Mister Monkey

by Francine Prose

  “Ray’s always with beautiful women who are also smart and friendly and nice. He’s been married I don’t know how many times. The women stay the same age, and Ray gets older. Though that’s not for me to judge, Father. I say more power to him. Ray’s a gentleman. Polite, a generous tipper, a good guy all around. And young Master of the Universe at the next table is a total piece of shit. So which guy would you choose for your daughter, if you had a daughter, Father? I don’t mean—”

  “Please, continue, my son.”

  “I start to pull out his girlfriend’s chair, but Ray gets there first. It’s another thing we have, our little joke, like a secret handshake. But this time I see his hand resting on the girl’s shoulder. He can’t help touching her. Tenderly would be the word. That kind of love can be tough to see, though probably not for you, Father, if it seems likely to lead to a litter of Catholic babies. But it can be hard for a single guy. I can handle it, otherwise I couldn’t work at Enzo’s. Guys are always proposing, couples celebrating engagements, anniversaries, Valentine’s Day, whatever. Hug hug. Kiss kiss. For the moment.

  “Ray’s telling his girlfriend something, and she’s hanging on every word. She adores him. I bring them their escarole. Delicious. They’re staring at each other: serious, confused, happy beyond anything that could possibly involve sautéed greens. Maybe she’s pregnant, maybe he’s proposed. I’ve seen it all, Father.

  “No dessert, thanks. Ray and his girl order espressos. They’re not planning on sleeping much.

  “Finally Ray says, ‘Mario, bring us a bottle of good champagne. No, make that a great champagne.’ Because guess what? They’re engaged!

  “Congratulations! I have to smile and pop the champagne while my head is exploding from envy. Or maybe it’s despair. I remember from Catholic school: despair of the distance from God is worse than murder or whatever. I may have gotten that wrong. When I saw them together I knew that happiness was a zero-sum commodity. More for them, none for me. I knew there was no hope for me, no chance for the friendship and love of a decent woman. I will never have what they have. And why? Because I’m not smart enough, not good enough, not handsome enough, not rich enough, not lucky enough—”

  “As long as we are still alive, there is hope, my son. Infinite hope.”

  “Maybe. But not for me. To be honest, Father, I wanted the guy dead. No, not dead. I wanted him never to have existed, never to have paraded his love in front of me like something that everyone has so much of that we can all afford to be generous and happy for everyone else. Is that a sin, Father?”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself, my son.”

  Don’t be so hard on yourself? Seriously? What about the part where the sinner is told to scourge his skin raw, to let leeches feed on his flesh, to cross the burning sands on his knees to the holy shrine? Mario must have wandered into some progressive Catholic Worker–type shit. Go forth and feed the homeless. Ladle Thanksgiving turkey gravy over the instant mashed potatoes of the poor and despised, a job for which his lifetime career in the food services industry has left him extremely well qualified.

  “Try to keep a loving heart and avoid sin, my son. Do your best to correct your faults and ask God for mercy. Go in peace, but before you leave, pause for a moment of prayer in the House of God.”

  “Will do,” says Mario. So does that wrap things up? He doesn’t feel any better or worse than he did when he walked in. Did the priest just catch him checking his watch? God sees.

  “Good-bye, Father, thanks again.” Mario stands, stumbling slightly. His knees aren’t what they used to be. That’s going to make his job harder. What bad knees will mean at Enzo’s is what Mario is thinking about as he leaves the confessional booth.

  The woman at the altar has gone. The priest told him to stay a while, and just in case he’s watching, Mario’s too self-conscious to leave. He sits in the last pew. What now? He bows his head, and with his eyes closed he sees what he was blind to, before. The church isn’t just poor. It’s dying. Everywhere around this slice of prime real estate, condos are going up. They’re building high-rises in alleys. This square footage is worth a fortune. The diocese is not going to keep this place open, especially when an upscale church of St. Francis is thriving, a few blocks away. And what will happen to the priest? He’ll be sent further down the food chain. A doomed priest in a doomed church has given the sacrament of confession to a man whose sins aren’t serious enough to be damned for. He looks at the crucifix over the altar, and it seems to him that the tilt of Christ’s head says, You think I died for you?

  Cheer up. The day isn’t over. He’s looking forward to seeing Mister Monkey. Who cares if it’s a children’s musical about a chimpanzee? He likes seeing what different casts do with an idiotic play. Once he saw a production in which they did the whole first half in silent pantomime, and the kids in the audience were positively shrieking with boredom.

  Not counting the Bronx Civic Opera La Bohème, which Mario and his eighth-grade pals mocked, warbling filthy made-up arias in their cracking voices, the first play Mario ever saw was Uncle Vanya. A Broadway producer gave Enzo tickets, and Enzo gave them to Mario only because Mario was the first waiter he passed en route to the kitchen. Such are the workings of God.

  Lucia, Mario’s fiancée, had left him not long before. She’d said he wasn’t the person she’d thought he was, but in fact he was that person and was never going to be anyone but that person. She was the one who’d pretended to be someone else, someone who wanted a life of simple contentment with Mario. By then Mario had moved back to his parents’ house for what he’d thought would be a few weeks. He’d been grateful for the chance to spend an evening out. Who cared what the tickets were for? A movie. The theater. A circus.

  The Chekhov play was performed in a loft for an audience so small that everyone knew Mario didn’t belong and probably suspected him of stealing the Broadway producer’s tickets. Or so he thought until he became so absorbed in the drama that he was no longer himself but an invisible guest at Uncle Vanya’s home, a visitor who knew these people better than he had ever known anyone. No one had ever talked to him so openly about their deepest feelings. No one, not even Lucia. Certainly not her. He had never imagined that anyone else suffered the loneliness that came over him, like an illness, in a busy dining room surrounded by customers depending on him not to find an empty chair and put his head in his hands.

  Watching the play, Mario understood that you could never make someone fall in love with you, or stay in love with you. The actors were talking directly to him, telling him that he would never get Lucia back, that she would never love him no matter how many times she agreed to talk it over. When Nanny tried to comfort Sonya, tears welled up in Mario’s eyes. Silent, looking neither right nor left, Mario wept silently through the final scenes. Why had he enjoyed feeling so miserable? A normal person—by which he means a normal male person—would never have gone anywhere near a theater again.

  He’s often wanted to say something after a play, to wait near the stage door and tell an actor or director how much he’d admired the show. But he’s never known how to begin. Just the thought of it makes his heart race. It scares him to imagine talking to creative people, though he waits on plenty of them at Enzo’s. An exhausted actor might not want to hear Average Joe Waiter’s blubby admiration. People are likelier to be nice to you when you are bringing them food.

  Sometimes late at night, eating a bowl of cereal by the refrigerator light, Mario thinks about a play he has just seen, or seen long ago. Though he has never given anyone advice except about what to order for dinner, he has lots of advice for the characters. He wants to warn the crippled girl to forget the gentleman caller. He wants to tell King Lear not to be so reckless. Sometimes Enzo reminds Mario of Lear. Enzo’s son Ricky has grown up into a heartless shark who plans to rob his siblings blind. What will happen to Mario then? He is lucky to work at a place that values experience. Everywhere else in the city, the waiters are half his age and all look like
fashion models.

  By now Enzo’s regulars know that Mario likes the theater. Cheapskates offer him tickets instead of a tip, but decent guys like Ray leave both. Movie stars ask him what he’s seen lately, though they never listen unless he mentions a famous name, and then they say, I worked with that person. Mario reads theater reviews, but he goes his own way. It makes him happy to walk into a theater and see a spooky Richard Foreman set. He still remembers the Twelfth Night in which Viola and Sebastian dressed and looked identical, and Mario understood that Shakespeare was talking about finding the lost other half of your self. He often finds himself humming a Brecht song about a guy kissing a girl under a tree; a white cloud passes by, and years later the guy can’t remember the girl but only the cloud. Mario likes the idea of forgetting the girl and remembering the cloud, though he sometimes worries that theater is the cloud, that he understands and loves people in plays so much more than people in life.

  Of course he prefers it when great actors say beautiful lines, or when a brilliant director spins the straw of a crappy script into gold. But he’ll settle for less, much less: actors, an audience, a stage or something like one. A children’s play, if it’s free. That he’s seen Mister Monkey so many times lets him overlook the imbecilic plot and find out if the director has done anything interesting with the unpromising hand he’s been dealt.

  Mister Monkey! What time is it? How long has Mario been sitting in the back of the church? No one can fault him for daydreaming. A waiter can’t afford that luxury on the job. Six days a week, all his adult life, he’s had to pay attention. He deserves a few minutes of reverie in the House of God.

  He checks his watch. Thank you, Jesus. He still has half an hour. He stands and sits down again. Something’s thrumming in the air, a seismic rumble like a mild earthquake, the furnace kicking in, or a car radio blaring hip-hop so loud you can hear the bass line from half a block away. It feels like some dark scary premonition of . . . Could he be having a stroke?

  But it’s neither a stroke nor an omen. A pigeon has flown into the church, and the frantic beating of its wings feels like blood whirring in Mario’s head. The bird makes several passes through the air, then bashes into the ceiling, drops slightly, stunned, then recovers and resumes its anxious swooping flight. Mario’s superstitious: a bird in the house means death. Where is St. Francis when you need him to catch the feathered fucker?

  Calmer, the pigeon perches on a rafter, growling softly, its bottle-fly-green iridescent breast rising and falling. Mario hurries out of the church. A bird in the house means death. It was an omen, after all. A prophecy of doom, but not—this time—for him. Before long, condos will rise from this hallowed ground.

  THE ENTRANCE TO the theater admits Mario to a gloomy corridor smelling of dust and roach spray. He surrenders his ticket to a skinny, grizzled guy in a dirty sweatshirt. A young Indian woman in a blue policeman’s uniform hands Mario a sheaf of stapled pages, more like a press release than a program, and shows him to his seat among rows of uncomfortable chairs.

  Though Ray always gives Mario two tickets, he never invites anyone to go with him. The last time he brought a date—years ago—was a mistake. What had he been thinking to take Sally Ann, a pretty waitress at Enzo’s, to a revival of Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune? They cringed all through the sex scene, and their discomfort increased when it turned out that Frankie and Johnny worked at the same restaurant. Mario and Sally Ann couldn’t look at each other as Johnny desperately attempted to make Frankie fall in love with him, and the whole play had seemed to them to be about how Mario was never going to do that. He wasn’t even going to try. They never went out again, and Mario has never again risked an evening at the theater being spoiled for reasons unconnected to the play.

  Another advantage of having two tickets is that he can choose which seat to take. Today that choice is made by the time he reaches his row. On the far side of his two seats sits a heavy middle-aged woman wearing layers of hippie fringe and her long hair plaited into a bristling gray braid. Mario is ashamed of the intensity of his reluctance to sit beside her.

  He leaves an empty seat between them, settles in, and skims the program. Almost all the actors have been on Law & Order. The woman playing Portia toured with the road company of Wicked. A few cast members are currently studying at NYU. This is the first professional appearance of Adam Leigh, who will be playing Mister Monkey and who wants to give a special thanks and shout-out to his mom. Everyone wants to thank someone or give a shout-out to someone else.

  Mister Monkey is traditionally played by a child. One production cast a small woman as the monkey. Mario read about it, but the show closed before he could see it.

  THE LIGHTS COME up on the entire cast paired off in couples, arms outstretched for “Monkey Tango.” Mario has seen the play often enough so that he usually knows who everybody is, but today he’s confused. Which actress is Portia, and which is Janice? One of the women is wearing a chic black dress and a black bag, swinging from her shoulder. That must be Portia. The lawyer. The other is wearing a rainbow Harpo Marx wig and a tight shiny purple suit. She’s got to be Janice. But as the dance continues and various pantomimes—miniduets foreshadowing the rest of play—take place, Mario realizes that the actress in the wig is playing Portia and the redhead in the little black dress in Janice. How strange.

  Everyone flings themselves into a square dance, then 1970s disco, hey hey monkey time, a few booty shakes of salsa, then they extend their arms and arch their backs for a rigid-with-shame mock-tango. Mario can’t stop staring at the woman in the rainbow wig, at the sad-clown suffering so visible on her happy happy face. Her eyelids snap open and shut like a doll’s. How can she open her mouth so wide without unhinging her jaw?

  Monkey Tango.

  Orangutang-o.

  You rang? Oh tango.

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

  Monkey tango. Into the jungle. With me.

  The kid playing Mister Monkey isn’t dancing with anyone but lacing his way among the dancers, creeping across the stage like a sadistic psycho in a home-invasion thriller. The rest of the cast seems afraid of him, especially the actress in purple, who visibly recoils whenever he comes near her. Has she found a new take on Portia: a monkey-phobic woman who refuses to let fear keep her from doing the right thing and defending an innocent chimpanzee?

  Or not so innocent, maybe. The kid plays the chimp like a rooster, a cock of the walk, elbowing actors out of his way. A family is under the thumb of a primate juvenile delinquent. Something is very wrong. Interesting, really interesting as a choice for Mister Monkey. But also disturbing. Mario looks around. Are the parents worried about their kids picking up bad behavior from a monkey? The parents don’t want to think too deeply about what the monkey’s doing. They paid good money for tickets. The play is supposed to be fun.

  The house lights go down, and a pale yellow circle—the full moon—rises against the worn curtain. There’s no orchestra, just a tape. It’s Mister Monkey karaoke. Even so, it’s familiar. Mister Monkey is about to tell the moon, in song, the tragic backstory of what happened to his parents, killed in Africa by the poachers who also murdered his adoptive stepmom, the sainted Mrs. Jimson. He’s about to sing about playing toss-the-coconut with his monkey mom and dad. Can his parents hear him? Where are they now? Before his own parents died, Mario used to think that this song was stupid, but now he finds it hateful, because it brings tears to his eyes.

  Mario has never before seen an aggressive Mister Monkey stride out of the wings and hunker downstage front and pummel the audience with a hip-hop rant about how Mister Monkey came to live with the Jimsons. His shoulders are hunched, he’s making those overhand lunges, pointing at the ground and (could this be true?) his crotch. And yet he doesn’t look like a rapper. He can’t quite carry it off. He looks like a child in a monkey suit, trying to rap. Of course Mister Monkey is angry at the criminals who destroyed his idyllic jungle existence.

  It’s riveting but
scary, and Mario’s surprisingly moved, because the subject, underneath everything, is the death of parents. Does the child playing the monkey worry, as Mario used to, about when his parents will die?

  The woman with the fringed shawl, one chair over from Mario, is rocking in her seat and gesturing at the stage, as if she’s trying to signal the monkey. Obviously she’s insane. A man in front of her turns around, but she’s not quite disruptive enough—not yet—for someone to call an usher. What is she doing here, alone at a children’s matinee? Like me, Mario can’t help thinking. But who would give her free tickets? She calms down when the Jimson kids prance out and yank Mister Monkey around.

  Mister Monkey lets himself be yanked, though there’s an unsettling moment when Mister Monkey’s teenage siblings seem to have discovered something disgusting on their hands. They’re kids, but they’re professional enough to get past it and go on. Or perhaps it’s happened before.

  Finally the song ends. Mister Monkey exits stage left, and the focus shifts to the Jimsons.

  Mr. Jimson is being played by a handsome but oafish-looking young actor. Still panting from their monkey dance, his teenage son and daughter look stricken.

  Mr. Jimson’s girlfriend, Janice, a confident, plucky redhead, clicks her long red talons like castanets. She sings the first verse of her song about how much she loves her fingernails. Biting them, chewing them, scratching her back. For a woman who is singing a love song to fingernails and who by the end of the play will go to jail for falsely accusing a monkey, Janice, in her little black frock, projects a calm assertiveness that Mario finds appealing.

  Given Mister Monkey’s explosive edge, Mario tenses when a cop goose-steps onstage to arrest him. Mario recognizes the Indian girl who handed out the theater programs, only now she’s wearing a red clown nose and giant yellow shoes. The kids in the crowd think she’s hilarious, so she has to let the laughter subside before she grabs the monkey’s arm. The monkey high-fives the policewoman, who high-fives him back, and they skip off arm in arm. Whoever this monkey is angry at, it’s not the girl playing the cop.