New World Monkeys (9 page)

I
n the morning her mustache is gone. This is something he notices right away. Even as she’s racing across the backyard toward him, waving her arms. “Hey! What are you doing?”

It’s like baby’s skin under there with the fringe gone, Duncan thinks. He can see her clean and shapely mouth forming the words
hey
and
what
and
are you doing
into a question. Can see the twitch of lip over teeth as she bounds across the grass, papers flying from her schoolbag. Duncan stands in the garden holding the shovel, assessing the pit, trying to choose a spot to start.

“Good morning.”

“You can’t dig without me.” Nearly out of breath. “You weren’t going to dig without me?”

“No.” He jams the shovel into the dirt and turns the soil.

“Are you going to wait? Until I get home?”

“Take the day off,” he says.

She hesitates. “I can’t.”

“Right. You’re on a schedule.”

“Come on, Duncan. Promise.”

He woke up after only a handful of hours of sleep, thinking about the kitchen. The sound of her skin flapping around it like something large and ensnared. He sat himself down in front of the computer, wanting to
scratch up some new ideas, but found he couldn’t concentrate on jeans with those great, winged thoughts of his wife set loose up there.

“I’ll promise too—we’ll both swear,” she says. “No one digs alone.”

This morning he asked himself whether this weekend commute was just a charade. Something they could participate in now in order to exonerate themselves later, assure family and friends that every stone had been turned. But he couldn’t sit still long enough to find the answer. He feared hearing the sound and feeling her skin under his palm. There was the uncharted mathematics of the span and length of his hands traveling over her open thigh.

And now the mustache is gone. He notices it. And she’s brushed her hair around her shoulders. A pink bra strap has slipped down her arm, out of her short-sleeved blouse. Is she really going to the library? How can he be sure? His attention is drawn to her pink bra, and, logically, to her breasts. To the handfuls he used to cup and slurp. To the dark nipples punching through white skin. But something tells him it’s too late. They have made resolves, exchanged indelible phrases like a currency. From this position, Duncan believes, any sentimentality should be forced down to the grass, twisted into submission. He’s a man, a quick grapple and down it should all go. Duncan will be safe in the garden, alone with the nanny who is simply bleached bone. It’s his garden, after all. It’s the shovel he bought for his own botanical pursuits. He doesn’t want to promise her anything.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay, I’ll wait.”

Lily arrives at the library in a gruesome funk. Why has she insisted on coming here this morning when there is, in all likelihood, a woman buried in their backyard? Nothing in the Osterhagen Loaning Library could possibly be of more interest. But the truth is messy. Duncan asked her to take the day off and even though she wanted to she could not bring herself to consent. There was a weakness in
yes
, shale sliced along the horizontal, and the word lodged in her mouth.

Lily climbs off the bike and shackles it to a tree. For months now she’s been carrying around a suspicion that Duncan is afraid to be alone with her. A fear that he remains bound by only some ancient courtesy. And that this long-weekend business is his way of staving off the decision that has to be made about their marriage. He had caught her off-guard this morning. His invitation had flustered her and she’d ridden away like a screwball, stubborn and inscrutable.

As she walks toward the building she pulls her shoulders out of their cyclist’s hunch. Lily thinks of the schoolgirls, their embellished swaggers and tightly braided abdominals. In comparison she is sag and flesh tone, the pilled acrylic of sweaters, a single gym sock balled onto itself. She has to wonder what significance her body held for Duncan that he would have stepped outside his own character last night and slapped her like that. He hadn’t wanted her body—there was nothing frisky in his action. It was a motion that lacked both genesis and evolution. She swears her ass still holds the shape of his hand. Lily looks down at herself. There’s an odd vigor in her belly, radiating up toward each breast. She feels a measure of twine cording all three points together, traveling through all points. She folds her arms across her nipples, hides the evidence.

“I need to get out of the city for the summer,” Lily had said near the end of May. They were idle at a stoplight. Across the intersection a cyclist had just been knocked off his bike by a bus. “I was thinking of going upstate. To the house.”

The cyclist was on his side, moving but still clamped to his bike by the pedals. “You’re going to be late this morning,” Duncan said. A small crowd flowering around the man both shielded him from subsequent knocks and prevented the bus from sliding away into traffic.

“Not that I’m saying it’ll be much better in Osterhagen. Heat is heat. But the library is quiet. And Bard isn’t far away.”

The cyclist was trying to unlock his pedal clamps and disengage from the aluminum skeleton. Duncan watched the driver of the bus make his way through the crowd, tugging at bare elbows and T-shirts until a path cleared. He stood over the fallen man; Duncan could see his jaw turning a series of words over and over.

“The house should probably be condemned,” Lily said, raising her window. “But there it is.”

Duncan leaned his head out of the car to catch the bus driver’s words. “That’s the angriest human being I’ve ever seen.”

Later, standing in Anne McPherson’s office, he’d thought, My wife is leaving me.

“I know this is managerial bullying, Duncan, but what can I do? You think I don’t see how everyone’s distancing themselves? The account’s ruined; they’re calling it Stand and Be Slaughtered.” Anne, a mercurial account director, began her pitch by shoving aside policy and lighting a cigarette right at her desk. “There’s no energy left around here, no more belief. Hawke gets turfed and all we want to know is who’s getting his parking spot. Memories have become vague and unreliable. Who liked this idea? Who counseled for this campaign? Who against? I don’t have a single AE who remembers being in a tissue session. Hell, I don’t remember being in a tissue session.”

Is Lily leaving me? Duncan wondered. Or does she want me to go with her? She was dexterous this way. Meaning, with her, could be ambiguous and irresolute. And his interpretation of it, he’d come to realize, was often nothing more than a barometer of his own heart.

“Duncan, they’re coming to you because you can fix this.” A tidy funnel of smoke whisking out each of Anne’s nostrils. “Hawke always breast-stroked against the current. This time around they want a partner. Not a fighter.”

“A yes man?” He two-stepped on her sisal rug.

Anne dropped her cigarette through the foam crown of a cappuccino. “What you did for laundry, Duncan, you can do for denim.”

There before him had been a choice of snares: the summer with his wife or the summer on this miscarriage of an account. He suspected that Lily wanted to be alone up there, practicing the bitter idioms of marital woes:
he never did, he never could, he never would.
As though he were past tense. Something acquired, inhaled, then crushed into reusable fiber. But he wasn’t about to just roll over and die that easily. He could leave the city with her for a while, leave the crowded sky of the eastern seaboard. The uncharged waters, the thin Atlantic, brackish, a rum and Coke sloshing up against the breakwater. They’d go someplace where things had round edges. A marshy substance in the air muffling what one could smell, what one could see. Cicadas crooning about the night, poplars grasping knuckles across the stretch of road. They would go to the river valley where stray oats and spores mushroomed in the cracks of wood siding, cedar planking, between fingers and toes.

The pervert is back. Like evolution, Lily thinks, while removing the volume of de Tocqueville’s
Democracy in America.
He has crawled out of the bathroom and climbed his way up to the stacks. She pulls out the copy of
Democracy
because it’s the only book among the hardcovers that leaves a chunk wide enough to spy through.

Lily crouches to watch; the man sits at a table, his chair tipped on its hind legs. He’s positioned back to back with one of the young girls at the study carrels so that he’s leaning into her, his crown nearly touching her ponytail.

Without looking at her he says, “Why don’t you roll down your panties for me?”

The girl doesn’t turn, doesn’t respond. She’s decorating a textbook
with a highlighting pen. Lily, however, feels herself react as she might to a swallow of bad milk, the sensation of dairy flecks left on the tongue.

The pervert clears his throat. “Go ahead. Roll them right under your skirt.”

Lily watches the girl’s jaw work away at a tough nougat of gum. She brings a fingernail to her cheek and carefully scrapes around fresh acne sores. Lily recalls her own years at St. Agatha of Catania as loping and feral. Anything but innocent. It was a place where, within a week of arrival, a convent girl would be taught to speak in a pitch just below the hearing range of the nuns.

The man looks straight ahead, waits, ostensibly, for some sort of rejoinder. He keeps balanced on the two chair legs. As he waits, Lily takes a good look at the unfortunate girth of his thighs. They give him a pitiful sense of sluggishness. Overall, she’d say he’s too chubby to be a pervert. She’s always imagined them a race of rattish men, narrow and buck-toothed. Although his wet comb approximates the image; hair flat and scissored into rectilinear precision. Lily looks between the girl and the man, trying to decide whom she would like to win. Where does her sympathy lie?

When she can no longer bear to remain concealed between the stacks of nonfiction, Lily comes around the corner, approaches the carrels, and rests the edge of
Democracy
on the pervert’s table.

“She can’t hear you.”

He looks at her. He hiccups, drops his chair down to all fours.

“What?”

“She’s wearing earphones.” Lily motions to the girl, whose head and foot are synchronized by either music or a nervous twitch. They both turn to watch as she inflates her gum into a bubble and holds it between her lips. Lily knows he is taking in the girl’s pocked cheek. Something like distaste milks his eye.

“Christ,” he says and looks back at Lily. “For a second there I
thought I was losing my touch.” Then he smiles, bares a mouthful of Chiclets and pearls.

“This is the thing,” Lloyd says as he shakes out a smoke. “The world’s lost every last bit of grace. In its mad rush it’s become a giant, voyeuristic carnival, right? Get on the computer and there you have it, all the graphic shit you want. Pictures, video, live feed—and if that’s not enough, you got forums to chat about it. Like growing a fucking orchid. A million people out there offering an opinion on sunlight and humidity. Dying to let you know you’re not alone. So you’ve got your furries and forniphiliacs, your trannies and frotteurs, your Japanese buruseras. There’s peeps, necrophiliacs, zoophiles—a list the length of my foot. Point is, whatever your hobby, you’ve got instant how-to access, right? A planet full of deviants ready to dish on gag balls and pony collars and the right amount of torque to apply to surgical tubing. And there’s even diagrams! You do much surfing? There’s diagrams for everything.

“Somewhere in this shuffle, we lost our imagination, okay? The power of visualization undervalued. Really, I’m an advocate for a gentler, simpler time. Before the gizmo age, best a kid had was a smudged magazine or two. What boy didn’t wait under the neighbor’s window to catch her undressing? One day she might forget that inch of blind and you’d get her unhooking her bra—that’s natural curiosity, am I right? Mind you, the reality isn’t so pretty. No way. Any woman over fifty unhooking a bra and it’s Look Out Below!”

Lily thumbs her lighter until it gives up a weak flame. “Is that your real name?”

“What?”

“Lloyd? Sounds made up.”

He gets a shot of smoke in the eye and squints at her through it. “You’re an uptight broad, aren’t you? I can tell.”

Lily turns away, looks around the shade of the empty library cloisters,
the arcade of shrubs stunted to the height of a man’s shoulders. In the center of the garden, the terra-cotta putto spouts a weak drizzle from his privates into a fountain.

“What’s your story, anyway?” he asks.

“My story?” She sits down on the edge of the fountain and pulls a stray hair from her tongue. Okay, the man is troubled—this is clear—but she was, for some reason, touched by his failure with the girl in the stacks. And he had cigarettes.
Smoking is such a stock tic
, he’d said, extending the crushed packet to her.
Go on, I don’t bite. You’re not my type, anyway.

“I’m working on a paper,” she offers finally, assessing the danger of his confidence. “And living up here for the summer.” But the words lack energy and must be persuaded from her. One week in Osterhagen and she’s already shrinking in her skin. A week since the charge of the wild boar that left them grabbing a hoof each and dragging it to the ditch, draping it with loose boughs. She’s still feeling sick about it, more so now that she knows its celebrity status. Of course she can’t express this guilt to Duncan. These details of her conscience are lost on him.