Monkey Island

by Paula Fox

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  PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF PAULA FOX

  Winner of the Hans Christian Andersen Award

  Winner of the Paris Review’s Hadada Award

  “The greatest writer of her generation.” —Jonathan Franzen

  “One of America’s most talented writers.” —Publishers Weekly

  “Consistently excellent.” —The New York Times

  “Fox has always been adept at writing apparently simple stories which on closer examination prove to explore the essential meaning of relationships … and to illuminate our understanding of the human condition.” —School Library Journal

  “Paula Fox is so good a novelist that one wants to go out in the street to hustle up a big audience for her.… Fox’s brilliance has a masochistic aspect: I will do this so well, she seems to say, that you will hardly be able to read it. And so she does, and so do I.” —Peter S. Prescott, Newsweek

  “Fox is one of the most attractive writers to come our way in a long, long time.” —The New Yorker

  “As a writer, Fox is all sensitive, staring eyeball. Her images break the flesh. They scratch the retina … Fox’s prose hurts.” —Walter Kirn, New York magazine

  “Fox’s achievement is to write with magnificent restraint and precision about the interplay of personal and historical, inner growth and outer framework, the process of learning to think about oneself and the world.” —Margaret and Michael Rustin

  “Fox has little of Roth’s self-consciousness, less of Bellow’s self-importance, and none of Updike’s self-pity. Unlike all three men, Fox does not jealously save the best lines for a favoured alter ego, and her protagonists do not have a monopoly on nuance. Instead, she distributes her formidable acumen unselfishly, so that even the most minor characters can suddenly offer crucial insight, and unsympathetic characters are often the most fascinating: brilliant, unfathomable and raging.” —Sarah Churchwell

  “There are no careless moves in the fiction of Paula Fox.… [Her] work has a purity of vision, and a technique undiminished by homage or self-indulgence.” —Randal Churb, The Boston Review

  “Paula Fox is as good as her revived reputation suggests.” —Fiona Maazel, BOMB

  Monkey Island

  ALA Best Book for Young Adults

  ALA Notable Book for Children

  A Horn Book Fanfare Selection

  “An emotionally powerful story … These are characters readers will understand and care about … Masterfully crafted.” —The Horn Book Magazine, starred review

  “[Fox] tells with almost unbearable clarity about a boy’s quest to find himself.” —Booklist, starred review

  “Exquisitely crafted with spare but resonant detail—an absorbing, profoundly disturbing but ultimately hopeful story.” —Kirkus Reviews, pointer review

  “Delicate and moving … A relentless story that succeeds in conveying the bitter facts.” —The New York Times Book Review

  “A quietly terrifying, wholly compelling novel … Once again, Fox displays her remarkable ability to render life as seen by a sensitive child.… Clear-eyed and unblinking as ever, she shows us the grit, misery and despair of the homeless.” —Publishers Weekly

  “A carefully crafted, thoughtful book.” —School Library Journal

  Monkey Island

  Paula Fox

  For Andrew Lee Sigerson

  and his dear mother, Kathleen

  Contents

  1 The Hotel

  2 Outside

  3 Calvin and Buddy

  4 Escaping Notice

  5 The Coffee Van

  6 Monkey Island

  7 Out Cold

  8 Oxygen

  9 The Biddles

  10 Searching, Finding

  About the Author

  1 The Hotel

  Clay Garrity’s mother, Angela, had been gone five days from the room in the hotel where they had been living since the middle of October.

  On the first evening of her disappearance, he’d waited until long past dark before going to a small table that held a hot plate, a few pieces of china, two glasses, and some cutlery as well as their food supply: a jar of peanut butter, half a loaf of bread in a plastic sack, some bananas, a can of vegetable soup, and a box of doughnuts.

  His mother usually heated soup for their supper and made hot cereal for his breakfast in the pot that sat on the hot plate. Clay lifted the lid. There was nothing inside. During their first week in the hotel, she had made a stew that lasted them for three days. That was the only time she had really cooked.

  He ate a banana, then picked up the box of doughnuts. Beneath it, he found twenty-eight dollars and three quarters.

  He wasn’t especially worried yet about her not coming home. She’d been gone entire days before, not returning until nightfall. But the sight of the money made him uneasy.

  Why had she left it there, almost hidden, as if she meant for him to find it after she’d gone? Could she have forgotten it? Where would you go in New York City without money? Still, she might have put the twenty-eight dollars aside for something special, like the clinic where she went for checkups, or for the new shoes she said he would soon need. The quarters could have been for making phone calls. And she might have had more money in her pocketbook. But he couldn’t quite believe that, because she hardly ever had more than twenty-five dollars after buying their groceries.

  He ate half of a doughnut as he stood at the table, staring at the carton of milk that stood outside on the sill of one of the room’s two windows. He thought of pouring himself a glass, but, in a flash, he didn’t want it at all. Even the rest of the doughnut felt too thick to go down his throat.

  He took the only chair in the room, straight backed and painted with a color his mother called down-and-out brown, to the other window and sat there a while, looking at the street five stories below. The traffic was light at this hour. Most of the people who drove past the hotel on their way to the tunnels that went to New Jersey had gone home by now.

  Clay imagined a tunnel going under the Hudson River, imagined the dark, moving water above it and beneath it, people in their cars who talked and listened to their radios that must crackle at such a depth, under so much water and earth and concrete.

  On the floor beside his mother’s bed was a small, battery-run radio. In the mornings while he was getting ready for school, washing his face at the basin and dressing, his mother would listen to a news program. Lately, she had been turning the radio on as soon as she came into the room, even before taking off her coat and putting down the bag of groceries she was carrying. When he did his homework, she lowered the volume. But she seemed to want some kind of sound all the time and didn’t care whether it was music or people talking.

  Once when he awoke in the night, needing to go to the bathroom, which was outside the room and down at the end of the long corridor near the stairs, he saw her lying in bed, holding the radio on her chest, its dial face casting a pale glow on her chin and mouth, a faint babbling noise issuing from it like voices in a distant room.

  “Be careful,” she murmured as he went to the door, his key in his hand. He knew that; he knew you always had to be careful when you went outside the room.

  He sat absolutely still, his gaze fixed now on the big apartment building across the street through whose windows he could see people moving about in lighted rooms among large potted plants. In the old life, in the apartment where they had once lived with his father, they had had two pots of African violets, and when one of the deep mauve flowers bloomed, it seemed to fill his mother with delight.

  The stillness that had come over him was almost like sleep. I
t was abruptly broken by an urge to look behind him. The first thing his turning glance fell upon was the wheeled metal rack they had found in the room when they moved into the hotel a month ago, and from which their clothes hung. His mother had told him that when people gave parties, they rented such racks for guests to hang their coats on. Probably the rack was left over from the days when the hotel was a real hotel, not an ants’ nest of ugly rooms where people in trouble waited for something better—or worse—to happen to them.

  What he saw, hanging from a wire hanger, was his mother’s brown wool coat. He placed his hand against the windowpane. It was cold, like the door of a refrigerator. Where would she have gone? Without her coat?

  Soon, he would have to go out to the corridor and to the bathroom that was used by nearly everyone on the floor, though he’d heard there was one room that had its own toilet and tub instead of just a washbasin. He would have to lock the door and hope there were no people leaning against the walls, people who would watch his every step as he went toward a battered door you couldn’t lock, and into the bathroom with its tub full of fans of tobacco-colored stains, the toilet sweating moisture.

  But he couldn’t go to the bathroom right now, though he needed to. He took a book from a cardboard box that also held some old stubby crayons and a Lego set he no longer played with. Then he pulled his mother’s coat off its hanger. He got onto his cot and covered himself with most of it, drew up his legs, and turned the pages of Robinson Crusoe to the place where he had stopped reading yesterday. The words he glanced at made no sense at all. He lay there, his finger in the book, the coat collar against his cheek. He was eleven years old, and he had never felt so alone in his life.

  Clay didn’t go to school in the morning and not for the rest of the week either.

  During the days, he wandered along the hotel corridors and up and down the gray cement stairways. He was always cautious, on the lookout for older boys and girls, some of whom would take whatever you were carrying away from you, and even your clothes. From behind locked doors of rooms, he heard people talking or quarreling. He heard loud radios playing what his mother called “hammer music,” and sometimes children laughing and shouting or crying.

  There was supposed to be a security man in the lobby, but he seldom showed up. Still, when Clay walked through there, he felt nervous. If the security man suddenly appeared, he’d ask Clay why he wasn’t in school. He might call the police.

  One morning he went to a park several blocks east. The only children in the play area were babies in strollers or carriages wheeled by their mothers, and there was nothing to do but watch them. A policeman came and stood behind the swings to smoke a cigarette. Clay left at once.

  There was nothing to do on the street near the hotel either except watch the passing cars, or the people going in and out of the apartment house across the street. He wasn’t worried about their noticing him. They never looked at the hotel. They didn’t look at much except the dogs some of them led on leashes out to the sidewalk at dusk.

  At night he didn’t get under the blanket on his cot but slept beneath his mother’s coat. He had eaten the bread, the bananas, and the doughnuts. Although he was hungry, he didn’t open the can of soup and heat it up. The thought came to him that it was his mother who should do that, who should turn on the hot plate and open the can with the opener she had bought at the little hardware store around the corner. If he opened the can of soup, she wouldn’t come back.

  But he knew he had to eat, even though something peculiar had happened to his appetite. It was as if all the hunger he felt was only in his head, not in his stomach. On the third night he’d been alone, he opened the door a crack and waited for Mrs. Larkin, who lived in the next room with her backward son, Jacob, to put out her garbage in a black plastic bag. During the night, someone was supposed to collect the garbage people left outside their doors even though that was against the hotel rules. There was always enough left scattered along the corridor to sour the air.

  He waited for what seemed an hour until he heard Mrs. Larkin drop the bag on the floor and lock her door. He tiptoed out and went to the bag and undid the thick, slippery knot. He found a few pieces of bread, a chicken wing that had a little meat left on it and which he ate with a slight shudder, and an apple with one bite taken from it. His mother had told him that Jacob didn’t like anything but french fries, and Mrs. Larkin had to throw away most of the food she tried to persuade him to eat.

  As Clay lay in bed, his hands gripping the coat, he knew something was bound to happen. Someone would come to the room, maybe two or three people. The school might send a truant officer. The woman his mother called Miss You-can’t-fool-me would turn up from Social Services, or else the man from Missing Persons, who always wore a whole suit and who had visited them twice before in their old apartment, would step into the room, his mouth full of questions about Clay’s father: Did Mr. Garrity drink? Take drugs? Had he been depressed? Was he unstable? Was Mrs. Garrity sure he wasn’t living somewhere with another wife? His mother had said, as she gave the man a photograph of his father, “He’s been out of work a long time.”

  For as far back as Clay could recall, his father had gone to his office carrying a large leather portfolio that held layouts for the magazine where he was the art director. Not much art, his father often said. It was more like being a puzzle director, figuring out how the copy would fit around the advertising and the photographs. Then the magazine folded. That is, his father explained to him, it ran out of subscribers and money.

  Mr. Garrity began to collect unemployment insurance and look for the same kind of job he had lost. But it seemed that many magazines were folding and many art directors were looking for work and not finding it. After a few months, he was hired by a house painter and painted apartments all over the city. Then the painter fell ill and went back to Greece, where he had come from, and where his family could help take care of him. Mr. Garrity sold ties for a few weeks in a men’s clothing store and took his lunch to work in a paper bag to save money. But the manager of the store said Mr. Garrity wasn’t friendly enough to customers and wasn’t cut out to be a salesman.

  He kept looking for work, any kind of work. And then one morning he said he couldn’t go out their front door, he had to think, he had to figure out what had happened to his life.

  Clay’s mother was afraid of the doorbell ringing. It might be a bill collector or someone from the landlord’s office. “Something has to be done,” she had said. His father had not looked up at her words but continued to stare at his shoes, which, Clay had noticed, were dusty and worn down at the heels.

  One evening his mother came home an hour after the time when they usually sat down to supper. Her face was flushed as though she’d been running, and her voice, which was usually low and agreeable, was loud and sharp. She had gone to see an old school friend, she said. “You remember Maggie?” she asked. Mr. Garrity nodded, not looking interested. “She’s made a lot of money designing sports clothes and she’s loaned me—it’s strictly a loan, Lawrence—enough money so I can enroll in a computer course and take care of things while I’m being trained. There are jobs out there, and I’m going to get one of them.”

  Clay had been doing his homework on the kitchen table and, after a minute or two, he looked up at his mother and father because neither of them was saying a word. He saw a look pass between them that startled him. It was as if they had never met each other before. His father pressed himself back in the chair he was sitting in, drawing in his elbows and legs. His mother stood a few feet away, her face still red, one arm held out, her palm turned up as though she was offering him something.

  His mother completed her course and found a job in a Wall Street office, where she worked what she called the graveyard shift, from eleven to seven in the morning. “All alone up there on the thirty-fifth floor with machines humming and clicking away,” she said. “I sort of like it.” When she came home, Clay was usually on his way to school, not the one he’d been
going to since they’d had to move into the hotel.

  The flush faded away from his mother’s face, and her voice lost its sharpness. The rent was paid, and some early evenings the three of them even went out to supper at a Chinese restaurant in the neighborhood, where they had gone often when his father was still an art director. But something was different.

  Whatever it was, it always began around suppertime. They would all be in the kitchen, his father looking down at the stove at something he’d cooked—he did most of the cooking now—and his mother might be at the sink, washing lettuce. Whatever it was didn’t show itself in words. It was hidden somewhere in the hot silence.

  Clay tried to ignore it while he was eating supper. But he thought about it in school. “You’re not paying attention, Clay,” his homeroom teacher said. “You’re daydreaming.”

  He wasn’t daydreaming, he wanted to protest. He was thinking so hard his forehead ached.

  One night loud voices from the living room woke him. His mother and father were fighting.

  “How can we?” his father suddenly shouted. “I might never get work again except for piddling temporary jobs. Another baby? You’re crazy!”

  “It’s too late now,” his mother cried out. “We’ll have to find a way.”

  Clay pulled the covers over his head, then reached out and pushed the pillow on top of the covers.

  The next day, his father met him after school and took him to the zoo. It was rainy, and most of the animals had retreated into the sheltered areas of their cages. Only a tiger paced behind the bars, panting, its golden eyes passing over their faces as though they were stones, its great paws slapping the wet cement floor of its cage.

  “I think the tiger hates being in there,” his father said.

  “It gets fed,” Clay said.

  “That’s true. Just enough food so it will have the energy to pace.”

  Clay did not feel his father was speaking to him; he might even have forgotten that Clay was there, standing next to him.