Mister Monkey

by Francine Prose

  All the guys saw it and stopped and looked. No one spoke, not even the motormouths, no one said Jesus Christ or What the fuck? No one knew what it was. That night, back in the camp, they talked about it. One guy said maybe it had nothing to do with the war. Maybe it was some lone psycho. There were sick fucks everywhere. And all of them, the Americans and the Vietnamese translators, took turns telling stories about the sick fuck in their town or neighborhood or village. It was probably the closest the guys ever felt to each other on that tour.

  Maybe once a year the dead monkey family visits Ray’s dreams. And he wakes up thinking that the success and longevity of Mister Monkey is reparations, after all—payback for the murdered monkeys. And restitution to him, Ray, for having had to see them when he was just a kid. A boy.

  So far so good with the not crying. Almost home, Ray thinks.

  Lauren looks down, as if she can’t remember what to do with the dead green plants on her plate. Finally she says, “Today at the office when I was supposed to be working, I streamed a documentary on my computer. About this national park in the Congo where all these amazingly brave scientists and rangers are trying to protect the gorillas from the soulless bastard mercenaries hired by oil companies which want all the animals dead and the game preserves privatized so they can drill. God, Ray, it was so heartbreaking . . . this poor gorilla was murdered . . .”

  “I hate that shit,” says Ray.

  “I thought of you, Ray, I thought of you telling me about the clause in the contract of the play saying that no one can mention evolution. How could anyone not think about it, and how could I look at this film and not think how shocking it was, killing creatures just one step down the evolutionary ladder. Not that I know that much about evolution, Ray. I hardly remember the science I took at college. I knew I was seeing murders. But why should that surprise me, with so much actual killing of human men and women and children going on all over the world, every single day? Why am I telling you this, Ray? You were in the war.

  “I thought about Mister Monkey, Ray. I thought of you. I thought, How ahead of your time you were! Writing about Africa and poachers and wildlife, all these things that needed to be said, things that still need to be said. You were hiding it in the story. And hardly anyone was saying it before you, Ray. Maybe Rachel Carson. You’re a hero, Ray, really. Mister Monkey is not just some regular kids’ book.”

  Maybe Lauren’s reading too much into it, but whatever. She’s young. If there are two or more ways to take what Lauren has just said, Ray decides to take it the good way. What the hell. Ray’s happy. He’ll worry tomorrow.

  His eyes are wet. Let Lauren think that they are tears of happiness, tears of gratitude for her love for him, for their love for one another. Let Lauren think that they are tears of modesty, tears of sadness and resignation about the tragedies he saw on the horizon even as he sat down to write Mister Monkey.

  Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Don’t do it. He needs to think of something that will work like a charm. A charm to ward off tears. Something so hot and distracting that it will dry up his tears like a blowtorch.

  He leans across the table and takes Lauren’s hand. She tenses slightly, startled by the force of his grip. Then her smooth fingers curl around his.

  “Okay,” he says. “Here’s a crazy idea. Why don’t we get married?”

  [ CHAPTER 7 ]

  A FAN’S NOTES

  MARIO HAS A funny feeling about this church, which he has never noticed, surprisingly, because the church is beneath the High Line, where so many small theaters are these days, and where Mario often finds himself, on matinee afternoons. Could the narrow, slightly sinister, soot-blackened church have appeared out of nowhere? Mario’s impulse to go to confession has also come out of nowhere, or so he thinks until he enters the church and realizes that he has been preparing his contrition ever since the night Ray Ortiz gave him tickets to Mister Monkey.

  The Little Church of St. Francis. Mario’s favorite saint. He loves the idea of Saint Francis as a ragged, smelly hermit kneeling to receive the laser-like stigmata of light wounding his hands and feet. Imagine not caring if birds shit on your robe! Passing the church, Mario pictured St. Francis hovering above the sidewalk, one outstretched arm covered with a line of black starlings unafraid of the toothy wolf nuzzling at the saint’s hip. With his free arm, St. Francis had beckoned Mario into the church.

  A vision of St. Francis. Who is Mario kidding? He went into the church because it was something his parents would have wanted.

  Mario is on his way to see Mister Monkey. He hopes he can get in and out of the church on time. He’s glad there’s no line for confession. There rarely is, except in the Polish and Mexican churches, whose parishioners must have more colorful sins to confess. Or maybe: the fewer sins people commit, the more they want to talk about it. Forgive me, Father, for doing nothing wrong.

  In the hierarchy of sins, Mario’s sins are microscopic. Forgive me, Father, for I’ve had bad thoughts. I have felt hate for a fellow human.

  The church is empty except for an old woman in black, kneeling at the altar. A sign announcing that the sacrament of confession will be available from noon to three is chalked on a blackboard. The parish must be saving on signage. The decor looks more Quaker than Catholic. Maybe a cash-strapped congregation has had to sell off its fake-Neapolitan paintings and brocade altar cloths. Ghostly white rectangles mark their absence from the walls. Jesus writhes on a polychrome crucifix above the altar. The baptismal font is a black ceramic birdbath.

  The one large oil painting is so encrusted with gunk, so cracked and badly lit that Mario has to shade his eyes to make out St. Francis rapt in prayer, a dusty wand of light finding his palms like those searchlights that used to signal a film premiere or (in this once-rough neighborhood) the opening of a new disco. Though St. Francis is kneeling, he appears to be levitating.

  Mario enters the confessional, and like one of those escalators that start when your foot hits the step, the priest begins. “In the name of Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.” Why do the Latin American priests speak so quietly and have such high voices? Is it racist to notice?

  “Amen,” Mario says. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I have sinned against charity. I have wished others harm. I have wanted them to suffer, and I have enjoyed watching them twist . . .”

  “Suffer . . . how, my son? Twist how?” Mario hears in the priest’s voice: Jesus Christ, God help me. On this otherwise nice Sunday afternoon he’s not in the mood to hear a serial killer describe eviscerating cats, though absolving a cannibal pedophile might be the peak of his career. Forgive me, Father, for I have committed the sin of not making myself clear unless it’s about the wine list or what a customer wants for dinner.

  “Who makes them suffer, my son?”

  “They do it to themselves. I watch these rich guys eat and drink like swine and ruin their lives, and I think: serves them right.”

  Mario can feel the priest’s relief misting through the lattice. Venial? He can do venial on autopilot.

  “How long has it been since your last confession?”

  “One week,” Mario says. Forgive me, Father, for I am lying. More like three weeks or four. Okay, a year. Could a year have passed since . . . ? Another year gone. Given how rarely—he’s read on the Internet—American Catholics go to confession, once a year should get him a gold star. So why lie? Because he is confessing through the priest to his mother and father, for whom confession was a regular obligation, not an impulse decision, for whom a year between confessions would guarantee him an eternity in hell. But if his parents are angels, can’t they look down and take pity on him? Doesn’t being in heaven mean they can see into his heart without having to worry about him being so lonely that he has no one except this stranger, this priest, to complain to about an especially awful night at the restaurant?

  Mario’s father has been dead eight years, his mother five. He misses them, if not every day then often, his sorrow intensified by th
e fact that he is still living in his childhood room in his childhood house. Reminders of them are everywhere; pangs of grief lurk on the stairs. A snapshot of the three of them on vacation untangles itself from a gnarled extension cord and ambushes him from a kitchen drawer. He is forty-six, a number as unreal to him as the thousands of years the Old Testament patriarchs lived. He is too old to believe that his life is about to start.

  Ever since his mother died, Mario has gone to different churches. He doesn’t want Father O’Blah-Blah who’s known him since he was a tyke, or father Blah-Blahbalino, who presided over his baptism, or the family priest, the incomprehensible mumbler, Father Machalski. Father Mitch is also dead and probably in heaven with Mario’s parents, though one never knows about priests. Mario doesn’t want a trusted spiritual adviser he meets for coffee and monitors to make sure he’s not flirting with the altar boys, a guy with problems of his own, though no one’s supposed to know that. Mario doesn’t want a community. He has enough community at Enzo’s: the other waiters, the wine stewards and busboys. Enzo still asking, now and then, How come Mario isn’t married? Mario wants an intimate but impersonal sacrament, like sex with a stranger, though he’s always been repelled by the idea of sex with strangers.

  He wants someone objective, a professional who knows the score. This many Hail Marys for that much sin. Not that Mario’s going to say the Hail Marys. He just wants to know how many. Talking for free to someone with a direct line to God is a bargain. People pay therapists fortunes to pretend to listen and doze off and say a few words at the end. Confession has helped Mario get through the hard parts of his life, or around the hard parts, the grievances and irritations, and oh yes, the occasional black spells of desolation and despair.

  “I’m a waiter at Enzo’s . . .” Mario always wonders whether or not to name-drop the restaurant. Maybe it helps the more celebrity-conscious priests visualize his temptations: most of Mario’s sins have begun at Enzo’s. As a young man Mario slept with the few waitresses—all beautiful—whom Enzo allowed into his male domain. Mario never mentioned marriage or even love. Wasn’t pleasure and friendship enough? The women never thought so, though at first they pretended to share his point of view. The awkwardness never lasted long; Enzo fires his waitresses when they turn thirty, which is surely actionable, though no one—warned perhaps by the framed photos of Enzo with an ecumenical range of Mafia dons—has ever taken action.

  Mario used to date customers too. Girls slipped him phone numbers right in front of their dates. Where did they learn to do that? Now they probably text, like that dumb bastard who texted his date that she was a four out of ten. If someone’s getting phone numbers now, it’s the younger waiters. There hasn’t been a woman in Mario’s life for . . . counting is bad luck. Anything could still happen, but he’s stopped making the effort. How would he meet women? Having been tableside for the sorry spectacle of so many computer dates gone south, he’d rather avoid that route.

  Father, are you listening? Have you fallen asleep?

  “Go on, my son.”

  “So this week a customer comes in, one of those spoiled rich kids who can sometimes, not always but sometimes, Father, make me hate my job. He says, ‘Bro? Can I ask you a favor?’ This yuppie scum-sucker calls me Bro, and I have to call him Sir? There are times when the unfairness of it all makes me want to howl like a dog, Father. Though I’m not a communist. I know that certain inequalities are part of God’s plan.

  “Anyhow Bro is on a first date, and here’s the favor. If the girl’s a keeper, he’ll do a thumbs-up when he hands me the wine menu, and I’m supposed to bring him something high on the list. But if she’s a dog, because, he tells me, many women look nothing like the pictures they post, either because they’ve been Photoshopped or because it’s not even her picture. More than one girl has admitted to him that she posted her hot friend’s photo. In which case we go to Plan B. I bring the guy something drinkable but cheap. Check, please. Call it a night.

  “So the girl arrives. She’s pretty, beautiful skin, everything about her is sweet sweet sweet, but she’s got pinky eyes like she’s been crying. She looks like a kindergarten teacher instead of the lingerie model the guy obviously has in mind. He knows, and she knows, and Enzo and I know, and everyone in the restaurant knows she’s not what he thinks he deserves. So I bring them a bottle that’s rated ten out of ten by the staff for the red most likely to give you a crippling sinus headache. Is that a sin? Dickhead Red, we call it.”

  “Go on, my son.”

  “I felt hatred, Father, pure hatred. I tried to feel sorry for the guy, to find compassion somewhere in my heart. And then I thought, Not only do I have to bring this steroidal piglet cheap wine to swish around his mouth, not only do I have to bring him and his date delicious food they won’t enjoy, because they’re not going to enjoy anything, certainly not each other, but I have to conspire with him to break this poor girl’s heart. Maybe the girl would love the food—but only if she was too stupid to see that the guy just hates watching her eat. And I’m supposed to feel sorry for him? Could you have done that, Father? Then everything flips, and it just seems sad, these two young people not knowing how soon they’ll be middle-aged, then old, then dead. And they’re wasting one evening, one minute of their youth, making each other unhappy.

  “Long story short, she goes to the ladies’. He takes out his phone, because he can’t stand being alone with himself for five seconds. I see this all the time, especially with the money guys, their phones might as well be Gorilla Glued to their hands. There’s a no-cell-phone rule at Enzo’s. But texting’s allowed. My man is so loaded he’s putting the phone up to his face and stabbing at the numbers.

  “When the girl comes back she’s yelling her head off. The idiot thinks he’s texting a buddy. He texts his friend that she’s a four out of ten—and he sends it to her. Are you following this, Father? I assume you e-mail and text. And she rips this guy a new . . .

  “So here’s what I’m confessing. I loved watching the guy get reamed. No pity in my heart at all. I felt like a kid at Christmas. I signal Enzo: let her be. Let her get it out of her system. Let her tell the whole restaurant what this genius did. She comes up with some fairly raunchy curses for a kindergarten teacher before she runs out of breath and turns and weaves toward the door.

  “Enzo puts his arm around her and walks her out. He tells all the crying girls his true life story. How he met one wrong girl after another, and he finally found the right one, and now they have nine grandchildren, they’ve been married forty-five years, and they’re still as madly in love. Well, strictly speaking, it’s not his totally true life story. Enzo married the first girl he had sex with, and he’s had girlfriends, action on the side, all his life, even now in his eighties. Enzo tells them that God will see into the hearts of the girls who have been insulted and ignored and injured. God will have mercy on them and send them love, marriage, children. Then he puts her in a cab. He pays the cab fare up front. Big tip for the driver.

  “Of course I was sorry for the girl. Poor thing didn’t deserve it. But she had her moment. Whatever she’d gone through with that guy, or earlier that day, or, for all I know, her entire life so far . . . by the time she leaves Enzo’s, Father, she’s made everybody pay. She leaves the guy sitting there with his mouth open and his thumb up his you-know-what. No one will talk to him, no one will look at him. He says something to the couple at the next table, and then he starts ranting and raving. Spit’s flying out of his mouth. I keep expecting Enzo to send over the musicians.”

  Has Mario said too much? What he’s confessed to is nothing. A failure of compassion. Are other people ever afraid that their sins are boring? Would it be more fun for the priest if he were a cannibal killer?

  “At last the guy leaves. Enzo has to bullshit him good-bye. His dad’s high up in the Russian mob. And pretty soon the guy’s just a crappy memory and a ten percent tip. Am I wrong to hate him, Father?”

  The priest doesn’t answer for so long that it
puts Mario on edge. Then he says, “My son, it sounds as if you have already forgiven yourself.”

  What kind of priest says that? Who cares if Mario forgives himself? Isn’t this supposed to be about God forgiving him?

  “Is there something else you wish to confess, my son?”

  “Envy,” Mario says. “The sickening, gnawing, stomach-churning, humiliating kind of—”

  “Envy of whom, my son?”

  “That’s another story. Or maybe it’s part of the same story. The couple at the next table. This guy, Ray Ortiz, he’s been coming to Enzo’s for years. He’s a writer. Kids’ books. Every so often somebody puts on a musical based on his book, and he gives me tickets. It’s a thing we have. He makes me thank him for the tickets, twice, three times. I don’t mind stroking the guy’s ego. He’s not our biggest celebrity, not by a long shot, but he gets respect, he’s a writer. A creative guy. Enzo’s told me a thousand times, always in front of Ray, how Ray’s book turned Enzo’s son Ricky into a reader. Ray’s book did the trick. Ricky’s a thief and a shithead, so maybe the book didn’t do him all that much good. But I’m obviously not going to say that. And at the end of the day I get tickets.”

  “To a children’s play, my son?”

  Was there a suspicious edge to the way the priest said children? Does the priest think he’s a pervert? Would denying that he’s a pervert prove that he is one?

  “I love theater. I’m a fan. I go whenever I can. Broadway. Off-Broadway. Off-off-off Broadway. Festivals. I don’t care. Sometimes customers give me tickets, sometimes I buy them, sometimes—”

  “Envy?” prompts the priest. He doesn’t want to talk about theater, though maybe he would, if he were better at his job, smarter at ferreting out the secret sins and lapses of faith that an ordinary person might not notice. Is it heresy that the theater gives Mario that mysterious . . . something that devout Catholics find in the Church? Mario would like to see this priest get through one shift as a waiter at Enzo’s.