Laura discovered she wasn’t pregnant after all, right after his accident. Yet another loss. It was better this way. Simpler.
Duncan added the Nicorette gum Ottoline had stuffed into the side of his seat cushion when she climbed back onto him while Ingie, when she had suddenly alerted to the trick being played on her, was busy shoveling all her private things back into her bag while the boys laughed at her. He studied the contents of his cigar box, taking inventory, something he found reassuring on the good days and on the bad days, though his plans were not yet entirely in focus, and then he slid the stamps back on top, closed the lid, and put the box away in the back of the desk drawer. Dinner smelled good.
“Did you hear about Adam Boxer?” Laura asked him as they ate.
Duncan could not quickly manipulate food onto the fork that she had wedged into the slot of his utensil cuff. In any case, he was at risk for aspirating bits of food into his lungs if he ate too fast, and his lung function was already compromised. The quad cough routine was not entirely efficient, brutal as it was at times. She could often hear Duncan’s lungs squeaking with every breath he expelled. Laura had read that sooner or later there was a good chance that vigorous treatment would inadvertently crack one of Duncan’s ribs. This would be the start of a spiral, with the risk of infection, pneumonia, dysreflexia.
Laura had to make a conscious effort to put her fork down and simply pace herself slowly through each meal with Duncan so as not to be finished ahead of him, which she knew discouraged him. She took a break while he continued to chase the cut-up chicken and orecchiette and broccoli with his fork, backstopping them at the raised rim of the special plate for people with compromised functions from which Duncan ate most of his meals. When Laura was little she had a Bunnykins dish with that sort of high rim. A Bunnykins dish might be more dignified than this heavy plastic institutional thing. Maybe she could find Bunnykins on eBay.
“Adam Boxer the pompous art historian? Didn’t I just read something of his in the New York Review of Books? What about Adam Boxer?”
“He died on a Yale squash court today.”
“What? He was only in his fifties. Seriously? Was it a heart attack?”
“No, it was a really freakish thing. He was playing squash with that guy we met at that dinner, remember, the one with the ridiculous mustache you thought might be waxed? Wayne Harris, the husband of one of the Garvan Collection staff, was playing on the next court, which is how I heard about it so fast.”
“What the hell happened?”
“Apparently Adam was diving low for the ball and there was spilled water on the floor they didn’t notice. Like many players, they had left their water bottles in the front corners of the court. Mustache guy, Fred? That guy he was playing, he’s completely traumatized. Apparently a ball had knocked over one of the bottles a few points earlier. Adam slid into the front wall head first and broke his neck. I don’t know if they figured out if he had a traumatic head injury, or if he just broke his neck, I guess it doesn’t really matter which it was, because he died right there.”
“Good bad luck.”
“I wish you wouldn’t say things like that.”
“Shall I just think them to myself instead?”
“I just wish you didn’t feel that way.” Laura got up from the table and went to the front hall closet, where she had stashed two framed drawings of the Explicated Four-Square House. She brought them into the kitchen and leaned them against the cabinets in Duncan’s direct line of sight.
“What the hell, Laura? Where did you get those?”
“They were on the bottom shelf in your study, and because I accidentally squished the tube when I moved your desk, I took them to work to get them flattened.”
“I had put that house out of my thoughts,” Duncan said, gazing at the drawings. He looked as if he might cry. This was not the response Laura had anticipated.
‘Well, I love this house, Dunc. I’ve never seen this side of your work before.”
“I loved it too, but nobody else did. It was a mistake.”
“Well, somebody does love this house, in fact. I’ve got news. Those rich collectors I told you about, the ones with the Ru pottery, the Cavendishes?”
“Mugsy and Gramps?”
“Jinxy and Dud. You have got to learn their names. You know their Shaker collection. They probably have the most important collection of Ru pottery in the world.”
“With rue their hearts are laden—”
“Anyway, they want to build this house. They saw the drawings when they came to the conservation lab a couple of weeks ago. I left them for a few moments when I was getting a bowl of theirs, and when I came back, they were admiring your Explicated Four-Square House. They want to build it as a guest cottage on their farm in Maine. Isn’t that great?”
“Oh, Laura. I don’t think this is great at all. I can’t take that on, not now.”
“There’s nothing you have to take on. You don’t have to be any more involved than you want. They’ll bring in a local architect to do all the technical work and work with the builder to make it happen. You could consult!”
“It’s too late.”
“What do you mean? I thought you would be pleased.”
“Really? You imagined that I would be pleased, and not upset that you showed my drawings to random rich people with silly names who make crazy decisions about building a house based on some vague, rudimentary drawings—”
“Not random people! Not vague! Yes to the silly names. It’s your house! And it just happened, I didn’t plan it. I really thought you would be happy to see your house built after all this time.”
Still Life with Monkey Page 22