Authors: Nancy Mauro
Here is where the official version skips to daylight: a stable hand discovers the child out by the barn, shaken, sticky with tears, flecked with hay and full of remorse for his behavior at dinner. It was decided that the nanny—lacking corporeal presence and still in need of punishment—had been washed away in the tidal flow.
Yes, her mother’s version flattens the nanny to villainous dimensionality. She was an antagonist with neither name nor motivation beyond fulfilling her typecast. The crone who, unable to have her own child, settled on abducting one from the manor house.
Who really was this Tinker when she was clothed in muscle and skin? Why did she give the boy to the Osters if he belonged to her? Lily strokes the rib that has lodged between her own. And if he didn’t belong to her, why would she stay, knowing what would come scratching at her door each night?
There is
one
motivation, but it is so visceral that Lily had nearly blinked it away until recently. She had been without desire herself for so long, she’d forgotten that it ever existed. Lily holds up the curved rib bone; all the while she’s been waiting for the pointed arch to come and save her when she’s had this round arch inside the whole time. Sure, the acute angle was superior for bearing loads, but the barrel vault crowned some of the strongest walls ever built. Wasn’t there valor in this, that a simple curve could hold up stone and cast iron and the ceiling over a heart?
Maybe there is one final turn in this theory. Maybe Tinker was grateful to Luis Oster, lumber baron. Grateful for the touch, for the unlacing, the stripping of the corset. Down to the flesh and she could breathe, finally. Maybe he had placed his mouth over hers and blown. Done the kind thing and raised those flattened ribs. Why had it been so hard to believe this—what a woman would do for touch? Lily stares up at the beams that run across the ceiling, that keep the parlor and the sunroom, the kitchen, Duncan and the Viet Cong, from collapsing in on her.
Yes, this is how the story goes. Tinker was just a nanny, with nothing to recommend her. But he had come to her in the night. It was her
wish. He touched her so that her skin fell away. Just here—his hand against the sternum, between the elastic arches of bone, he had bent his dark head and licked fat from the furrows of her heart.
Lily watches as the woman on the table beside her sits up, nudges each wedge of vertebrae into alignment. She begins to count the collected parts of her body.
The last part of this story is a sad one, all right? As you know, the casting aside of bones always begins as the touch of love. That’s how it is in the beginning. But the truth always shakes out in time: some of us are just too feeble to illuminate a face for long. We’re left behind. A slow abandonment, but there it is. We’re alone as we were before, only worse. The muscle has memory. Takes up space inside.
Let me tell you what I did
, the woman says. She has lost count of her bones and begins to arrange them in small piles instead.
I waited for harvest, for the fall. The man and the boy had left me by then. One morning I walked out into the field of barley. I walked out right into the path of a swather, then I crouched low and waited.
She turns the fifth rib over, inspects it from each angle.
It’s not pleasant to take inventory of yourself this way
, she says.
At times it’s best to remember that the whole is always greater than the parts.
“I
’m positive this is against the Declaration of Human Rights,” Lee-tower says.
“Fuck the declaration.” Duncan pulls the art director’s head out of the desk cabinet. Earlier this morning he’d come into the office to find that someone had jimmied the lock on his drawer. They’d left the velvet sacks of the One Show Pencils, but filled the rest of the space with HB number 2 pencils, their wooden skins chewed to hell. How frustrating, Duncan thinks, that at this stage of evolutionary development a man—considered perceptive, immune to flattery even—could lose the intuitive ability to recognize a quisling from his handshake or the degree to which he is able to meet the eye. How unfortunate that it’s only by taking the quisling by the shirt collar—first with the threat of a good garroting and then by shoving his head into a desk—that he may be made to reveal his true character.
He lets Leetower sit upright. Then holds a pencil to the boy’s mouth. “Open up.” Betrayal might be expected of women, but cunning in a male—an underling—it’s vile and sly. It’s the death of heroes, the exit ramp from manhood.
Duncan himself never dreamt he was betraying Hawke when, a few weeks before the man’s departure, Upstairs took him to lunch at the Mercer Hotel and, through circuitous discourse, asked him what exactly
was
Hawke’s ongoing input on the Tide account since their glory days of five years past? The fact that Hawke rarely came in before noon, that Fridays and Mondays were out-of-office days where he’d take his phone calls in Westchester, these things were common knowledge available to anyone with a watch and calendar who cared to stand in the office lobby and wait. So had Duncan fudged his boss out? Hardly, What he was doing there, third bourbon sour in hand (just keeping up), was trying to assert his own role on Tide.
Yes, yes, we know you created the Laundry Elves. But we can’t rest on our laurels, can we? In any case, you might benefit from a break from packaged goods. We’ll see if we can’t get you to help on some other business. We need to create another showpiece account here, yes? But more on that later. Let’s get back to Hawke. …
“If you’re innocent, Leetower, you have nothing to fear.” Duncan can hear Skinner’s soggy baritone tower from his lungs but he doesn’t let go of his shirt collar.
“Duncan, man. This is a two-hundred-dollar Varvatos shirt you’re stretching the hell out of.”
“You want to do this the hard way?” He waves the pencil in front of Leetower’s face.
“What about principle?”
“Are you kidding? This is advertising.”
“I just want you to know, I swear I had nothing to do with this.” Leetower closes his eyes and lets Duncan fit the pencil, lengthwise, between his teeth. He’s never noticed it, but Leetower’s incisors flare slightly from the arcade of teeth. He runs the pencil lengthwise through his mouth, searching for a point of contact. But the bite is all off. Leetower opens his eyes. Looks up at Duncan, but not in an
I told you so
manner. Not with triumph, but rather as if to double-check his liberty.
“It wasn’t me.”
He lets go of Leetower’s collar. “Well, someone wants me out.”
“It’s probably a joke, Duncan. You know how this place twists people.”
“Is Kooch saying Vietnam was his idea?”
“No,” Leetower says, looking unsure. “I mean, I don’t think so. First I heard was the other day in your office. When Anne told us about Tide.”
Duncan grips the back of his chair. “I’m sorry, LT. I had to make sure.” He’s waiting to be overcome by a fear of his own actions, a remorse or disgust. He waits, but the feelings just don’t come. In fact, there’s something horribly pleasing about the way the boy stands up near the desk and waits, rubbing his neck.
Duncan moves around the chair and puts his hand on Leetower’s shoulder. “Sit down, sit down.” He points to the spot on the sofa next to the brown smirch they’d discovered a month ago. “Sit, sit, sit.”
Leetower obeys. He folds his legs at the ankle the way Duncan’s advised him to (the feminine thigh crossing had people in the department rolling dice and speculating). Duncan sets himself on the edge of the desk closest to the sofa. He runs a hand through his hair, rolls up one sleeve, and leans on his arm. “Listen, LT. I just want you to know, no matter what shit goes down here, I’ve got your back, buddy.”
“Okay.” The boy nods. “I’m with you.”
“Are you here to kill the hired help, Duncan? Because I have a major presentation next week that could really use my attention.” Anne picks the chewed yellow pencil off her desk and throws it back at him. It bounces off his chest and rolls under a chair.
“You hear Kooch has been telling people Stand and Be Counted was his idea?”
“Then why come to me?”
“So you have heard?” Duncan tugs the hair at the back of his head. “You let him slander me and you did nothing?”
“Why would I want to drive you out of here?” Anne slides a pair of reading glasses over her nose. “Without you there is no Stand and Be Counted. Without Stand and Be Counted there’s no Christmas bonus,
no free weekends at the Fire Island house. No coke parties. You’re such a selfish asshole, Duncan.” She turns back to her computer screen.
He shrugs down onto her sofa. “Well, somebody’s filled my desk drawer with pencils.”
“So take up sketching.” Anne adjusts her glasses and looks at him over the frames. “And Jesus Christ, get some sleep. You look like one of those fucked-up heroin addicts from the old Calvin Klein ads.”
“Yes, consciousness,” he mumbles, eyelids slack. “That annoying time between naps.”
“Listen.” She glances into the corridor. “For the record, if you’re going to point fingers, choose somebody known for his bite.”
The trick to the CoffeePot Café is to overlook the homogenous exterior. Nestled alongside a UPS Store in Osterhagen’s sole strip of franchised sellouts, the CoffeePot suffers unnecessarily from the uniform salmon plaster facade and the neon cast-off glare of the 7-Eleven next door.
Inside, someone has fought back with fervor. The pioneer spirit surfaces in the cleaved log paneling, the hewn pine tables, two rows of faux leather booths separated by a split rail fence. From her window seat Lily can hear the counter girls’ uninterrupted chatter, their voices rising bravely over the horse-powered growl of the espresso machine. One tells the other her plans for skipping town come fall and starting a new life with an aunt in Staten Island. Attending a college for hospitality service. But earlier when she served Lily coffee, her pour sloshed out of the cup and flooded the saucer.
Lily’s been at the window booth the past hour faced with a sliced but uneaten grilled cheese sandwich. Panofsky’s cracked and tattered
Gothic Architecture
is with her as well, its pages loose and tucked back against the spine unsequentially. Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing to forecast the unease that falls over her when she spots Skinner’s truck pulling into
the parking lot. It rumbles on loose bolts, its tires trailing wet shit and hay. Lily sucks back her breath, watches the old junker narrowly skim her bicycle out in front of the café.
The old man slides out of the cab. She hasn’t seen him since the night she caught his poodle, but his walk across to the CoffeePot is the same lurching swagger. Unpromising. One glance at his cambered approach and even the counter girls stop their dreaming, pour him straight black in a paper cup. Lily slides down in her seat, hoping for transparency. She wishes Duncan were here. Wants to tell him that she’s learned a thing or two about isolative analysis. That it’s never really been about that night on the dirt road itself—but about all the subsequent moments they have chosen to leave unrectified.
“Your husband’s a good shot,” Skinner says.
Lily straightens her shoulders. Draws her cold saucer of coffee toward her. “I hear they had to close the sawmill. For a major cleanup.”
Skinner picks up the sugar bowl from her table. “Maybe we did the town a favor. You hear there’s a body buried around here?”
Lily shakes her head, opens her eyes wide. “Is there a cemetery nearby?”
“I’m talking a killing’s taken place. My own dog came around with the bone.” Skinner bends and unleashes a turbulent cough over the table. “Where’s your husband, anyhow?”
She rotates her cup. As much as she doesn’t want to imagine Tinker’s leg clenched in that filthy mutt’s mouth, she knows she must engage in order to avoid disclosing Duncan’s location. “What sort of bone did you find?”
“A human one.” The old man looks at her with impatience. “We just cracked open something bigger concerning those Arabs. The same mighty son of a bitch killed my boar also killed a man.”
Lily toys with her teaspoon. “How do you come to that?”
“I’m no genius, but that’s how these psychos work, start small then work their way up.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I got the bone. I’m more certain than most.”
Lily can’t help it, her laughter at his unforensic indictment is quick and bitter. “Why, was the bone in the same ditch as the boar?”
Skinner tips the sugar bowl into his cup. “This whole town’s gone to hell.” He picks up her sandwich knife to stir his coffee. “They got lids for these cups, or what?”
It’s only minutes later, when Skinner pulls back out of the parking lot, bald tires rotating along their original track, that she realizes her mistake.
D
uncan sits in front of his jimmied drawer watching Leetower stack the layouts and scripts for tomorrow’s presentation in a portfolio case. Earlier, he made the boy empty out the gnawed pencils from his desk. Now all that remains are the velvet satchels containing his One Show Pencils. He places each of them in his bag.
“You think getting pulled off Tide will hurt my career?” Leetower asks, tugging the zipper on the nylon case full of mounted storyboards.
It’s Kooch who answers, his beefcake frame appearing at the door. “It can’t hurt you, Leetits, because you’re nobody to begin with.”
LT looks up. “Spoken by the poster boy for social services.”
“Today you’re a dispensable piece of shit. Tomorrow, Stand and Be Counted will rebirth you to a better life.”
“Christ.” Leetower picks up the case. “Like
Cats, the Musical.”
“Put that stuff in my car,” Duncan tells him.
“You might want to hold off, little buddy.” Kooch walks into the room, holding up his yellow notepad. “I think I got gold right here.”
The art director looks between his boss and his partner. He fidgets with the portfolio handle.