Mister Monkey

by Francine Prose

  It would have been unfair to Eric too. How old is he? Thirty? His best friend from drama school might be starring on Broadway right now. A Yale classmate of Margot’s is playing the mother in a revival of The Glass Menagerie at Lincoln Center. Margot doesn’t know what’s worse: her untalented classmate’s success or the fact that a woman her age is playing the mother. Nothing can disarm the angel with the fiery sword guarding the gate to the garden where the ingenues frolic, the pretty young girls unaware of the outer darkness.

  Margot will never play Sonya again, not unless she can find her way out from behind the disguise of the forty-four-year-old woman and reveal her true face, the unlined, hopeful face of a girl who has mischievously chosen to wear the mask of middle age.

  All that Margot could say was, “Roger? Roger’s . . . always been weird.”

  Later, during “Speed Dial,” the duet in which she and Eric fall in love while singing into their cell phones, she saw something in Eric’s eyes. Rather she saw something missing: basic friendliness, maybe. Surely his turning against her must be about something more than her reluctance to discuss Roger’s mental health.

  Fan mail from a flounder. What had Roger meant? It’s not every day that Margot gets letters from a mysterious gentleman. Not any day. The biographies of iconic stage actresses and movie stars, which Margot used to read when she felt stronger, described receiving diamond bracelets and invitations to weekends in Paris and parties on luxury yachts, notes tucked into bouquets of red roses.

  Margot’s fan letter arrives in a plain business envelope, sealed. Nothing is written on the outside. Was Roger sure it was meant for her? Why didn’t she ask him what the flounder looked like?

  She is about to open the letter when someone knocks on the door.

  “Come in,” Margot says.

  “You looking for me?” asks Lakshmi.

  AT THE START of the production, Lakshmi wore funny outfits, vintage items from costume shops. Striped tights, green tutus, tuxedo jackets, flowered straw hats. But lately she’s given all that up for the baggy navy shirt and the belted blue pants in which she plays the cop who first arrests Mister Monkey and then Janice.

  “Are you ready for ‘Monkey Tango?’” she asks Margot.

  “Do I look ready?” Margot replies. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound—”

  “I’ve got this,” Lakshmi says.

  Margot has to be onstage for the opening number, “Monkey Tango,” a musical extravaganza featuring the entire cast and referencing King Kong, Cheetah, Mighty Joe Young, the monkey murderer in Poe, the Hindu monkey god Hanuman, every good and bad ape the lyricist could think of, all culminating in Mister Monkey, the smartest, cutest, nicest, strongest, most powerful chimp of all.

  After that Margot is off for twenty minutes, during which time the audience meets Mister Monkey, Mr. Jimson and his kids, the housekeeper Carmen, and Mr. Jimson’s girlfriend, Janice. No wonder everyone hates Janice. Everyone hates Eleanor, who seems to take an extreme (even for an actress) delight in playing the wicked, scheming Janice.

  Margot has made a mental note never to wind up in the ER where Eleanor works. Eleanor is one of the biggest bitches Margot has ever acted with, and the bar for that has been set very high indeed.

  Margot gave Eleanor a chance. During rehearsals she invited her out for coffee. When Margot tried to talk about Chekhov, Eleanor had been unpleasant. But after Margot overheard Eleanor telling Roger about her drama school experience, it occurred to her that Eleanor’s bitchiness might mean she is staying in character, which would make Eleanor the most committed actor in the cast.

  Margot used to spend her downtime hanging out with Lakshmi, a well-meaning person with an interesting background: two dads, one Hindu, one Muslim, both big fans of musical theater, and a Web-designer boyfriend, Mal, whom everyone but Lakshmi thinks is possibly sinister and definitely sexually confused. Given her family history, it’s odd that Lakshmi’s gaydar should be so weak, but Margot has had her own troubles with that form of myopia: her second husband and one boyfriend. If there is one thing Margot has learned, it’s to resist the temptation to give advice or tell strangers about her professional and romantic disappointments.

  According to Lakshmi, her dads gave her the wrong name: Lakshmi is the Hindu goddess of wealth.

  Margot said, “You never know. You might get rich.” And Lakshmi giggled, because she secretly thinks she might. Most young people do.

  Lakshmi has mentioned that she’s writing a one-act play with a part in it for Margot. But when Margot failed to ask even one polite, follow-up, fake-interested question about Lakshmi’s play, she sensed her disappointment. When Margot asked Dr. Reid why her heart is so hard, he advised her to be more forgiving to herself. Lakshmi will be fine. Margot’s burden is heavy enough without her taking on the weight of the world.

  By this point in the production Margot and Lakshmi have run out of conversation. Lakshmi has quit stopping by Margot’s dressing room, except on business. Margot can work on her voice, or better yet, disappear into the Empty Space, as first Carola Lester, then her former acting coach Maureen, and now Dr. Reid have all suggested, though each with a different name for it and for a different reason.

  LAKSHMI SAYS THEY have just enough time before “Monkey Tango.” She can pin Margot’s hem. Then in the twenty minutes between “Monkey Tango” and Margot’s next cue, Lakshmi can mend the purple skirt. Wrinkling her nose at the skirt is Lakshmi’s sign that she is on Margot’s side. She knows the skirt is a travesty, and that it’s Roger’s fault. Why should that hurt Margot’s feelings too?

  Margot glances regretfully at the envelope containing her mystery fan letter, then puts it on the counter and climbs onto a chair. She’d rather not read it with Lakshmi watching. Lakshmi spaces two large safety pins around the hem, which puckers and droops. Dreamily she fastens the third pin outside the skirt instead of inside, so that now the pin, instead of the hairy threads, will grab the spotlight and distract the audience from whatever Margot is trying to do.

  “Punk lady lawyer,” says Lakshmi. “Own it.”

  “I’ll take that note,” Margot says icily as Lakshmi hurries out.

  Margot tucks the letter into her book, a paperback of Just Kids. Why do people only want to hear the story of how a future celebrity got all mixed up and knocked around in the big martini shaker of youth, until something—ambition, resilience, a lucky break, a dear friend’s death—poured out a famous person, alchemically mixologized into a perfect cocktail, refreshing and delicious?

  THE JACKED-UP SMILEY intensity with which they perform “Monkey Tango” always makes Margot think, and try not to think, about an Evangelical youth group she saw once in a Birmingham mall when she was touring Alabama with a road company of Wicked. And like it or not, it always reminds her (as it is supposed to) of yet another of Roger’s harangues:

  “The parents slave at their jobs all week, the kids work hard in school, and they come to the theater to watch us work harder than they do. The more energy we put out, the more of ourselves we give, the more the audience will like the play, and the longer the show will run.”

  He’d asked how many of them had heard of Raymond Ortiz. No one had. Apparently Ortiz was a Vietnam vet from the Bronx who wrote what he’d intended to be a novel for grown-ups, but the god of children’s theater had other plans for Mister Monkey. When the book was adapted for the stage, the contract contained a clause prohibiting one word, one joke, one reference to the theory that man descended from the apes. Don’t even think evolution.

  Giselle had asked if this Ortiz was some kind of Christian fanatic, and Roger said no. It was a savvy business decision made by Gavin Leaming, who adapted the musical from the novel. That clause has allowed the musical to be performed all over the South and even (with some modifications and the actresses costumed differently) in the United Arab Emirates. In fact the book said nothing about humans and chimpanzees being biologically related, so why introduce a controversial and freighted topic, so di
stracting and extraneous to this charming and deeply touching story?

  During rehearsals, Roger had pushed the cast, yelling in his pebbly cigarette voice, “Faster! Higher! Reach for the stars! Monkey Tango for the Fat Lady!”

  “What Fat Lady?” Danielle asked the group. She was afraid to ask Roger. Eric explained that it was a quote from J. D. Salinger, from The Catcher in the Rye. Margot knew he was wrong. She couldn’t remember the right book, but she wasn’t going to ask Roger and reveal that she didn’t know. And make Eric look bad.

  “Idiot,” Roger had mumbled. No one knew if he meant Eric or Danielle. No one knew which of them not to look at, so no one looked at anyone else.

  Roger needn’t have worried. At every performance they monkey-tango as if their heads are about to explode from sheer simian joy. And the audience enjoys the snappy rhythms and the breakneck Cole-Porteresque rhyming of the names of every monkey in literature, stage, and screen, every heroic deed and petty crime that a primate has ever committed.

  Monkey Tango.

  Orangutang-o.

  You rang? Oh tango.

  King-King Kong-o. Mighty Joe Young-o.

  Monkey tango. Into the jungle. With me.

  The tango is more like a square dance and just about as sexy. The cast form couples and slide-step across the stage with stiff tango arms, then switch partners and tango back, then line up facing the audience and do The Monkey, 1970s style, which amuses the grandparents and the older parents. It isn’t so much a performance as a final warning for the kids to quit wriggling in their booster seats; for the grandparents to unwrap the cough drops; for the tourist couples to check one last time that their cell phones are off; and for the parents to wonder if they can take a nap and still find their kids there when they wake up.

  No one—no one but Margot—is thinking about Margot’s skirt.

  The song marks time. The applause is like a parting slap, reflexive and halfhearted, an afterthought as Portia and Carmen, lawyer and maid, skip together offstage.

  BACK IN HER dressing room Margot steps out of her skirt and hands it to Lakshmi, who goes off to fix it. Then Margot puts on the jeans she wore to the theater, sinks into the grimy corduroy recliner, and opens the letter.

  Somehow she’d known that it would be anonymous, just as she’d known that it wouldn’t be a death threat or a psychotic rant. The sheet of plain white paper is neatly folded, in thirds.

  The typeface is soft, slightly blurred. The letter seems to have been typed on something like the hand-me-down IBM she used in middle school. She thinks of those (antique!) detective stories in which forensic experts track the letter writer through the wear on the typewriter keys. Ancient history! Gone forever!

  On the page are four lines, single-spaced:

  “Failures and disappointments make time go by so fast

  that you fail to notice your real life, and the past when I

  was so free seems to belong to someone else, not myself.”

  —Anton Chekhov, from a letter to Maxim Gorky, January 3, 1899

  It’s the saddest sentence ever! The melancholic sweetness of it, oh, the wrenching grief! And what an amazing coincidence: Margot was just thinking about Uncle Vanya. Though of course, as every artist—every human being—knows: there are no coincidences, but rather a river of mystical connections into which, from time to time, we are allowed to dip our big toe. Who knows how and when we are suddenly enabled to draw from that stream flowing constantly around us? And when two people, or two events, enter that stream together, we—simple, unenlightened creatures who have no idea what else to call it, or what it really means—we call it a coincidence.

  Margot rereads the letter. My God. Those lines were written by the theater’s greatest genius, or anyway one of the top three. Even Chekhov, even he believed that he had let his life, his real life, slip by in a fog of failure and disappointment. Does everyone feel that way?

  We are alive for such a short time, and we spend it so unsatisfied, longing for what we can never have. Trying so hard. For what? We’ll all die, and what will it matter, the Tony or the Obie or the Oscar or the dusty, badly lit dressing rooms in the recently renamed High Line Theater where they are doing Mister Monkey?

  Maybe there is another life, less painful and lonely, its details better worked out, a life in which Margot and Chekhov will share angelic contentment, or at least acceptance. Chekhov was forty-four when he died: Margot’s age. Perhaps they would have been friends and helped each other endure the failures and disappointments.

  Margot’s eyes fill with tears. How maddeningly counterproductive! Portia the high-powered lawyer isn’t blubbering over her vanished youth. Portia’s too busy preparing the defense that will save Mister Monkey.

  Margot cannot use her grief right now. And she’ll have to redo her makeup.

  A voice from the hall says, “Five minutes, Margot.” She finds a cotton ball and dabs at the raccoon mask and black rivulets that the tears and mascara have applied to her face

  Though she has no basis for believing this, she feels certain that the letter writer knows her. He knows where she has come from, what she’s been through, what she’s suffered, who she is.

  UNCLE VANYA WAS their class senior-thesis project in the graduate program at Yale. The fact that Margot got the part of Sonya proves that she hasn’t imagined or invented the promising girl she used to be.

  She hardly even had to act. She was Sonya, madly in love with the melancholy doctor Astrov, who loves Yelena, whom Vanya also loves, and who loves Astrov but who refuses to leave her elderly professor husband. And so on and so on, like Popeye and Olive Oyl, like Krazy Kat and Ignatz, everyone wanting the one person they can never have.

  How can Sonya not love Astrov, so handsome and kind, so modest—and so far ahead of his time? So worried about the planet! The Russian forests are groaning under the ax, birds and forest creatures are being smoked out of their houses, rivers are drying up, landscapes vanish, never to return . . .

  This work-ravaged, burned-out hero shows up at Vanya’s farm, straight from treating a typhus epidemic. Will the future thank him?

  God will remember, says Nanny.

  Alec was playing Astrov, so playing opposite him had been easy. Yearning, pure yearning had poured out of Margot. How thrilling it was to escape the prison of her self and become the brainchild of a genius, fueled by pieces of her soul, burning like the plumes of fire, the cast-off carapaces of a rocket. What had she wanted so badly? What was so important?

  Oh, the sad, sad, sadness of their puny ambitions. Chekhov got that right. Because the truth is: some part of her still wants the world to know that she is a talented actress.

  The road from Sonya to Mister Monkey’s lawyer has been paved with concessions, good manners, and graceful acceptance. Below a certain level of fame, a diva is just a pain in the ass. After a point Margot had done what came easily, automatically, what someone else wanted, all the time thinking that it didn’t count, that she would have her life to do over, to get right. She has changed from a girl showing the world what it is like to love someone who will never love you into a woman having a daily shit fit because of the ridiculous costume some sadistic half-mad children’s theater director is making her wear.

  If only she had listened to Carola, who, the week classes ended at Yale, invited Margot to dinner at a New Haven address. The address was all she gave Margot, who imagined how chic and elegant—how Carola—the dinner would be. How intensely she had looked forward to that celebratory banquet!

  The address turned out to be a take-out Chinese food joint. Carola wore a perfect Chanel suit. Over their plastic trays of General Tsao’s chicken and fried rice, at a Formica table under a buzzing fluorescent light, Carola told Margot that if she wanted to be happy in life, she needed to lower her expectations. Starting now. Margot has eaten in plenty of greasy spoons since then—there’s a Cuban-Chinese place, La Isla des Perlas, right near the theater—and it’s done nothing for her happiness level.

/>   There is no single moment that Margot can point to and say, This is where things took a turn. If the weather had been sunny, if only she’d missed that flight. No Broadway spectacle shuttered in a week. No train wreck ended her career. More no’s than yes’s. A few unanswered prayers. Two marriages and several love affairs torched, each by its own demonic arsonist.

  She could have been a great Sonya if she’d known what she knows now. That the thankless servitude Sonya describes, the life of lowered eyes and expectations, of unrelenting hard work, no love, no romance, no children, no reward, old age, then death—it is a real possibility! That life could happen to anyone! More than likely it will. Sonya doesn’t believe it. She can’t. She’s too young. The irony is that you don’t believe it until you’re too old to play Sonya.

  Who sent Margot the letter? Was it one of the actors who wanted to date her at Yale, who took her out for a drink and asked why her heart was set on Alec, a sociopath in the midst of a lifelong love affair with his insane twin sister? Could the letter have come from her therapist? Dr. Reid might own an old typewriter; that would be his style. But it wouldn’t be his style to quote someone else. He’s been very helpful, but sometimes Margot notices that he is only interested in his own opinions. When she’d asked him to please not come to see her in Mister Monkey, he was insultingly eager to respect her wishes.

  If she were smarter, more imaginative, more talented, if she had any of the qualities that would mean she’d be playing the mother in The Glass Menagerie instead of Portia in Mister Monkey, she’d know who sent the letter.

  A dozen men from her past scurry through her memory en route to where they belong. No, not that one. Wait. No. Not that one, either.