Mister Monkey

by Francine Prose

  “There are no coincidences,” Devi says. “Everything happens for a reason.”

  “Oh, yes there are,” insists the lady judge, a less spiritual person than Devi. “The world is senseless chaos.”

  If Portia had been thinking, she would have asked the mailman to give the letter to the proper addressee. But she wasn’t thinking. Or maybe she was thinking more clearly than she knew. She crossed the street to the brownstone and pushed the button that said O’LEARY (not her name) and SMITH. When the buzzer rang, she said into the speaker, “I have a doctor’s letter addressed to a Mr. William Smith.”

  Someone buzzed her in. Maybe someone was expecting an important doctor’s letter. Portia climbed three flights of stairs and reached the end of the hall just as a woman opened her door. The woman (Ms. O’Leary, Portia assumed) looked enough like Portia—similar body type, features, even the same red spiky hair—that both women noticed the resemblance and laughed, a little nervously. Possibly that was why the woman invited Portia in, instead of just thanking her for the letter and closing the door.

  The first thing Portia saw, on a little round table in the fake “colonial” style that she would never have had in her own home, were several framed vacation photos of her husband and this woman. Why did a stranger have so many pictures of Portia and Bill? But wait. They were pictures of Bill and this woman. Her husband and this woman in Paris, in Vienna, squinting up at the statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome. All places he’d been with her. Could this woman have Photoshopped her face onto photos of Portia and Bill? No, it seemed. She hadn’t. This woman had been to these places with Bill. Or, as she said, my husband Bill.

  Portia was glad she’d brought her phone. She showed the woman photos of herself and Bill in the same spots. Of course the photos of Portia looked worse, that is, Portia looked worse, because they were taken with the phone, and some of them were selfies, a bad idea over forty. But mainly Portia looked less happy to be in the same places with the same husband.

  If Lakshmi directs as well as writes, she will have to think of something besides pacing and crossing and uncrossing her legs for Margot to do, to signal Portia’s agitation. This is what a director does—though unfortunately not Roger, who seems to have left his brain in some regional theater somewhere.

  Portia’s husband had been a bigamist for a decade. The street he worked both sides of was not wide Upper Broadway but narrow Bank Street in the West Village. How could someone get away with that for so long and not slip up and get caught?

  Devi will tell Portia not to blame herself, because we all have inner lives, secret selves. And it sometimes happens that the inner kernel takes over the outer husk, like a pod from outer space. The words outer space make the bigamist’s wife give Devi a quick suspicious look and jump up and get off the subway, though it’s not even clear if this is her stop.

  Lakshmi needs another story to insert either before or after the story of the bigamist’s wife. Why are all her stories about lying and betrayal? She would like it to be a story about a monkey, maybe because she has been working on Mister Monkey, and because she’s proud of the monkey costume she sewed from a brown bedspread they practically paid her to take from Goodwill.

  If her play has a decent producer, and it doesn’t jack up the cost of the production too much, which it probably would, she would like to bring an actual monkey onstage, perhaps a rescue monkey kidnapped from the set of a children’s movie or horror film that paid the monkey wrangler extra to drug the chimp and make it even more hyper than normal.

  Maybe she’ll put the bigamist story before her own true story, because she likes how the idea of an “inner life” segues into the story she wants to tell about her own history—that is, Devi’s history. Devi’s monologue will be the emotional climax of the play.

  Lakshmi-Devi’s story could just as easily go after the monkey story, if she finds the right monkey story. Because both of her fathers have told her about troops of monkeys in Lucknow stealing the lunches of picnicking medical students. The part she likes best is the part about how they met. Devi’s Muslim dad, Hussein, heard the siren song of the cheap CD player on which Devi’s Hindu dad, Prakash, played Stephen Sondheim in his dorm room. How happy they were to have found each other until their affair was discovered by their fellow students, and they were beaten and expelled from medical school and might have gone to jail for being gay had the Hindu-Muslim riots not broken out and ironically saved them by killing thousands of innocent people, including their parents and many close family members.

  They had nothing left. Nothing more to lose. They applied for student visas. Allah or Ganesh or both must have wanted them to come to the United States. They landed in Detroit, where Lakshmi’s Muslim dad (future dad, at that point) had rich, exceedingly modern, and liberal-minded relatives who took pity on them. After overcoming many setbacks, both dads completed their medical training and moved to Queens, where together they opened their urology practice and became community heroes during the AIDS epidemic. They adopted Lakshmi, the child of her Hindu dad’s niece—who had been killed in yet another, later outbreak of sectarian violence.

  How could she not love the musicals that had brought her fathers together? Company! Into the Woods! She’d learned the songs as a child. She still knew the lyrics. Her dads would be so proud if Lakshmi wrote a play that was produced. They are concerned but supportive about her career choice. They are much more worried about Mal, but they know that forbidding her to see him would only strengthen her love.

  Naturally she’s inherited her fathers’ passion for the theater. That was why she’d applied to NYU and gotten involved with Mister Monkey, the saddest show on earth. She should have known from the handwritten notice on the drama department bulletin board: from the fact that the notice was there at all. Internships and low-paying theater jobs are in such demand that students remove the announcements of jobs for which they plan to apply.

  Her Hindu dad, Prakash, was so delighted that Lakshmi was in a play about a monkey that he took it upon himself to pick her up at the theater after an early rehearsal. He asked Roger if he had a minute, which turned into twenty minutes, during which her dad lectured Roger about Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god.

  He listed the god’s holy attributes, explained that Hanuman was the smartest, the strongest, the most in control, the god who resembles a golden mountain. He described how the god tried to eat the sun, which he mistook for a mango. How he lifted a mountain to find the herb that healed the god Rama’s wounded brother. How he set fire to an island because his enemies tied a burning branch to his tail. How his courage, speed, and strength helped reunite Rama with his beloved Sita.

  The other gods were so jealous of Hanuman’s superpowers that they cursed him with the inability to remember the fact that he has superpowers—unless he is reminded.

  Unless someone or something reminds him.

  Roger said, “Is that a good thing? I suppose that not knowing that you have superpowers would make you more modest. But I’m not sure that modesty would be a fabulously useful quality for a god. Don’t you agree?”

  Lakshmi had never heard Roger talk that way. He was flirting with her dad!

  Roger couldn’t see, or maybe he did, how happy it had made Lakshmi’s dad to lose himself in those beautiful childhood stories. It hurt her to watch how quickly Roger got bored and in his boredom began to fantasize that her dad was cruising him. She watched Roger become simultaneously huffy and kittenishly seductive. She has never forgiven him. Some part of Roger knows that, which is partly why he is going to fire her and blame it on the producers.

  Roger told her dad, “We have a beautiful line in the play. In fact it’s one of my favorites. I’m sure you heard it. ‘Mister Monkey is the smartest, cutest, nicest, strongest, most powerful chimp of all!’”

  “Excellent,” her dad had said. He’d thanked Roger again and collected Lakshmi and taken her all the way home to Queens by taxi.

  Whenever Roger didn’t listen to her, or tal
ked over her, or disagreed with her, which was practically always, Lakshmi wanted to quit the play. But she liked the costume job, the tiny acting job, and it’s made her fathers proud. Both dads commented on the wonders that Lakshmi achieved with Mister Monkey’s costume. They were sorry to hear that Mister Monkey is about to sink and take everyone down with in it, except for Jason and Danielle, who are so light they’ll bob to the surface. Everyone except Eleanor, who, amazingly, has been able to turn in a stellar performance as Janice and then go on to her day job as an ER nurse.

  Lakshmi has a tiny girl crush on Eleanor, who is strong and hopeful about the future and therefore a positive role model for a young woman planning a life in the theater. Roger likes Eleanor too, and Roger hates everyone else. Even Adam gives Eleanor a pass when he’s on the warpath. Only Margot is jealous of Eleanor, which is sad. Eleanor could have been Margot’s friend and ally, and Margot needs a friend and ally.

  In Lakshmi’s opinion, Mister Monkey is a nasty piece of imperialist propaganda justifying human trafficking, which you would know if you were smart enough to substitute a person for a monkey. The white man kidnaps the savage chimp and gives him an Upper East Side apartment and a super-straight snooty new family. It is not a fair trade for his freedom and his idyllic life in the jungle. Lakshmi is still deciding whether or not she’ll have Devi give a little speech—nothing too didactic or off-putting—about monkey and human trafficking.

  Better to end it with Devi’s story about her two dads and about her memories of being a beloved, blessed child sitting in the dark theater before the lights came up on Into the Woods. Better to leave out the politics, just as it’s better to save the details of her relationship with Mal for her second play.

  Maybe Devi should tell the audience about her—that is, Lakshmi’s—conversation with Roger. If she does she’ll change the production they’ve been working on together. She’ll make it a more successful and popular play than Mister Monkey.

  Roger comes to inform Devi—Lakshmi—that he is going to fire her because the producers are cutting back and have decided to save the pennies they pay her, barely enough to cover her subway fare, a salary on which she couldn’t survive, not even in Queens, were she not living half the time with Mal and half the time with her dads. It will seem more important and tragic if Devi is being let go from a Broadway hit and not from a miserably failing production of Mister Monkey. The audience will understand and sympathize with her inability to speak up in her own defense because she wants the director to recommend her when someone asks for a good inexpensive costume designer.

  At least (in real life) Roger had the decency to apologize. He was sorry. It wasn’t his decision. It was all the producers’ fault.

  Roger has zero interest in Lakshmi’s outer or inner life. He knows nothing about the play she plans to write. She hasn’t decided if, in her play, he will say he’s sorry.

  Devi faces the audience. Signal lights scatter like fireflies in the subway tunnel behind her. She tells the audience that, at the end of the conversation, her former boss, Roger the director, felt around in his pocket. He grew increasingly frantic in search of something he appeared to have lost, something he’d wanted to give her . . . Lakshmi waited for him to tell her what it was, but he didn’t, and she didn’t ask.

  Lakshmi is not entirely sure where the play will go after that. That’s why now, whenever she rides the subway, she studies her fellow passengers for something she can steal.

  Tonight a guy with a weirdly long head and a lantern jaw, like Frankenstein or Lurch, is sitting down the car from her and across the aisle.

  He can’t stop looking at her, which she understands, because she’s still wearing her clown-cop costume. But he’s not giving her anything, not a scrap of information, let alone a monologue that would work onstage. Useless, completely useless! Besides which, the intensity of his stare is starting to make her nervous.

  When she was in junior high there so many more perverts around on the subway and in the streets. She hardly ever took the train without glancing up from her book to find herself looking straight into the winking eye of some icky stranger’s penis. Has their number really decreased, or do they just prefer junior high girls? Does not seeing them mean that she’s old? Dear God, where did her youth go? She’s spent too much time around Margot, and now she’s caught Margot’s ill and desperate way of thinking.

  The long-faced guy almost seems as if he want to talk to her, as if he’s about to speak but doesn’t know how to begin. Lakshmi is plotting how she’ll outsmart him if he gets off at her stop and tries to grab or grope her en route to Mal’s.

  If only she could call Mal and ask him to meet her at the station. But that would ruin everything they do together later. And Mal will be grouchy all night.

  The young woman clown-cop and Frankenstein facing off on the subway car, both on the edge of speech. Could this be the end of the play?

  The train stops. Lakshmi waits till the last possible second, jumps up and rushes out the door too fast for the man to follow. In fact he doesn’t even get up. Maybe he was harmless. She was just being paranoid.

  He watches her until the subway pulls out of the station and he can no longer see her.

  It’s the perfect place to end the play. Lights out. No sound except the thumping of human hearts rising into human throats. Wild applause. Straight to Broadway. Lakshmi’s name in lights.

  LAKSHMI’S NIGHT ENDS somewhat differently.

  By the time she walks the ten blocks to Mal’s apartment, she’s begun to sweat. But Mal likes her better sweaty, so she doesn’t worry. Of course she worries, but she’s worried about so many things aside from being sweaty that it makes more sense not to worry at all.

  One might think a person would never forget something like that, but Lakshmi can’t remember how exactly it began. A lot of what ifs. What if you wore your uniform home? What if you knocked on the door? What if we had sex like that? Nor can Lakshmi remember how it gradually became apparent that Mal wouldn’t have sex with her or even be nice to her any other way.

  She is the daughter of scientists, so she experimented. But the results were depressingly clear. If Lakshmi changed at the theater and came home in her street clothes Mal would frown and turn his back and sleep on the couch, even though it was his apartment. The same thing happened if she didn’t pound on the door but simply let herself in with her key.

  After a while the what ifs grew more specific, more precise. What if I’d done something wrong? What if you were the cop who’d come to arrest me? What if I resisted arrest? What if you did this with your nightstick? At first it was a shock, and a humiliation, but the shame faded along with the shock, and now it’s just her relationship with Mal. It’s not what she would have chosen, but a woman in love can’t always choose.

  So she is like a specialty hooker, except that a hooker gets paid, and Lakshmi is doing this for love. For love, whatever that means. She believes, with her whole heart, that she is in love with Mal. She thinks of him when he’s not there. She thinks of him when she’s fixing a costume or knocking on an actor’s door.

  And of course she thought of Mal whenever she marched out to arrest Mister Monkey. Could Adam have somehow sensed that a fake arrest is Lakshmi’s principal means of real-life foreplay? If Adam picked up on that, maybe that was why . . . she can’t let herself think that. She is not responsible for Adam’s roiling hormones!

  She wants to be with Mal, she wants Mal in her life. He is the person she wants to see when she gets home from the theater.

  Lakshmi pounds on Mal’s door.

  “Who is it?” Mal says, through the door.

  Lakshmi says, “Police. May I come in?”

  Mal says, “If you must.”

  Mal opens the door. He is lank and bleached and indefinite-looking, like a watercolor of a person. He can’t stand without bending slightly, sagging at the knees, though he’s not very tall.

  He says, “Good evening, officer. Is there some sort of problem?
”

  He backs away as Lakshmi walks in. He looks guilty and afraid.

  “Am I under suspicion?” Mal asks.

  “Stay where you are,” Lakshmi says.

  [ CHAPTER 9 ]

  ELEANOR AND THE CHILDREN OF GOD

  PORTIA AND MR. JIMSON have nearly finished the scene which got minimally more interesting when Margot accidentally dropped her phone and persuaded Roger to let her incorporate this “mistake” in her performance.

  Portia’s phone hits the floor. As always, the audience falls silent and watches her pause before drop-kicking her prop phone behind the curtain.

  Adam jumps out of the wings, vaults halfway across the stage, and lands on both feet, crouched, his arms hanging limply, knuckles dragging the floor. Wham! Mister Monkey body-blocks Portia, who has moved toward her phone in preparation for the crowd-pleasing penalty kick.

  What the hell is Mister Monkey even doing in this scene? He isn’t supposed to be present at this love duet between his human dad and his future stepmom.

  Margot scrambles away from him, then inches back. It’s awkward, squeezing past Adam, who stays close behind her, imitating her wobbly walk. Margot is a professional, Eleanor will give her that. During these last weeks, she’s soldiered on, playing Portia, undaunted by the fact that she is being sexually harassed by her underage monkey client.

  When Portia gets a clear shot at the phone and raises her leg to kick it, Adam lunges forward and grabs her foot and holds it in the air, a few inches off the ground.

  This is way beyond off-script. Nothing like this has ever happened.

  They square off, staring, mongoose-cobra, Margot corkscrewed around and tottering on one high heel, the frayed hem of her purple skirt riding dangerously up her poor little chicken thigh. Adam could break her leg! Does the audience have any idea how rogue and psychotic this is? Do they think that violent assault is acceptable children’s musical theater?

  A few seconds more and Eleanor will have to run out and grab the monkey she just tried to put in jail. The monkey she should have put in jail.