New World Monkeys (19 page)

Lily stretches on her side and stares at the fireplace that they won’t be using this summer. A pleated skirt of iron in front to keep embers off the tiled hearth. Funny, she has already decided that these are the bones of the woman from the photograph. And the more she glimpses up here of human nature, the more likely it seems that Tinker’s death was an inside job. Although, she really has no way of knowing. She could call her mother, the self-professed keeper of family trivia. What else did she know about the boy? About the vanished governess? The great-grandfather’s temper? But the business is a little too
Turn of the Screw
for her mother’s taste and definitely lacking in spiritual expiation. The woman was a missionary, after all, and always in a haste to get to the point, or to the act of contrition. Lily knows her mother will have no interest in the violence of the nanny’s death; the story will only hold water for her at the point where Oster repents. For Lily, the story burns where he sins.

Her mother understands everything and nothing and in her counsel there is little salient meaning. At Thanksgiving she might mourn Lily as a child bride, offering her a single train ticket home. At Christmas she can
be found lighting votives in hope of grandchildren. Lily can never quite warm up to these gestures—and not only because of their confused intentions. The truth is, she’s embarrassed to be among the woman’s priorities, the subject of prayers, after an entire childhood of being an afterthought. Still, Lily never has the heart to stop her. She’s allowed her mother to pull her aside, remind her that a man wants the kind of woman who knows how to ease apart the knot of his day. Lily’s hands, it’s clear, have yet to learn this palliative gesture.

Coming home from her parents’ house, relief always meets her at the elevator, scoops her up in its great mitts and carries her through the door. It is the dampening effect of concrete. In the city Lily is free to ease apart the strands of her own husband in her own way. If she so chooses. And hasn’t she chosen? Duncan was unaware, but there were a million things she’d done for him and kept in her heart. Not indulgences, more like stepping forward in the dark to shift scenery. Tucking an extra foot of sheeting in at his side of the bed and switching his sliced white to whole wheat and never, ever reminding him that the bills don’t pay themselves. Early on she recognized he needed a tract of land around him and so didn’t complain when he worked late and weekends, or reeked of beer and smoke. When he got the idea to travel to Southeast Asia during the thesis year of her master’s program she had even supported his shitty timing. Encouraged him to go without her.
It’ll be good for you to do your own thing.
Christ, they weren’t even married then and already she’d developed a sleight of hand to guard him from her own disappointment.

The phone rings, startling her.
Gray’s Anatomy
slides to the floor, chapters fan from the spine and strain against the tack of glue. “Topography of the Cerebral Cortex” folds into a permanent dog ear. The phone must be dug out from between sofa cushions; the uncomfortable expedition of hand into the gorge of crumbs and grain.

There are several long seconds before he speaks and when he does his voice is full of surprise.

“You’re home.”

“Duncan?”

“Expecting someone else?” A screen of television laughter connects his words, the consonance of audience whelps and cheers.

“What?” she says.

“Why did you put my trophies in the closet?”

She can hear the studio audience sing along to the intoxicating chant of the network. “Are you drunk?”

“I want an answer.”

She holds the phone away from her face, looks at the handset as though it has, in some way, gimmeled the transmission of his voice. What sort of answer? Anything she can offer he will only peel down to an ugly objective. Duncan thinks he wants to know things, but he can’t even bring himself to admit to even simple indignities. His own anxiety around her parents being at the top of the list. Last year she was the one who had to watch him fret before one of their overnight visits. Duncan had tensed up like something bound and volatile, spent hours on a stepladder testing every lightbulb in the place. He even vacuumed the area rugs in one direction so that the nap stood stiff.

So when she removed his One Show Pencils from the living room and put them in the linen closet, it was meant to be an invisible action. Duncan would not have even noticed if she hadn’t forgotten to return them afterward.

What are these doing here?
He’d stood by the closet holding them one afternoon.

How could she explain? The inscriptions on the Pencils read:
Best Television Campaign: Tide, Laundry Elves.

How could she sit and allow Duncan to stumble through an explanation to her father? That an award show existed for television commercials? Her father, aside from being humorless, had spent much of his own
youth squatting in a Rwandan village hut, rifle strapped to his chest to guard against an aggressive mountain faction while his coffee beans were harvested.

“Lily,” his voice rattles up from the city like a shaking pan of frozen peas, “I asked you a question.”

Anger begins to move through the dense packing of her organs. She touches her healed lip and thinks of that miserable night in the old shit’s farmyard, of her husband’s loveless bite. And then, of all the small and good things she has done for him. Duncan has slept right through them. It’s just like him. Forget the years of predictability, he had chosen to wake for this.

“They were five years old.” She hears herself, salt pouring into the great slice of him. “Just gathering dust out there.”

Before he can reply, a walloping blast sounds out. The house reacts first; windows knock against their casements. Around Lily loose items vibrate in the sonic aftershock. She feels the jolt in her neck, in the lean strip of muscle that winches around her windpipe. It’s unclear whether Duncan hears the insult that precedes the cannon blast or her cry of fear that follows. In any case, when she recovers enough to say his name, the phone is dead.

U
ntil today she believed they were too young for divorce. They’d only just left their twenties. Could still afford the wait-and-see attitude of youth. The universe might still intervene and shake a few tricks down its sleeve. Things could happen, an enormous cannonball could crater out the house and leave them clutched in one another’s arms.

Or nothing could happen. Nothing at all.

It’s been weeks of waking to the chorus of country birds. Another Wednesday in June and the days surround Lily like an iron lung. The library is closed for maintenance, the old building shut down by stale breath and floorboard music. She slips, instead, into the acreage of barley out back, entering just beyond the edge of garden where Duncan first found the headstone. His shovel is staked in the soil like a signpost. The crop welcomes her, parts with ease, the bristle tickling at the breastbone. This is the best way to travel through barley, she thinks. With the same parting and spreading motion of hair, of legs, of waves. A half mile to the west the sky drops empty of trees and the neighboring stubble fields slope into the Hudson. With jeans tucked into socks, Lily moves slowly toward the river; there are still a dozen hours left in this day and behind her is only the empty house.

Until today she and Duncan had only blunt edges and slow motion to bump up against. But this morning she woke and forked her tongue
through her name—
Lily
—with the same cold thrust she’s heard him use. This morning she saw the truth cross overhead like a formation of honking, shitting geese outside the window: she is waiting for Duncan to leave her. She’s waiting for him to do it.

The truth is she’s afraid of large strokes and sudden movements. There are dire consequences whenever she makes one. The wild boar for instance. And if she’s still remorseful over the handling of the pig, how would she ever endure the guilt of euthanizing her marriage? Where would she go besides? There’s no way she’ll return to her parents, a cracked egg on their doorstep. The misery of their house perhaps worse than the misery of remaining pressed between the glass and screen of this sliding door. Her mother and father never warmed to Duncan, never exhaled in his presence. And while they couldn’t turn a blind eye to divorce, they would at least blink rapidly, suggest an annulment. The tidy dissolution of the past five years of her life.

This morning she opened her eyes and saw fact. If they separated she would be the bereft one. From the beginning Duncan had been surrounded. He built himself a nest of sound and paper and resided there. He would never quite realize he was alone. Then, little by little, he would not be alone. There would be people with whom he could talk out his failure until it was drained from him like yellow fluid from an abscess. He was only thirty-two; soon he’d be ready again. Friends would embrace him, throw arms around their recovered brother, be ready with the flip observation that he was better off as God had made him.

And why shouldn’t they part? The thought of children had never interested them—it wasn’t as though they’d be giving up on anything bigger than themselves. Besides, her rectilinear tastes didn’t nuzzle up alongside his. The noisy guitar bands he follows,
the wheedling yet revealing dialogue of a generation with nothing to rally around
that he participates in, none of these things has found its way into her own flesh. Some women, she knows, un-petal like marigolds for the right man. And here she is with nothing to unfurl.

The last time he tried to undress her—how long ago was that?—she had felt his hand across her breast, so sudden and heavy she thought something had dropped from the ceiling of their bedroom. She turned to face him; there was only darkness between them.

A hundred years ago, in England, people would pay to watch the unwrapping of Egyptian mummies.
Lily’s breath had caught in the serif of the words.
What do you think happened? Inside the wraps they found pharaohs turned into driftwood. Queens of dry, brown matter.

Where had this knowledge come from? Whose voice had spoken, telling Lily to turn him away before he did it to her first? Duncan removed his hand. Not with the sudden motion of scalding water, but something slow and deliberate.

In the barley she takes a head of grain and squeezes. At least a month or two, they’d been told, until it would be ready to harvest. There is no give from the young plant; the straw binds the six rows of kernels like a tight scrotal sac. And that’s how she comes to understand. Sees it then with the precision of an acute triangle. Nothing turns on a dime. She will never really identify the moment the pointed arch changed the architectural world because the Arabic influence had just leached in from around the edges. This is the same reason she doesn’t recognize anything about Duncan. They have picked at each other for so long that new tissue formed. New bone calcified over the existing structure.

Lily clears a round patch in the grain and sits down. Against her better judgment she has watched for signs of what will happen next. Birds striking the sunroom window, the pattern of flight of a plastic bag, the scattering of twigs in the grass. She knows there are techniques of divination that are beyond her: the study of bones, the interpretation of laughter. Sideromancy, the burning of straw on hot iron. But Lily prefers the observable, the empirical. Happy coincidences, common denominators, even numbers. Things that happen twice.

She had met him before. Before the time they began to date, she had met him briefly, they had bounced against the surface of each other with a pleasant thud. And then they parted. And then they met again.

The second time she had just returned from Italy. She was walking in the area of the university, circumnavigating it really, waiting for her thoughts to polarize. Lily was trying to find a path to take her from the last two years in Europe to what lay ahead. Was it academics? A return to the seminar rooms and libraries divided into floors of prattle or hush. Eventually she might apply to the Institute of Fine Art for a Ph.D.

She had just put the question out there, so that when she saw Duncan—she realizes this in hindsight—she couldn’t help but think it was the universe responding. Bright, efficient, prompt for once, it had dropped a piano on her. Maybe that was her mistake. Taking Duncan as a sign rather than a coincidence. But from that point on, she was unable to divorce him from the shape of her future.

He was with a film crew that day, wearing gloves against the bite of early spring and ratcheting the lid off a cup of coffee. Around them the city was bald, waiting for either buds or one last snow to smudge the hard edges. Lily had stopped short, his name in her mouth. He was standing with a gang of men and she was too shy to approach. Waited instead for him to recognize her or something of what had passed between them two years before.

There were things about Duncan that had vanished: the blink and stumble of boyhood, the loose pouch of a boy’s body. He was rough and tousled, a kind of beauty discovered only when youth begins to disappear. A man now, hair snipped like corded wheat, a fine imprint of lines around his eyes. But the eyes—there it was. Exactly the same Indiana sky. She felt her mouth line with mink and a light in her belly rousing not the butterflies felt by girls, but the thousand frantic moths that awaken women.