New World Monkeys (7 page)

He leans into her ear. “Come back with me tonight.”

Lily keeps focused on Skinner, doesn’t answer.

“You shouldn’t be here alone,” he tries again.

She turns to look at him then. “Where should I be?”

“The city. The apartment. School.”

Her fingers come away from his arm. “No,” she says quietly. “Everything is here.”

He tries to stay calm under the belting swoops of Skinner’s discourse but Lily has shifted away, lowered her head. Mindful of the room’s scrutiny he reaches for her, keeping the motion as offhand as possible. “Look at me,” he says.

She obeys. Her face is soft if only for the benefit of the crowd.

“You’re getting mixed up here.”

She stands within his arm, so silent and intense that for a long moment even the old man’s harangue is flattened under the pressure of her stare. Then she lifts to her toes and puts her lips to his ear.

“Be mixed up with me.” Her voice is an unfamiliar fever. “I’m staying.”

Skinner’s warbling tenor expands again to fill the entire room, to plant the seeds of reckoning in unsuspecting hearts. Duncan clears his throat, looks away from Lily and finds the old man glaring at him.

“What will you do for your town?” Skinner speaks with enough force to burst a capillary in his clear eye. Pecks of saliva stand out on his chin. “How far will you go when asked?”

Duncan hears a dangerous measure of madness and accountability in this question. Or does the real danger lie in Lily’s declaration? She’s going to take it standing, he thinks. And now he’s left to decide. Just how far is he willing to go?

“B
rass-on-secretary sex.” Leetower crouches by the sofa, his knees making a sound like popped bubble wrap.

“No, that’s Brass-on-Filipina-cleaning-staff sex. Look at the shape.”

“Kooch is right.” Anne bends over the camel-color cushion, scratches at the edge of the stain with a fingernail. “I can see the head of Imelda Marcos in there.”

Duncan stands in the doorway to his own office on Monday morning. First thing that irritates him is the sight of the stout junior writer, Kooch, sitting at
his
desk. In
his
swivel chair. He’s holding an old framed photo of Lily close to his face.

Duncan’s second irritant is the deep maroon heart in the center of the sofa cushion.

“That was not there Thursday.”

Anne looks up. “You’re back.”

“See the shit that happens when you take Fridays off, Duncan?” Kooch cranks the chair horizontally until it complains under his weight.

Anne, a senior account director, flicks an acrylic nail at Leetower’s ear and points to the cushion. “Flip it over, houseboy.”

Duncan walks in. With his office occupied, he’s forced to lean against his desk. He watches Leetower take the cushion by the edges and turn it upside down.

“We’ve got a dead midget on our hands, Duncan. I heard you heard?” Anne hoists her pot-roast rump on the sofa. “Ravi’s starting casting tomorrow.”

“We already went through this shit, Anne.”

“Six years ago. Surely there are new midgets by now?”

“The best dwarves are from the State Circus School.”

“There’s no money for Ukrainians, Duncan. Local casting only. Besides, you’re off the account.” Anne stops and looks at Leetower beside her. “Please tell me that’s your halitosis.”

“I think it’s the stain.”

“How’s Stand and Be Counted coming along?”

“Fine.”

“Good.” Anne points to Leetower and Kooch. “The boys are on it with you now that Tide’s on hold. And in absence of a creative director, may I be the one to remind you, no hippie shit.”

“Thanks. Put it in the brief in case we forget.”

“Seriously,” she says. “Hippies have got to be the biggest sixties cliché, no?”

Leetower and Kooch look at each other and shrug. “We were born in the eighties.”

Anne stands up. “Your mothers should have lifted furniture.”

Lily is meant to be writing a treatise on the principle of luminosity in Gothic architecture, but is forced to set up shop in a dark carrel between the women’s bathroom and a shelf of nonfiction. The window tables have been claimed this afternoon by teenage girls, heads bent to the task of applying varnish to their nails and punching text messages into their cell phones. Private school, Lily thinks, walking past the tables of kilts scrolled up way past regulation.

She sits down in her corner by the ladies’ and thinks that to get through this dissertation, to become a Doctor of Philosophy in the History
of Art and Archaeology she must eat, sleep, and breathe the pointed arch. She recalls the passionate tone of her dissertation adviser encouraging her:
Champion the acute angle, Lily! Celebrate this Arabic innovation, this great gift of the hapless heretics.
But as she touches a palm to her cheek to measure for the feverish sweat of the obsessed, it seems that for her, sustainable passion isn’t so easily come by.

Physically, the arch of the French Gothic era exerted less lateral thrust than its predecessor (the round arch of the Romanesque). This allowed for more window and less wall, more light in the cathedral and less lithic darkness
—here Lily could lord over colleagues studying the Romanesque. What did the round arch do but hold up the crude, dark churches of the unenlightened? Places for people who worshiped from fear, who burnt and bled their offerings—
The first systematic combination of the pointed arch and the ribbed vault in the Abbey Church of Saint-Denis ushered a revolution of both building style and theology.

Lily scribbles this note, although she doesn’t quite trust the pinpoint accuracy of the statement. Knows that history is the luxury of hindsight; people entering the Early Gothic Period didn’t know they were entering the Early Gothic Period.

I, however, happen to know I am entering a Shit-Eating Period.
She adds this to her previous note as two girls come out of the bathroom. Lily hears them first; the snigger and huff that precedes all teenagers, which she remembers from her school days at St. Agatha’s. She looks up as the girls pass. They’re the strong-jawed sort, the kind who hide behind sweeps of hair and charcoal eyes. Lily recalls plucking her own brows into similar experimental crescents. Their bodies, however, are a different matter. She has heard theories, knows what estrogen in drinking water can do to teenagers these days. She certainly doesn’t remember these high-rigged breasts and grasshopper legs from her own adolescence.

Lily chews on a piece of hair. Truth is, she’s probably just a revisionist. She thinks back to the last five years of her own history. Her life with Duncan. As a biographer, can she isolate the inciting event, the moment that sent the small huddle of husband and wife plummeting? Could she plot it
on a graph:
The Progressive Decay of Married Life?
It’s impossible. On several occasions she has tried to drum up the urgency to set things straight—for herself at least—to discern what sin she has committed to turn her husband away, and how far she should go to bring him back. Thinking his sleep and his absence were smooth walls against which she could test her longing and sadness, she waited until Duncan slept or left for work to finger through photographs and sniff his shirts. Here was a birthday card, a dried flower, a postcard from the weekend in Montauk when he had taught her to swim. Imagine that—she was a woman who had never learned to swim! For three long summer days he held her in the turbulent sea, teaching her to kick and breathe and simply float. At night, in the safety of their cottage, she confessed she had never learned before because she had never trusted anyone before.

But did she feel nostalgic for this now? For the cup of his hand under her neck, at the small of her back, keeping her weightless and safe above sea level? Look into your heart for a songbird, Lily. Into the belly for the pang of love. Duncan’s face might be the only face she has ever loved, but is it enough? Is it realistic? The stretches without him are never long enough. This reason too, she can give for a summer in the country; an absent Duncan, a present Duncan. Which will she like better in the end?

In the margin of her page, she has drawn an anatomically correct heart. She’s about to shade in the valves when the restroom door opens again. Lily looks up, expecting another kilt. Instead, a squat and blocky man slips out of the women’s bathroom and eases the door shut behind him. He nods at Lily, gives her a thumbs-up. Walks away.

Every idea, garbage.

On Tuesday morning, Duncan uses his arm as an all-purpose wiper blade to clear his desk of yesterday’s ideas for Stand and Be Counted. The framed photo of Lily that Kooch had been studying falls into the sullage
with the rest of his desktop trash. Duncan fishes it out. Lily in her silk
ao dai
, avoiding the camera lens by a shy ten degrees. She had posed for the photo with her hair pulled tight, purposefully demure. This was just after his trip to Vietnam. She came out of her bedroom with mincing steps, bowing deeply and draped in the violet silk that he had bought her. She was trying not to laugh—he remembers the moment in digital detail—her suppressed laughter and then suddenly his entire existence was bifurcated. It was a terrible juxtaposition: behind him was this life that he’d carefully fashioned from scratch, and ahead of him was the woman for whom he’d toss it all away without a second thought. It
was
terrible. But it was also beautiful. How strange that she, who moved into his arms as lithe and seeking as a child, would require such ferocious contemplation. She was soft, occupied such little space, how could he have known that she had the power to decimate him? That he would help her do it? Looking back, he realizes it was the end of their friendship and the beginning of her reign.

For five years this photograph has held agency on the right-hand corner of his desk. Now Duncan opens the top drawer of his file cabinet and transfers Lily there. Right next to his expense account file. These five years have definitely made him slow-witted; he didn’t even make much of a fuss when he was moved off Tide. Felt he had it coming. But he is ready, finally, to widen the scope of the blame. For instance, why not fault Lily for a portion of his career whiteout? Point to the detrimental effects of marriage to an über-critic. Yes. He rolls the file cabinet shut. No doubt he’s learned the value of self-editing with Lily around. And a tough lesson about inviting her opinion.

The last time he’d prepared work to show Hawke, he made the mistake of giving Lily his scripts, handing over his raison d’être, seeking perhaps some human compassion. Certainly not an academic analysis. She just thumbed through the deck as if it were an income tax report.
Christ, Duncan. How many more product testimonials do we need anyway?
She shook her head and let the stack of papers drop to the coffee table.
What about
compelling drama? What about realism? Your scripts are about as organic as corn-dogs.
Why did he think he could expect enthusiasm from her? This was their division: Lily was a student, while he was a student of life.

He remembers when she finally settled on the pointed arch as her dissertation topic. She had launched the idea at him over dinner, the table her lectern. Duncan hardly recognized her that night. The thought was uncharitable, but he felt there was something suspect about her waxing on Gothic innovation, how she hit the consonants hard when speaking of the arch’s Middle Eastern genesis. Could she have cultured this idea just to thwart his claim on creativity? Every word seemed to announce a challenge. Lily and her ache to be eccentric, he thought. There was nothing soft left in her.

“Still no word on the boar. Though I suppose no news is good news.” The library cats murmur and click while they sort books near Lily’s computer terminal. “What about homecoming? Has anyone asked the question?”

“That’s right, he’s the season starter,” Persian says. “They have him run out across the field, don’t they?”

“Skinner won’t leave his house again—in case the pig finds his way back. Says even Emmett couldn’t get him back in the pen.”

“I brought him out a casserole last night.”

“You know that the poor hog has no lower canines?” Ginger leans on the book trolley. “That’s why his upper tusks grew so long.”

“Leave it to the male species to compensate.”

“Imagine foraging without lower canines.”

Lily feels the twitch returning to her cheek, she can’t bear it. “Anyone consider,” she says, without looking up from her monitor, “that maybe the boar went back to the wild? Where it belongs?”

Ginger cat looks over at Lily with either unmitigated pleasure or sheer anxiety. Since the meeting on Sunday they’ve been trying to fold her into their banter and have found endless tasks to place themselves in Lily’s path. Although, now that the older women have got her, they seem unsure
of their follow-up. They look at each other, something itchy in their exchange. There’s an empty chair at the reference desk. Ginger is quicker on the draw, reaches it first, plants her hands on the backrest. She ignores Persian’s loud exhalations and drags it up alongside the computer station.

“Your husband is quite lovely,” she says, sitting and calmly crossing her legs. Lily understands her movements, thinks she’s part of a generation of women—she’d include her own mother in this—who can compose themselves instantly from a handful of loose bits. “Very handsome.”

“Thank you.”

“How are you finding everything at Oster Haus?”

Lily fixes on her computer screen. “Quiet. Musty.”

“Well, that’s nothing new. The place has been empty for ages.” Persian is gruff, impatient with pleasantries. “Where’d your side of the family resettle again?”

“Albany,” Lily supplies.

“Your great-grandfather started up the sawmill.” The old woman stacks a tattered pile of westerns onto the trolley. “Luis Oster. Came from the Palatine immigrants in Herkimer—out on the Mohawk.”

“
Very
German. He even brought over a wife from the Rhineland.”

“Well, the house is
very
American,” Lily says and pretends to copy down information from the computer screen.