Mister Monkey

by Francine Prose

  The group migrates toward the table, then stops, unsure of where to sit. Rescued from the stall, the women rush to help their hostess arrange the children on the floor around the coffee table and bring them bowls of spaghetti lightly laced with tomato sauce. Left behind, the men fall into the nearest chairs, and when the women return they distribute themselves around them. The chair beside the grandfather stays empty longer than the rest. He is relieved when the seat is taken by a pretty young woman he noticed before (though he has forgotten her name) because she is dressed like a rag doll, like Pippi Longstocking, whom his daughter used to love. Two jaunty red pigtails stick out of the sides of her head, and freckles have been painted on her nose and cheeks.

  “I’m Edith,” this saint of etiquette reminds him. She sticks out her hand, and the grandfather shakes it, a light mist of anxiety dampening his palm.

  His daughter and son-in-law bring in two large baking dishes. Beneath a layer of cheese baked brown, the bubbling eggplant emits such delicious smells that the guests burst into applause.

  Raggedy Ann pitches herself at him, enraptured before he has even spoken, a mannered gesture for which the grandfather is grateful. He is conscious of the tops of her breasts beneath the low neckline of her gingham doll’s dress. The grandfather recalls a museum show of Japanese street-kid style. Edith isn’t Japanese. She is quoting Japanese street-kid style, she would probably say. And he will have to try not to look at Edith’s breasts.

  The grandfather remembers a scene from the play: the victory celebration, when Mister Monkey jumped into his lawyer’s arms. From his seat in the second row, the grandfather got the impression that the monkey was humping the lady lawyer, who wasn’t happy about it, at all. Was that a regular part of the play? Did the director instruct them to do that? Was this another grown-up joke provided for the parents?

  The grandfather found it so upsetting that there was nothing to do but pretend it wasn’t happening. The actress dropped the monkey, and the moment ended. Grandpa, are you interested in this?

  “Sally tells me you’re a curator,” Edith says.

  “Retired,” the grandfather says.

  “I’m a painter,” she says.

  “Where do you show your work?” the grandfather asks, because he knows he is supposed to.

  “Nowhere right now,” says Edith. “I’m shopping around for a gallery, actually.”

  “I was curator of European painting.”

  “Awesome,” Edith says. “I heavily reference the Old Masters in my process. In fact they’re kind of my current subject.”

  “How so?” the grandfather says.

  “I get large reproductions and cut them up into tiny squares. Then I piece them back together into images, like puzzles, like pixilated photos, and I glue them on a huge sheet, and then I paint a picture of the sheet. I always get something different from whatever I’d planned. So it’s like a discovery—and a disappointment.” She laughs and sits back and crosses her arms over her chest. Good-bye, Edith’s breasts.

  “Like life,” says the grandfather.

  “Like art mostly, I guess,” says Edith. “Of course since Miles was born, I’ve hardly been able to work. Mostly I’m too exhausted. And that’s okay with me. He won’t be little forever.”

  “Is Max your only child?”

  “Miles. His name is Miles. My husband and I are fighting about that. I mean, about having another kid. I think kids need siblings, don’t you?”

  The grandfather doesn’t know what to say. Only children run in his family.

  “What painters do you like?” he asks, to revive the stalled conversation. Otherwise Edith will turn to the young man beside her, and the grandfather will be left staring at the back of the head of the woman on his other side, who is talking to the man on her left.

  Edith says, “Right now, I’m kind of into the Spanish painters. Velásquez. What a genius! Obviously, right? Murillo. Zurbarán. Oh, and Goya. At the moment he’s my guy.”

  Obviously. Right. Any number of suitable banalities occur to the grandfather, but a swell of memory washes them away.

  Instead he hears himself say, “Goya was my late wife’s favorite painter. She was a very sophisticated woman with very subtle elegant taste, but her favorite painting remained the one she’d loved as a child, the Goya portrait of the little boy in the red suit with the bird cage.” Is there a monkey in that painting? He can’t recall.

  He goes on, louder, willfully ignoring the fact that Edith no longer seems to know what to do with her bright faux-freckled face as he says, “We slept under that painting for almost fifty years. She died looking up at that painting, and when she died I ripped it down from the wall. To be honest, I never liked it. I took it out of the frame and tore it up into little pieces you could have for your art project, if you wish. They’re probably around somewhere. I never throw anything out.”

  “A hoarder!” Edith’s anxious face reminds him of the faces of the schoolchildren sitting on the museum floor in front of the Goya as he rambled on about his dead wife.

  Edith says, “Oh, no thanks, that’s okay. I like to do the tearing myself, that’s part of my process too. I’m sorry about your wife.”

  There’s nothing more to say. Mercifully it’s one of those moments when the table talk expands to include the group, so that Edith and the grandfather can listen to the discussion about new restaurants that have opened in the area: the (for now!) affordable taqueria, the fried chicken place they adore but would probably skip if the kids didn’t insist, the vegan café with the best green tea but so much attitude there was a drama when a child came in sucking a lollipop and the parents refused to get rid of the “corn syrup kebab,” as the manager requested. When the parents finally took the lollipop away, the kid tore the place up. Led by the fathers, the dinner guests pump their elbows and cheer for the tiny hero of resistance. They are happy for the chance to make it clear that, while they may have food issues, they are not as far gone as the manager of the vegan café.

  The grandfather says, “I’ve got a story.” He decides to ignore the cautionary looks he’s getting from his daughter. He can tell a story if he wants to. Long before any of them were born, he was telling stories at parties. And some were fancy benefit galas at which he was supposed to persuade his wealthy dinner partners to underwrite an upcoming museum show. So why is everyone acting as if the demented old fart can’t say anything intelligent to a roomful of people who have forbidden themselves to think or speak about anything beside how to trick their children into eating quinoa?

  The grandfather says, “I was in Portland, Oregon, visiting a museum donor we’d heard was interested in funding a show. This is a Portland story. I was having breakfast in a restaurant, farm to table, locally sourced. So the waiter goes up to the chef in the open kitchen, and I hear him say, ‘Table Four. Nothing that moves, nothing that breathes, nothing with a face.’

  “The cook says, ‘Shit! Do dandelions have faces?’

  “The waiter thinks for a minute. Then he says, ‘I’ll go check.’”

  The grandfather has told this story before. He waits for the laughs. No one laughs. He recalls his daughter wondering how many of her guests were vegetarian. Probably they all are, and they probably think he’s mocking them, which he probably is.

  Why did he tell the story? Was it aggression, as they seem to believe? No, it wasn’t, not really. At least he doesn’t think so. He just wanted to say something funny.

  There is a part of the story that the grandfather didn’t tell.

  By the time he went to Portland to beg for money from the donors, he’d known his career was over. And he knew why the museum had decided to offer him early retirement: the expensive Danish show.

  Two years before, he’d gone to Copenhagen for a conference and fallen in love with the light in the nineteenth-century Danish paintings. In New York no one noticed the Danish light, but they’d noticed (in a bad way) the image he chose for the invitation: an 1898 Borgensen of a lovely woman
holding a monkey, its legs wrapped around her waist. He’d thought the painting beautiful, but according to the publicity department, no one else did. During the play, this afternoon, the painting kept appearing before his eyes. Was that why he chose that play? If so, he should go into therapy, the way his daughter kept suggesting after Jane died. He would rather spend the money on theater tickets, even if he picked the play to remind him of the mistake that torpedoed his career.

  Anyway, he had reached “an age.” He certainly didn’t want to be one of those old guys who refuse to go quietly, who make fusses that people gossip about. Maybe he should have wanted to be one of those guys.

  After Jane died, he’d volunteered as a docent in the museum where he’d been curator. His daughter said it was good for him to get out of the house, but maybe it would be wiser to choose another museum. He’d said no, he knew that one. He knew every painting in it.

  Too well, as it turned out. After a few weeks he was let go. He’d upset the students and teachers when he told a grade-school group how much his wife had loved the Goya portrait of the little boy in the red suit, how he’d bought her a decent reproduction that hung over the bed in which she died. All he was supposed to do, the docent coordinator reminded him, was to ask the kids to point to the cat, the birdcage, the magpie. Not to ramble on about loss and death. Is there a monkey in the painting? It scares the grandfather that he can’t remember.

  In the hospital, his newborn grandson had been swaddled in white, like an injured foot. How could a tiny human with two swollen eyelids and a blue sock on his head have so changed his life? Most nights, the grandfather has only to think of the child and he feels calm enough to fall asleep. Expecting a child to change everything was always too much to ask. No wonder the child is cautious about how much of himself he is willing to give.

  The grandfather sees his daughter looking at him from the opposite end of the table. He can tell that she can’t quite hear him, but her face has stiffened slightly.

  Relax, the grandfather thinks. One consolation of age is desensitization. You worry less about saying the wrong thing. When you are young, you think you will die from shame, but with time you learn that embarrassment won’t kill you. That is another reason why the young despise and fear the elderly. They have no manners, no social sense. They will say anything!

  The parents want him to shut up. Well, they needn’t worry. He couldn’t speak if he wanted to. He’s paralyzed by a shyness he hasn’t felt since eighth grade, but this is worse than eighth grade because then part of him hoped that his solitude and humiliation wouldn’t last forever. But now he knows that it will, that at the end of the evening when the parents return to their bright messy kitchens and their quarrels about whose turn it is to put the kids to bed, and finally to their own warm beds, with a warm body beside them, he will go home to his neat apartment in which Jane’s clothes have hung in the closet for years, despite his daughter’s efforts to persuade him to give them away, despite his son-in-law’s offer of help. No wonder his daughter is wary of a man who shares his bureau with the scarves and gloves of the dead.

  These overburdened, overworked parents cannot know how lucky they are: they are young and have someone to help them. Even if they get divorced tomorrow! They are not alone. The grandfather’s grief feels sharp and new: beyond remediation.

  The child helps. The thought of the child helps. The grandfather half rises out of his chair for a better view of the children’s table. They are playing with their spaghetti, sucking it in and making mustaches of the dripping strands.

  His grandson is the leader. The others look to him for direction. Again the grandfather feels that pain in his chest, the ache of loving the child with a hopeless love. When a little girl rubs spaghetti in her hair, his grandson shakes his head, and she stops. He is the king of the children, but he is also one of them, a child with an army of children who will do whatever he says. Perhaps he’ll throw the first clump of spaghetti, just to see what will happen. Then the grandfather will have to watch how the parents handle the children’s rebellion.

  He wishes there were someone he could tell about Mister Monkey, about the actress in the torn purple skirt, playing out her own tragedy, separate from, parallel to, but much, much sadder than the play about the lawyer defending a monkey. And what does that woman receive in return? Getting humped by a boy in a monkey suit. The boy waiting outside the theater.

  If only he could tell Jane. She would have understood how his sympathies went out to the actress. But who is he to feel sorry for her? A retired depressed old widower whose only tie to the world is through his grandson’s intermittent love. And why would he have needed to tell Jane? His wife would have been in the audience along with him and the child she will never meet.

  The grandfather closes his eyes. He hears his kindly son-in-law deflecting attention from inappropriate, fading Grandpa with news of a cool new bar with a garden. It’s just around the corner, not expensive, no attitude, a nice place to get a drink. This distracts the parents long enough for the grandfather to recover.

  When he does, merciful Edith, forgiving angel of loving kindness, is waiting for him.

  “How long have you been retired?” she asks, not actually listening. He could say “for a thousand years” and she wouldn’t react.

  He says, “Did you happen to see that Golden Age of Danish Painting show here in New York? Maybe seven years ago.”

  “I wish I had,” says Edith.

  “That was mine. It was wonderful. I felt as if I’d discovered a new country. I’d been in Copenhagen for a conference. I’d wandered through the museum, and the light that shone from those paintings . . . it was like the light of the first snowfall you see as a child. I remember feeling that peppery, almost painful stillness, like just after the snow stops falling.”

  Edith says, “Wow. What was the subject matter? The content?”

  “Boats in a harbor. A coastal town, landscapes, a bonfire in winter. Women standing at their windows, or writing at their desks. Christ, it wasn’t the content,” he says, instantly sorry. He needs to lighten up. He’s as bad as Hugo. Edith is being nice.

  “It was the light,” he says, almost pleading. “The show was beautiful. But almost no one came to see it.“

  “I hate when that happens,” Edith says.

  “When what happens?” says the grandfather, so loud that Edith jumps. “I even fucked up the invitations. I should have picked a pretty image. Something neutral. Flowers. A harbor. But like an idiot, I went for the image that I thought would start people talking. And it did start them talking, it started them saying, I’m not taking a Saturday out of my busy life to take the kids to see a nineteenth-century Danish woman doing something unhealthy with a monkey.”

  “That sounds awesome, actually,” says Edith. “Doing what with a monkey, exactly?”

  “Holding it,” the grandfather says. “Holding the monkey.”

  “And what was the monkey doing to her?”

  “Nothing,” says the grandfather. “Patting her on the head.”

  Edith says, “I don’t get what the problem was. Who painted it? Anyone I would have heard of?”

  The grandfather says, “Tell me all the painters you’ve heard of, and I’ll stop you when you get there.”

  At first Edith can’t figure out what he’s said. Then her face reddens beneath the fake freckles. Poor Edith didn’t deserve to be punished for being polite to an older person. What has she done to provoke the mean old bastard into making her feel bad about herself? He’s sorry, but it’s too late.

  “Whatever,” she says. “Excuse me.”

  The grandfather wants to apologize, but Edith has turned her back on him and is reaching for a lifeline of small talk from down the table.

  Again the grandfather rests his head in his hands. Soon this will be over. All he has to do is wait. Maybe they will let him read his grandson to sleep.

  These parents are giving their children everything they have. He can’t fault the
m for having nothing left for themselves, or for each other, or for him. Especially him, with whom every interaction is a memento mori. In principle they like the idea of grandparents, of multigenerational families. How marvelous for the children! They just don’t like being reminded that being a grandparent means being old.

  His grandson doesn’t mind. The child knows who is old and who is young. The child is aware of everything happening in the room.

  Something brushes against the grandfather’s arm. The child has left his friends and has taken a moment to rest his head on his grandpa’s shoulder. The moment will pass in a heartbeat, in a few irregular heartbeats. Bump bup. Pause. Bump. Long pause. Bip bip bip. His fluttering heart will toy with him until he’s afraid, and only then, he hopes, will subside.

  What stops it now is the child’s hand in his jacket pocket. Edward takes out the programs from the play, keeps one and puts the other back in his grandfather’s pocket. Holding his pamphlet above his head, flying it like a standard, Edward rears up, as if on a horse, and runs off to join his friends.

  [ CHAPTER 4 ]

  EVOLUTION

  EDWARD PUSHES THE elevator button, slams it with his palm, not because he wants to run away and leave Dad at his school, but because he wants the elevator to make Dad and Hugo stop fighting.

  He tells himself that it hasn’t been all that long, only a little while since Hugo asked Dad for the monthly tuition check, and his dad said, Could Hugo please wait a day, he was running late for a presentation, and Hugo said, No, thank—he said zenk you, he said no zenk you very much—he couldn’t wait a day, the check was already a day late, and his dad said, A day late? A day late? Then Dad said he was sick and tired of feeling like Hugo’s hand was scrabbling around in his pocket.

  Edward hates the idea of Hugo’s hand in his dad’s pocket, the pocket in which Dad sometimes brings him a pack of sugar-free gum if he promises not to tell Mom. Hugo said he was sick and tired of parents pretending to care about their children’s education, to want to be part of a cooperative school and everything it represents, except that they’re too lazy and cheap to do anything to support it, and Dad, yelling now, said, “What school? The Sunflower Bullshit School.”