Mister Monkey

by Francine Prose

  Eric, she’s glad to see, is on high alert. He’s watchful, but he too is waiting before he wades in and pulls Adam off Margot.

  The disaster they’ve all feared is finally happening, though each has pictured a different disaster, or near disaster. Now all they can do is watch from across the gap between the reality and whatever they’d imagined even as they convinced themselves that, if they were lucky, nothing would happen.

  EARLIER THIS AFTERNOON Roger called a meeting to tell the cast what they already knew. Mister Monkey is terminal: the production has two weeks. Everyone’s sorry. They want the play to go on; it’s a job, it’s work in the theater, it’s not being unemployed.

  Everyone is sorry but Eleanor, who only auditions for shows that she knows won’t run for long. Not that she wants to jinx things, but from the start it was clear that Mister Monkey was unlikely to move to Broadway or become a perennial off-off-Broadway hit.

  The hospital lets her work half-time and is flexible about her hours. She can start her shift after the play. But she can’t expect them to be patient forever.

  That could be one reason why she’s the only one in the cast who has been having fun. She’s the only one who isn’t concerned about her future.

  It’s taken focus to play Janice, plotting to ruin everyone’s life, when in fact Eleanor is so often worried about her colleagues. Margot has every right to panic. What could be more scary than the prospect of middle age in a clown wig trashing The Merchant of Venice to save an abusive preteen chimp you legally represent? Roger is running on empty. Eric and Rita are in love with each other and with other people. Adam is darkness, darkness, terror, and rage building toward a volcanic eruption inside a monkey suit, and Giselle, poor Giselle, is nearly out of her wits.

  How ironic that Eleanor should play the villain when she is the only one with compassion for the others, with sympathy for all of them, hapless children of God. Though—she’s only human—she does have a problem with Margot.

  Maybe there’s some special mood-altering chemical in the adhesive, but whenever Eleanor puts on Janice’s press-on nails, she feels the bubbly onslaught of bliss. She’s exactly where she wants to be, doing what she wants to do.

  When she sings her gross, crowd-pleasing, chorus-girl high-kicking song about how she adores her nails—biting them, chewing them, scratching herself with them—she means every disgusting word. She loves peeling off her nails like a stripper and flipping them into the crowd and seeing the well-behaved audience turn into a grade-school mosh pit. Eleanor loves Mister Monkey and everything about it. After being a saint at the hospital, it’s not just a release but also a blessing to play a lying, scheming, heartless, gold-digging bitch.

  Eleanor has enjoyed it, or most of it, but it will seem like a vacation—not to go to the hospital directly from the theater.

  When he’d given them the bad news, Roger, lately grown so detached, rallied enough to exhort them to keep pushing their limits, giving the play their best shot, to remember that they are artists telling the stories of the tribe.

  For the second time, Roger told them to do it for the Fat Lady, which Eleanor feels is a private message for her, whether or not Roger knows it. Except perhaps for Margot, she is the only one who might get the reference to Franny and Zooey, the book that changed her life, the book that woke her up to the fact that she and other beings have precious living souls, the book that made her begin to understand that everyone has a Buddha nature, which we can see if we only look hard and patiently enough.

  She has never mentioned this coincidence, if that’s what it is. The subject is way more personal than she wants to get with Roger, who has always liked her, and certainly way more spiritual than anything she wants to discuss with Margot, who has never liked Eleanor and who never will.

  From the first day of rehearsals, Roger treated Margot badly. He’s more impatient with her than with anyone, even Giselle. That’s another reason why he’s resisted scolding Adam or even firing him, as Eleanor has suggested to him during more than one maddening conversation.

  Roger went deaf when Eleanor talked about the production being sued, a word that in her experience usually sharpens people’s hearing. He claimed to be in control.

  Just between the two of them, he said, Eleanor had to admit: this is definitely the most interesting thing to have ever come out of Mister Monkey. They’re watching male adolescence happen! In real time! Onstage!

  Roger pretended not to hear her ask, What if someone gets hurt?

  When Roger announced that the run was ending, his restored attentiveness and momentary zeal were so unexpected and touching that not one person snickered at the idea of Mister Monkey as the story of any tribe, anywhere. Besides, they knew Roger wasn’t talking to them. He was aiming his Hail Mary–pass pep talk at Adam’s heart, or whatever organ governs his behavior. Roger preached at Adam, as if his speech about theater and art might somehow tamp down the hormones (Eleanor hopes it’s hormones) that has made it tricky to work with him.

  Margot calls Adam an embryonic sexual freak, and Eleanor believes her, though he has never gotten funny with her or Rita, or Lakshmi, before she got fired. If Adam wandered into Eleanor’s ER, she’d suggest a psych workup. She’d page the best guy in psychiatric and, if necessary, the beefiest, kindliest orderly who’s handy with a syringe.

  ADAM HOLDS ON to Margot’s foot. The audience waits, silent, motionless, like the dead in Our Town. What are they waiting for? After an eternity, Adam releases Margot and lopes offstage. Portia totters a little, then gives the phone a girlish punt beneath the edge of the backdrop. The audience applauds, but this time with less jubilation than relief. At least he didn’t flip Margot off the edge of the stage, which is what Eleanor has feared. What she was prepared to prevent.

  Standing nearby Eleanor, watching from the wings, Rita refuses to look at her. Except for Roger and (possibly) Adam, the cast doesn’t like her. They’ve confused her with Janice, the witch. How could they, of all people, not understand that she’s chosen to stay in character when she’s in the theater? And why couldn’t she tell them? Janice never would.

  The moment she peels off the press-on nails—ta da!—she morphs back into Eleanor, the only person in Crazy Town who knows that someone is going to have to talk to Adam before someone else gets hurt.

  Officially, that’s Roger’s job. But Roger’s not going to do it.

  And now it’s happened, or almost. Adam needs to be helped. Or stopped.

  Eleanor is good with people. She can figure out what’s wrong and what to do about it. It’s her job in the hospital, and it’s fallen to her here. She’s the one who steps in when no one else will step up. She has become the go-to person for cases that not even the social workers will touch.

  Not long before the Mister Monkey rehearsals began, an old man came in to the ER, having just murdered his cat, which he’d brought with him in a black plastic trash bag. He’d killed it because his wife was dead, and he was alone. He was afraid of dying, but he was more afraid of his cat eating him after his death.

  No one wanted to touch this. They’d called Eleanor, who bypassed the curtained cubicles and put the elderly gentleman in the one consultation room where the magazines hadn’t been stolen. She was the person who paged the psych guy and the orderly she would call, if she had to, for Adam. Everyone knows what Eleanor does, which is why the folks in administration have been flexible about shifting her hours to make time for Mister Monkey.

  Compared with the old man and his cat, Adam will be a breeze, though Eleanor has no idea what she’ll say. It’s easier in the ER. Just being there means that you’re asking for help. Adam hasn’t asked Eleanor for anything. Though isn’t grabbing Margot’s foot a plea for someone to pay attention?

  As Adam muscles past Eleanor on his way offstage, she grabs his arm and says, “Adam, I need to talk to you later. Let’s go get a cup of coffee after the show.”

  Weeks ago Eleanor would never have done that. Mister Monkey and Janice are
arch enemies and rivals. And back then Adam had still seemed like a normal kid, on the grumpy side, but at the age when boys are either enraged or unattractively eager to please the adults.

  The situation has deteriorated and now has reached the point at which Eleanor must weigh safety and common sense against Mister Monkey the Musical’s paper-thin resemblance to art.

  Adam shrugs off her hand, but the tilt of his monkey chin tells her that he likes the idea. A grown-up woman is asking him out for a grown-up drink.

  He knows he’s in trouble for what he just did to Margot. But even if Eleanor yells at him, it will be more interesting than sitting around and waiting for his gaga mom to quit bothering gaga Roger.

  When the curtain drops, Eleanor waits until Giselle rushes backstage to get a note from Roger. Shouldn’t the note be about Adam’s twisting Margot’s leg? Shouldn’t someone talk to Adam? Shouldn’t it be his mother? Or failing that, the director? Giselle and Roger will find a way to avoid the subject. This is how murders happen with lots of people around. Eleanor should find Margot and make sure she’s okay. But someone else, Eric or Rita, will have to do that.

  Slumped against the wall outside Roger’s office, in an orange T-shirt with white bleach blossoms and baggy lemon-yellow satin basketball shorts, Adam could be any sad guilty kid waiting for his mom to emerge from a parent-principal conference. Eleanor has changed out of Janice’s little black dress and slipped into the faded green scrubs that will save her time when she gets to work.

  Maybe not being Janice will make it easier to get through to Adam. Wrong! When he sees what Eleanor’s wearing, he scowls. His immediate future has gone from cool to embarrassing: coffee with a nurse. At the same time he can’t quite believe that Eleanor has actually come to find him.

  “Ready?” Eleanor says.

  Adam shuts his eyes and shakes his head. His cheeks wobble like a baby’s. Even though he’s a gymnast he’s going soft in that way boys do just before they turn into men. He can’t look at her when he says, “You need to ask my mom.”

  Eleanor opens Roger’s door without knocking. Roger has his back to the wall. Giselle sits demurely in a chair, Adam’s monkey suit neatly folded in her lap. Giselle has told Eleanor that she hand-washes the costume every night, because she doesn’t trust the dry cleaners not to soak it in poison, and because she’s read how dust mites can damage Adam’s respiratory system. Has Eleanor heard about this in her work as a health professional? Eleanor said no, she hadn’t, and when Giselle looked crushed, she’d said she’d ask; new information comes down the pipeline, all the time.

  Eleanor doesn’t want to know what Giselle and Roger are discussing. She asks Giselle if she can borrow Adam for fifteen minutes and go get a cup of coffee.

  Giselle’s face goes slack with horror. Why is Eleanor doing this to her? Perhaps because her son just grabbed an actress’s foot and almost flipped her? That may be why Eleanor might want to talk to him now.

  In fact Giselle is grateful, but her fragile pride in her mothering skills won’t let her admit it.

  “Adam doesn’t drink coffee.”

  “Of course,” says Eleanor. “A soda.” She should have said juice.

  Even Eleanor tortures Giselle, though she tries hard not to. Giselle squinches her eyes and shakes her head. It’s where Adam got the gesture. It would kill him to know that.

  “Bullshit, Mom,” says Adam, who has wedged behind Eleanor in the half-open door. “I fucking drink Red Bull.”

  “Adam!” says Giselle.

  “Juice?” says Eleanor. “Orange juice?”

  “Organic?” Giselle pleads.

  “And an order of General Tsao’s chicken,” says Adam. “For one. Right, Mom?”

  “Please, Adam, please don’t.” Giselle is practically whimpering.

  “Back in fifteen minutes!” trills Eleanor, ignoring Roger’s expression: the kidnap victim whose rescuer is leaving without hearing the cries from the basement. Roger and Giselle should be thanking Eleanor for doing their job.

  Adam follows Eleanor out of the theater. The audience has fled. The only person around is a man with a long sad face who looks like Boris Karloff and seems to be waiting for someone.

  “See ya, Frankenstein,” Adam says, halfway down the block. “That freak is here every day.”

  How could Eleanor not have noticed? Because she’s always running off to the hospital. She reminds herself to text Betsy, the head nurse, and say she’ll be late.

  Talking to Adam will be hard enough without having to watch the clock. Eleanor takes Adam’s arm, to hurry him. It’s a shock to feel skin instead of nubbly chenille. She’d forgotten how short he is. His anger has made him seem taller. No wonder he’s unhappy. Adam pulls away and follows her down the block to the café that says We’re French by serving thin bitter coffee in awkward soup bowls.

  Adam stands in front of the bakery counter and gapes at the croissants, apple tarts, macaroons.

  “You’ve been here, right?” asks Eleanor. Wrong again.

  “A billion times,” lies Adam.

  “What would you like, Adam?” Eleanor has learned, in her work in the ER, that it’s helpful to say the patient’s first name as often as she can without it seeming peculiar. In TV detective procedurals, the cops keep repeating first names—sometimes to comfort the victim, sometimes to extract a confession from the perp.

  Most of the other nurses use surnames with adults, but Eleanor thinks it’s a mistake. The Jamaican nurses say honey and dear, but Eleanor can’t. And certainly not with Adam.

  Adam says, “I’ll take two of those almond thing-ies. And a large coffee. Black.”

  It’s madness to let a testosterone-poisoned twelve-year-old stoke up on sugar and caffeine. He’ll tell Giselle, if he thinks it might upset her. So what? One cup of coffee won’t hurt. Let the kid feel grown-up.

  “We only have one size ,” says the barista, her white toque rakishly bobby-pinned to her jaggedly cropped ice-blue hair. Eleanor thinks, I used to be you, or a version of you. I used to be worse off than you. My dad was so cheap I had to clean up little-kid vomit from the rides at the local amusement park so I could have money to go to the movies.

  Adam says, “Then I’ll take whatever fucking size coffee you fucking have.”

  “Bad words!” says Eleanor.

  Now the young woman looks at them. She sees a boy and a nurse. She raises her eyebrows, one more slowly than the other because of the piercings. By the time Eleanor has paid a shocking sum for their coffee and croissants, Adam has taken his bowl and plate to a table and is sitting with his back against the window. He has already eaten most of one pastry. He’s got almonds and sugar all over his mouth. He looks defiantly at Eleanor.

  “Hungry,” she says.

  “Fuck yeah. You try climbing around that theater like a tweaking chimpanzee when every second you know some cheap-ass construction could break and paralyze you forever. Did you know that chimpanzees fall from really high up in the jungle? And die?”

  Sir, where does it hurt, sir? When did the pain begin? Honey, can you rate your pain on a scale of one to ten? In the ER, Eleanor would know what to say, but here, surrounded by strangers focused on trying to keep their coffee from dripping into their laptops, she doesn’t know where to begin.

  She has never looked at Adam this closely. Not even during “Monkey Tango.” She always turned away, flashing the audience with her smile, belting out the lyrics. Mister Monkey is the smartest, cutest, nicest, strongest, most powerful chimp of all. Wasn’t that enough for Mister Monkey? No. As it turned out, no.

  Adam’s skin is smooth, almost waxy, but the circles under his eyes give him the look of an aging, Satan-worshipping rock star. He’s put on weight. He used to jump into Margot’s arms. Margot used to catch him. Gone forever, those innocent days.

  Adam says, “Did you know that monkeys and humans share ninety-eight percent of the same DNA? Do you know that lots of monkeys can sing, and the male monkeys with the best voices attract
the most fertile females? Do you know that male chimpanzees don’t enter puberty until they’re fifteen and that they sometimes eat infant baboons? Do you know that chimpanzees have wars, and that a mother and daughter chimp turned into serial psycho killers, murdering and eating babies? When I read that, I wanted . . . I just wanted to just give up. Do you know that practically every monkey in the wild, everywhere in the world, is in danger of extinction because their habitats are disappearing? Do you know that some monkey breeds will become extinct before humans get a chance to even see them? Do you know that when a chimpanzee is happy, his eyes sparkle like a human’s? Do you—”

  “Interesting!” interrupts Eleanor. It suddenly seems possible that Adam could go on reciting monkey fun facts until it’s time to bring him back to Giselle. “No, I did not know any of that. How do you know so much about monkeys, Adam? Are you studying monkeys in school?”

  “I don’t go to school. I was kicked out. My private school hated me so much they wouldn’t take my dad’s thirty-five grand a year.”

  Eleanor would like to know why, but asking might further dampen Adam’s mood. Giselle never mentioned Adam’s school. Usually that’s the first thing New York parents tell you, even in the ER, where you’d think it wouldn’t matter.

  “Me and my best friend Derek set the gym on fire. So I’m being homeschooled.” Finger-quotes around schooled. Adam’s got confectioners’ sugar all over his plump little hands. Shouldn’t a gymnast have calluses? The monkey suit, thinks Eleanor.

  Adam’s exaggerating. But something happened. Eleanor needs to stay focused on what he just did to Margot. She needs to gain his trust in order to get him talking. In that way, he’s like a small grown man: he’ll only listen if he’s talking.

  “Homeschooling . . . meaning you and your mom?” Eleanor takes a bite of croissant to chase away the tragic Old Master painting that’s appeared, like a hologram, in her head: Adam and Giselle alone, at night, a dimly lit table covered with books. Adam is sleeping, or pretending to. Giselle sits there, sad and mystified, watching her son. A religious painting in an abandoned church.