Mister Monkey

by Francine Prose

  Dedication

  For Emilia, Malena, and Jackson

  Contents

  Dedication

  Prelude: A Page from Mister Monkey

  Chapter 1: Margot Holds the Moment

  Chapter 2: Adam and On the Origin of Species

  Chapter 3: The Grandfather

  Chapter 4: Evolution

  Chapter 5: Miss Sonya Has a Dream

  Chapter 6: The Author of Mister Monkey

  Chapter 7: A Fan’s Notes

  Chapter 8: Lakshmi

  Chapter 9: Eleanor and the Children of God

  Chapter 10: The Monkey God (Mister Monkey) Dreams the Future

  Chapter 11: Roger the Director

  About the Author

  Also by Francine Prose

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  [ PRELUDE ]

  A Page from Mister Monkey

  ONCE UPON A TIME, not so long ago, a scientist (and loving mother) by the name of Mrs. Jimson said a tearful good-bye to her family in New York and went to study monkeys in Africa. There she became friends with a smart, friendly, playful, super-cute baby chimpanzee she named Mister Monkey.

  She and Mister Monkey and Mister Monkey’s chimpanzee mom and dad spent hours tossing coconuts back and forth in their lovely jungle home among the trees that smelled sweetly of tropical flowers and the brilliantly colored birds nesting in the vines.

  All night the full moon lit up the jungle like a baseball field. Sometimes Mrs. Jimson wrote in her notebook. Sometimes she sent home letters telling her family how much she missed them, and how she had come to love little Mister Monkey.

  One night evil hunters sneaked into the game preserve and shot Mister Monkey’s parents. And when Mrs. Jimson tried to protect them, the hunters killed her too.

  Poor Mister Monkey was an orphan! No one knew what to do. The game wardens put him in a cage for his own protection. Day and night, he sat in a corner of his big cage and cried. It was like being in a zoo! Every kid who has ever seen a monkey in the zoo will know what Mister Monkey was feeling.

  Then one day the wardens got a letter from New York asking if Mister Monkey could come to the United States. The Jimson family wanted to adopt him!

  Pretty soon Mister Monkey found himself on an airplane—and then in New York. The tall buildings scared him. What if they fell down? He couldn’t get used to the noise of the traffic and the smoky air. Where were the birds and flowers? It was so different from his jungle home.

  But Mister Monkey liked his new dad and sister and brother. He liked their big comfortable sunny apartment. He liked their smart friendly housekeeper, Carmen.

  Mister Monkey learned to talk and taught himself tricks to entertain his new family. At parties, he’d scamper among the guests, picking pockets. When people discovered their wallets missing, he always gave them right back.

  Life was perfect until Mr. Jimson’s evil girlfriend, Janice, accused Mister Monkey of stealing her wallet and not returning it.

  Even when he was put in jail, Mister Monkey knew that everything would be all right. That was because he had magic monkey vision. He could see the past and the future. He knew what was going to happen to the humans he loved, and to the humans he didn’t love. He had godly superpowers. He could read minds. He could see into souls.

  Mister Monkey told Mr. Jimson not to worry. But just to be on the safe side, Mr. Jimson hired a lawyer named Portia McBailey. . . .

  [ CHAPTER 1 ]

  MARGOT HOLDS THE MOMENT

  WHO CARES IF it’s children’s theater? Margot is playing a criminal lawyer crusading for truth and justice! So would someone please tell her where, in what deranged fashion universe, a defense attorney would appear before a judge in a rainbow Harpo Marx wig and an obscenely short, hobblingly tight, iridescent purple suit? Margot arrives at the theater an hour early, since part of her preparation now involves a series of meditations designed to help her overcome the humiliation of squeezing into an outfit that her character—Portia McBailey—would never wear unless she’d quit being a lawyer and gone to work for an escort service, role-playing a slutty executive-secretary birthday clown.

  Now, as she enters her dressing room before the Saturday matinee, she notices that the hem of the purple skirt has come entirely undone. The dimpled fringe of ragged cloth trailing clumps of thread will hypnotize the audience. Mommy, Daddy, why is that funny lady’s skirt so hairy? Margot counts off ten deep breaths so as to repel any negative thoughts that might otherwise collect around Lakshmi, the overworked, underpaid NYU drama-department graduate student who runs—who is—the costume department.

  Margot had volunteered a thrift shop treasure from the back of her own closet, an ’80s Armani pants suit from her brief marriage to Enrico; it would have been perfect for Portia. But Roger had insisted on indulging his fetishistic attachment to the sleazy synthetic that morphs from violet to scarlet when it catches the light.

  Roger won. Roger is the director. Roger didn’t threaten to have Margot replaced. Roger didn’t have to threaten to have Margot replaced. Margot gave in to his blackmail, his mortifying demands: the fright wig and the hooker suit.

  Not until the first time she walked out onstage—and the audience burst out laughing—did she understand what Roger intended. How many hours has Margot spent, in her career, practicing entrances and exits for a specific effect? Until now, mocking childish hysteria was not an effect she’d gone for.

  But this is children’s theater, not the freaking Merchant of Venice. The quality of mercy is not strained, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven. Margot memorized Portia’s soliloquy when she was in high school. She thanks and blames her drama coach, Mr. Blake, for everything that happened since. How disengaged he was, so irresistibly bored that all the girls adored him. What was that poor bastard’s story? Margot never thought to wonder, and now she doesn’t want to know.

  The quality of mercy is not strained—not even for a monkey.

  Lakshmi has lowered the hem twice, as Margot requested. Begged. In return, Lakshmi persuaded Margot to tone down the fuchsia lipstick which, along with her newly flaming pelt of spiky orange hair, she favors these days. Margot imagines Portia going for that look: confident, self-sufficient but available, a brittle protective screw-you shell encasing a gooey caramel of longing.

  “Really?” Lakshmi had scrutinized Margot’s lips, which the drugstore lipstick had turned a hypothermic purple. “For Portia?”

  So this is what it’s come to: a note on her lipstick means that Margot is being taken seriously. She’d traded her drugstore Night-Blooming Orchard for the Dior Dusky Pink that cost a chunk of that week’s paycheck, the pathetic pittance for which, like the rest of the cast, she feels absurdly grateful.

  They are in this together, everyone is happy to be here and disappointed to be here, glad to have a part in a play, glad to work for scale, but truthfully not all that overjoyed to be working in an off-off-off-off Broadway production of Mister Monkey, the umpteen-hundredth revival of the cheesy but mysteriously durable musical based on the classic children’s novel.

  The actors and the stagehands behave as if they’ve taken a blood oath not to complain, except for twelve-year-old Adam, who whines because his monkey suit smells and he can’t breathe. His stage mom, Giselle, has told everyone that if Adam develops health issues from asthma-causing dust mites, she’ll sue.

  Only the interns are cheerful, as are Jason and Danielle, who have taken a break from their drama class to play the Jimson kids: the two motherless teenagers who have become Mister Monkey’s de facto siblings. By the end of the play, their widowed father, Mr. Jimson, marries Portia the lawyer—played by Margot.

  Jason and Danielle have no idea that Mister
Monkey the Musical is not the beginning of something but rather the middle (Margot hopes it’s the middle) of something, that something being the bewildering stall in which Margot’s life is circling. And what did Jason and Danielle imagine beginning when they couldn’t learn their characters’ names and missed so many cues that Roger changed their characters’ names from whatever they were in the script to Jason and Danielle?

  Margot takes ten more breaths, counting backward, then does her vocal exercises, which her therapist, Dr. Reid, says is a form of Zazen meditation. The oxygen blast reminds her of what she tells herself at moments like this: give everything. Self-doubt is lethal. Irony is poison. Every role you play with your whole heart and soul can be Ophelia, Juliet, Portia. Lady Macbeth. Well, maybe not Lady Macbeth.

  The great Carola Lester, Margot’s acting teacher at Yale, used to say it was their job to be theatrical, on- and off-stage. They must never forget that they are telling the stories of the tribe. Margot was the star, the one for whom the drama department had high hopes. And now she’s Portia McBailey, representing a monkey.

  Margot prepared for Mister Monkey as if for a real play. She’d worked out Portia’s background, the successful legal career that has enabled her to take on cases—an innocent monkey!—for fun. But the purple suit had forced Margot to reimagine Portia as a noble failure, lonely and slightly desperate but consequently happier to meet and fall in love with Mr. Jimson, an attractive widower with two children.

  It had seemed like a lucky sign when, on the first day of rehearsal, Margot found, in the garbage near her third-floor walk-up on Sixth Street and Avenue A, a ton of 1950s law books, several of which she lugged to her dressing room. Carola had instructed them to surround themselves with objects their characters might collect. What will Margot do with the law books when Mister Monkey closes? And what were they a lucky sign of? Some doddering lawyer retired or died in his storefront office in Alphabet City. Best case: a renovation.

  In a moment she’ll go find Lakshmi. But for now Margot closes her eyes and runs through the great soliloquies, in her head. Out, damned spot. Romeo, Romeo. The speech that most calms and inspires her, the 10 mg. Xanax of art, is the heartbroken aria with which Sonya wraps up the tragic misdirected love duets of Uncle Vanya.

  We shall go on living, Uncle Vanya. We shall live through a long chain of days and endless evenings, we will work for the happiness of others, now and in our old age, without rest, and we will die submissively, as we have lived. 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, and rejoice and look back on our hard lives with tenderness—and smile.

  Brave, disappointed, resigned to her fate, Sonya would know what it’s like to play a lady lawyer in a musical for children, aged five to twelve, and their parents, grandparents, birthday party and bar mitzvah guests, and on selected weekday afternoons, for school groups offered tickets at a steep discount. That Margot’s character is named Portia is one of the little jokes thrown in to keep the parents from poking their eyes out from boredom.

  Portia is the only lawyer willing to represent a beloved pet chimpanzee whose party trick is picking pockets. Mister Monkey has been falsely accused of stealing the wallet from the Hermès (another mom and dad joke) bag of Mr. Jimson’s evil girlfriend, Janice, who sees Mister Monkey not only as a rival and threat but also as a banana-eating lower life-form with filthy personal habits. Eleanor, who plays Janice, gets the Hermès, a plain black dress, long scarlet press-on nails, and her own (naturally) auburn hair.

  Eleanor’s day job as an emergency room nurse has made it tricky to schedule rehearsals. An inconvenience that Roger has seemed, inexplicably, not to mind.

  Mr. Jimson is being played by a young actor named Eric on whom Margot has a tiny hopeless crush. Much too hopeless and tiny to hurt, as others have in the past. My unhappy love affair. Margot used to like describing men as my unhappy love affair. She only used it in the past tense. Alec or Jim, or Enrico, he was my unhappy love affair. But hadn’t that presumed the existence of a happy love affair that made the others seem unimportant? What if unhappy is the only kind that Margot ever has?

  Mr. Jimson’s two teenage children love Mister Monkey. Their mom—Mr. Jimson’s martyred wife, Mrs. Jimson—willed them the baby chimp whose parents were shot by poachers. She’d grown close to the chimpanzee couple before she too was killed in Africa, where she’d studied and defended endangered primates.

  After one rehearsal Roger showed the cast a documentary about heroic scientists and gamekeepers fending off poachers and mercenaries hired by the oil company, which wants to destroy the wildlife and exploit the rich resources of the national parks. The film, which featured heartrending footage of murdered animals, was supposed to inspire them, but it only depressed Margot more. Shouldn’t they be doing something about that instead of acting in Mister Monkey?

  Mrs. Jimson (who is dead before the play begins) saw herself as Mister Monkey’s godmother. So to her widower and kids, Mister Monkey is more than a pet, more like an adopted son or brother. The “children” know that Dad’s girlfriend, Janice, is trying to frame their goofy monkey sibling. Janice is pressing charges, and Mister Monkey is being tried for larceny, at taxpayers’ expense.

  Roger told the cast that the premise wasn’t actually so far-fetched. Only a hundred years ago, a dog was found guilty by a British court for having bitten a child—and sentenced to be hung by the neck until dead. Dogs were executed on the gallows at the Salem witch trials.

  Danielle burst into tears, and Giselle, who came to every rehearsal, put her hands over Adam’s ears and said, “At least the poor creatures got trials. Now the world’s so crowded, they euthanize innocent puppies just for taking up space.”

  Margot has prepared for her role by concentrating on the affection that the Jimson family, and Carmen, their maid, have for Mister Monkey. She has had to imagine a different monkey, an enchanting creature. Unlike Adam, a grumpy child actor in the monkey suit that Lakshmi sewed from a nubbly, brown chenille bedspread.

  At another rehearsal Roger showed them a video about companion animals, dogs and monkeys and even goats that live and work with the blind, the elderly, the quadriplegic. Margot tries to focus on those admirable primates and, she’s learned from Dr. Reid, to avoid calculating her own chances of winding up dependent on a chimpanzee to bring her the TV remote. She has been given her mantra: this is not about me!

  Animals frightened Margot’s mother, so Margot never had a pet, except for the contraband turtle her mother made Margot’s father flush down the toilet when he stopped by. A child’s love for a kitten or puppy is one of the positive emotional memories that Margot will never be able to draw on, so she substitutes a sense memory of how angry she was when Dad took Yertle into the bathroom and emerged empty-handed. He never apologized. It makes it harder for Margot to feel compassion for Mister Monkey’s worried family but easier to work herself into a snit over a mistreated pet. So that’s how she’s playing Portia: fired by indignation.

  The hem has got to be fixed. Margot opens her dressing room door and, propping one elbow against the edge of the doorway, warbles, “Has anyone seen Lakshmi?”

  Bad timing. She should have looked both ways. Roger is shambling down the hall, mumbling. As he passes Margot, she hears him say, “How the fuck can someone fire a person who’s hardly getting paid in the first place?”

  “Hi, Roger,” Margot says. Why did she do that? Does some infantile part of her still crave Daddy’s attention?

  Roger stops, turns around, walks back. There’s a stutter in his gait that Margot finds alarming. Roger’s eyes look milky. It’s selfish and small of Margot to resent him just because of her ugly costume.

  Roger is a suffering human. As they all are, God help them.

  Roger takes a crumpled letter from his pocket, hands it to Margot, and says, “A gentleman left this for you at the box office. Fan mail from a flounder.”

  JUST YESTERDAY,
ERIC came to Margot’s dressing room and asked if she’d noticed anything strange about Roger. Maybe something about the show or about them (Eric smiled) had driven Roger over the edge. Could their director have suffered one of those teensy transient strokes?

  That Eric is shy, tall, with a beautiful smile, and ten years younger than Margot is not Eric’s fault. Nor is Eric to blame for the fact that he is not terribly bright.

  To feel grief and shame because Eric was asking her the way a kid might ask his older sister’s opinion was a waste of the precious time that Margot is paying a fortune in therapy bills to learn to appreciate and value.

  No one in the cast tells Margot anything. No gossip, no rumors, nothing. But a week or so into the run, she ran into Eric and Rita in the hall. Rita plays Carmen, the passionate Latina housekeeper who refuses to accept the injustice being done to the monkey so beloved by the children she’s cared for since their mother died.

  In the dimly lit, cramped, fire-safety-code-violating corridor, Eric and Rita leaned over a sheet of paper. They were eager to show Margot the news item that Eric had found online and printed out, a story from South Africa about a chimpanzee that turned against its owner and ripped his face off because the guy refused to share the birthday cake he’d bought for another chimp. Eric and Rita were including Margot in a select club whose members would think this was hilarious: a cult that began when they’d watched Roger’s film of the home-assistance monkeys doing everything for their owners but programming the DVR.

  If Margot didn’t think that the murder-monkey story was as funny as Eric and Rita did, it wasn’t because she was a more sensitive compassionate person, but because it was suddenly clear to her that they were sleeping together. Their laughter was so private they could have been laughing at her. Margot needs to remember Rita’s laugh in case she ever again in this lifetime gets cast as someone having sex with another human being.

  Margot couldn’t answer Eric’s question about Roger behaving strangely. She has forgiven Roger for her costume by telling herself that his brain’s been destroyed by a lifetime of dinner theater and summer stock. Mister Monkey was a step up for him. But there’s no point in Eric thinking about steps up or down. He would know what step Mister Monkey was for a woman Margot’s age.