Authors: Nancy Mauro
Lily decided to spend the summer in Osterhagen in order to end the hunting and gathering and give flesh to her dissertation. Really, she should be traveling by now. Her adviser at the university had recommended she
spend at least a year tracking her topic from Western Europe to the Middle East. But she doesn’t have the spirit for that kind of enterprise at the moment. For one summer it would be enough just to look up from the garble of French and German texts and lantern slides and not see another Peruvian sweater or batik blouse or scarf-looped neck from the Institute rising over her. Lily, herself now trapped for a third year in the impact of the pointed arch in Gothic architecture, needs one summer without the hovering, waxen faces of academics, their heads evolved beyond the need for a body. Somewhere along the way, all doctoral students acquire the pallor of sour milk, a twitch and eccentricity proportionate to the obscurity of their academic program. Just last week she watched a Cambodian student of eleventh-century Hispano-Moresque ivory carvings pound the shit out of a vending machine. She doesn’t fully understand this tendency toward becoming curious and consumed. Though the university
is
flypaper for the susceptible mind. Full of String theorists and Bolsheviks and AM radio prophets obsessing over the hypothetical stretch effect of black holes on the human body. Not the danger of black holes. But the theory of danger. She’s seen it in her own dissertation adviser, that gleam of madness when the woman’s lectures turn to Byzantine iconography.
In the Osterhagen library Lily stands among the popular fiction thinking she has spanked the broadside of enough vending machines to know that at some point educational institutes are irrelevant to her own life. Who’s taking out the garbage, who’s signing the doorman’s Christmas check—these are the basic requisites of man that need to be sorted first.
She passes under the library’s cupola roof and notices where the flux of seasons has stained the joints of the domed structure. Would she have made a better engineer than historian? She could take a parallax view of the situation: get the cathedral standing, after that you can make it beautiful. But at a time when she was searching for a direction to give her life, the innovation of the pointed arch popped something open inside
her. Like a tracheotomy with the barrel of a Bic pen. In builder’s terms, the tension of a pointed arch allowed for taller windows and doorways, less wall, more light to enter the church—it was bullshit what people associated with Gothic, it was really a period of great light, the piercing of dark and brooding structures.
But beyond this? The art of it? Lately it feels that critical analysis is a luxury. First man gets water and food and shelter. Only then does he remember he has no clue how he got here. He starts asking existential questions that’ll never get answered. And it frightens Lily to think that she just doesn’t care.
By late afternoon the house pushes him outdoors away from work and onto the buffer of seed lawn. With the lacing of modern irrigation systems, the land has been divided and subdivided away from the river so that a neighboring field of stubble separates the property from the Amtrak line and the banks of the Hudson. Behind the house a vegetable patch has grown fallow but holds the lapping barley at bay.
Duncan stands on the lawn and reaches for a fist of the grain that has shot chest high. He gives it a tug and feels the resistance of the ground sucking back on the roots. That’s the tenacity of the soil, he thinks, impressed by the industry of the land. Yes, it would be much easier to back machinery out of a barn than to try capturing the nuances of flare-legged denim. If only his job were a matter of baling a windrow of hay or haggling over the price of feed. He takes his phone out of his pocket and dials Leetower.
“I’m staring at amber waves of grain,” he tells the art director.
“I’m staring at a dead midget.”
“You mean dead dwarf. Not funny.”
“Bad news, Duncan. One of the Laundry Elves is dead. The Tide shoot is cancelled.”
“What?”
“Cardiac arrest. Apparently midgets don’t live that long. Their hearts have to work too hard—like Great Danes.”
“One of the dwarves died?”
“You’d probably get seven years out of a Great Dane. Which is like, what, forty-nine human years?” Leetower sighs heavily. “We got fleeced on the midget, Duncan.”
“I can’t believe this. Which one?”
“The one in the green velvet suit.”
“Fuck, I loved that guy.” Duncan skims his hand along the awn of the grain.
“How’s the Kiss of Death campaign coming?”
“Great. I’m frenching it into submission.”
“Sorry, man. See you Monday.”
Duncan walks away from the cultivated field, his pastoral fantasy suddenly bruised, unsteady. He had cast the three original Laundry Elves himself six years ago for his award-winning Tide Laundry Capsule launch. Dwarves as allegorical representations of the concentrated power of detergent capsules. He drew from the childhood fable of the shoemaker. From
Snap, Crackle
, and
Pop.
Laundry Elves became the tumbling, frolicking icons of laundry detergent in North American households. Duncan had handpicked the men from the Ukraine State Circus School and saved them from a life of post-communist oppression. It was true he’d been moved off the account—the junior team needed a shot at flexing their talent—but he still felt personally involved.
Duncan moves back toward the rear of the house. The garden is a patch of pebbles and dust screened from the neighboring property on the east by a rotting hedge. What he’s looking for out here is a little orderly distraction. A gentleman’s garden he can plow and harrow. He stands with his hands in the pockets of his shorts, and surveys the garden. What’ll he need to round his weekends? A shovel or spade, some fifty feet of hose, a
bag of fertilizer. And something hardy to plant. Pumpkins and squash, masculine gourds, potatoes he can persuade from the ground. There’s got to be enough summer left for a tuberous root. It would be nice to move from denim to soil now and then. Yes, he thinks. It’s time to
make
something. He decides to buy a shovel.
T
he old library cats circle and pounce while Lily is in midflight through the lobby. “We caught you,” Ginger says, creeping around the side of the bulletin board. Though the old floorboards have yawned apart over the years like a wide-toothed comb, they are deceptively silent under the woman’s feet.
The better to startle you with
, Lily thinks.
“I told you she hadn’t left.” Persian blows aggressively into a tissue and then wipes at her nostrils. “It’s only five now.”
Lily backs up against the great corkboard. There’s a flutter of postings, the rattle of thumbtacks in a tin.
“Will you come to the meeting tomorrow?” Ginger is breathless, shuffles a stack of paper from one arm to the other. “It’s more a gathering for Skinner, really. Cheer the old man up.”
Lily presses her bike helmet to her chest. “Skinner?”
“Truth is he brought it all on himself.” Persian’s voice is taut with recrimination. “You should have seen the way he spoiled that thing.”
“He’s a bachelor. We all have to make allowances.” Ginger hands Lily a sheet of paper from her stack. “The Sovereign belongs to him.”
In Lily’s hand is a flyer emblazoned with a photo of the same feral hog she and Duncan killed less than forty-eight hours ago. Accompanying it is a plea to local residents:
Help Us Find Our Sovereign of the Deep Wood.
“It’s been gone over a week now. Skinner found the latch snapped right off his fence.”
Persian shakes her head. “I never agreed with feeding an animal off the kitchen table.”
“He’s raised that thing since it was a piglet. Pets are like family.”
Lily can hear the polite gap in their commentary as they turn to her for input. But she finds herself staggering and inarticulate under the weight of this information.
“A wild boar?”
“Wild?” Persian sneers. “Better looked after than most kids in the county.”
Is the twitch in her cheek an illusory spasm? The wagging of her spotted conscience? Lily dumps the bike helmet over her head, attempts to disguise the bead-and-reel pattern of sweat collecting along her hairline.
“You’ll come tomorrow at seven, then?” Ginger gets ready to press another leaflet on her. “We’ll have refreshments.”
Lily can feel the first trickle of perspiration sliding down her temple. “Where is it?” she hears herself ask.
“We’ll be right here.”
“And you might bring your husband.” Persian sighs. “Save two old ladies from rolling the Welcome Wagon out to Oster Haus.”
This is how it happens, Lily thinks with a foundering heart. With one sentence, one grainy photograph, suddenly the pig is hapless, domestic. Beloved.
Lily comes home that afternoon with news that they have killed the town mascot. She drops the flyer on his desk, a picture of the wild boar in better days (a silk capelet draped over the shoulder haunches) and the words
Sovereign of the Deep Wood
in Franklin Gothic font.
“Jesus,” Duncan says. “I hardly recognize it with the cape.”
“Did you call anyone?”
“Me?” He touches his chest. “I thought you were going to.”
She turns away from him and heads for the door.
Duncan stares after her for a minute before getting up and following her out. He’s thinking of the things she doesn’t do when she comes home from the library. Wifely tasks she has long since given up performing. Like tossing her book bag aside and calling out,
Honey, let’s fuck!
She doesn’t do that anymore.
“What kind of shit luck is it to kill a mascot?” Out on the driveway he watches as Lily unlocks the car and slides behind the wheel. “What are you doing?”
“They’re obviously looking for it, Duncan.” She stares at him for a moment as if focusing her inexplicable anger into the cubic space of his head.
Duncan stands as his wife noses the Saab into the lean-to at the side of the house. He hears the kiss of metal and wood as she buries the ruined front grille against the plywood shell. There’s an annoyance gathering in his shoulders that feels like cheap wool against the skin as Lily makes a tight, three-point turn in a car that she never drives. Then he remembers the moment before the collision, her attempt to grab the wheel away, and he thinks, she’s just been allowing me to drive it all this time. Something in her expert handling of the vehicle says,
Let’s not kid ourselves, the Saab is really mine. Always has been.
Lily kills the engine. Because of the tight fit, she has to crawl over the gear shift to climb out the passenger side. Duncan briefly entertains the thought of locking her in—if only it were possible—and observing her for a few days, watching as she descends through various states of anger all the way down to remorse and dependence.
Maybe he should try. What’s the worst that could happen?
She slams the door and comes to stand at the butt of the vehicle. “I don’t understand. You were sitting inside with the phone all day.”
He drives his hands into the pockets of his shorts. “And you were at the library.” He notices a heavy grease stain across the front of her pants. “That
is
where you were?”
Lily frowns. “Right, the library.” She waves a hand as if brushing away a fog of mosquitoes. “Summer school’s on. Seems everyone failed the tenth grade last year.”
It’s probably grease from the bike chain on her pants. Duncan wonders how he’s going to get it out, tries to recall the efficacy of baking powder and lemon juice on grease. Maybe if he uses a commercial stain remover before putting it into the wash?
“The day just slipped.” He touches his pockets for a cigarette. “Let’s leave it at that.” First a morning of toil with nothing to show, then the bad news about the Laundry Elf. After that, he just couldn’t bring himself to check the car in sunlight. Suspected there might still be gristle and bone in that front grille, the snatch of hackle that rises in anger at the back of the neck.
“Obviously the pig slipped your mind, too.” Lily presses a fingertip to her hairline. “They’re having a
get-together
for the farmer. Telling them now is out of the question.”
“Because they’ll think we conspired against the mascot?” He laughs. “Bad for the family name, right?”
Lily slides her eyes across him as though he were on fire. “It was a pet, Duncan. Besides, you’re not the one staying here all summer.”
He takes a step back. “I assume this means we’re not going to be driving?”
“You can leave for the city after dark tomorrow.”
Duncan lifts his foot and presses a flip-flop against the back bumper. “We should have gone to town for help the other night.”
“Shoulda, woulda.”
Is it the mustache that’s made her so shrewd? Could that little scrap of hair be controlling her like a second brain?
“I’m just saying, maybe there was a chance.”
“Duncan, you smashed its skull in half.”
He swallows. “Hey, you’re the one who finished him off.”
She turns to him now, a surge lifting her to her toes. Like he’d just lashed her with a downed power line. But he knows what she’s doing. He pulls back his shoulders, offers military resistance. Lily’s attacks are deliberate and heat-seeking and he refuses to shrink beneath them. She is inexorable when it comes to laying blame. When in fact—and it’s quite possible, he’s starting to believe—she took some pleasure in bashing the shit out of the pig, the Sovereign of the Deep Wood. He wouldn’t be surprised. She didn’t even flinch, didn’t even wait for him to refuse before bringing that tire iron down.
It’s her, not me, he understands with a new, mute pleasure. All these years I’ve been trying to warm my hands over a kettle of cold water.
When she speaks her voice catches the barbed end of a trill. “Who the hell else was going to do it?”
In her bedroom, Lily flattens her cheek against the door. There’s a riot going on in her gut, a primal demand that she apologize immediately, that she go to his room and say,
Look, I know that I’m an absolute horror, Duncan. My words are regrettable. I don’t know why this is happening. It’s cruel and I’m sorry.