Still Life with Monkey

by Katharine Weber

  “What are those drawings hanging on that wall?” Megan asked, suddenly, gazing past Duncan into the dining room. “Is that a Frank Lloyd Wright house?”

  “No, it’s mine, something I did a long, long time ago,” Duncan said, secretly pleased by her error. She got up and went into the dining room to see them close up.

  “This is fantastic!” she exclaimed. “The Explicated Four-Square House. Wow. This isn’t like anything I’ve ever seen at Corrigan & Wheeler.”

  “Thank you. No, it isn’t.” Duncan waited at the table for her to come back into his field of vision. “It’s actually going to be built this coming summer,” he told her. “In Hallowell, Maine.” He was glad of the opportunity to be in her eyes more than someone who used to be significant but now just needed to be eased out of the firm.

  “I haven’t seen that yet,” she said. “I’d love to work on it.”

  “It’s not going through the office, it’s just this little project of my own, on the side. It’s a strange thing, having something I designed when I was an architecture student suddenly come to life.”

  Duncan really had not wanted to want anything. But this house—the Cavendish Four-Square—had become important to him. It didn’t really change anything about his situation, yet every day now when he woke up he found himself thinking about details of the plans instead of details of his own plans.

  “I’m so sorry about Todd,” Megan said suddenly. “Everyone misses him. We were friends. It was because of Todd that I applied for the internship.”

  “I was just thinking about Todd,” Duncan said. “I would have loved to have him helping with the detail work on this house.” This was partly true. Once the permits had been issued in Hallowell and bidding had started, Duncan had indulged in daydreams about what it would have been like to work on this house with Todd, if there had been no accident. Road trips to Maine, just the two of them. “Did you know him well?”

  “I met him at overnight camp in Vermont when we were kids, and then we met again at an architecture symposium in London one summer. Since moving to New Haven, I was getting to know him better,” Megan said.

  “One night last May he took me out to Biscuit Island and showed me around the site. I know we weren’t supposed to be there at night, but it was really thrilling for me. I had never been there. He brought a picnic. He was an amazing person. He talked about India all the time. He invited me to go to India with him next year.” Her eyes brimmed, but she didn’t actually cry.

  “How did you get out there to Biscuit?” Duncan was trying to picture this. An ugly little jealous worm wriggled in his heart.

  “We borrowed a dinghy with an outboard motor. Todd said it was okay. I don’t know if it really was okay, but we put it right back where we found it moored at the public dock. I love the name Spartina. Why didn’t we call the house Spartina instead of the Steiner House?”

  “Most clients love to see their names on the plans, that’s why,” Duncan said, hearing an echo of Jimmy Corrigan telling him exactly this in exactly these words when he was the young architect sitting respectfully with the distinguished elder, asking respectful questions. “Clients love having their names on projects. It makes them feel important, and they can imagine becoming known as famous patrons, like Edgar J. Kaufmann and Fallingwater. Or Dr. Farnsworth. It really helps distract when you’re way over budget and you can talk about the long view and posterity.”

  “That makes sense. But Spartina is such a great name—like Fallingwater. But I think I just figured out the name of my new kitten. She’s going to be Spartina.”

  Duncan smiled. He was a fool for kittens. “Better than Fallingwater, for a kitten.”

  “Anyway, that night was one of the most wonderful experiences of my life,” Megan said. “When I was there last week, now that all the subs are back on the site and everyone’s cranking to get it finished on schedule, I got really upset.” She hesitated and stopped. Ottoline hopped down onto the kitchen table to once again delicately pick at the irresistible freckles scattered on the backs of her wrists.

  “They’re really not tiny little bugs, monkey,” Megan told Ottoline, without pulling her hands away. “Do you think I have fleas, or mites?”

  “She’s programmed to hunt for tiny insects on the undersides of leaves, so maybe she does,” Duncan said. “You were about to say something. What upset you?”

  “It was magic, that night on Biscuit Island with Todd. He was so proud of his work. He showed me all the window details, and how he had solved a problem with that placement of the new chimney, the way it tucks in with the line of the widow’s walk. It was such a Todd Walker gesture! And now that’s gone. It’s so disrespectful of Todd.”

  Duncan nodded, thinking about how much he had enjoyed the feeling of his own talent sparking when that particular solution had suddenly revealed itself, as he sat alone at his desk in the stillness of the house on that spring morning, away from the hubbub of Corrigan & Wheeler. That was the moment he suddenly recognized with thrilling clarity how to tuck that chimney precisely into harmony with the existing features of Spartina. Todd had only been responsible for drawing the elevations for the presentation a few days later.

  “But now it won’t be Todd’s design,” Megan continued. “I mean, The Thimbles are a fantastic spot, and Biscuit Island is amazing, and Spartina, the Steiner House, it’s a really cool project. I love the way you and Todd made it all work with such balance and integrity. When Todd took me out there he was so proud and excited about all of his work, everything he had created. It was going to be a huge portfolio piece for him, a really fantastic beginning for his career.”

  “I understand how you feel,” Duncan said. He needed to see the Steiner House one more time.

  FIFTEEN

  “The blood of horseshoe crabs is blue”

  “THE BLOOD OF HORSESHOE CRABS IS BLUE,” GORDON said, leaning over the railing and peering down at the decaying, bleached carcass of a horseshoe crab bumping against the side of the boat. It kept rising and falling with the swell as if it were still alive. “It’s a really beautiful blue, almost a haint blue like your porch ceiling.”

  “I can’t see it from here,” said Duncan, whose wheelchair was strapped into a position facing the fore end of the Thimble Island ferry. “Is it worth your taking a picture on my phone so I can see it?”

  “Nah,” said Gordon. “It’s not bleeding. It’s dead. I was just saying.”

  If you listened for it, Gordon’s muted lisp rendered “saying” as “thaying.” He crossed the empty ferry and sat down opposite Duncan on one of the bench seats that lined the boat. It was too early in the morning for most tourists, who were likely to be few anyway, on this cool weekday in the middle of May.

  “It’s ten past nine,” Duncan said irritably. “I’m getting a little seasick sitting here. I feel trapped. I thought we had to hurry to catch this nine o’clock ferry. I made Wendell rush through everything in my morning routine so we could get on the road to meet you here. I had a banana in the van.”

  “I think I see a pair of tourists coming. They must be the ones he said he had to wait for,” Gordon replied, shielding his eyes against the glare of the morning sunlight. A strong breeze pleated the surface of the water in the harbor, and the ferry knocked against the dock. The tourist couple scurried past Thimble Marine Service, past someone in coveralls in the doorway of the repair bay repainting an upside-down dinghy propped on two sawhorses. A forklift that was maneuvering a stack of plywood sheets, moving back and forth between a lumber truck and the top of the ramp down to the wharf, nearly ran them over.

  “The Madison Beach Hotel reserved the ferry for them,” Gordon said. “That’s what he told me. I think they took that taxi down from there. Must have cost a fortune. See it?”

  “No! I can’t see anything that isn’t directly in my line of vision, dumbass,” said Duncan. He never mocked Gordy’s speaking, though mentally he noted the “thee it?”

  “Well, there’s a taxi tur
ning around that probably just left them off, and the guy said we were waiting for these people who were coming from the Madison Beach Hotel,” said Gordon. “That’s all I’m saying.” (“thaying.”) Gordon had bicycled the fourteen miles down the Post Road from Madison, and had in fact passed the Wharf Road turnoff for the Madison Beach Hotel, not far from his house. His bike was now chained to the handicapped parking space signpost where Wendell had parked the van on Indian Point Road.

  Wendell couldn’t swim and was fearful of boats and water, but he could drive the van. Gordon couldn’t drive, but he was happy to go out with Duncan on the ferry to circumnavigate Biscuit Island so Duncan could see, from the water, progress on the Steiner House, along with any observable changes to his original designs. Laura, who could have both driven the van and accompanied Duncan on the ferry ride, was at a mandatory staff meeting at the Yale Art Gallery, where the agenda was a discussion of ways to develop better practices for managing their inventory and chain of custody documentation procedures.

  Wendell had driven Duncan to the Stony Creek town dock, where they met Gordon. Wendell was a deft handler of all the mechanics of loading Duncan on and off the van, and he had helped them onto the ferry. He was now happily ensconced at a corner table at Thimbleberries for the duration of their outing, with coffee and a toasted English muffin and a medical text, studying for his next exam. He tried not to mind the bacon smoke coming off the grill. He was in an orthopedics module, and was devoting the morning to memorizing the twenty-six bones in the foot. He almost had them all, the tarsals, metatarsals, phalanges. When he looked up from his anatomy text to test himself, he was delighted to see that the boat had not even left the dock yet, which meant he would have that much more time to himself.

  The tourists approaching the ferry were both bandoliered with camera and binocular straps. They wore sunglasses and straw hats. They were an elderly couple, Japanese. The husband was reading aloud from the open guidebook that he held reverently in front of himself, like a missal. He was farsighted, and the new sunglasses he was wearing, purchased during a stop at the CVS in Guilford on their way to the ferry (which was why they were late), had ordinary lenses. His expensive prescription sunglasses had been left behind in their previous hotel in Watch Hill. He blamed his wife for this.

  They processed up the footway onto the ferry, the husband first, the wife following, holding tightly to the handrail as she proceeded. Gordon stood up to offer her a governing hand as she teetered at the edge of the boat deck, but she didn’t take it. She managed to keep her balance as she boarded, and then she followed her husband to the aft bench seat where he was already settling, still studying the guidebook.

  Now the ferry captain boarded, and in a practiced motion he shoved the footway back onto the concrete pier and snapped into place the carabiner end of a dangling white plastic security chain. He swung himself onto the seat behind the ship’s wheel and started the engine. As it chugged to life with a strong diesel smell, he came out of the pilot’s cabin to collect fares.

  Gordon explained that they wanted to circle (“thircle”) Biscuit Island slowly if that was possible, seeing as how there weren’t any other passengers, with the exception of the Japanese couple. Gordon paid their fares and went back to sit across from Duncan, who was trying not to think a lot of thoughts about a lot of things. Duncan watched his brother organizing the dollar bills he had received in change as he put them in his wallet. Duncan had given him the wallet for their birthday in April, though Gordon had said that he didn’t want to exchange presents. The wallet, a simple, handsome, calfskin billfold, was actually something Duncan had bought for himself but never used. These days he didn’t have much need for a wallet, and the old one that he kept in his desk drawer was sufficient.

  “You still worry that Lincoln and Washington and Jackson are going to be kissing each other on the mouth unless you keep them all facing the same direction?”

  “It just wouldn’t be dignified,” said Gordon, closing the wallet and putting it in his pocket. “Not a judgment, just not presidential.” He loved the wallet, but felt terrible that he had nothing to give Duncan in return.

  The captain cast off the lines that were looped over bollards fore and aft to snug the ferry to the dock, and a moment later the engine roared as he gave it full throttle. Soon they were chugging out into the harbor, following the meandering tourist route around the Thimbles.

  “Remember that time we went out fishing for blues with that guy from Daddy’s office on his Boston Whaler?”

  “I guess so, yeah,” Duncan answered. “We were what, eight?”

  “Probably. We launched from this same dock. We went out into the sound past all these same islands. You really don’t remember it?” Gordon persisted. “What was that guy’s name, his salesman who had that boat, Dean something, Dean Dixon?”

  “I think I do remember that guy. He was a retired football player or something. We went out on his boat that one time with Dad, right. Why?”

  “We went out for the whole day and got sunburned. Mom was really mad about that when we got home. You and I were spinning for tinkers off the boat and then Daddy hooked a baby shark off the back of the boat, remember? With the big rod that was mounted on the back for blue fishing?”

  “I think so, sure. Though our father wasn’t exactly an avid fisherman.”

  “You really don’t remember, do you?”

  “Maybe not. So what? What about it?” Duncan said. “Is this going somewhere?”

  “When Daddy reeled in the baby shark, that guy, Dean, leaned over with a big net and scooped it up, and he held it and told us to come near so we could see it up close, so we could touch it through the net. Then he hit the shark against the side of the boat to break its jaw and then he cut the line and threw it back in the water with that hook stuck in its mouth. He said there were too many damn baby sharks that would only turn into big sharks.”

  “I have no memory of that,” Duncan said.

  “I’ll never forget it as long as I live,” Gordon said.

  They lapsed into silence. The ferry scudded along at a steady rate and then shifted up to an increased and louder rate of speed.

  “See that house over there? On Halls Point Road, past Flying Point?” The boat had turned west and Duncan was in fact facing and could see what Gordon was pointing out on the far shore. “See that stone house? With the tree? Ayn Rand lived there for two summers.”

  “You’re kidding,” Duncan said.

  “She told an interviewer she got the idea that Howard Roark should work in a quarry because of the Stony Creek quarry.”

  “How very autodidactic of you, knowing that,” Duncan said. The boat slowed to circle Cut-in-Two, the island where General Tom Thumb courted his wife. Could the Japanese couple understand a word of the captain’s scripted explanations of each landmark as they blared out of the loudspeakers? “What else you got?”

  “Jack London wrote Call of the Wild in a boarding house in Branford,” Gordon said.

  “That is not strictly a Thimble Island fact,” Duncan ruled. “What else?”

  “General Tom Thumb and his wife don’t interest you?”

  “Actually, since my accident, I’ve been thinking a lot about freaks,” Duncan said. “Diane Arbus said something that really interested me. She said that most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. But freaks were born with their trauma, so they’ve already passed the test. That’s how I feel. Not that I was born like this, obviously, but now I have joined the freaks.”

  “I don’t see you that way, Dunc,” Gordon said sadly, gazing at his brother’s familiar face. “I don’t think of you as having changed at all, really.”

  The boat sped up and zagged in another direction, and something was announced about the next island on their left. The Japanese couple stood up and began to take photographs.

  “Wiryam Howard Taft?” the wife inquired of the Wheeler brothers. “He was important man?”

  “
He was very important,” Gordon replied. “He was the fattest president in the history of the United States.” She tittered nervously and uncomprehendingly, covering her mouth with the hand not holding her camera.

  Duncan felt a headache blooming. The motion of the boat, the noise of it, the diesel stink in the air—it was all such a potent return to that day in July.

  Gordon could feel Duncan becoming less and less present. Don’t leave, he thought. Stay, stay here. Please stay. Stay with me.

  “Hey, Hot Wheels,” he said. “I think we’re heading straight to Biscuit Island now. Doesn’t he usually go the long way? Are we skipping Governor Island?”

  “Maybe he’s taking a shortcut for the pathetic cripple on the boat,” said Duncan.

  “No,” corrected Gordon, “the pathetic freak. We’ll probably catch Governor on the way back in.”

  “You know Doonesbury?” The tourists had moved up to stand at the bow for a better view. “We like Doonesbury very much,” the husband said. “We have come to see his house on his personal island!”

  Biscuit Island loomed ahead. The two small cottages that occupied the leeward side of Biscuit looked weathered and tired. They shared a dock that had taken a beating over the winter, and there was ugly yellow police tape crisscrossing the broken ladder that descended straight down one side into the water.

  As they approached the island, the tourist couple took pictures of each other at the railing of the boat, with Biscuit and the outer Thimble Islands for a backdrop. Gordon offered to take a picture of the two of them together. They demurred, and the husband said, “We already have many selfies!”

  The boat slowed, and the motor dropped down into a low-gear chug as the captain slowly circled. Clumps of spartina grass waved among the rough pink granite outcroppings of bedrock. Gulls nested along a barren stretch. They motored around the island toward the seaward side, the suddenly breezeless calm turning the movement of the boat into a glide on an unrippled lake. The Steiner House—Spartina—gleamed in the soft morning light. What a beautiful folly. Blooming rugosa roses dotted the dense green foliage at the water’s edge with flashes of pink and white. The percussive echo of hammering and the occasional whine of a table saw, amplified by the water, sounded very near.