Maybe Eric’s drunk now, because from the way he’s blowing his lines, you’d think that Adam had just jumped into his arms and humped him. Why is Eric falling apart? Mr. Jimson reaches, like a drowning person, for Carmen’s hand. That is not in the script at all. Wait till Roger sees that.
Margot’s supposed to say, “Now we can all live together!” Instead they stand around watching her try to unthaw her brain. This is all Adam’s fault. He is so, so sorry. Something outside him made him do it. Or maybe something inside him . . .
Margot finally mumbles, “Now we can all live together.”
By now Adam should be climbing the scenery and flipping around the ceiling. But he stands there, paralyzed, watching. It throws Margot and Eric even further off, like some evil chain reaction.
Mr. Jimson asks Portia if she will be Mrs. Monkey. Will she be Mrs. Monkey? Eric must be high! Could this be more awkward? Especially after that hug between Adam and Margot: that is, between Mister Monkey and his lawyer. Adam has to remember: everyone doesn’t know about that. Only Adam and Margot know. So far.
Will she be Mrs. Monkey? Would she by any chance like to marry the trashy perv chimpanzee who just sexually aggressed her?
Adam wants to be back in kindergarten. Meaning: before the divorce? Brilliant insight, doctor. Adam’s mom says it’s indecent, how Margot is in love with her therapist, obviously a quack who should be brought up on charges. Margot will have plenty to tell Dr. Quack-Quack now. Mister Monkey humped me. Adam likes the idea of them discussing how Margot felt when she finally noticed that Mister Monkey has a penis. Oh, what has he done? They will be talking about him. He imagines the doctor saying, Really? Mister Monkey has a penis? And he feels himself getting hard again. God, he hates being his age.
Adam wants to be back in kindergarten. Miss Linda had shown the class a video of elephants and told them all to line up and clasp their hands and swing their trunks as they walked their elephant walk. He was no longer Adam with the fighting parents, the Adam who knew, in nursery school, that he would never be the kid whom the other kids wanted to be friends with. No, he was Adam the Elephant, trumpeting his confidence and pride as he and his elephant posse dominated the jungle. Fuck with an elephant and he will stomp you flat, no questions asked.
Adam says good-bye to his happy kindergarten memories and hello to the scary reality of Mr. Jimson and Portia, motionless and mute, unable to work their way back from Eric asking Margot to be Mrs. Monkey.
Derek is always talking about how great things are going to be when he gets older and gets a girlfriend and they have sex. Adam used to believe him, but based on what just happened with Margot, he’s no longer sure. Maybe the first time he has sex won’t be as much fun as the first time he became an elephant.
His kindergarten teacher saw something in him. He was the best elephant in the class. The kids took another look. His teacher told his parents that Adam had a gift. That summer he started theater day camp, where he began his rise to stardom by playing one of the orphans in a scene from Oliver. Who would buy their beautiful morning, their beautiful day? Orphan child, orphan monkey, Adam’s career has come full circle and wound up one step down the evolutionary ladder he’s not supposed to think about.
Adam would like to think about that instead of doing what he’s supposed to do, which is: grab the rope that Lakshmi is lowering from the ceiling, then scramble up a pole and climb around the set, so the audience can watch his monkey high jinks and be spared the full douchiness of Mister Jimson and Portia falling in love.
Normally Adam’s glad he doesn’t have to observe that pitiful spectacle, but this afternoon, Eric and Margot are so bad he can’t stop looking. So it’s a standoff, as they try to get a grip, and Adam fantasizes about kindergarten and keeps being yanked back to watch Portia and Mr. Jimson wreck the play. Meanwhile the rope just dangles there with Lakshmi on the other end.
A shaming twinge of jealousy makes Adam shiver inside his stifling costume. A few times he’s gotten the feeling that Margot sort of likes Eric. And now some demented part of him is hoping that the reason why Portia is having trouble declaring her love for Mister Jimson is that Margot has feelings for Adam. Maybe she didn’t completely hate it when he jumped her. Adam knows it’s not the coolest way to get a girl, to leap into her arms and press your monkey dick into her innocent flesh. But it made Margot pay attention! Adam wants to grow up, get it over with. He’s sick and tired of his childhood.
He’s drifted so far out that when he hears a crash, it takes him a while to figure out that Margot has dropped her phone. This is cool. What now?
What would Mister Monkey do? Mister Monkey would run and pick up the phone and hand it to his lawyer. He would make it into an adorable chimpanzee move. But Adam can’t. It’s no longer simple, Portia and Mister Monkey, the heroic lawyer and her grateful client. Now it’s Margot and Adam. The victim and her . . . what? Margot forced him into it, not knowing how smokin’ hot she looked in that purple suit. What would Adam’s mom say if she knew he even thought that?
Could he make it up to Margot by picking up her phone? Would he be doing her a favor? Or would she hate him even more: the pushy child actor spoiling the scene that she imagines is going to win her an Obie.
Mister Monkey waits and watches. He wonders: What would Charles Darwin do?
Then, all of a sudden, some little preschool turd in the audience yells, “Grandpa, are you interested in this?” The kid’s waited for the most dramatic moment—when Margot’s phone is lying on the stage—to ask his retarded question.
Adam should have picked up the phone. Mister Monkey should be doing triple flips. He should have had Margot’s back. It would have made her hate him less.
But the kid’s question interests Adam. It’s as if the kid’s asking him.
Is Adam interested in this? Not really. But now—finally!—he knows what he wants. Not to travel to the moon, or to hand Jason and Danielle a wad of snot, or to be back in kindergarten, or to show the world that Mister Monkey has a penis.
He wants the theater to turn into a real jungle. He wants to become a real monkey, a chimp who knows how to swing from vine to vine with flocks of bright parrots screeching around him and the air damp and heavy with the perfume of tropical flowers. He wants to swing through the lights and the pulleys and ropes until he escapes through a window.
He wants to land on his feet, on the sidewalk outside. He wants to take off his Mister Monkey face. Then he will figure it out.
It’s just at that moment that Margot kicks her phone. Margot aims and punts it. Hard. Slam-dunks it into the wings.
Adam loves her. He always will. And he’s ruined it forever.
ADAM LOITERS OUTSIDE the theater, which is too crappy even to have a stage door, not that they need a secret exit to help them avoid the mob of adoring fans. He’s waiting for his mom. The last thing he wants is to sit around for the boring discussions of what they should have done when Margot dropped her phone. Postmortems, his mother calls them. When Adam asked her what that meant, though he sort of knew, she made him look it up. What he found on the Internet scared him, though he’d seen it a thousand times on TV. But somehow he hadn’t known that it was real, that a stranger in surgical scrubs can cut you open after you are dead, just when you are probably thinking that nothing worse can happen to you.
Luckily no one leaving the theater recognizes him. They’re jostling and pushing each other like people fleeing a burning house. Without the monkey suit he’s invisible. No fool’s going to come up to him and say, Aren’t you that amazing child actor who played Mister Monkey? Can I have your autograph? Your agent’s name? Would you be available to star in a TV pilot?
Adam’s free to scan the crowd for that rude little piece of shit. Grandpa, are you interested in this? Everyone in the theater heard.
Quite a few kids have come with grandparents. And no one’s signaling, I’m the little dickwad who ruined your show. But among the stragglers, there’s one kid, maybe five or six, hi
s grandfather is bending over to hear what he’s saying, bending lower than the other grandpas. Is it gay of Adam to notice that the boy is pretty, with glossy black hair and pale skin? The kid could be a star. Adam never will, not unless he gets a face transplant and a massive infusion of growth hormones.
That’s the kid. Adam’s sure now, though he can’t say why. He stares at them, and he must have some kind of power, because the grandfather catches him looking, and it’s as if he’s hit the old man with a laser. Pow. As they walk away, Grandpa turns back to see if Adam is following them. It would calm him down to know that Adam can’t go anywhere because he has to wait for his mom.
A few people are hanging around the theater entrance, mostly tourists, stunned like vampires in the light. There’s one youngish couple who look foreign and almost cool until the guy fires up a fruity E-cigarette and blows fake smoke in Adam’s face.
Both of Adam’s grandfathers died young, of smoking-related causes. Adam has promised that he’ll never smoke. His mom made him swear on the life of his baby half-brother Arturo. Derek smokes, and Adam probably will too, but for now he’s superstitious.
Adam wishes he had a grandpa like the one in the TV ad about grandparents keeping secrets. If Adam had a grandpa, could his loving grandfather keep the secret of what just happened onstage with Margot? Adam would only spoil everything by always thinking about how old his grandfather was and how soon he was going to die.
What’s taking Mom so long? She always finds a reason to talk to Roger, though Roger never listens. It usually takes Mom a while to realize that Roger’s blowing her off and then to recover from Roger’s having blown her off. The second week of rehearsal, Giselle asked Roger to give Adam some notes. Roger perched on the edge of the stage, and Adam and Mom sat in the front row as Roger told Adam to play Mister Monkey like someone who hasn’t done anything wrong, but whenever anyone accuses him of anything, he thinks he might have done something wrong. Did Adam know anyone like that? Adam did. He was like that. How did Roger know? The last thing he wants is Roger poking around in his head, reading his mind in that scary way his mother does, sometimes.
Should he have picked up Margot’s phone? What will he say to her tomorrow afternoon when they will have to act as if nothing happened and do the Sunday matinee? He humped her leg! Are they not going to mention that?
ADAM IS ALWAYS shocked by how happy he is to see Mom, as if some part of him secretly feared that she’d died or disappeared and he would never see her again. But here she is, and now the second part kicks in: Mom always looks older than he remembers, weirder and heavier and less put together. Mom hugs him and kisses the top of his head, which she means to be sweet and loving and maternal but which only reminds him of how short he is.
The streets are crowded, and no one is paying attention to them, which is fortunate, because even before they reach the subway, Giselle has begun her own postmortem. Slice, slice, saw through the rib cage, take out a handful of guts, then start in on Adam’s brain. Well, fine. She’s serious about his acting. Too serious. She rattles on without noticing that Adam has dropped behind her so that people will think she’s talking to herself. First he likes the pitying or contemptuous looks on their faces, then he doesn’t.
As they near the subway, Adam’s mom pulls him closer, raising her voice so that every stranger can hear how he lost focus for the last part of the show and how he needs to concentrate. All the time Mom’s ripping into him, she’s calling him honey and sweetie. Sweetie, this isn’t day camp any more. Honey, if you’re going to do this, do it right. Adam stops listening. He hears disconnected words. Monkey. Moon. Margot. Your cue.
Giselle doesn’t quit talking till they reach the subway steps, which require her full concentration. Clinging to the railing, Mom slows everything down, annoying everyone behind her. Adam hates how they glare at the panting, asthmatic old hippie in her gypsy skirt and scarves, even as some dark secret part of him thinks it serves Mom right. Serves her right for what? Oh, poor Mom, poor Mom. Even Adam blames her for things that aren’t her fault.
He and Mom get seats on the train, and now the people facing them can watch her ranting about the play. Adam is really acting now, impersonating a normally angry, resentful kid listening to his mom, when in reality he is a boy in hell. Everybody is acting. His dad is acting the part of a successful corporate lawyer, of Heidi’s adoring husband and Arturo’s doting dad. His mom is acting the part of his mom, but she’s not doing so well. She could use some notes on a less maddening way—something less annoying than a poke in the shoulder—to rouse her dozing son when they reach their stop.
Trailing his mom through the fascist corporate wasteland otherwise known as Battery Park City, Adam hopes the elevator will be empty so they can ride in privacy up to the thirteenth floor. According to Mom, they got a deal on their apartment because people are superstitious, even in New York. The elevator door opens. No one’s inside: the first answered prayer all day.
Giselle takes forever rummaging in the tasseled Tibetan feed sack she uses as a purse. Adam could find his key in a second, but he has to let her do it. Once he’d gently bumped her out of the way and unlocked the door, and she’d burst into tears.
“Bingo,” says Giselle. She steps aside to let Adam enter first, half polite, half afraid he’ll bolt if she turns her back. But where would he go? To Heidi and Dad in Park Slope? He could go to Derek’s, but last time they hung out there, Derek played a DVD of Requiem for a Dream because he said it reminded him of Adam and his mom. That was completely unfair. Adam’s mom is his acting coach, not some junkie blowing up like a Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon and trying to squeeze through a keyhole.
When the door closes behind Adam and his mom, it’s like being thrown down a hole, or in solitary, the camera zooms in on the prison door getting larger and slamming shut, and the screen goes dark. Adam reminds himself, This is not some CIA black site! This is a nice two-bedroom apartment with a view of the harbor. During the divorce, his parents fought over the furniture: neither of them wanted it. His mother said she refused to live with a couch on which his dad had put his ass. Now Adam can’t look at the couch without thinking about that.
When Adam pulls the drapes, his mother says, “Leave them open, honey. That view is why your father and I moved to this godforsaken hole. Lots of people would die for a view like that.”
So why can’t Adam look at it without thinking about how they’re all going to die, and how he and Mom are going to die first because of their proximity to the water? Is there a name for Adam’s problem? A few times he’s tried to Google it, but he doesn’t know what to search. One site said that some people are afraid of their own desire to jump out a window or off a bridge. But that’s not what he’s afraid of. Adam closes the curtains, and this time his mother doesn’t protest. Natural selection: a human woman mates with a monkey boy, and they survive the apocalypse.
Giselle says, “What would you like for dinner? I can cook, or we can order out.”
Neither is the right answer. If they call out for Chinese, Mom always gets General Tsao’s chicken, which Adam doesn’t like, and she eats the entire carton. She always makes him open the door for the delivery guy and figure out the tip. She says that calculating 20 percent is the only math skill a person needs. The alternative is that Mom will cook a pound of pasta, and they’ll compete to see who can eat the most, fastest. The more Adam eats, the less Mom gets.
“Let’s have pasta,” he says.
“Cacio e pepe?”
Adam nods.
“Excellent choice,” his mom says. “Simple and delicious.”
Giselle opens a bottle of white wine and gulps down a full glass, as if it were water.
Adam gives her wine the hateful look he usually reserves for her cupcakes. She pours another glass, fills a pot with water, and puts it on to boil.
“To Mister Monkey,” she says. “Long may he run.”
Adam likes watching her in the kitchen, stripped down to a black T-shir
t and her witchy skirt, no scarves or shawls to catch fire. When he tries to imagines how Mister Monkey felt when he saw his monkey parents and his human stepmom get shot, he pictures his real mom going up in flames at the stove. Giselle’s on her way to impaired, but she’s not there yet. The cooking part of her brain is still intact, and the food is ready in no time. Grated cheese, cream, pepper, butter. Everything Adam likes.
After a while he hears Mom chanting something, or maybe singing lyrics, unintelligible until the nonsense sounds resolve into words.
Five little monkeys jumping on the bed
One fell off and broke his head
Mama called the doctor, the doctor said,
No more monkeys jumping on the bed
Four little monkeys . . .
Mom says, “Want to hear something funny I just remembered? I guess it’s because we’ve been talking and learning so much about monkeys. Anyhow, when you were little, three, maybe four, you and me and Dad drove up to Boston to see Dad’s cousin, and the whole way there you sang that rhyme about the monkeys. The whole way there! We couldn’t stop you. Dad kept trying to dial it down, he’d say, ‘Okay, Adam, one little monkey jumping on the bed, we’re down to one!’ But as soon as you got down to one, you’d push the number back up again, seven little monkeys, ten little monkeys . . .”
“What’s the funny part?” says Adam. How could Mom imagine that such a sad story—her and Dad and him all happy and singing in the car—is humorous? Adam wants to weep. What happened to that cheerful kid? Where has he gone? How could he have been taken over by the mentally disturbed humanoid who lives inside him now, halfway between a boy and an animal, halfway between a boy and a man, not human, uncivilized, molesting Margot onstage?
Mister Monkey Page 5
