Love Monkey

by Kyle Smith

  We watch A Bath.

  “The film quality is pretty good,” I say to Mike.

  “Yeah,” he says tersely, in a shushy kind of way, as though I were chattering away during the climax of The Godfather.

  “But I guess you can’t edit on these video cameras, huh?” I say.

  “Actually,” he says, “I edited out the part where I admit I’ve never changed Alexandra’s diaper.”

  Ah, I get it. So this is not the rough cut. This is the finished drama of A Bath, edited down to its essence. Which consists of a mom splashing water around on a confused-looking little person who looks as if she’s considering submitting a complaint to Amnesty International.

  “So pretty,” says Karin.

  “Isn’t she pretty?” says Mike.

  “Pretty,” says Shooter, dutifully.

  “Actually,” I say, “the phrase that comes to mind is below average.”

  Except I don’t.

  “Yes,” I say, because it is the easiest thing to say. I wonder, when did people stop cooing over me? Or, given that I am Manboy and my mother can’t deal with me as an adult anyway, is she still talking about me this way? “Oh, Tom, he’s great. He’s 397 months, 180 pounds, 5 ounces. Got a big, full head of hair!” Well, that last part isn’t exactly true anymore. Let’s face it, I was much cuter then. That’s why it was so much easier to get a breast in my mouth.

  My cell phone goes. I knew the calls would be rolling in soon.

  “Tom?” A female voice. Nasal and impatient.

  “Well, if it isn’t,” I say. I try to hide my genuine delight under a layer of sarcastic delight.

  “I’m bored,” says Bran. “You bored?”

  I admire a girl who admits she’s bored and home alone on Saturday night. “Yeah,” I say. “Only I’m not in the neighborhood. I’m in the Hamptons.”

  “You dit’int invite me!” she says. I love the way she says “didn’t.”

  “I’m sure,” I say, “that I can make it up to you. Movies on Thursday?”

  “Yeah. Hey, I may have a girl for you.”

  “Is it you?”

  “Show up and find out,” she says.

  “Would this person have deep and abiding contempt for me?”

  “I don’t have contempt for you.”

  “Aha! So it is you.”

  “You’re pretty cocky for a guy who sucks in his gut when he’s trying to hit on girls.”

  “Girls adore my gut,” I say. “Makes ’em feel thin.” Besides, my gut is shrinking. The swim trunks are getting baggy.

  “Um, oh-kay,” she says. “And girls like ugly guys because they make us feel pretty. And girls like short guys because they make us feel tall. That’s why Danny DeVito is such a sex symbol!”

  “Wow,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Just. Give me a second.” Sniff, sniff.

  “Tom, you okay?”

  “Sort of,” I say. “No. I mean. You just, kind of hurt my feelings.”

  “I’m so sorry! Really?”

  “No. In your face, Lowenstein!”

  “You twat,” she says, and laughs. “I’ll see you Thursday.”

  Thursday, August 9

  My friend couldn’t make it,” Bran tells me.

  “Oh really.”

  “Yes, really,” she says. “How does this thing work?” She’s pushing buttons on a computer monitor. It beats dealing with the minimum-wage drones who sell tickets in person. But nothing is happening. When she touches the button saying “9:30 P.M.” nothing happens. Nothing happens the second time. Nothing happens the fiftieth time.

  “This fucking thing,” she says, looking around for someone to berate. I’m a little fearful at these moments.

  “Let me,” I say, being all manly about it, assuming control. I figure if the screen gizmo happens to work for me, I’m a golden god, her box-office hero. But if it doesn’t, she can’t very well blame me, can she?

  I haven’t seen Bran for a while, but looking at her now, with her cool flowy black hair and her just-about-to-laugh mouth, I start to remember why I used to phone her every other day, why I thought for a long time, Would it be so bad if I ended up with Bran? Before I gave up and accepted my demotion to non-potential sex partner, to Him? Oh, He’s Just a Friend. Last spring we went to a play. Afterward we stopped by Langan’s to get companionably drunk. She told me about the coolest moment in her life: when she was a college sophomore and just aching to become one of those Serious Young Journalists, she went to a job conference crawling with other Serious Young Journalists and met Barbara Walters. I laughed. She said I was mean.

  I’ve been nice. I took her to many dazzling parties, got her drunk. Even got her high. What I did not get was in her pants, nowhere near. Yet we make each other laugh. We’re like a married couple, except we’re still attracted to each other. My problem is, after an evening together, I get all warm and cuddly like and I start cutting out the self-censorship button, the way I do when I’m with my guy friends. Guys make fun of each other mercilessly. Do it with a girl and…you can forget about doing it with that girl.

  We talked about relationships that didn’t work out and we got drunker. And lamentier. We had a nice cab home together since she lives a few blocks from me. “Thank you for being my friend,” I said, with barroom sentimentality. “I’m glad we’ve gotten closer,” she said. We went into the clinch. It wasn’t a phony see-ya-later hug. It was a real boy-girler.

  At the Union Square manyplex, we stroke the screen, we tap the screen, we rub the screen, we press the screen. Two college graduates are unable to win the rights to buy tickets to a movie.

  “Do you really want to see this stupid movie?” I say.

  “Of course not,” she says. “I thought you wanted to see it.” “Are you kidding me?” I say. “You thought I wanted to see a movie about a ditzy blonde with a passion for designer labels? How gay do you think I am?”

  “In those pants? Not very,” she says.

  “What’s wrong with my pants?”

  “They hang loose in the back,” she says. “How am I supposed to check out your butt? And the less said about the mustard stain, the better.”

  “This? No one can see this. It’s really small.”

  “No, you’re right,” she says. “Only you can see it. It’s in vis ible to everyone else.”

  We’re strolling down University Place. She pulls up in front of a Korean flower shop slash deli.

  “Ooohhhh, I love these,” she says, sticking her whole face in a big barrel of flowers. “Lilies of the valley are the best. Remember that.”

  “You want to go back to a time when if a guy liked you, he’d keep sending you flowers. I want to go back to stewardesses being chosen primarily for their looks. Unhappiness reigns everywhere.”

  “Tom, can we be real for a second?” she says as we head back down University. “I’m worried about my friend Sharon. She might get fired. I’ve known her since I’m eighteen!”

  “I like that, ‘Since I’m eighteen,’ ” I say.

  “Are you making fun of me?” Her eyes are blazing.

  “I just said I liked it!” I say.

  “What did I say?” she says. “ ‘I’ve known her since I was eighteen.’ ”

  “No, you said, ‘Since I’m eighteen.’ It’s a very New Yorky way of talking. People didn’t say that in Rockville, Maryland.”

  “Jesus, you are such a snob,” she says.

  “What’d I say?” I say.

  Bran and I often have conversations like this. Things are going perfectly smoothly, I make some light remark, she takes it as an insult, she scolds me for a while, my balls become Grape-Nuts and my A-Rod turns to shrimp cocktail.

  There’s a giant pile of garbage outside a dingy office building on University. This being New York, casual mountains of garbage are not news, but in this case, a dozen young hipsters are going through the refuse. It’s mostly paperwork and vinyl records in blank white paper sleeves. Every so often a
bored-looking middle-aged blue-collar white guy comes and adds another barrel or bag to the dump.

  “There’s a noodle shop around the cor—,” I am saying when I realize I have lost her. Unlike me, Bran is a real reporter: she actually wants to go and see what people are doing with their lives. Me, I prefer not to think about it.

  Bran is talking to someone sifting through the paperwork and records.

  “You know what this is?” she says, sparkling. “This is KK-Killuh’s garbage!”

  In Manhattan below Fourteenth Street, it’s the equivalent of finding Princess Diana’s used tiaras. And it makes sense: as Mr. Killuh is, according to tabloid news reports, currently an involuntary guest of the state of New York, what use does he have for an apartment on University Place? You know how they say people comb the obits looking for apartments that have suddenly become vacant? Maybe they should start checking Vibe while they’re at it.

  Bran is going all Lois Lane on me. “This is a ‘Talk of the Town’!” she says.

  “You need to know someone at The New Yorker to get into ‘Talk of the Town,’ ” I say. Wait a minute: I actually do know a couple of people at The New Yorker. A girl I went to school with and her friend. You know how they always say you have to know someone? I’m somehow one of those someones.

  And see how far it’s gotten me? I start picking through the garbage on the off chance that I might get paid to write about what I find. This puts me below the level of garbageman: they at least know their interaction with trash will earn them money. I’m collecting garbage on spec.

  The site of a well-dressed twenty-nine-year-old woman picking through garbage, even in New York, even in this century, is unusual. People stop to stare. Some figure this must be really good garbage, and they start picking through it as well. Soon half a dozen well-dressed New Yorkers with degrees from top eastern universities and 401(k) plans are trawling through the detritus of an illiterate criminal from Staten Island.

  There is a black guy next to me. We rummage together, joined in our celebrity worship.

  “You like K-Cube?” I say.

  He looks at me, gives me a little pat of recognition. “You all right,” he says. “Can’t judge a book by its cover.”

  I happen to know the etiquette on the matter of Mr. Killuh’s name; he is addressed as K-Cubed (pronounced “K-Cube,” of course), never as K-K-K. If you call him that, you’re a racist.

  “Look,” I say conversationally, showing him a booklet. “Blank deposit slips.”

  “Give ’em here,” he says, his eyes twinkling with bank fraud. “No, wait. Never mind. You see any withdrawal slips?”

  Bran is running around interviewing people. I help pore through the pile.

  I’m finding ICM contracts, riders listing demands (“Artist will travel in first class at Promoter’s Expense”), scripts for music videos (“This video will be about the NOTORIOUS CRIMINAL KK-Killuh. We want to make it as THUGGED OUT as possible.”), lists of producers and songs, and a long, tangled exchange between KK-Killuh and some party promoter about whether or not his mother was treated with the deference due a woman of her stature at some awards dinner. Bran is talking to the guy who was standing next to me a minute ago. It turns out he’s a rapper too; he’s doing a gig at Joe’s Pub tonight.

  “Why don’t you get with me instead of him?” he whines. “Look,” he says, rolling up his sleeves. “I got bigger arms than that guy. Feel.”

  Is this how people ask each other out in the ’hood? So much simpler. On the other hand, if I were black, I’d get no dates at all.

  A guy who looks like he invests in socially progressive stocks is rustling through a box of blank fax sheets. Bran grabs him for a quote. “I don’t know if I feel bad about being here, or if I feel bad about not being here soon enough,” he says. “You should never be late to a good pillaging.”

  “Bran,” I say. “We gotta eat something.”

  Bran and I gather up a bunch of documents and records and stick them in a box. She carries it proudly in front of her belly: her baby. We go to a diner for a burger.

  Bran is humming the latest Madonna song. Producing a TV news segment involves months of work to put together a twelve-minute collage of pictures. This, though, could be an actual written story to be printed in a magazine next week. Her name in black ink. She doesn’t get to see that often.

  “Do you think it’s a story?” she says.

  “It’s a story.”

  “I’m going to stay up all night writing it. I’m so excited.”

  “Bran,” I say. “It’s a five-hundred-word story.” I take my cell phone out of my backpack to make sure it’s still on. You never know when Julia’s going to call.

  “You shit,” she says. “What are you doing with my phone?”

  “My phone.”

  She starts pawing through her five-gallon bag, the one I mock-ingly called “fake Fendi” the first time I saw it even though I, obviously, can’t tell the difference. It turned out that I’d stumbled onto the truth. She didn’t talk to me for a month after that.

  “So what’s that?” I say, as she unearths a scratched Nokia.

  “You got the exact same phone they gave me?”

  “Looks that way,” I say.

  “You have to get a new one, then.”

  “Uh-uh.”

  I pay for the grub, then Bran and I head across the street to one of those cool old-fashioned quasi-Irish pubs, with carnival glass and conspiratorial little booths and beer by the pitcher.

  “You’re buying this time,” I say, sitting at the bar.

  “I don’t have any money,” she says, and opens her wallet. This is the cartoon moment when the moths fly out, but she’s right: she’s busted. Girls never have any money. Girls get away with a lot, if you ask me. I hear the Kennedy kids walk around without cash too. And royalty.

  I order a Guinness. She looks at the beer list as if it’s written in Urdu. “Stella Artois,” she tells the waiter. I grimace, involuntarily.

  “What?” she says, all defensive. “I’ve never had one. I want to see what it’s like. Why do you have to always insult me?”

  “I’m not insulting you,” I say. “I’ve had every one of these beers.” Many times. “I could have described them for you.”

  Bran is tall, looks taller in her gray wool suit. Wide lapels, shoulder pads, baggy pleated pants. Girls dressed this way for a brief moment, in the late 1980s. Then they came to their senses.

  “You’re looking at my suit,” she says.

  “Where did you get it?” I say, dodging.

  “It was the first suit I ever bought!” she says, brightly. “It was three hundred dollars. Then the next week it was on sale for a hundred and fifty so I returned it and bought it again.”

  She’s still wearing the first suit she ever bought. In the late eighties.

  “This girl at work asked me if I was a lesbian,” she says morosely.

  “You do dress like Ellen DeGeneres,” I say.

  “Why are you always saying such hurtful things?” she says. “You’re such an asshole.”

  Gaffe! Backtrack. “All I’m saying, you’re a cute girl. Dress like one.”

  “How?”

  “You’re wearing, like, thirty percent too much clothing,” I say.

  I give the bartender a bill. Bartenders like me. I always overtip them. Give them an extra buck, they give you an extra six-dollar drink. What goes around comes around. It’s barma.

  She takes a sip. I drink half of my pint in a gulp.

  “Do you ever think,” Bran says gently, “that you drink too much?”

  “Actually, since it hasn’t started working yet,” I say, “I was thinking I should up the dosage.”

  The J box starts up with “Tangled Up in Blue.” The strumming hits me like intravenous beer. Ahh. Muscles going slack with joy.

  “Did you know that in the original version of this song, the one on the New York sessions bootleg—” I say.

  “What song?” sh
e says.

  “This song. On the original version, it’s—”

  “What song is this?”

  “ ‘Tangled Up in Blue,’ ” I say.

  “By who?”

  “Oh come on,” I say. “Dylan! It’s the first song on Blood on the Tracks!”

  “What cen tury is it from?” she says. “Don’t they have any new music?”

  Let it go. “Anyway,” I say, “on the original version of this song, it’s all in the third person. He was married when they first met, soon to be divorced. He helped her out of a jam he guessed but he used a little too much force.’ On the Minneapolis session, the one that was used on the commercially released album, it’s all in the first person. Makes it so much more personal, don’t you think? More powerful. And the language is so beautifully economical. Instead of saying, I met her, we cheated on her husband, I talked her into dumping him, he just says, ‘She was married when we first met/Soon to be divorced.’ And then he kills her husband, but Dylan never comes out and says that. It’s just, ‘Helped her out of a jam I guess/But I used a little too much force.’ ”

  The idea of shooting the other man has a certain desperado flair, no?

  “Tom,” she says, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  We wind up on University looking for a cab. We’ve had only one drink but I notice Bran seems to be walking awfully close to me. Leaning on me a little. I send a tentative arm slithering out on a reconnaissance mission to her waist. Normally when I do this I’m in for a nasty remark or two, like, Tom, how many times do I have to tell you I’m not interested? After three years of failure, one tends to scale back on operations a little.

  But at the moment Bran seems to like having my arm around her. For the first time ever.

  A few notable rejections by Bran:

  The first time I met her. We were at a birthday party for some guy I’d never met at a grim little Bowery apartment filled with people I didn’t know. Bran and I made each other laugh. I asked for her phone number. She gave it to me. Then she started dropping hints: hints that she wasn’t interested. I called her anyway. We talked for forty-five minutes. I made her laugh some more and then I asked her out.