Mister Monkey

by Francine Prose

  “Sorry!” The woman in the yellow dress kicks her backpack under her chair, with an extra kick for being naughty. “It goes on walks when it wants to.”

  “Bad boy,” says the man in the fedora.

  From beneath the fuzzy blanket of sickness, Sonya forces a smile. If she opens her mouth she’ll vomit. She keeps her gaze level and, looking neither right nor left, glides across the room with both arms extended, as if the floor were slicked with ice. Her path is blocked by two men, one playing the accordion and the other singing “Come Back to Sorrento.” It’s a horrible dream, worse than her nightmare about the monkey on her floor. At least the monkey wasn’t singing Neapolitan ballads.

  She needs to navigate past the musicians, but she’s too tired, too sick. She pushes past them, grabbing the accordionist’s arm for balance, so he hits a wrong note and hisses, “You stupid piece of shit!”

  Bracing herself against the corridor walls, Sonya makes her way to the dimly lit bathroom with its white subway tiles and vintage black and white octagons. Was this where Al Pacino got the gun hidden behind the toilet tank? The fact that she remembers The Godfather seems like a good sign, suggesting that she is not going to pass out.

  The nausea subsides a bit, but she still feels dizzy. What she really wants, what would actually help, is to go back to the dining room, grab some bread from the basket on her table, and bring it back here to eat in the cool quiet bathroom. She splashes her face with cold water.

  It’s pure luck that the bathroom is empty. By the time someone walks in, Sonya will be safe, hidden inside a stall. She touches more surfaces than she would if she weren’t drunk.

  Sonya opens the door to the farthest stall from the door, enters, locks it, and sits down, fully dressed, on the toilet. She’s beyond her usual fear of being locked in a public restroom.

  She rests her wet face in her wet hands. Trying to dry them with toilet paper would only make things worse. It’s been a terrible day! She should have patience with herself. Hours on the subway, school, the meeting with Guadalupe, and now this first date from hell with a wealthy psycho who by some grotesque coincidence is obsessed with Darwin—the genius who may get her fired.

  She just needs to recover a little before Greg starts to wonder where she is. Before he sends someone to check on her, or pays and leaves, neither being desirable options.

  She has no idea how long she has been sitting on the toilet when she hears: buzz buzz moan. What is that? Her phone. Someone’s sending her a text. Probably Greg is checking on her. She finds her purse, which has fallen on the floor, even though she has read about fecal culture samples taken in public bathrooms. The clarity and disgust with which she remembers this gives her hope that she can recover enough to go back and finish her first and last dinner with Greg.

  She remembers everything now. Enzo’s. Greg. Their table. The happy couple beside them. Clams. White pasta. Red wine. Texting is what a decent human being does when he realizes that his date has been gone for an alarmingly long time. Probably she is perfectly fine and will thank him for caring. On the slim chance that she isn’t all right, he can gallantly intercede.

  The message is from Greg. The letters spell out Nathan, dude.

  Nathan? Only slowly does Sonya realize that the message is meant for someone named Nathan and not for her, that Greg is drunkenly texting the wrong person. And he’s hit SEND. He gets credit for being able to write. She can hardly read.

  She has a dark premonition about what might happen next. She wants to stop the letters before they appear on the screen. She wants not to look. She wants to put away the phone without seeing what Greg has written.

  Another message box appears below the first.

  Dude, on the scale of one to ten, she’s a 4.

  Sonya is so instantly sober that she can do the math and think. There is a slight chance, an infinitesimally slight chance, that Greg doesn’t mean her. There is a bigger chance, a much bigger chance, that he does. There is a slight chance he wasn’t texting his friend and sent her the message by mistake. There is a bigger chance that he was.

  In a few moments she will have to return to her table and say something, or not say something, about the fact that Greg texted his friend to say that she’s a four. Commodified her precious self, her only self, rated her body and soul. But if she’s being honest . . . is it the fact of the rating or the number that upsets her? Would she be so insulted if he’d said she was a ten?

  In a few minutes she’ll return to the dining room, and soon after that she’ll go home. At home she’ll take a Xanax, and slide into sleep. She’ll have nightmares, awaken, and, she hopes, fall back asleep. In the morning she’ll teach her class, if she still has a class to teach.

  But for now she sits in the stall and watches her thoughts swing from vine to vine, backward through the day, all the way to last night’s dream. Again she sees the monkey sitting on her floor, tearing up paper and giggling. But now she recognizes Mister Monkey, who isn’t laughing but praying for mercy with a secret rite involving paper snowflakes gusting up to the deaf ears of the monkey god in his distant monkey heaven.

  [ CHAPTER 6 ]

  THE AUTHOR OF MISTER MONKEY

  RAY ASKS THE driver where he’s from, and when the driver says Chad, Ray knows that it’s in Africa, but not where in Africa, so the conversation lags until the driver asks Ray if he wants to let the evening in. It takes Ray a while to understand what he means. It’s a goddamn poem. By all means let in the evening, though technically it’s late afternoon, broiling for late September.

  The driver pushes a button, the windows roll down. Has someone told him that evening is English for the carbon monoxide, grit, and whatever airborne toxins blast into the car as they stop at the red light at Park and 125th? English for the bone-shaking rattle from the train trestle, the smell of stewing garbage, the half-delicious, half-crematorial smoke from the halal food truck, and a plume of rage from the mother pushing a stroller halfway into the intersection: her semaphoric fuck you to the traffic? What blows in through the open window is like a concerto in which each musician is playing whatever note he wants, all of them playing at once. The Sun Ra Arkestra. Whatever happened to them? There is no one Ray can ask, except maybe his second wife. Kathy. He could call her in Chicago, but he’s left his phone at home.

  So what? He hates the fucking phone. He just hopes he won’t need it, hopes there’s no problem finding Lauren, whom he’s picking up on the corner of 55th and Sixth. There’s never been trouble before. Sweet Lauren is always where she says she will be, not a minute before or after she says she’ll be there. People made and kept dates for centuries before cell phones existed. An old man’s thought, Ray knows.

  Ray concentrates on loving the city outside. It’s his city, and he is riding in a car-service luxury sedan, being driven to pick up his beautiful girlfriend Lauren at her office in midtown and from there out to Brooklyn to have dinner at Enzo’s. The future looks bright. At least the immediate future. Another old man’s distinction.

  “Thank you,” he tells the driver. And thank you, Mister Monkey. For the millionth, the hundred-millionth time, he thanks an imaginary chimpanzee. Sure, Ray wrote the book. But it always felt as if that little primate son of a bitch wanted to be born, as if thieving tough Mister Monkey muscled his way into the world.

  “Highway or street?” says the driver. “Both ways, heavy traffic.”

  “You’re in charge,” Ray says. The Klonopin and the half Percocet are starting to work. As usual Ray feels it first in his jaw, which he has to clamp shut because he so wants to open his mouth and say, “I’m so fucking happy.”

  “Street,” the driver says. “I’ll take Park.”

  “Absolutely,” says Ray. “You’re my man.”

  On Park and 115th they pass the projects: brick walls the color of watery piss, the lawns more garbage strewn than they were when Ray grew up there. The whole city is luxury glass-and-steel doorman condos; this is the only place that’s deteriorated. Wh
en Ray was a kid, the guy who lived downstairs was murdered by the Cape Man, and when they staged the Broadway musical, the director, the producer, Paul fucking Simon himself, they took Ray out to lunch, picked his brain about Cape Man and sent him front-row seats. The music was okay. To be honest, it pissed Ray off, how much better Cape Man was than Mister Monkey the Musical, which he has always despised.

  Whenever Mister Monkey is produced, which, given how bad it is, still happens surprisingly often, the contract specifies that Ray gets two tickets. He gives the tickets to Mario, his favorite waiter at Enzo’s, where Ray spends the royalty checks for the play.

  Blowing the (minuscule) theatrical royalties on dinner at Enzo’s is a family tradition that all of Ray’s wives and girlfriends have liked. Not the checks from his publisher and licensing firms, the Mister Monkey puppets, the speaking engagements and wise investments from the years when Mister Monkey was still being optioned for the movies, and the option money was still good. Sometimes he senses that a nosy stranger is wondering how Ray manages to live so large on the back of a twenty-five-year-old monkey. The answer is: investments. But it’s none of anyone’s business. Ray has never minded buying and selling houses, moving from one apartment to a fancier apartment, and his luck has been good. So far.

  “Knock on wood,” Ray says aloud to himself, in the absence of wood to knock on. His money is money from God working through the mysterious agency of a children’s book that has stayed in print, that has been translated into dozens of languages, and which is still being read in classrooms all over the world. Those checks pay the mortgage and the IRS, the grocery and cable bills.

  The money that buys dinner at Enzo’s is distilled from the trickle of proceeds from Mister Monkey the Musical. As Ray tells his girlfriends and wives, the checks are reparations, payback for all the things he hates about the play.

  For example, Carmen, the slutty, dopey, heart-of-gold Latina maid. In Ray’s book she’s brilliant, like Ray’s sister Carmen, who cleaned houses to pay for college and is now a sociology professor at Fordham. When they were kids she always took Ray’s side, the way Carmen takes Mister Monkey’s. Another crime against his book is that bullshit song and dance in which Portia and Mr. Jimson fall in love on their cell phones. That’s not in his novel, either.

  Sometimes the royalties pay for an appetizer, sometimes for an Amarone from the top of the list plus the veal chop for two and the grappa. It doesn’t matter. Ray makes up the difference, and every so often, for old times’ sake, Enzo tells the waiter (always Mario) that Ray’s dinner is on the house.

  “Look at that,” the driver says.

  Two cops have three kids spread-eagled against a massive concrete column beneath a trestle. Jagged spikes of oily rust drip down the concrete.

  “The cops up here do what they want,” says the driver.

  “They always do,” says Ray.

  “Same everywhere,” says the driver. The light changes, and he hits the gas, flinging Ray back against the seat. The neighborhood still sucks, and Ray is lying every time he tells kids that they can get out if it, they can better themselves, like he did. Half lying. They can escape if they get a one-in-a-million lucky break and meet a succession of lovely, helpful women who are decent and nice even after you dump them. Ray feels his mood track toward the dark until the delicious meal before him dances through his mind like a cartoon character, joining its cartoon hands with those two kindly fairies, Painkiller and Muscle Relaxant.

  Ray has been coming to Enzo’s ever since Mister Monkey became a bestseller and Ray’s then-agent, Con (one of those joke-descriptive names), took him there to celebrate. Ray was still a kid then, a deer-in-the-headlights boy afraid even to ask how Con knew Enzo.

  It just so happened that Enzo’s son Ricky was a big Mister Monkey fan. The kid wasn’t much of a reader, but he’d read Mister Monkey four times. Enzo had shaken Ray’s hand with the dignified macho of a man thanking another man for doing his son a favor. The second time Ray went there, this time with his editor-girlfriend Emer, Ray brought a signed copy. To My Man Ricky, Keep reading! That holy relic had briefly made Ricky the star of his class at St. Ignatius Academy.

  Enzo has a famously good memory. All these years later, Ray can still get a table. So that’s become the tradition. The day the check comes in the mail, Ray drops everything and calls the wife or girlfriend. Now it’s text. He texted Lauren. Enzo’s? Pick u up at 6? Boom.

  Even this far uptown, the traffic is so heavy that they sit alongside the projects, waiting for two lights to change. The projects were ahead of their time, fully prepared for the crack cocaine years, by which point Ray was out of there, trading up through Manhattan and Brooklyn before landing back in Harlem, in a high-floor loft with a downtown view of Central Park, a doorman condo that he was savvy enough to buy years before Harlem got crazy.

  Sometimes he tells the drivers, I grew up here! And the drivers say, No kidding. They could give two shits. Less than two shits. Ray doesn’t care what they think. Right now he doesn’t feel like talking.

  He’s had an interesting day. This morning he went to a public school up in the Bronx to read aloud from Mister Monkey. So what if they’re still using prehistoric fossil Raymond Ortiz as living proof that a kid could come from the streets and get famous? He is still a poster child: the upwardly mobile Puerto Rican. He didn’t make it all that high, which may be part of the reason he’s invited to these schools. J. Lo isn’t stuffing her insured-by-Lloyd’s-of-London ass into those tiny chairs, reading to first-graders. Ray has succeeded just enough to write a book that the teachers read to the kids, year after year, and feel they have to assure Ray: their students still really like it!

  Ray always enjoys these visits. He likes seeing the kids’ faces, each child so unique, all of them already so themselves: the adults they’ll turn into, the old people they’ll become, boiled down into a cute little concentrate, like a bouillon cube, or like those tiny Japanese sponges his daughters loved; dropped in the water, they swelled into flowers and pink brontosauruses. He’d loved those magic sponges, just like he loves the heroic (and hot!) teachers who this morning herded three depressingly overcrowded classes into the cramped library and sat the kids on the floor. They made them sit on their crossed legs (crisscross, applesauce!) and then the teachers prayed, silently but so intensely that Ray could practically hear them: please make the kids be good.

  The kids were good, good as gold, but if Ray can’t remember one moment that made today any different from any other Mister Monkey reading in any other classroom, it’s not because the kids were good or bad, but because Mister Monkey is always the same, as are the questions. Ray is always playing the world’s oldest ex-street-kid ex-gang-member turned successful children’s writer.

  Did you like reading when you were a kid?

  He tells them how his high school English teacher gave him Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas. That was when he first understood that books were written by people and didn’t just pop up like mushrooms out of the library shelves. He said what he always says: “You kids need to wait till you get older to read Down These Mean Streets. That book’s got some grown-up parts. I know your teachers will be mad at me because my saying that is gonna make you kids want to read it right now.”

  The children laughed uncertainly. The prettiest of the teachers gently reminded him, “Mr. Ortiz, this is a reading readiness group.”

  Before Lauren, Ray would have checked out the teacher to see if she was someone he wanted to fuck. But not now, which is a good thing, because Ray is getting a little long in the tooth for casual hookups and first dates. Sometimes he wonders what men his age did before Viagra.

  “Meanwhile,” the pretty teacher said, “I’m sure our students are eager to know what made you write Mister Monkey.”

  Ray said what he always says. “I went to the zoo and saw a monkey. The Bronx Zoo, actually. It’s not all that far from here. It cheered me up and made me want to go home and write a book. Have you kids
been to the zoo? Your teachers should take you on a school trip.”

  The children had loved him even more. He was trying to set them free!

  Ray sees no need to mention the fact that every so often he goes to the zoo and stands in front of the monkey cage and cries. He is still surprised when (not every time, but sometimes, with a mysterious sense of relief) he finds himself in tears. He doesn’t want to know what he’s feeling. It seems wiser not to know. It feels good to cry, alone (in a crowd) and in a relatively controlled situation.

  Ray does remember one incident unlike any he’s experienced in a classroom situation before. A few months ago, a little boy raised his hand and asked, “How much money do you make from your writing?”

  Ray was so taken aback that he’d mumbled something about paying for food and the phone bill, but the kid wasn’t having any of it.

  “No,” he said, “I mean how much?” Other kids took it up: How much? How much? How much? Until Ray had to tell them that it was none of their business. What they’d wanted to hear was: a lot. Otherwise why were they wasting their time, listening to him?

  The driver swerves right and brakes.

  “Come on,” says Ray. “What the hell, man?”

  “Sorry,” says the driver. “These limo guys go slow as they want.”

  “They’re getting paid by the hour,” says Ray. “What do they care?”

  “Exactly,” says the driver.

  No one ever has any idea what a tiny fraction of the true story Ray tells. The monkey he’d seen at the zoo, all those years ago, had made him feel the opposite of cheered up. He’d gone there with Astrid, his teacher in the writing class for Vietnam vets at Bronx Community College. Every day for months he’d been typing the words My Bronx, and then nothing else, certainly nothing he wanted to show Astrid or the class. So he was feeling a little . . . discouraged, when Astrid asked if he wanted to go to the zoo.