New World Monkeys (28 page)

He starts to run.

“He’ll bite your goddamn hand off!” Skinner begins to lope along behind him.

As his knees crank Duncan thinks, I’ll never get there in time. As he
circles the lean-to, he is suddenly aware of his own arms and legs in relation to the geographic coordinates of the yard and the grave. He can hear the old man behind him, age and bagpipe lungs posing only a slight disadvantage. He imagines a satellite view of the grounds and locks down their positions—the old man’s versus his own—performs quick calculations of distance and speed, factors in the poodle’s quadruped pace. And Duncan knows, through a combination of formula and intuition, that he has lost.

Then Lily comes around from behind the house. Lily, who is bent at the waist, mouth set with grim effort. Lily, who has the poodle by the distended scruff of the neck and is using both hands to drag it alongside her. Lily, his wife! Lily, for whom he has never before felt such joyous affection and gratitude. He and Skinner have no choice but to wind down in a dead heat, nearly tripping over one another in their efforts to decelerate. The old man’s lungs make known their displeasure at the sudden wind sprints. The massive canine twists under Lily’s grasp, tries to fix its mouth on her slender wrist. She looks at Skinner, thrusts the animal toward him. “Keep your damn dog out of my yard.”

“H
ow was the retirement party?” Leetower lowers himself onto the sofa the way a camel sinks to the ground, with the gentle buckling of legs. “Did the vets enjoy your literary masterpiece?”

Kooch looks up from the paratrooper television scripts. Duncan can’t help but notice the acute slope of his forehead in profile.

“I took home a couple waitresses.”

“Love those Jersey girls.” In his sketchbook, LT is penciling a drop shadow behind the doodle of a semiautomatic. “So Vietnam was a hit.”

“Well, we got a campaign out of it and I got laid twice.”

“I’m impressed, Kooch.”

“I’d be impressed if you’d shut up and focus on the work.” Duncan’s irritable and exhausted. After last night’s hunting expedition, he had just enough time to shower and start his drive into the city.

“Jesus, Duncan, you’re turning Kurtz on us.”

“Let’s go back to the collateral,” Duncan says. “I don’t want to give Stand and Be Counted any reason to kill this shit.” He takes out the rough marker renderings. “My gut tells me we need to go in with a totally fleshed-out campaign.”

“But you said that would only overwhelm.” Leetower turns to a blank sheet, holds his pencil over the page as though sensing a pedagogical moment.

Duncan presses his fingers together into a power tepee. He has left Lily in the path of potential lunatics. In an effort to avoid focusing on this reality he decides to lay some business acumen on his charges. “We’ve been living with the idea for a while now, but this Vietnam thing
is
risky. We can offset any trepidation by showing how it blows out in collateral.”

“Where’s the risk?” Kooch folds the television scripts in half and looks at him with that same fanged smile as last week. “We’re not targeting vets. We’re talking to the eighteen-year-old girls the vets want to fuck.”

He’s nearly had it with Kooch, the way he hurdles over authority to make every encounter confrontational. He’s got a brick shithouse of a body and a mouth to match, leaving Duncan with the suppressed desire to frag his sorry ass.

“We work with Product Development, get a commitment from them for a new line of colored denim. I want to give them names like Blue Cordite, Yellow Phosphorous, Agent Orange.”

“I’ve got the illustrator working out a few ways to present the line.” Leetower taps his pencil nervously.

They both look at Kooch. “What do you got?” Duncan asks.

“What do I got?” He picks something out from his nail and wipes it on a mouse pad. “I already came up with the campaign. What else you want?”

Duncan’s steepled fingers slide apart. A fine mist collects along his hairline. It must be delirium caused by his sleepless night, because he swears he just heard Kooch say the campaign was his idea.

“Duncs, you have some killer veins in your forehead.”

Before he can speak, Anne walks in and slaps a file folder on his desk. Judging by the clenched lines of her jowls, by the sound and force of her entry, it’s safe to say that she’s still surly from Thursday night. She won’t even look at the junior peons.

“So, you’re getting Tide back, Duncan.” Anne runs a tongue over her teeth. “Next week, after you’ve presented Stand and Be Counted, you get all the midgets you want. You should know, however, that I had to
talk you up. I blew roses out of your ass. I’m sure they think we’re fucking. They’re even giving you Hawke’s leather sofa.”

Next week. Why doesn’t this elevate him?

“Also, Leetower and Shithead here are off Tide. Which I am
so
sorry about.” She awards the boys with a terrifying smile. “But it was inevitable. Upstairs is concerned with the optics of a junior team alone on Tide. Someone’s put the bug in their ear that P&G will want to see the team’s reel.”

“We’re not junior. We’re intermediate.”

“And not just any reel,” Anne says from her seat in the steamroller. “But one with some groundbreaking, anthemic, ‘Why 1984 Won’t Be Like
1984’
masterpieces on it. Not that dog-walker wank you two got into
Communication Arts.
I was in the meeting on Friday, so I’m reporting straight from the horse’s mouth: ‘If Duncan’s off Tide, you better be replacing him with those Apple guys.’ Incidentally, Duncan, you’re cheaper. So congrats.”

Duncan has forgotten all about the midgets, about the entire laundry world. Work has been just hooches and wallows for him. He’s no longer the smooth-faced boy who had worked diligently at Hawke’s feet to turn Chernobyl babies into elves. One Show Pencil or not, how to go back there, to the land of small men? When here, he has surrounded himself with snipers and Lurps, rear-hatch gunners, jump school graduates, the snaking Mekong River and Graves Registration. Honeydippers burning the shitpots! His own client isn’t even worthy to receive this work. How will he make it his ongoing priority if he also has Tide to contend with?

“So, Stand and Be Counted, next Tuesday morning.” Anne looks at Leetower. “I want you there in case they have questions about the art direction. We’re on at eleven in their boardroom.”

“So what are we supposed to do after that?” he asks on behalf of the partnership. It seems Kooch has enough sense to keep quiet.

“Guess it’s back to writing coupons for you boys.” She smiles.

Once Anne takes leave, Leetower sighs and bows to Duncan. “Well, looks like you’ve been proclaimed Emperor of the Gibbons.”

“Yes. I’ll be living in trees and staining bark with my urine.”

Kooch looks at him. “You wouldn’t be there if I hadn’t given you the idea.”

Duncan snorts, feels the spray of it across the back of his hand. “You are a fucking piece of work,” he says to the other writer.

“Really?” Kooch sits up. “Because I could hear crickets chirping before I started talking about Vietnam.”

“I think you might have just ruined your career.”

Kooch throws his head back, an imitation of laughter. “Don’t count on it.”

Lloyd approaches her study carrel with a shoe box under his arm. “My dancing shoes, sweetheart.” He lifts the lid on a new pair of high tops.

Lily looks up from her copy of
Gray’s Anatomy.
“You give sneakers a whole new meaning,” she says.

“Enough about me, Lily.” Lloyd settles into the desk beside her. “This morning I would like a complete description of your childhood bedroom, please.”

She closes her book, looks at him. “And what has brought on this desire?”

“The shivers of your girlhood are always with me.”

“What year are we talking?”

“Adolescence. The traumatic years.”

Lily chews on the end of her pen. “A spring awakening.”

“Don’t skimp on the details.”

“My childhood bedroom,” she says, thinking of the house in Albany during the fallout of her mother’s missionary years, “had a revolving door.”

“Promising intro.”

“I was ten. There was a nun in the house.”

She’s an ascetic
, Lily remembers her mother saying later, while signaling to the paramedics to lift the stretcher over the rosewood floors.
We thought she was just in seclusion.

When they had a particularly contemplative guest it was Lily’s bedroom, tucked away over the garage and visited only by a drill of woodpeckers at the window sash, that was offered up first. Though her mother was partial to the tonsured Franciscans or the Poor Clares, the quiet room with the pink canopy bed had been given to a reclusive Eremite a week earlier.

Lily had skulked the corridors with the jealousy of the displaced, with a sudden nostalgia for dolls that she’d previously abandoned. For a few days she watched as meal trays were left in the hall. The housekeeper, used to the fickle eating habits of hermits, exchanged cold food for hot without a word. Lily, meanwhile, grew anxious waiting for the nun to emerge.

It took another day of fretting until she had an idea. Although she’d have to become invisible, crouch low, suck in her breath in order to execute it. How else to see those pink walls again, or to give those dolls—her dear children—their liberty?

She had never seen an expired body but imagined it might resemble the sick and ailing Ethiopians from her mother’s church brochures. In her mind, the dying required constant vigilance, someone to swat flies from the mouth and swollen bellies. The woman in the bed, though, while rank, was too desiccated for flies. Death was nothing like sleep, Lily thought. And heavenly sleep was a lie. She had pushed open the heavy door and understood everything at once. It was there in the crinkled stillness, mouth gaping.

Later she stood in the hall with the group of Vietnamese boat people her parents were sheltering in the pool house. They watched the paramedics thumb around for the old woman’s pulse.
It’s these Eremites
, her mother said, wringing her hands at the foot of the bed.
They ask for solitude, and then—heart attack.

You can smell it out here
, Lily said.

Her mother turned, surprised to see her among the crew at the door.
You get to your room.

This is my room.

Well, wait in the kitchen then.

Some of the Vietnamese children were hopping foot to foot, tugging at their mother’s arms.
They get to stay.
Lily frowned.

That’s because they’re Vietnamese, Lily. They’ve been through worse.

“Did the refugees touch you in your sleep?”

Lily stops packing her shoulder bag and looks at the pervert. “They were perfectly kind. You asshole.”

It’s odd, but she hasn’t thought of the dead nun in years. So many fossils, she thinks. What sort of anthropology can account for these bones resurrecting together?

Lloyd sighs and finishes tying the laces of his sneakers. He stacks his feet on the library carrel. “Lily, Queen of the Wasps. You waste your idealism. Have you or have you not been watching me for the past ten minutes?”

She gathers up her satchel and looks at his new shoes. Each one is topped with a mirror the size and shape of a sand dollar.

“Your problem, darling, is that you see what you want to see, believe what you want to believe.”

“True, I give you too much credit.”

“Listen.” He lowers his feet and leans across the desk toward her. “I’ve been thinking about your little situation. With the mascot.”

“Please, no thinking.”

“You know, at first I hoped you’d flourish in a life of crime. But I’ve got to be truthful, Lily, it doesn’t do a thing for you.”

“I’ll get over it.”

“Okay, you’re not going to like this,” he continues. “But I have a suggestion. You should confess.”

Lily’s shaking her head even before he finishes his sentence.

“If you’ll allow me to quote you, ‘Exist in a realm of action for once!’ They’re doing up a display in the lobby with the boar’s tusk—whatever hasn’t been ground into sausage.” Lloyd stops to chuckle at the latest fabulist tale concerning the boar’s remains. “How will you walk past that every day, Lily? In fact, at the risk of being pilloried, I say you need to take this one to the top—to old Farmer Brown himself.” Lloyd sits back in his chair, pleased.

She wants to cuff him. “That’s not going to happen.” Thinks of their close call with the poodle the other night. She can’t let their transgression with the wild boar jeopardize the possibility of exhumating the entire Tinker. Sunday, after literally flinging mud at her husband, Lily locked herself in her room (not that he was wanting in) and held the photograph of Oster Haus up to the light. Blocked out the sound of Duncan in the shower, and tried to see something new in the dark smudge of governess. But there was only the whip of dark hair, one arm around the child, the other held up against the sun. She can’t tell Lloyd, but she has sworn a larger secrecy to the thigh bone.