New World Monkeys (5 page)

She touches the doorknob. Such an easy moment in theory, one foot in front of the other until she reaches him. To sit on his bed and say these things so that he’ll know she’s not a complete lunatic. So he’ll know that somewhere in there, she’s still Lily. Surely they’re not the first couple to fight? In fact, they’ve had words in the past, they know how to apologize to one other. It is simple kindness and humility—an arm around the shoulder, a kiss on the forehead. That’s all it would take from her to allow them to go on happily ignoring each other for the rest of the summer.

And then she’ll lose her mind. She lets go of the doorknob. Whatever instinct she has to apologize must be snuffed out tonight. Even the
deepest apology will just be a veneer. The words she really wants to say are the kind that contain unbearable pathos, that can only be delivered as a pleading whine—
What’s gone wrong with us?

Truth is, even before she became the pig killer, she was missing that lovely quality of vulnerability that might have kept Duncan on her side. Made him sympathetic through her mistakes, those crude blurts and haughty spells of shyness she hasn’t been able to shake since girlhood. She steps away from the door, tells her gut to hush. An apology is a statement, but all she has for Duncan is a question. And tonight she’s not ready for the answer.

They met shortly after their own century gave itself up to the twenty-first. When they finally began to date, he understood immediately how simple, how desirable it would be to assign their futures the same trajectory. He was a miserable slob, she was clean and smart, her hair glossy. He had contracted scabies. She was everything he considered himself unworthy of, but desired anyway. And in a few months she would be his wife.

She was waiting in arrivals for him and all he could do was unzip her jacket and slide his arms in and around her. It was easy to believe they had been bound this way as children. For the last hour of his flight he’d flexed her around in his mind like a doll with hinged joints. He put Lily through gymnastic trials, dressed her in the silk
ao dai
tunic that he’d brought back for her. Then, just as quickly, he undressed her. He fell to his knees, his mouth open against her beautiful, white thigh. She was so private, so cautious, he had come to believe the only way he would ever know this woman was through the skin of his lips.

It had taken him two hours in Vietnam to realize he was too old and too sober for the month-long Contiki tour he’d signed up for. Lily hadn’t wanted to go—the ravaged scrap of land wasn’t her thing—but she supported his interest. He was a bit of a war buff and had always admired the resilient country, hankered to write about the slim-hipped race. Duncan
thought of Vietnam as the first war of his childhood. Remembered how his father and some of the neighborhood men, other rail workers mostly, could spend hours on the lawn discussing what they’d caught on the news between shifts. He’d told Lily that for reasons rather nostalgic the country had seized his imagination. He had loved this, how free and easy he could be with his thoughts around her. No one else had ever encouraged him to have an interior life, let alone listened attentively to the details. The things he would have gotten whipped for in Minnesota, Lily found artistic and worthy. He could reveal his passions—be run by them from time to time—and she would understand.

In the beginning he thought this was the reason they worked so well together. She was the historian lining up facts, and he was the writer filling the blanks in between. When other women would have crowed at a month-long absence, Lily planted within him the idea of getting an article out of his trip. In the end what had prevented him from doing this was the tour itself, its boozy orientation and the third-world ruts in the road between Hanoi and Saigon. He could barely hold a pen to paper. He excised the ready availability of alcohol and Australian girls in string bikinis from every phone call he made to Lily. While these things provided him with voyeuristic entertainment during the bus ride south, what he really wanted was to be with her, to hear her pretty laugh. Even while he was carousing around Saigon, or riding the waves at China Beach, or vomiting a gasoline stream of rice wine into the Perfume River in Hue, already he was conscious of doing these things for her, of turning experience into stories that might amuse. As he crawled through the historic Cu Chi tunnels, following the tight, sarong-sheathed ass ahead of him, his biggest desire was that when he returned, Lily would still want to be his wife.

In the airport he scratched a red welt on his arm and sunk his head between her neck and shoulder. He stuck some of her hair in his mouth.

“So, what have you learned?” Lily asked.

“I’ve learned that an overzealous customs agent can change your life in a matter of hours.”

“Do you still want to write articles?”

“My notes got napalmed at Immigration. Do you know you’re the first person to ever pick me up at JFK?”

“Well then,” she pulled back, spread open the palm of his hand, and kissed him there, “it must be love.”

I
n the morning, Lily discovers she has a mustache. Jesus, she thinks, backing away from the mirror. How long since she had a close-up look? She kicks open the bathroom door to let the shower fog ease out and can hear Duncan plunking away in the kitchen below. Flipping the toilet lid down and taking a seat, she pulls the bath towel around her in a tight swaddle. It’s clear there’s been a breach of trust, her body has sprouted hair in formal protest, asserting its will through her follicle shafts. How long has it been this way? Lily’s heard of bamboo that can grow twenty-four inches a day, of flesh-eating viruses that claim limbs faster than surgeons can cut away the offense. Maybe the mustache also falls into that category of phenomena, she thinks, stroking the lush patch. It feels like pussy willow. Of course, she’s had to take the occasional tweezers to her upper lip in the past. And while she can’t actually remember the last time that was, how can she not have noticed the dark growth under her nose? Lily unwinds from the towel and stands looking at her naked body in the mirror, something she hardly does anymore. She can’t bear the schism; inside she’s scarlet and alkaline, outside she’s all ridiculous anatomy. This hand, that thigh. The corrugated flare below the ass. She possesses neither impressive heft nor the enviable ribs and twigs of the half starved. Rather, she floats in between with clicking kneecaps and curves that are nothing more than nods to curves. Buttons sit flat over cleavage. Duncan used to
look at her with an intensity in his cocked eyebrows that was almost frightening. It thrilled her to be watched that way, as though she could light up everything that was fierce and carnivorous within him. But it’s been ages since he’s even strayed a toe to her side of the bed. Can she blame him? What about her is ravishing, exactly?

Surely he’s seen the mustache. He’s been in her face and in the house for days, shuffling around; why hasn’t he said anything? Even yesterday, while she railed on about the dead boar, he just looked at her with complete apathy. Lily takes off her glasses and presses her face against the mirror. She feels her anger over the boar percolating again. He practically forced her to kill it. She was holding out the tire iron—it was obvious that someone had to put the squealing horror out of its misery—and he refused to step in, disrupt the flow of his own drama. But wasn’t that classic Duncan? Always floating around the peripheries of emergency. Here was a man who felt at home in the audience with a megaphone. She’s never forgotten how he wanted to write a movie about her parents,
The Missionary and the Mogul. The Nun and the Nabob.
She had to snuff that project out. And now here he is again, forcing Lily to play the part of the executioner.

In the mirror she tries spying some Renaissance curve, a Grace perhaps with bundled muscle under rice paper wrappings. Instead she sees the shallow depth of field, the flat unfolding of the thirteenth century.
Lily
, her mother would say,
a man wants a feminine woman to bear his children, a kind hand. A helpmate.
It’s not exactly a turn-on, she knows, watching your wife bludgeon a wild boar to death with a tire iron.

A waft from the kitchen then. She pulls on a T-shirt, pokes her head through, and sniffs. It’s a familiar smell. Bacon. “He’s frying bacon,” she tells the churlish face in the mirror. Once the connection is secure in her head, the odor becomes offensive, triggers a gurgle in her belly, a finger easing open a hair-clogged drain. He is taunting her. Lily feels a suction reversal, and leans into the sink. Bile and orange juice tear a path up into her mouth.

She’s suddenly glad she didn’t apologize last night. And come to think of it, why not keep the mustache?

He had spent years trying to be like Hawke and then the past month trying to be anything but. Duncan understands the logic behind the man’s retro-sixties campaign. Those wide, swinging cuffs carried the misguided optimism and hash-stained freight of the entire counterculture movement. But the hippie was a hack idea, stale, something best dragged into the poor quarters and promptly shot.

What he didn’t foresee was that Hawke’s departure would leave him the unofficial heir to the creative director’s struggling efforts. Duncan waited to be taken aside, to feel the warm breath of the Brass on him:
We think you’re the guy to turn this ship around. The one to resurrect dinosaurs.
After all, look at what he’d done for laundry detergent. Until Duncan’s repositioning of Tide, the client’s strategy read:
Gets Your Whites Whiter.
Until Duncan, strategic planners insisted a product could be both
new
and
improved.
It was his campaign that had moved the needle on laundry detergent. Won him his gold One Show Pencils and earned him an early reputation as the go-to guy. Man to save sinking ships.

But reassurance from the Brass never came. Instead in the weeks that followed Hawke’s dismissal he was moved from packaged goods to the seriously listing denim account. And now, after a month of false starts, he still doesn’t have a single viable idea to mount and hump and enjoy. As Duncan walks around the garden, he realizes what he’s doing wrong. He should be writing what he knows. Let’s see: He’s got a finger on the pulse of waning marriages. And getting grease stains out of trousers. And facial hair, the female variety. Yes sir, that’s his specialty. It’s obvious. He should be writing for a woman’s journal.
Good Fucking Housekeeping.
That’s what the universe is trying to tell him.

Okay, stop it, he tells himself. Just calm the fuck down.

He’s come out to the garden this morning to turn a little soil for inspiration. Rationalizes that this past half hour of manual labor in frying-pan heat (really just making gentle surface wounds to freshen the desiccated
soil) might in fact help him muscle out a few concepts to bring back to the office tomorrow. He needs a place to start and some serious traction.

Duncan uses a spade to expand the tiny garden plot where he will soon plant his tubers. Sweet potatoes, yams, shallots, sunchokes. He slices into the grass and feels some remorse, like he’s scalping the lawn to make room for more garden. He peels away a layer of grass, revealing brown soil below, and sinks his spade into the earth. There’s a feeble underground clunk. The spade stops short; he’s hit a rock. Duncan bends and loosens it from the loam then shovels it onto the grass; it’s the size of a generous fillet of beef and as flat as a skipping stone. He is immediately suspicious—it’s too well proportioned to be indigenous. He nudges it with the spade as if it might dance for him or crawl away. The stone has the smooth contour of a beach pebble, a weary thing worn away by tides. He crouches and scrapes off the dirt. Then, turning it over in his hand, he sees someone has carved an inscription across its backside:

Duncan drops the stone as if it has spoken to him. The inscription is not crudely rendered, but engraved with a tool. He kneels then and picks up Tinker with both hands. Maybe it’s the sky clouding over or the raven settling on the clothesline that makes him turn. He looks at the house.