Mister Monkey

by Francine Prose

Who knows Margot well enough to know how moved she would be, how saddened but heartened by the Chekhov quote? Like a note in a fortune cookie baked for her by God, a kindly reminder that she is concerned with—obsessed by—the wrong things, with age and fame and success, when, as Chekhov and Dr. Reid say, she must remember that each moment of life is a gift.

  Did the man who left the letter stay to watch the show? Could he be a stranger who has followed her career? Does he see every production she’s in, even Mister Monkey? Will he be in the audience this afternoon?

  Fairy godmother Lakshmi reappears with the skirt. Margot takes off her jeans. The skirt fits. The purple suit seems almost stylish, coolly retro and ironic. Even the Harpo wig isn’t as disfiguring as usual. Margot thinks of Lucille Ball. A female comic genius!

  “Great look,” Lakshmi says.

  Margot has gone from being not dressed for the party to being dressed for the party.

  THE KIDS PUSH the revolving scenery around, and the lights come up on Margot, at a desk. More lights, more slappy applause. Carmen enters and sings a rumba about poor Mister Monkey, wrongly accused by Janice. By the final chorus, Portia and Carmen are singing to a modified salsa beat, “The monkey didn’t do it. He didn’t, no, no, no . . .”

  Margot knows the scene so well she could do it with half her brain missing, which is helpful, because she’s still distracted by memories of playing Sonya to Alec’s Astrov. She’d poured her entire soul out, believing that she could make Alec love her and stop wishing that he was having sex with his twin sister in a stall in the men’s room of the Beinecke Library. We shall go on living, Uncle Vanya. Beyond the grave, God will know that we have suffered and wept, and He will pity us, and we will see a bright beautiful life.

  Margot’s pain had been awful. But it seemed preferable to her current state, this hamstering back and forth between panic and numbness. Once more she lets feeling pour through her, this time directed at the man who sent the letter, somewhere in the darkened rows among the yellow-and-black booster seats donated by the Yellow Pages. She feels a taste of the excitement she used to feel when she thought that someone in the audience might offer her a part.

  By the time Margot and Rita sing the final verse, the most anxious child in the theater has stopped worrying. Mister Monkey will be fine!

  The letter writer knows that Margot is capable of putting her whole self into the role of a righteous lawyer, like Spencer Tracy as Clarence Darrow in that film about . . . Oops. Evolution. The E word. It throws Margot off, and she’s a heartbeat slow in getting out her lines. The others look at her. Even Jason and Danielle are wondering what’s wrong.

  Nothing is wrong. Unlike the others, except Roger, Margot has been doing this long enough to know that it happens. Actors go up, they forget their lines, blow their cues. It’s just a pity that it’s happening when the man who sent her the letter might be out there, in the dark.

  Things improve during the courtroom scene. Margot/Portia is cross-examining Eleanor/Janice, when Carmen, Danielle, and Jason dance onstage with Janice’s wallet, the one she’s accused Mister Monkey of stealing. Not only have Carmen and the kids found the wallet, but—this is a crucial plot point—they have found two of the outrageously long scarlet fingernails that Janice has worn since the start of the play.

  And now it turns out that Janice (will the witness please hold up her hands?) is missing two of her talons. Somehow this proves that Janice hid the wallet and that it wasn’t stolen by Mister Monkey.

  In rehearsal, Roger admitted that this was a plot hole. But they had to go with it, even if they wondered—as anyone might—why Janice hadn’t simply gotten her nails replaced during the time between the alleged theft and the trial. It was a problem in the book, but generations of Mister Monkey lovers and their parents haven’t complained.

  Roger said that the burden of making this unlikely plot-turn work was on Eleanor, who is playing Janice, and Eleanor said, “I can handle it, guys,” in a tough, gum-cracking tone. Maybe she was being Janice. Lucky Eleanor, with her other life, her outside life as a nurse. Acting’s a hobby for her, not a vocation, not a heartbreak and a torment.

  Anyhow, the kids in the audience aren’t wondering why Janice has been walking around missing two nails ever since she hid her own wallet and pretended it was stolen. They are too busy loving the jaunty, hilarious gross-out raucousness of the song that Janice/Eleanor is singing about fingernails. How she loves fingernails, how she likes to eat them, chew them, swallow them, bake them into cookies, brew them into tea. But now her beloved fingernails, her darling fingernails have betrayed her. She peels off the rest of her press-on nails, and flings them into the front rows, like a stripper. The children shriek with horror and delight and scramble to catch the nails. The parents think it’s a little weird, but the kids are having fun.

  Lakshmi, in her police hat and blue shirt and pants, her authority considerably compromised by her giant yellow clown shoes and red golf-ball nose, marches out and perp-walks Janice offstage, just as she did to Mister Monkey.

  The judge—Roger in a barrister’s wig—tears up the charges against Mister Monkey. Jason and Danielle fling the scraps into the audience, and the kids leap out of their seats like baseball fans trying to catch a pop fly.

  Mr. Jimson thanks Portia, and Portia says, “Mister Monkey is innocent! The quality of mercy is not strained—not even for a monkey.”

  The kids burst into applause. The parents are clapping too, so are the out-of-town couples. Justice has been served. Everyone likes the triumph of innocence, especially the parents, who think it’s a good lesson, well worth the (very reasonable) price of the tickets. They would have paid ten times more to see The Lion King, and the kids wouldn’t have gotten half as much.

  For the moment, it’s working. Brushing off the scraps of “legal document” confetti lodged in her wig, Portia believes in what she’s done, Margot believes in what she’s done, and through Portia, Margot has reached the audience via the glorious medium of theater.

  Art is art, theater is magic, no matter how humble the venue. Together they have transformed a house full of strangers into a group of people all rooting for Mister Monkey! Portia is their heroine. If the letter writer is out there, let him accept this thank you from Margot: a reminder that the muse chooses her own time and place to make an entrance.

  Right on cue, Mister Monkey bounds onstage and races across the courtroom. In a burst of high spirits, he leaps into his lawyer’s arms and clamps his legs around her. Adam is small, but in the weeks since rehearsals began, he has grown taller and heavier, making this “spontaneous” lift and hug more of a challenge for Margot.

  This afternoon, just when Margot least expects it, just after her moment of spiritual connection, of quasi-transcendence, that’s when she realizes that Adam is pressing his groin into her hip, grinding hard, and—can this be true?— she feels the hummock of a hard-on under his fuzzy monkey suit.

  That filthy little pervert! What does he think he’s doing?

  She drops him. Boom. Adam’s a gymnast. He bounces onto his feet. He looks up at her. A glint of triumph flashes inside the frayed eyeholes of his costume.

  Margot has been molested by a boy in a monkey suit! And she kept on acting right through it. Somehow she stayed in character. How professional is that? Or is she just another female victim, putting up with anything that any male of any age thinks he can get away with?

  Margot needs to do something. But what? She knows better than to accuse Adam. No one will believe her. What if it happens again? She’ll take the little perv aside. Let the lunatic stage mom sue her.

  Margot’s concentration lapses once more, this time descending into a spiral from which she can’t retrieve it, even during the low-effort, audience-pleasing cell phone duet with Eric. Mr. Jimson is trying to call Portia, to thank her for saving Mister Monkey. His cell phone keeps cutting out: another crumb of reality tossed to the grown-ups.

  Finally, frustrated and desperate, he pockets his pho
ne and sings out loud for all to hear: He loves her! I love you, Portia! I love Mister Monkey’s lawyer!

  Poor Eric hasn’t done this long enough to know how contagious another actor’s off night can be. He goes flat on a high note, misses another, forgets a lyric and then a line. Margot can hardly get out the four words required of her: I love you too.

  Normally, it doesn’t matter what she and Eric say. While they are belting out their love, the overjoyed chimp is climbing the walls, the kids in the audience are whooping and yelling, thrilled by Adam’s super-monkey leaps from rope to pole. And the parents are figuring out that their imprisonment in these uncomfortable seats is almost over.

  Adam knows what he’s done to Margot. He stands there, frozen, staring at her. In the second row, where she always sits, Giselle must be losing what’s left of her mind.

  Eric is supposed to say “Will you be Mrs. Monkey, dear Portia? I mean, Mrs. Jimson.”

  Instead he says, “I mean, will you be my Mrs. Monkey, Mrs. Jimson?”

  The children giggle. Eric is sorry he’s blown the line, but also liberated from the challenge of pretending to fall in love with his monkey’s tacky, middle-aged lawyer.

  So what if they’ve made mistakes? They are artists. Professionals. The show must go on. Margot and Eric run toward each other and meet in a body-slam embrace. In unison, or near unison, they sing out, “Calling my soul mate! Coming in clear! I’m never losing you again!”

  Just then Margot’s cell phone flies out of her hand, clatters onto the stage, and lands not far from her feet, where it spins and then stops.

  Everyone is watching. Should she pick it up? Would Portia? Portia would bend over in a flash, even if it made her skirt ride up and show the audience her ass.

  A couple of parents laugh nervously.

  Margot holds the moment. She has the audience in her power. How long can she let it go on? She thinks of all the great silences in the history of the theater. The echoing silence in Macbeth after the knock at the gate. The two-minute silence that followed Isabella’s plea to Angelo in the Peter Brook Measure for Measure. Krapp’s silence as he shuffles through the Beckett play. The silence that is the only answer when the stage manager in Our Town asks about the dead sitting in their straight-backed chairs, waiting, waiting . . . What are they waiting for?

  What are they waiting for?

  Focused on Portia’s dropped cell phone, this silence lacks the profundity and intensity of those great theatrical silences. On the other hand, it is silence. The audience waits to see what will happen. It’s Margot’s silence, hers to end or prolong for as long as she wants.

  It is then that she hears a child in the second or third row say, very loud and clear, “Grandpa, are you interested in this?”

  Grandpa, are you interested in this? What a rude little freak! Any child who could put those words together is old enough to know better. Old enough to know that if you talk that loudly during a silence in a tiny theater with weird acoustics, chances are pretty good that everyone can hear you, even the actors on stage.

  Grandpa, are you interested in what? In this blood, these tears? In these lives, the only lives that these actors will ever have, in the point which they have reached in their lives and from which they can only hope and pray to ascend?

  At least no one laughs. Maybe the audience is too embarrassed. They are probably thinking that the kid is saying what they would say if they had the nerve. Like Jesus in the temple. Grandpa, are you interested in the emperor’s new clothes? Does anyone really care whether a monkey’s owner and his defense lawyer decide that they are soul mates, or whether a lady lawyer in a rainbow wig picks up her cell phone?

  What is the letter writer thinking? Margot can’t bear to imagine his compassion, the loving kindness curdling into pity, or worse, the knowledge that she is beyond his help, too low in this circle of children’s-theater hell to be saved by a message from Chekhov.

  The cell phone remains where it landed. No one moves to retrieve it. The audience listens for Grandpa’s reply. The cast is bewitched. The silence continues, but now the audience is straining to hear Grandpa’s answer.

  Unlike the child, he will whisper. He will say yes. He wants the grandchild to be happy. Margot cannot see the old man in the dark, but she feels sure that he is a loving grandfather, protective, the kind of grandpa Margot never had, either of the grandfathers who died before she was born. How different things would be if Grandpa, the kid, the cast, and the audience knew that the boy playing Mister Monkey has just tried to jerk off against Margot’s hip.

  Grandpa will say, Yes, I’m interested. Then maybe he will ask the child, Are you interested in this?

  The child loves the grandfather. So the child will also lie and say, Yes, Grandpa, I am.

  Margot doesn’t think. She acts. It is a drama-class exercise, repeated over and over, never to be forgotten. Act. React. Don’t think. She acts without thinking and kicks her cell phone as hard as she can. Blam. It shoots behind the curtain. Later she will be sorry. But right now it feels great!

  The audience applauds. Hooray! We’re free! Let’s all kick our cell phones straight to hell! Three cheers for gutsy Portia!

  The child squeezes his grandfather’s arm and scoots forward. The lady kicked her cell phone! Is she going to get into trouble?

  The child’s first sign of genuine interest lifts the grandfather’s spirits, even though he worries that if the child goes home and kicks his mom or dad’s cell phone, just lightly, just to see what will happen, and the parents ask the child why, he will say that he saw a lady do it, in the play he saw with Grandpa. The grandfather knows that this worry is needless. Unlike the actress, the child is too smart and mature to kick a phone. But children learn by testing, observation, and imitation.

  Though the child’s parents are too kind and polite to mention it to the grandfather, they will blame him if their son kicks a phone. They will laugh about it when they wake in the darkness and talk the way couples do when they are trying to shorten the night or lull themselves back to sleep. They will agree it’s hilarious, the bad behavior their son learned when his loving, well-meaning grandfather took him to the theater.

  [ CHAPTER 2 ]

  ADAM AND ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES

  DANIELLE ASKS, “DON’T you ever miss the jungle, Mister Monkey?”

  The lights go down, and a full moon, pale as lemon ice, rises over the stage. Adam puts his paws over his eyes, inhales swarms of monkey-costume dust mites, and, trying not to gag, sings the first notes of his solo, “Monkey Moon”—a ballad about longing to be a baby chimp again, back in his lost tropical paradise, tossing coconuts back and forth with his murdered monkey mom and dad.

  But that’s not what Adam wants. He wants to forget the sad film Roger made them watch about the dead wild animals in Africa. He wants his voice not to crack before he finishes the song. He wants to grow taller so he can play something cooler—and hotter—than a shrimpy orphan chimp. But none of those desires will help him call up the feeling that his mom says he needs for this song. Yearning, she’d said. Yearning. What the hell does that even mean? There’s a girl in his building Adam thinks about sometimes. But Mister Monkey doesn’t—and wouldn’t. And the next eighty minutes are supposed to be about what Mister Monkey wants. Mister Monkey wants to be tossing a coconut with his parents.

  Mother, can you hear me? Adam raises his arms over his head and steps into the spotlight so that the fuzzy Y of his silhouette falls across the moon. On the Internet and in books and newspapers, he’s read that the moon is approaching Earth, exerting its unstoppable, ever-strengthening tidal pull on the waves and winds and weather. So here come the tsunamis, the blizzards, the tornadoes, the Katrinas and Sandys. And they still call it extreme weather? It’s mild compared to what’s coming, so what will they call that? Adam imagines his favorite weather girl, the one with the tight shiny blouses and the cascade of blow-dried curls. Another catastrophe by late in the week, folks, and brace for a wind and water d
isaster during the morning commute . . .

  Maybe by then it will be possible to leave the planet and start over somewhere else. Soon people will be able to travel to the moon on a shuttle rocket. Adam wants to be the first gymnast-child-actor-skateboarder in outer space. He wants to ride the lunar craters.

  Here is something else he wants, something that makes it even harder to touch the audience’s heart with his monkey yearning. He wants to spit or sneeze into his paw so that, at the end of the song, when Jason and Danielle skip out onto the stage and dance his sorrows away in a fruitcake jitterbug, each of them will grab his paw and get a slimy surprise. Adam knows it’s a terrible thing to want. Does it make him a terrible person?

  In one of the monkey books he read, a baboon saved up water and dirt to make mud to fling at a colonial gentleman who’d been tormenting him. Adam doesn’t have mud but only his own available fluids. And it’s not that Jason and Danielle are tormenting him; everyone and everything is.

  Let “the kids” complain to Roger. Who is Roger going to fire? A twelve-year-old actor and gymnast and singer the size of an eight-year-old who can take direction like a grown-up and do triple flips? Or two college students who can’t even remember their characters’ names?

  Adam cracked up laughing when Roger got so annoyed that he renamed the characters Jason and Danielle. Was Roger allowed to change things in the play? Adam’s mom said no, but Adam knows that plenty of things from the book have been changed. For example, cell phones. No cell phones in the novel.

  In the book, which is from the 1970s, Portia and Mr. Jimson keep leaving messages on each other’s answering machines. No one has those anymore. No one but Adam, who has saved the machine on which his dad says, “Wait for the sound of the beep and leave a message for baby Adam—or his mom and dad.” Adam keeps it in the back of his closet and every so often plays it when his mother’s not home.

  The point is that sneezing or spitting on Jason and Danielle would be a seriously monkey thing to do. That would be taking Adam’s character to a whole other level.