Mister Monkey

by Francine Prose

  Except, that is, for one beautiful line, a line that is like a prayer.

  In his experience, the children in the audience cannot make any sense of the play. None whatsoever. It’s okay to steal wallets as a party trick? But it’s not okay to steal them for real? Except that Mister Monkey didn’t really steal a wallet. The woman with the fingernails made that up.

  And when the truth comes out, everything’s fine, and everybody goes right back to happy-funny monkey-human life, except that the pretty redhead goes to jail. Any kid in the audience who pretends to be interested is faking it, he’s lying, and Mister Monkey hates lies, perhaps because in his monkey-god trickster career he has been forced to tell so many.

  Nor does he like the part about Mr. Jimson and his kids. Why couldn’t the antimonkey genius who wrote the play have given him monkey brothers and sisters? He’s seen a play about monkeys in Japan in which every primate had loving siblings.

  He hates the part about being taken from his home, about his parents’ murder. In real life they prosecute people who keep monkeys as pets. The authorities take the monkeys away and send them to live on refuges funded by wealthy American universities. He’s supposed to “get over” being orphaned and kidnapped, “healed” by singing one bullshit song about the moon. He should eat the fucking moon like a fucking mango.

  And he’s supposed to believe that Mr. Jimson and the kids are great, his heroes, his saviors, his adoptive family, how cute and chic to have a monkey. They must have a special variance passed by the city of New York, to say nothing of permission from their co-op board. They might as well be in league with the poachers. A maid taking care of him means what? Does the sexy Carmen comb his fur for nits as gently as his monkey mom did? Meanwhile around the world his cousins, if he has any cousins left, are being slaughtered and starved and forced out of their disappearing habitats and sent into lifelong incarceration and exile.

  Mister Monkey tries not to think about that, just as he tries not to think about the ridiculous lie that humans are more highly evolved than monkeys. He can fly through the air, he can swing from the trees, he can survive in the jungle. And what can humans do? Hold bogus trials and put on plays and kill monkeys so other humans can drill for oil and destroy the planet.

  There is so much that Mister Monkey doesn’t want in his mind: the sufferings of the confused and frightened child actor Adam, who is his current iteration on earth. The sadness of Adam’s mother and of the actress he torments onstage.

  Mister Monkey imagines the teacher Miss Sonya taking a sleeping pill, and (supposedly unevolved creature that he is!) he sees so deeply into Miss Sonya’s mind that it’s as if he has taken the pill himself, and he falls asleep.

  Mister Monkey loves to sleep. Because he dreams about the future.

  He sees Ray and Lauren at breakfast in their sunny kitchen. Lauren is pregnant, and though Mister Monkey considers himself a rebel, he is glad to see that Lauren and Ray are wearing wedding rings.

  He is alarmed to see Miss Sonya with cats. But there is a child, Miss Sonya’s child, squeezing the cat until Miss Sonya rescues the cat, and then he sees her in a classroom full of children who adore her.

  He barely recognizes Adam in the tomato juice commercial. He’s older, he is more like his true self, doing midair somersaults in the sneaker commercial, taking circus classes in drama school.

  Giselle marries a widower she meets at a Battery Park City neighborhood Christmas party, and stays married long after Adam’s dad has left Heidi and Arturo.

  Mister Monkey loses track of Mr. Marber in the dead of night, in the bed he used to share with his wife. But he sees the grandson Edward receiving a high school science award on a stage and thanking his late grandfather for introducing him to dinosaurs and monkeys. The mention of the grandfather brings tears to the eyes of the grandson’s parents, and to the eyes of many people in the audience. Mister Monkey (the Monkey God) likes that. It gives him a hopeful feeling about the future, even in the sort of dream in which he is watchful because he doesn’t know what comes next.

  He sees Lakshmi sewing, surrounded by clothes, pooled rich fabrics and silks. The Monkey God would like to think that she is making costumes for a spectacular extravaganza about a monkey. He has a vision of Eleanor in the emergency room, onstage, until the sound of applause turns into the rustling of plant stalks outside a Buddhist temple where she has gone to pray.

  For some reason Roger, Margot, and Mario refuse to visit Mister Monkey, to enter his dream. He doesn’t care. His dream is crowded enough. Perhaps he will catch sight of them when he falls asleep tomorrow. He will find out about them later.

  What he wants is to wake up now, so that he can think about Mister Monkey the Musical.

  With his head tilted back on his jeweled gold throne, he goes over the scenes in his head. The lyrics, the dances, the songs, all of which are garbage.

  But there is one line that he listens for, one sentence shouted by the whole cast at the end of the first big dance number that he waits for. He listens for it, so excited that he can hardly breathe until he hears it.

  “Mister Monkey is the smartest, cutest, nicest, strongest, most powerful chimp of all.”

  That is the single greatest line in the play. In any play. It is like a prayer.

  Mister Monkey is the smartest, cutest, nicest, strongest, most powerful chimp of all.

  When he hears that, it breaks the spell.

  He remembers his superpowers.

  [ CHAPTER 11 ]

  ROGER THE DIRECTOR

  A BISHOP IS sailing from Archangel to the Solovetsky Monastery.

  He sees a tiny island in the distance and asks the ship’s captain about it. The captain tells him that the island is inhabited by three hermits: bearded, filthy, ragged, silent, devoted to saving their souls.

  Against the captain’s advice, the bishop hires a boatman to ferry him to the island, where he finds the hermits just as described. When he asks how they are saving their souls, the oldest hermit replies that they work and pray. And how do they pray?

  Three are we. Three are thee. Have mercy.

  The bishop realizes that they know something about the Holy Trinity, but they are praying all wrong. He offers to teach them how to say the Lord’s Prayer correctly. Our Father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name. And so on. First one, then the second, then the third make many stupid mistakes. A whole day passes before the hermits get it right. But finally they can say it. Night has fallen by the time the bishop returns to his boat.

  Standing on deck, he’s gazing over the water, feeling good about a day well spent, when suddenly he sees a speck of light, glowing over the sea. The light grows brighter and larger and is rapidly approaching.

  It’s the three hermits, hand in hand, radiant, running over the surface of the water. They’ve forgotten the Lord’s Prayer! As long as they kept repeating it, everything was fine. But they lost one word, then another . . .

  The bishop replies that their prayer will reach God; it’s not for him to teach them. He says, “Pray for us sinners,” and bows low before the hermits, who turn and fly back across the sea. And a light shines until dawn at the spot where they disappeared from sight.

  TOLSTOY’S “THE THREE HERMITS” is Roger’s morning prayer. Everywhere Muslims are bowing toward Mecca, Jews going to temple, Catholics to confession. The Carmelite nuns and the Buddhist monks have been up for hours, chanting.

  The story lifts Roger in its arms and carries him back to his childhood in Brooklyn, to his Russian grandmother, whom he loved above all the world. He has never loved anyone so much. His grandmother who made pickles in the family washing machine, and cherry brandy in summer, until one day the family found her lying on her back on the basement floor, beside the washer, her mouth to the hose from which dark brandy dripped. The grandmother who every Easter filled the kitchen with sweet cheese puddings made in flower pots, with flaky dough crescents covered in powdered sugar, who every Sunday took him to the Orthodox church in Brownsvi
lle or Bushwick before it was Bushwick, where you prayed standing up, listening to the deep low chanting of the men’s choir in the stall high above the altar.

  The worshipers were all taller than Roger, and as it got hotter, acolytes ran around with ice water and smelling salts for the ones who fainted. One summer morning Roger passed out. Just before he slumped to the floor, overwhelmed with sleep, he saw the church and everyone in it covered with glittering mirrors and light and the edge of a white bird’s wing, reflected kaleidoscopically, an infinite number of times. He looked up to find himself surrounded by adults looking down.

  Roger sits up in his bed, in his small but sunny and miraculously rent-controlled apartment on West 11th Street, with his pug Ilya on his lap, and a cup of excellent coffee, and tells himself the story of the three hermits. It’s like one of those vocal warm-ups that, to tell the truth, he’s never liked hearing actors do: all those embarrassingly visceral grunts and howls. The story of the three hermits is Roger’s prayer and his workout, his daily affirmation. Unsurprising that a story about repetition should derive its power from repetition. Three are we. Three are thee. Have mercy.

  The story of the three hermits is his kale salad, his lemon juice and warm water: more effective than the faddish crap his actors swear by because they read about it when they’re getting their hair styled. It’s his ritual, though he hates that word, along with custom and tradition: hocus-pocus designed to speed us into the grave.

  Such a simple story, but how generous with its consolations. When he forgets something, which has been happening so often that, he knows, the cast thinks he’s losing his mind, he comforts himself by thinking of the trouble that the hermits have with the Lord’s Prayer. His brain has begun the process of sifting the gold from the straw. The story of the three hermits is better for Roger’s blood pressure than for his work in the theater, but the story is the sweet spot in his day before he must leave his apartment and go to his job breathing life into the cold dead corpse of Mister Monkey.

  The production was cursed, the way theater people believe Macbeth to be cursed. Mister Monkey Macbeth. When Linda, who is producing along with her husband, Dave, called and asked him to direct, Roger didn’t bother asking who had been fired or quit. Nor did he try to find out. He’d done Mister Monkey once before, so he was the logical choice, whereas he can’t afford to be choosy.

  The last time he did Mister Monkey he had asked the cast how many of them had read the book when they were kids. No one had, and he’d learned his lesson. This time he asked a harder question so that it would be less disappointing when no one knew.

  How many of them had heard of Raymond Ortiz? Not one hand went up. Roger explained that Raymond Ortiz was a Vietnam vet from the Bronx, who didn’t set out to write a book for kids, but the god of children’s musical theater had other plans for Mister Monkey. Possibly only Rita had ever been to the Bronx, and even she was wondering where Roger was going with this.

  Recalling those early rehearsals, Roger feels something like the chagrin with which he remembers desperately loving young men who turned out to be not worth his love, social climbers and geishas who saw Roger, during his brief golden moment, as a step up the ladder toward someone more successful and famous.

  His life (by which he is afraid he means his pride) depends on doing his best, even with this silly children’s musical. How hard he’d tried to make the cast sympathize with Mister Monkey or at least have strong feelings. Perhaps if they’d liked Adam more . . . He’d shown them a film about poachers killing gorillas, and a video about animals trained to help the elderly and the crippled. That went over their heads. They don’t have pets, they live in small apartments. Pets urinate in their hallways and defecate on their doorsteps. Roger’s the one with the beloved dog, and no one ever asks, How’s Ilya?

  In those first days his throat hurt, and his fingers ached from snapping them at the cast. He preached about the power of words, about hard work, about telling the stories of the tribe. He exhorted them to push themselves harder. Do it for the Fat Lady. He was referring to Franny and Zooey, of course, with its stirring explanation of the reason, the only reason, to go out there and act your heart out.

  No one caught the reference, and Roger lost the will to explain after dumb-ox Eric told the others that he was referring to The Catcher in the Rye. During the first weeks Roger so wanted the play to do well that he’d gone into the lobby after the show and shaken the audience members’ hands and thanked them for having come. But so few people could look him in the eye, and when they did he was so unnerved by what he saw that he gave up. Now he cowers in his office until Giselle arrives.

  Every so often Roger needs to step back and get his bearings, to remind himself of who he is and of everything that he’s accomplished. Instead he swims like a salmon upstream against the current of his own better judgment, against the wisdom of bad and good experience. He has denied the obvious all through those early rehearsals, determined to wring something real and new out of this troupe of the walking dead that rose from the ashes of open auditions for Mister Monkey.

  In desperation, he told them about the dog tried by jury and hung in England, a century ago. If Mister Monkey had been a Victorian . . . Roger should have quit right then when Danielle screamed, and Giselle covered Adam’s ears and whined about euthanizing puppies.

  Only Eleanor seems to have some feeling for Mister Monkey—or perhaps for Adam—though she is the one who’s supposed to be trying to send him to jail. Doubtless her day job in the ER has helped Eleanor develop more compassion. In Roger’s opinion Eleanor is from a higher species. She is a saver of lives. Nothing they do can approach the good she does. Some days they are artists, some days they are entertainers.

  Some days, not even that. Some days the stage swarms with soulless, monkey-tango-dancing zombies. Roger has had to detach himself, to wean himself from the warm milky breast of hope, and to pretend (at least to himself) that there is some higher purpose to this communal sabotage of a moronic text and a tuneless score. Roger’s no stranger to failure. But during this production he’s become newly acquainted with guilt, remorse, and a new set of weights on his conscience.

  One of those weights is Lakshmi. Roger wants to believe that there was nothing more he could have done to save her job or persuade her to stay and work for free and a great recommendation, which he’ll give her anyway. When Linda and Dave told him they were shutting down the play, they told him to slash the final weeks’ budget. Quit giving the kids free booster seats, let them sit on Mom’s lap. When Roger said there wasn’t one more cent he could trim, they asked to see the spread sheets. Tipped with a nail that cost as much as Lakshmi’s weekly stipend (no one could call it a salary), Linda’s finger skimmed down the columns and stabbed the line that said “costume department.”

  Linda and Dave had never seen the need to have a costume department for a production in which everyone but Margot and Adam could just wear their own clothes. From the moment Roger hired Lakshmi, even as she was excitedly designing Mister Monkey’s nubbly suit, Roger has been preparing for the day when he would have to fire her.

  Roger worries about Lakshmi. When one of her musical-loving dads came backstage for a casual chat (actually, a lecture) about Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god, Roger had the distinct impression that the guy was cruising him. Twice Roger has met Lakshmi’s boyfriend, who—even allowing for Roger’s diminished ability to understand the young—seems like a grifter, a pervert, and a creep.

  One night Roger saw Lakshmi leaving the theater in her police uniform. She claimed that wearing a clown-cop suit made her feel safe on the subway. Roger caught the musky scent of some sexual weirdness involving the boyfriend. After Lakshmi left the show, the intern who filled in for her couldn’t find the police outfit. Roger wasn’t surprised to learn that Lakshmi had taken it with her.

  The heavier drag on his conscience is Margot. Roger knows he’s been unfair. He’s ashamed of the satisfaction he gets from ignoring her suggestions, fr
om not trying to hide his contempt. There is no excuse for his bad behavior. He is honestly baffled by his impulse to make her unhappy. He’s spent enough years in therapy to suspect that he can’t forgive her for being a dark mirror of his own worst fears about, and for, himself—loneliness, mediocrity, age, failure—and for what he and Margot share in common: their undignified refusal to go gently into that good night of children’s musical theater.

  Margot enlisted Lakshmi in her case against Roger for making her wear that costume, but he stands by that decision: it loosens up the crowd. The audience response is more welcoming and jollier than any she would have gotten in her vintage Armani pants suit and her butch-cut red hair.

  Roger can feel his shoulders tense every time Margot walks onstage. Why can’t she see her outfit as Beckett-inspired children’s theater avant-garde with a nod to Dada, instead of through the microlens of her vanity and self-involvement?

  Even Eleanor believes that Roger’s failure to control Adam—who has gotten somewhat aggressive since the start of the show—is because Roger doesn’t care about Margot or about what Adam does to Margot. But that’s not true. Roger knows that Adam has gone off the rails, and he’s made at least one concession for the general good of the cast: banning Adam from doing his acrobatics during Margot and Eric’s cell phone duet, though the audience had been grateful for something to watch while Margot and Eric sang.

  The truth is that Roger has been fascinated by what Adam is doing with the paradoxically predictable and implausible role of the orphaned chimp. As Roger told Eleanor, they were watching adolescence happen in real time. Onstage. Who would have imagined that something so rich and complex could be mined from tapped-out Mister Monkey? Roger hasn’t asked Adam to dial it down, because he doesn’t want to know if what Adam’s doing is the result of hormonal madness or a considered artistic choice.