New World Monkeys (14 page)

The old man’s gummy snort of pleasure actually eases her mind. He’s just having a little fun with the downstaters. Still, Lily understands that Skinner is a restless bloodhound. Despite his scattered eccentricities he is genuine and bred to track to the death. She and Duncan will have to rethink this eventuality. To make for the forest or the hills, to give the posse the slip, to leave the car and clothes—to reinvent themselves and disappear—is not an option. There is the wrench of Tinker. Lily has been trying to tell Duncan that she has a familial obligation to the nanny. That she cannot go back to the city, back to nothingness. How to make him understand the importance of the lovely white femur! And they’ve only just begun; fold now with such a miserly bone count and all of it will be a wash. They haven’t pulled enough from the garden to form a woman. They haven’t gotten far enough to constitute success.

She trips across the lawn toward Duncan with only this intention. To tell him that they can’t give in, can’t buckle just yet. They haven’t even found her head. Maybe then. Once they’ve found Tinker’s skull they can run, leave the small bones buried.

She goes to him. He hesitates in the darkness. While he does step forward, she can see that he’s confused, maybe resigned. She has flown across the strip of grass and into his arms to share the foreseeable problems with conventional escape. Instead, his arms close around her, he braces her as if catching something that’s fallen out of a window. Her mouth opens against his own, an incisor cuts a horizontal slice through lip. They come at each other this way, with optimism hammered thin as foil, still sentient of all that is hostile, muddled, and injured between them. The inescapable trace of farm manure in the air makes everything less desirable. The Osterhagen they have never discussed is the one they have just arrived in at this moment, with the singular task of deciding whether to leave together. The others—the boar and the nanny, the pervert, the artillerymen torn between this graceless kiss and blasting a charge through the trees—are the complications they have invited to avoid being alone with the truth.

Lily sits up in bed. The linens around her are too tight, sterile. Like she’d been tucked into bed by a nurse. She hears Duncan plucking around in the sunroom below and touches her lip. It had stopped bleeding almost immediately, the wet flesh repairing itself at a stunning rate. Duncan had scraped a few dry specks from her chin, then walked beside her to the truck. Sat himself in the middle while Skinner drove them home. It was possible that they were thinking the same thing, how pleasant it was not to talk, not to encourage familiarity.

Lily snaps the top sheet and watches it billow over her fresh-shaved legs. When she hears him take the stairs quietly she tries to level the velocity of her breath and fill the room with a quiet, welcoming consistency. She rubs left leg against right, remembering the pleasure of frictionless calves. The bedroom door is partially open. Lily has re-created herself under the sheets in the likeness of sand, a soft landing. Yet beyond this rolling topography—more satisfying than sand, she knows—are the hard ridges beneath. Tooth and toe and nail and the simple, painful angles at
which their mouths may meet. He must feel this? Her buried lures? For what other reason does he return to her each weekend? Lily sucks the small nub formed over her cut lip. In piecing together a dead woman might they also resurrect another?

He comes down the hall. She closes her eyes. He walks past.

Lily sits up. Despite the bread knife in her gut she sits up. She can scarcely believe it, the sound of his sneakers retreating down the hall. For some reason, she was sure he would come to her. She’s embarrassed—no, she’s outraged. Why is it that he won’t even try? At some point in the night the radiance had returned to her. Couldn’t he feel it? The afternoon that they’d sat together in the closet, in the ease of darkness, hadn’t he felt it then? Or does Duncan think he can just go on living in the spaces around her? If so, Lily thinks, he’s got another thing coming. Tomorrow night, he’s got another thing coming.

I
n the morning she watches Duncan unload groceries and wonders why the silent rubbing of her smooth calves failed to draw him in. She scoops her plain oatmeal right from the pot and watches him stock the cupboard, trying to ignore his careless shelving (the cans should be arranged by content, not size). Duncan’s hair, she notices, has grown an extra inch or so beyond the collar. As he moves Lily thinks, I have licked the split between those shoulder blades. Felt his weight on top of me. Now the thought makes her envious, as if she’s read these details in another woman’s journal but has been denied the pleasure herself. Something about the leanness of those places, the scull of rib beneath his arm, the groove of lower back; they are unrecognizable. What would Duncan do if she went to him now? Slipped her arms around his chest, pressed her body to his back?

She crosses her legs, looks away. The trick, she knows, is to allow him to initiate. A year ago, she wouldn’t have thought twice about offering him her body. A year ago, she was sure he’d accept, gratefully. Last night he’d kissed her to appease the jeering cannoneers, but the action was lined with the mercury of bad temper and the shame of being ridiculed. He’d forgotten himself. And she was encouraged. Now with the morning burning on, and distance back between them, she finds herself petrified of rejection.

Duncan begins a low whistle, something unmelodic. She knows the tune, the one he uses to fill space.

“What do you think?” She will try. “What are we going to dig up tonight?”

He pauses midbar. Ties a grocery bag in half. “Actually, I’m going to have to take a break.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. I got a call from work this morning. You were still asleep.” He scratches his head and looks at the cans. “It’s this idea we’re working on for Stand and Be Counted. The Vietnam War.”

“Oh.” Lily’s word for all occasions. Comes out round and mealy to disguise the burn.

“You can dig if you want,” he offers. “But I’ve got to go back and look at some old footage.”

She feels the roots of her hair incinerating. “No, that’s fine. I’m busy too. At the library.” Lily curses herself for having made this ridiculous pact to dig together. She can’t renege now, as if she has nothing else to do up here, like she’s dependent on him. As though her life, when tacked up alongside his, lacks diesel and passion.

He turns from the shelf suddenly, holding a can of beans. “Garbanzo? Same as chickpeas, right?”

She scrapes the last rubber edges of her breakfast. “They don’t exactly hand out doctorates, you know.”

He puts the can down on the table. “I know that, Lily. I know you’re busy.”

She can’t look up or she will cry. She’s done with this heavy lifting, this pretending, the illusion of chatter and interest. And what does Duncan know about Vietnam? He took a booze cruise through the Bay of Tonkin once. How’s that supposed to sell jeans? Lily can feel him look at her and so she folds the newspaper in half, her eyes circling the same paragraph.

“So we’ll both get some work done this weekend, okay?”

She doesn’t respond. There’s a static crackle surrounding him and it annoys her that he holds his work up like something that must be carried across a swollen river. In Duncan’s paranoid landscape he is forever on the verge of losing his job. And in its impermanence it becomes vital, tragic, and necessary. Blue jeans as vocation.

As if you’re writing the next Pulitzer
, she’d like to say to him.

He moves to the refrigerator. Opens a carton of eggs and inspects for cracks. “Just try to keep clear of those guys, all right? Skinner and the Clan.”

Jesus, is that a drawl in his voice? She goes to the sink, nudges dishes around to make room for her saucepan.

“Although, I think we handled things pretty well last night. And they seem to like you at the library, right?”

Lily watches the bowls capsize in the suds. “I’m there to work,” she says, “not socialize.”

Duncan starts to say something, but she cranks the faucet over his response. It’s horrible, this sudden and insincere interest in her well-being. If he truly cared he wouldn’t be pulling a runner twelve hours into the weekend. As the dishwater begins to lap at the brim of the sink she turns around to face him. He’s standing in the same position, still watching her.

“You know, Duncan,” she says, looking him in the eye, “they
are
offering a reward for the pig. I’m thinking of turning you in.”

“It’s my day off.”

“And?”

“Give me something to go on. I’m watching Bob Hope reruns.”

“What about you get to keep your job for another week?” Duncan closes the kitchen door behind him, stands barefoot on the porch.

“Kooch is in Jersey.” Leetower yawns violently into the phone, adenoids vibrating like a tuning fork. “He was a prick on stilts yesterday. I was looking forward to a day away from him.”

“We’ll do it ourselves,” Duncan says quickly. He’s pleased at the
thought of evolving the campaign in Kooch’s absence. “I think I’ve got a way to work in the other jeans.”

“Fuck, you’re fast.”

“The American Grunt Girls wear the flare legs, right? So we put the Viet Cong girls in the skinny jeans. Whatever your preference, we’ve got it—we’re sympathetic to both sides.”

“Girl-on-girl engagement? Are you serious?”

“Dead.”

“It’ll never make it out the door.”

“You need to start thinking one-eighty on this, LT. I guarantee, there will always be someone to bring you back to zero.”

“You’re an inspiration to the red-blooded.”

“Go with God. I’ll be in by noon.”

Lloyd says he’s trying to sort out what type of pervert he would like to be. Until now he’s been a dabbler. Crossing forms with the freedom of a student not yet decided on acrylics or oils, poetry or fiction. Certainly there are no absolutes, no hard-and-fast rules dividing the flashers from the frotteurs from the Peeping Toms. “But as it stands,” he says, “I’m just a dilettante skittering across the surface of true talent.”

When Lily left the house this morning, Duncan was still packing up for the city. Bon voyage, she thought, letting the screen door crack back against its frame. Now she follows the pervert between parked cars in the lot behind the library and is cheered by the fact that there is someone who looks forward to her company. She says nothing about the encounter with the townsfolk last night, abides by some intuitive precaution to keep such scenes on a separate grid.

Still, she feels a sting of pity for Lloyd’s pear-shaped frame. He taps the bonnet of a Lincoln while telling her there’s purity in choosing a single perversion, devoting one’s life to it. This only reminds her of the pointed arch that she has somewhat abandoned in the library.

“You’re boring when you think too much,” she says and follows him into a lane that runs the ten blocks of Osterhagen. Lloyd holds out a fresh cigarette.

“Fire, Lily. Fire!” He snaps his fingers.

She comes up alongside him, sparks the silver lighter while they walk in gravel tire ruts. “You should just make the jump,” she says, reminding herself to focus on his problems for a change. “Exist in a realm of action—reach out and touch someone.”

“I just don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.”

When Lily suggests he compile a short list, draw up pros and cons for each, his features pinch in toward the center of his face. “Draw one up yourself. You sure waste a lot of time with me.”

It’s true. She should be sorting out the various abandoned approaches to her dissertation, the tumble of papers, the small mountain of books she dragged from the city. But all she can muster is a casual and scattered interest, the same clinical detachment she had experienced years ago toward the end of her undergraduate study in Italy. It was a weariness, she thought back then, of a hot Italian summer and a rambling life of scholastic ambiguities. She’d gone to Italy hoping the snug little boot would kick up a squall in her soul, but she was knotted down tight. What was the point of her work? Lily had succeeded on paper but that was just cheap ballpoint. She understood the technical phenomena of building a cathedral with only compass, string, and a straight edge. But she simply couldn’t feel it. Her professor had pointed out Brunelleschi’s Renaissance discovery of linear perspective construction; how for the first time in the fifteenth century the eye of the viewer could finally be brought into mathematical integration with a painting.
Yes
, she nodded. The Gothic was positively brilliant for all it just barely accomplished before it was handed over, before it ushered in the Renaissance.

Four blocks in and the lane gives way to yards strung with clotheslines, the chewed lace of fencing. Lloyd ducks beneath a sugar maple, holds apart a bracket of chicken wire. She has to crouch on all fours to pass
through the snag into the backyard. Lily thinks, the Pied Piper is leading me through the lanes of Osterhagen.
And I follow happily.
There’s something compelling about this fat little man; he advocates deviancy with a brand of reasoning she can get behind.