Mister Monkey

by Francine Prose

  “Right. Just me and mom. Plus of course Wikipedia to fill Mom’s gaps. My mother has a lot of gaps, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  “So what are you studying?”

  “Monkeys,” Adam says sourly. “Darwin.” Adam looks at Eleanor to see how she’s reacting.

  Eleanor cannot think of one thing to say about Darwin. How stupid she’s become! She needs to cut herself some slack. It’s a lot: the hospital, Mister Monkey, and now trying to fix Adam for long enough to get through the final performances.

  Adam says, “Want to know some interesting facts about bonobos?”

  Eleanor knows where this is going. Once a famous opera singer came into the ER with tonsillitis; his doctor was in the Hamptons. He tricked Eleanor into agreeing that tonsils were a vestigial organ, so he could say, as he must have said to countless women: what about the clitoris, isn’t that a vestigial organ? Eleanor had asked him to rate his pain on a scale of one to ten. “Six,” he said, “sixty-nine,” and laughed. Let Adam talk about bonobos. Talking is better than silence.

  He takes a giant swallow of coffee and chokes, his brimming eyes trapped and mortified behind the scarlet face of a breathless boy.

  Finally he says, “Little known fact. Bonobos are the only species besides human to have missionary sex. It’s how they say hello. Welcome home. They let bonobo children hook up as soon as they figure out what goes where. Why couldn’t Mister Monkey be a bonobo? Who would you rather live with, a bunch of bonobos feeling good? Or chimpanzees eating each other’s babies? Or humans waterboarding each other and destroying the planet?”

  “That’s harsh,” Eleanor says. “That’s not all humans do.” In the ER, this would be the moment when she’d quietly ask Adam, or his appropriate adult, if he was taking any medications . . . for example, for depression.

  “What else?” demands Adam. “Build bridges? Fly drones? What do we do that’s worth doing?”

  “We write children’s musicals about pickpocket chimpanzees.”

  One corner of Adam’s mouth twitches. Coffee foam clings to his lower lip. He wipes his mouth with his paper napkin.

  Eleanor says, as gently as she can, “Adam, what you’ve been doing onstage—you think that’s how bonobos act?”

  Adam stares into his coffee. “Okay. Maybe not. I was trying to work in some hip-hop moves I’ve been teaching myself in the gym where I work out.”

  “How often do you work out?”

  “Not as often as I used to.” He pokes both thumbs at his stomach, then pinches the roll of baby fat under his shirt.

  Eleanor says, “Your body’s constantly changing. In seven years you won’t have one cell you have now.” That’s not exactly true, but it’s the kind of thing kids like to believe. They can still turn into a whole new person.

  “Change for the worse.” Adam bites into his second pastry. “Can I ask you something? Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “Not at the moment,” Eleanor says. “To be honest with you, Adam, I’ve had plenty of boyfriends. I haven’t had one for three, four years. And you know what? I’m working two jobs. I’m busy. I don’t miss it. Maybe I’ll have another boyfriend sometime. But why are we talking about me?”

  Adam says, “Do you know that once this orangutan practically raped a human female? And that young male orangutans are practically constantly gang-raping female orangutans?”

  Eleanor says, “Adam, you’re not an orangutan. You’re a human. And you can’t keep doing what you’re doing to Margot. Someone’s going to get hurt.”

  Adam recoils, as if from a slap. It’s the first time they’ve mentioned Margot. He turns and looks out the window for so long that Eleanor is losing hope of ever restarting the conversation when he turns back and says, “How old is she?”

  “Who?” Eleanor knows who.

  “Margot.” Adam shuts his eyes when he says her name.

  “Hard to tell. Early forties, maybe.”

  “That’s what I figured,” Adam says. “I Googled her and added five years.”

  “Why do you ask?” says Eleanor, though she knows that too.

  “I think I love her,” mumbles Adam so softly that Eleanor has to lean forward to hear. “Does that make me a totally sick person? She’s like thirty years older than me.”

  “Not at all,” says Eleanor. “When I was your age, I was in love with my science teacher and my drama teacher. That’s why I’m doing what I’m doing today.”

  There was no science teacher, there was no drama teacher. Eleanor is saying whatever she thinks will make Adam feel less alone.

  “I hate being a kid,” says Adam.

  “Try not to,” says Eleanor. “You won’t be a kid much longer. You won’t be living with your mom all your life. Nothing stays the same.”

  “Whatever,” Adam says. Then even more dubiously, “I’ll try.” He’s heard what she has to say.

  Eleanor should let it go, but she can’t. There’s one more clause in the treaty they need to hammer out together. “You can’t keep sliming Jason and Danielle with spit or snot or whatnot.”

  “How do you even know about that? Did those bitches tell you?”

  “We watch each other. We watch people. We’re actors. That’s what we do.”

  “I guess.” Adam likes her calling him an actor.

  At the table beside them are two elderly women, old friends. Eleanor wishes she could be having coffee with them. She wishes she was at work. She is at work. She’s just supposed to be somewhere else.

  It’s a law of nature: at the worst possible moment, her phone chirps. At first she thinks it’s Giselle, demanding she return Adam. But Giselle doesn’t have her number. Eleanor declines the call, and when it buzzes back as a text, she sees that it’s Betsy, from the hospital.

  “My day job,” she tells Adam.

  Adam says, “You could make a fortune consulting for a TV medical show. My mom met a woman who does that and is going to get me an audition.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Eleanor says.

  “So could I ask you one more thing?”

  “Depends.” Eleanor braces herself.

  “Why do you bother? You waste all that time and energy getting them breathing again or starting their hearts up when you know the polar ice caps are melting, and the city will be flooded or burn to a crisp, and the monkeys are disappearing forever, and everyone will either drown or die of thirst or both. So what the fuck?”

  “Bad word,” says Eleanor. “How’s that going to play out? I’m sorry, sir, I’d like to help you with your gunshot wound, or your toddler who’s eaten all the Tylenol, or Grandma’s broken leg, but the world’s going to end pretty soon so we can just do nothing and wait for the apocalypse.”

  Adam says, “I wasn’t going to hurt Margot.”

  “I know that,” Eleanor says. “But you could have broken her ankle.”

  She wishes she could forget the look on Margot’s face when Adam grabbed her foot. She looked like someone remembering some past hurt and fear. Eleanor has seen a YouTube clip of Frances Farmer, the beautiful lobotomized actress, on the 1950s TV show This Is Your Life. You could watch her wondering how to arrange her face, how she was supposed to feel about the most important people in her life.

  Early in rehearsals, Margot asked Eleanor out for coffee and got on the subject of some drama school production of Uncle Vanya. Right in this café, Margot did Sonya’s final speech.

  Embarrassing! Eleanor had always loved that speech, but Margot made it sound like bullshit. A life of service? Meaning what? Chekhov was a doctor, he’d worked through a cholera plague. He knew, and Eleanor knows, what service is.

  Margot is a child of God, Eleanor reminds herself.

  “Margot hates me now,” Adam says. “I don’t know why I’m so mean to her.”

  Eleanor says, “Sometimes we treat the people we love worse—” She stops in midsentence, appalled by the platitude burbling out of her mouth.

  Adam looks as if a gunman has just burst in the door,
but Eleanor knows the danger isn’t in front of his eyes but behind them. His horror grows as tears well up, slowly at first, then faster, gelid and fat. Giselle would blame Eleanor for making him cry. Giselle should be having this conversation.

  Eleanor wants to put her arm around Adam’s shoulders, but her job in the ER has taught her how to tell who wants to be touched and who doesn’t. Adam doesn’t. He stops crying and drags his arm across his face.

  He says, “At least you got to have your lives. You got to grow up. Every night I look out our window, at that view my mom is so crazy about, and I see the flood, like in some cheesy disaster movie where the dad tries to get his family to higher ground. If my dad saves anyone, it’ll be Heidi and baby Arturo. But Dad won’t even save them. He’s not smart enough or brave enough or—”

  Eleanor says, “My dad was the miser in the fairy tale. He made me work in an amusement park mopping up toddler puke.”

  Adam says, “Gross. Coney Island will go first. My dad isn’t that bad. He gives me a twenty whenever I see him. Which isn’t that often.”

  “I used to be like you,” Eleanor says.

  “I doubt it,” Adam says. And he’s right. She was angry. But she didn’t grab someone’s foot onstage. She didn’t think the world was ending. The world didn’t end.

  “Want to see something?”

  “Sure,” Adam says uncertainly.

  Eleanor stands and turns her back to him, raises the blouse of her scrubs, lowers the waistband slightly. Adam makes sure that the two women beside them are deep in conversation, then looks more closely at Eleanor’s tattoo: a shattered bleeding heart encircled by a crown of thorns.

  “That’s a statement,” Adam says.

  “It was meant to be. That was my heart.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Time passed. I like my life. I like the people I know. Even Roger. Even you.”

  “Even Margot?”

  Eleanor wishes he weren’t making her lie. She wishes he didn’t know it.

  “Margot too.” A child of God. But she’s not going to say that.

  “There’s so much time between now and when I’m grown up.”

  “It goes fast.”

  “And what do I do until then?”

  Adam thinks there’s so much time, but there’s no time at all. Eleanor needs to be at work. She tries not to look at her phone.

  She says, “You’re an actor,”

  “I guess,” says Adam. “My friend Derek says I’m a poseur.”

  “Then he’s jealous of you. And he’s not your friend.”

  “That’s what my mom says,” says Adam.

  “She’s not wrong about everything. Give her some credit.”

  “The play’s closing,” Adam says. “So much for my acting career.”

  “It’s not just this play. It’s your life. Act like you don’t think the world is ending. Act like you think it can be fixed.” Eleanor wants to say: do it for the Fat Lady. But Adam would think she meant Giselle and, even if she could explain, it would deafen him to the rest.

  Eleanor says, “You’ve got talent. You can have a fun life.”

  “Where? Underwater? Blue and with gills?”

  “On planet Earth. Breathing oxygen.”

  Adam doesn’t answer. They look down. The table is covered with crumbs. Eleanor looks Adam in the eye and flicks, or tries to flick, a crumb at him. The crumb sticks to the table.

  “Goddammit,” Eleanor says.

  “You need the press-on nails,” says Adam.

  “That I do,” says Eleanor.

  In this café full of strangers, the nails are the secret that she and Adam share. The secret is that they are actors. Less than an hour ago Eleanor had long red nails and was scheming to put an innocent monkey in jail.

  The story of Janice’s fingernails is the story of their tribe. Eleanor and Adam have been doing something together, creating a world, the illusion of a world, the world that is Mister Monkey. That world has music and color, song and dance, villains and lovers and heroes. It transcends Roger’s tyranny and vagueness, transcends Adam’s feelings for Margot; transcends the group nervous breakdown occurring backstage. It is the consolation and the reward for what Adam is suffering at home. Janice’s fingernails and Adam’s monkey suit are all they need to make them, and the people who watch them, feel less alone.

  Adam doesn’t need to be punished or medicated. He needs to have faith and grow up and be less sad. Eleanor looks across the table at Adam, whose eyes are shining. With tears? With hope? With chimpanzee happiness?

  “You’ll be happy, I promise,” Eleanor says.

  “Okay, fine,” says Adam. “I’ll try to be more boring. Mom’s got to be finished driving Roger nuts.”

  Eleanor says, “Roger’s already nuts. I’ve got to go to work. You want me to walk you back to the theater?”

  “Jesus Christ,” Adam says. “I’m twelve. I can walk down the fucking block.”

  “Bad word,” Eleanor says. “You promise you’ll keep your shit together?”

  Adam says, “I promise.”

  They get up and walk to the door. Eleanor leans down to kiss Adam’s cheek, and Adam, his sad chubby face clenched tight, tilts his chin so she can reach.

  ELEANOR MISSES THE crosstown bus and chases it to Seventh Avenue, where it pulls ahead. She runs the rest of the way to the hospital, rethinking her conversation with Adam, adding to it, improving upon it, telling him all the things she didn’t think of, things she didn’t have the time to say and probably wouldn’t and shouldn’t have said, if she’d had forever. Should she have told him that she understood something about him and his family because, on the night Mister Monkey opened, she’d seen his dad’s brittle trophy wife kneel and pretend-hug Adam just to torture Giselle? Eleanor’s glad she didn’t say that. It would have made Adam feel worse.

  Maybe she should have told him how her high school English teacher, whom she’d always despised, had assigned the class to read Franny and Zooey. She’d read and reread the section in which Franny repeats the Jesus prayer from the book in which a Russian pilgrim learns that constant repetition can synchronize the prayer with your heartbeat.

  Eleanor wasn’t going to waste her senior year repeating, Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy. But she’d liked the idea of something in tune with her heart.

  That was what Roger was quoting when he’d told the cast to do it for the Fat Lady. Do your best, act your heart out for the Holy Spirit or Jesus or the Buddha or whoever you want to imagine is out there in the audience, watching the performance and caring what you do. For the one person out there for whom it is making a difference. That was something Adam could think about. Something he could try.

  Eleanor doesn’t believe in God, but she does believe that every living creature has a soul like a sparkler throwing off shards of light. She believes that everyone is a child of God, though she can’t remember where she first heard that expression. She’s afraid it might have been some horror film about a cult, or a Joni Mitchell song. But so what? She’s made it her own, a cult of one, a cult in which she is the leader and the leader’s only disciple.

  It was almost like a science experiment she performed on herself. Whenever someone annoyed her, she would think, That person is a child of God. The algebra teacher who failed her was a child of God. The cop who nearly busted her and her friends for smoking pot in the park and made her friend give him a blow job, he was a child of God. Her miserly, mean, alcoholic father was a child of God. Her sad, delusional mother was a child of God.

  Eleanor whispered it under her breath until she no longer had to think or say it, because it was always there, synchronized with her heartbeat. Child of God, Child of God. All of them children of God. It got her through college and drama school, and then, when it became apparent that the theater might not be the best place for someone who wants to keep believing that the world is populated by God’s children, she’d decided to go to nursing school. That she can work in the ER and still find
time to act, that she can put in the days and nights she puts in, is a sign that her beliefs have not only made her a better person but also have magically enabled her to have her cake and eat it.

  How much could she have told Adam? It was better to keep it simple, to say what she said. Eleanor thinks she got through to him, but she’s been wrong before. Almost exactly a year ago a Columbia freshman staggered into the ER. They got his blood alcohol level down and sent him back to his dorm, and a few days later his body washed up against the Morton Street pier.

  It’s bad luck to think about that, especially now that she’s almost at work. But it’s important to remember and never let happen again. One difference between the ER and the theater is: in the ER, mistakes matter more. You don’t ask the director if you can incorporate them in your performance.

  THE EMERGENCY ROOM has seasons that change with the weather and time and day of the week. In the fall and on Halloween and St. Patrick’s Day, it’s alcohol-poisoned college kids. In the winter more fractures; more overdoses and suicide attempts in early spring. Since St. Vincent’s was razed to make room for condos, their territory has expanded. Now they see elderly tubercular bachelors from Chinatown, and West Village line chefs with lopped-off fingertips wrapped in dish towels. They don’t get as many stabbings and gunshots as they do in the boroughs, but enough taxi and bicycle accidents, enough heart attacks and strokes to remind them of why they are there.

  Eleanor’s mood bumps up a notch when she walks past the guard desk. Cranky Clarence is on duty, but even he gives her a nod.

  She loves the smell of the ER the way a farmer loves the smell of the earth, the sailor the salt of the sea. The sweet and sour bite of alcohol, floor soap, disinfectant, and something more organic, faintly rotten underneath. She loves the chemistry of panic overlaid with the hard-won patience and calm. The hospital is Eleanor’s life. The theater is recreation. Outsiders talk about the adrenaline rush of working at the ER, but they’re being reductive, distilling it down to one hormone.

  Cure sometimes, heal frequently, comfort always. They’ve all heard that saying at some point during their first week of medical or nursing school. It’s always seemed so much more useful than the curt, judgmental, unforgiving “First do no harm.” How do you know you’ve harmed someone until it’s too late? If Eleanor ever gets another tattoo, which she won’t, it will say “Cure sometimes, heal frequently, comfort always,” and she’ll ask that the words be arranged in a rainbow arc above her shattered, bleeding tattoo heart.