Mister Monkey

by Francine Prose

  It wasn’t a date, just a friendly teacher-student outing—until he had a meltdown outside the monkey house. Sobbing like a little bitch. It’s embarrassing to remember, even now. Back in those days, he cried a lot. He’d start talking about the war, about Vietnam, and the next thing he knew: waterworks. Maybe he had a teensy-tiny touch of PTSD. You didn’t hear much about that then. It wasn’t a real diagnosis, or anyway, not in his corner of the Bronx. No one ever knew what to do when he started to blubber. Some girls seemed to like it, some didn’t, not that Ray cared whether they liked it or not. Mostly people would ignore it, looking slightly past him, waiting patiently the way they did around someone with a debilitating stutter. He doesn’t cry much anymore, except at the zoo, but then again, he hardly ever talks about the war.

  Astrid brought him back to her apartment and tucked him into her soft, sweet-smelling bed; she’d slept on the couch and nursed him back to (relative) mental health on a diet of daytime TV, Valium, and miso soup. She’d joined him in bed a short time before he was well enough to leave it.

  They both agreed that, given the change in their situation, he should drop her writing class. By then he’d moved out of his mom’s apartment in Washington Heights and was living with Astrid in the East Village. What was it about the monkey house that had made him fall apart? He’d told Astrid he didn’t know. Technically, a lie. He still has some memories of the war he’d just as soon keep to himself. In fact he’s never told anyone, nor does he intend to.

  It was Astrid who suggested that he write about a monkey. Get to the root of the problem! She’d given him a personal monkey reading list. He’d wondered why so many of these books were horror stories—“The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Monkey’s Paw”—or books for children: Pippi Longstocking, Curious George. Did no one think that adults could be interested in monkeys unless there was an element of terror? His favorite was A High Wind in Jamaica, about a group of children kidnapped by pirates who have a monkey whose tail has fallen off from cancer and who steals food from a pig. Ray had loved the novel, but he couldn’t see how reading about children on a pirate ship would help him write his own book.

  He wrote Mister Monkey in three weeks, on Astrid’s typewriter, while she was teaching. He’d meant it as a book for grown-ups, and he and Astrid broke up not long after she read it and liked it and then asked if he thought it might not work better as a story for kids.

  “Excuse me?” the driver says.

  Ray seems to have said “Hostile bitch!” out loud. Thirty years later, certain feelings stay painful and fresh, though Astrid was right, and Ray owes his life to her. Astrid was such a saint that even after Ray left her, she sent Ray’s manuscript to a friend who worked for an editor, an Irish redhead named Emer who persuaded him to change his book in every way Astrid suggested and also in some ways that Astrid wouldn’t have dared to suggest.

  Mister Monkey’s adoptive family morphed from poor and Puerto Rican to rich and white. Did Ray want his book to sell—or was he okay with a niche market? He wanted his book to sell. Without knowing that it was something to want, he wanted a table at Enzo’s. It was Emer who persuaded Ray to describe Mister Monkey as “super-cute”—an expression he would never have used—on the book’s first page.

  “Sorry,” Ray tells the driver. “Talking to myself.”

  A ribbon of green lights unfurls before them as they cross the border from welfare Park Avenue to billionaire Park Avenue and cruise past the stately apartment blocks.

  The midtown traffic jam is like death, Ray thinks. You want to believe it won’t happen to you, but inevitably it does. As the cab idles on 57th, Ray meditates on the strangeness of coming full circle. All these years later he’s living with Lauren, who works at the same company that published Mister Monkey, where he met Emer, whom he made the mistake of marrying. A quarter century. Jesus Christ.

  He’d walked out of Emer’s office when she told him to relocate Mister Monkey’s birthplace from Vietnam to some unspecified African jungle. East Ooga-Booga. Ray had been to Vietnam. The whole point was Vietnam. Did Emer know that animals—whole monkey families—were victims of so-called collateral damage? He’d stalked out of Emer’s office and stood on a midtown street corner—the same corner on which he’s about to pick up Lauren, as a matter of fact—and wept like an infant whose mommy has taken his pacifier away.

  When he cooled off and came back, half an hour later, Emer said that Ray needed to understand: people want to forget. Human Psychology 101. Didn’t he know that war was the kiss of death for juvenile fiction? What mattered was the story. The story you invent. Emer quoted Bertolt Brecht: no one can make his own suffering sound convincing. If your stomach hurts and you say so, people will just be disgusted.

  Ray went to the library and looked up Bertolt Brecht. That was when he knew that he had fallen in love with Emer. And when he figured out that it was probably a good idea to stop talking about the war.

  Emer had been wrong about a lot of things, but not, as it turned out, about Mister Monkey and its sales potential. After all the arguments, Ray had rolled over for every one of her editorial suggestions. Mister Monkey’s parents were no longer killed by soldiers but by poachers. Mister Monkey wasn’t adopted by a military family but by the grieving husband and children of a primate biologist. Ray said that Emer’s version was boring, and Emer said that people liked their kids to be bored. Kids preferred to be scared, but the parents were the ones who bought the books.

  Not long after they broke up, she quit publishing, and she went into film. Emer is now a studio executive in Hollywood. Every year she sends massive, expensive Christmas cards with photos of herself and her partner, Jill, and the twins. Tinsel and colored lights in the palm trees.

  Ray and Lauren have talked about Emer only because it’s such a coincidence: his being involved with two women who worked at the same publishing house, decades apart. Though really it isn’t so strange. Ray and Lauren met at the publisher’s party celebrating Mister Monkey’s twentieth birthday. A short person inside a monkey suit had draped a medal embossed with Mister Monkey’s face over Ray’s bowed head.

  His current editor, Grace, gave a speech about what an honor it had been to work with Ray Ortiz, though during all the time she’s been Ray’s editor, they’d only “worked” together once. That was right after 9/11. Grace called to ask if they could take out one sentence from the beginning of Mister Monkey. It was: “What if the buildings fell down?”

  Sure, Ray told Grace. Cut it. He’d understood. Let the first paragraph read: “Mister Monkey was scared of the tall buildings. He couldn’t get used to the noise of the traffic . . .”

  What did an orphan monkey’s arrival in the Big Apple have to do with 9/11? But like everyone else, Ray had been so sad. Way too sad to argue about a sentence. At this point they could put that sentence back in, and it would be fine with the kids, who are always watching apocalyptic disaster films about tall buildings exploding or crumbling.

  Even as Grace was giving her speech, Lauren caught Ray’s eye from across the room. Those few seconds had telegraphed a promise: she would come over and find him after the bullshit was over. So Mister Monkey had played Cupid just as he did for Portia and Mr. Jimson.

  Lauren is in marketing, in Ray’s opinion a more modern and youthful occupation than being an editor or a writer. They’d left the Mister Monkey celebration early and gone to a Japanese businessmen’s hotel bar that Ray knew about, a quiet place in midtown.

  The reissue of Mister Monkey featured a vintage author photo of Ray as a handsome, moody street kid in the army fatigues he’d put away forever to take Astrid’s writing class. Where did those cheekbones go, and will they really never return? Luckily for him, Lauren has an imagination. She can look at this Ray and see that one, though to be honest, Ray has no idea what she sees when she looks at him.

  From halfway down the block, Ray spots Lauren standing on the corner. Perfectly calm, perfectly on time, perfectly poised, perfectly his. Slung o
ver her shoulder is a stylish leather backpack. In her crisp yellow dress, she looks like a rich high school girl rocking two grand’s worth of imported Italian calfskin. Lauren comes from money. Her dad, who is not much older than Ray, made a fortune buying cocoa butter from Third World countries and selling it back to them as toxic beauty products with American labels.

  On their first real date, Lauren told Ray that her dream was to make amends: reparations for the damage her father has done. And Ray had said that was funny, not humorous funny but coincidental funny, because he’d written Mister Monkey to make amends for some things that had happened in Vietnam. He’d come to think of the book—and the money it made—as reparations for the damage that the war had done to him.

  If Lauren wondered what he’d meant, she’d known better than to ask. She’d waited politely while he went off to the men’s room and returned, his eyes red from weeping.

  Anyhow they’d had that in common, the idea of reparations, which seemed deeper and heavier than what connects most couples. And now they’re going to Enzo’s to enjoy some delicious payback for the humiliations of Mister Monkey the Musical.

  “That’s my girlfriend over there,” Ray tells the driver. “The young lady in yellow.” Is Ray imagining that the driver’s shoulders straighten when he sees who is going to be riding out to Brooklyn with them? Lauren slides in, kisses Ray, snuggles against his shoulder.

  “Tough day?” says Ray.

  Lauren says, “Not bad. And you?”

  “The school kids were amazing,” Ray says. “I could have stayed there forever.”

  “You’re a generous guy, Ray,” says Lauren. Just the sound of her throaty voice gives Ray a semi-hard-on. Not bad for sixty-two, though his erection subsides when he thinks of the very different compliments she could pay a hot young guy. Like the driver. Generous Ray. Big deal.

  “What’s wrong?” Lauren says.

  Ray flexes his palms to include the car, Lauren, the East River, the sky.

  “What could be wrong?” he says.

  As they cross the Brooklyn Bridge, the daylight bouncing off the skyscraper windows flashes a friendly shout-out. We remember you, Raymond, say all those tiny orange suns. We knew you when you were a boy. He and Lauren have left Manhattan and died and gone to heaven.

  Lauren says, “It’s so beautiful. This is so much fun.”

  That’s exactly how Ray wants her to feel and just what he wants her to say. That it is beautiful and fun to be out with a guy twice her age who has been married three times and doesn’t want to get married again. Or have kids. Ray already has three girls and a boy. His middle daughter is two years older than Lauren. Not one of them earns enough to live on. His youngest daughter is battling depression. Hereditary, from his side, Ray sometimes fears. They all depend on Ray.

  Ray’s kids get along with Lauren. The kindest of his children, Miranda, works in a bookstore in Fort Greene and texts him whenever someone buys a copy of Mister Monkey. She likes telling her customers that she’s the writer’s daughter. For Father’s Day, she gave Ray a volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Ray only needed to read a few lines to realize that thoughtful Miranda had given him literature’s most moving description of what it is like to love a younger person. Though what was his daughter really doing? Because in Ray’s opinion, and for Miranda’s information, the person Shakespeare loved seemed to have treated him much worse than Lauren treats Ray.

  Ray would like to know who made the rule that people are only allowed to fall in love with people their own age. It’s just a pity that Lauren wants to get married. She is too cool to say so, but Ray heard it in her voice when she asked, oh so casually, “Would you ever think about getting married again? Ever think about having kids?”

  “That would depend,” lied Ray. What was he supposed to say? Absolutely not? That was over a year ago, and Lauren hasn’t brought up the subject since. Ray hopes she has gotten past it, accepted it, made up her mind to let all that go and enjoy the beauty and pleasure of a car, the Brooklyn Bridge, the promise of dinner at Enzo’s.

  As they turn onto the expressway, Lauren says, “I put in an order for Mister Monkey coloring-book pages. We’ll give them out free to the schools. Curious George has them. Why not us? It’s good for the schools and for the book.”

  As they pull up to Enzo’s, the driver gives Ray his card. They should call him five minutes before they want to leave.

  “Shit. I forgot my phone,” Ray says.

  “I’ve got mine.” Lauren takes the driver’s card from Ray, and it seems to Ray that she and the driver exchange a look that lasts a beat too long and that conveys the knowing forbearance of the young in the presence of the elderly dementia patient. Ray’s just being paranoid. He should have remembered his phone.

  “Bon appétit,” says the driver.

  As always Enzo appears after a very short wait.

  He says, “Raymond, how are you? You still writing books?”

  “You still serving pasta?” says Ray.

  “And the lovely Lauren,” says Enzo. “Good evening, Signorina.”

  What a memory, thinks Ray, who over the past months has come this close to calling Lauren Emer or Vicky, the names of his first and third wives.

  Even at six-thirty, the place is mostly full, and Enzo shows them to a table a little too close to the one beside it.

  “You should have called earlier,” Enzo says. “My apologies, Raymond. I can only do what I can do. It’s busy.”

  “We appreciate that,” says Ray.

  Ray phoned Enzo this afternoon. They are lucky to get this. And Enzo and Mario will make them feel like honored guests: the most important people in the restaurant. Enzo leaves, and Mario takes his place. Ray and Mario shake hands.

  “Buona serra,” Mario says.

  “Buenas noches,” says Ray.

  As always, Mario starts to pull out Lauren’s chair, and as always Ray laughs and beats him to it. He wants an excuse to touch Lauren’s shoulder. For decades, this dance has stayed the same, though the ballerinas have changed. Gentleman Ray lets Lauren face the room and takes the seat facing the wall.

  At the next table is a young woman, pretty enough, but nowhere near as striking as Lauren. And (Ray can’t help noting) she’s frumpily dressed. She is alone, but the crumpled napkin across the table suggests that someone was there.

  The young woman scans the restaurant, as if she is worried that her date might never return from the men’s room. A schoolteacher, Ray thinks. More schoolteacher-like than the three sexy teachers he met in the Bronx this morning.

  Ray says, “Good evening,” mostly to take her mind off her missing date. Ray hopes he’s not young and handsome, sitting where Lauren can see him. Lauren isn’t that type of girl. But a woman can’t help comparing.

  “Mario,” Ray says to the waiter. “What can I do for you?” He and Mario laugh again. Not real laughs, more like friendly snorts.

  Mario must be pushing fifty by now. Ray has known him for years. He is tall, and his looming presence spares him the throat-clearing and “Hi, my name is” chatter that other waiters rely on to announce themselves. Mario has only to stand there and Ray reaches for the wine list.

  Mario says, “Should I choose?”

  “I trust you,” says Ray.

  Mario puts one hand over his heart. Ray hands him an envelope containing two tickets to Mister Monkey. For Sunday afternoon, when the restaurant is closed. Mario treats Ray well, and, tickets or no tickets, Ray leaves him a 20 percent tip, even when Enzo comps him. Ray isn’t one of those cheapskate celebrities who try to pay their bill with free stuff.

  “Enjoy the show, Mario,” says Ray.

  “Thanks, Mr. Ortiz.”

  “Ray.”

  Mario reappears and pours the wine: a wizard casting a spell of silence.

  “To Mister Monkey,” says Ray.

  “To Mister Monkey,” says Lauren.

  The young woman at the next table is staring at them, slack-jawed with shock. What could
they have done to provoke such amazement? Has she recognized Ray? It happens. Rarely. But it happens. Someone saw him at a bookstore reading, a teacher remembers that he came to her school. Somebody IDs Ray as the author of their favorite children’s book.

  After two umbrella cocktails at the Japanese businessman’s bar, Lauren had asked why he hadn’t published anything since Mister Monkey.

  Ray said what he saves for certain girls. “Have you seen The Shining?”

  “I love that movie,” Lauren said. “It’s the scariest movie ever!”

  “All work and no play makes Ray a dull boy.”

  “Are you warning me that you’re an ax murderer?” Lauren said.

  “I’m warning you that I’m a writer,” said Ray.

  Lauren took the bait, as they all do, though, like all of the women who have fallen in love with Ray, Lauren is too smart to think that she could give Ray what he needs to start writing again. A woman who imagined she was going to be his muse wouldn’t have made it past the first night.

  The girl beside them has stopped staring and gone back to scanning the room for her date.

  The candlelight flatters Lauren, but so does every light. Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, she’d said beautiful. She’d said fun. Ray needs to enjoy the moment and not worry about the future.

  Lauren says, “Don’t you ever want to go see your play? Aren’t you even curious?”

  “It’s not my play,” says Ray. “It makes me sick to think that anyone would associate me with that mindless piece of crap. If I didn’t know that Mario will go see anything, in any theater, anywhere—”

  “I understand,” Lauren says. “But if you ever wanted to go, I’d go with you. It could be fun.”

  “I just gave Mario the tickets. You saw me.” Ray shrugs.

  “Maybe next time,” says Lauren. “Or I could take my nephew.”

  Ray loves her assuming there’s a next time, but he hates her mentioning the nephew. Lauren is going to want to have a child, and that is when she will leave him.