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Fiction Short Story

by Joyce Finn

Monkey Business

My stuffed monkey lay tangled in the twisted canes of the climbing Rainbow’s End rose. After pulling out some thorns, I found a note pinned to its gold lamé cape. It read: “I’m outta’ here. Took what’s mine.” A little smiley face dotted the ‘i’ in ‘David’.

I never had a clue. Never saw it coming. I know, I know—here I go using clichés again. David says they ooze from lazy minds, but it doesn’t matter what he says—I am not lazy. And to think I left work early to share a bit of news with him. Then this. BAM!

Cradling the monkey, I opened the back door and stood with eyes brimming and unfocused. No kitchen table, no chairs, no wastebasket, no refrigerator, no dirty cups on the drainer, and no hooked rug—nothing. The insides of the cupboards were ol’ Mother Hubbard bare. Even the packets of sugar we nicked from Freddy’s Tavern … gone.

I stumbled from one room to the next. Holes remained where he’d jimmied out the rod brackets for my dining room curtains. Wet splotches pooled on the hardwood floor where vases, filled with red-purple tulips, stood this morning. Not a dust bunny in sight.

Upstairs, light blazed through the unprotected bedroom windows while I shivered in the heat. No his-and-her bureaus, no bedside tables, no bed, no loose change. The barren room echoed with the click of my heels. The closet emptied except for my clothes, dangling from hangers, obviously pawed through in a search for who-knows-what. He even took the lamp my Auntie Ruth, in Australia, sent us last Christmas. Grotesque, he called it. Reminded him of two dogs humping, he said. She meant well, I said. We both agreed it looked better than the bouquet of daisies she sent the year before. They arrived, surface mail, six months later: black, moldering, reeking so badly that windows next door slammed shut. David nicknamed her The Dingbat from Down Under.

Taking the lamp was just plain mean. I suppose if he had more time, he would’ve pried out the toilet and sink or dismantled the banister.

Finally, I stood in front of his study door. He’d often glare down his narrow nose if I interrupted him and Sherry while they collated his latest book, the tenth in a series. Sherry, she of the thin ankles and tinkling Tibetan bracelets, had come on loan from the university.

After all the lectures and book tours on self-help—his specialty—David became an expert on helping himself. My darling husband; this stranger of fifteen years.

The monkey with the gold lamé cape was a gift from David on our third date. We sat, spooned into each other, under the elm overlooking the water at his family’s lakeside home. The damp seeped through my underwear while pebbles imprinted my hips. None of that mattered with his breath against my neck, and that deep voice of his whispering, whispering in my ear.

He said his family had been gypsies from the time of The Great Khan from the Steppes. The monkey was an heirloom handed down from generation to generation. “See the singe mark there?” He brushed a paw against my cheek. “From the great fires of St. Petersburg during the revolution.” On the monkey’s left side, he showed me the rips repaired with tiny stitches after the family fled from the Nazis.

None of it true. I found a “Made in Guatemala” sticker on the monkey’s backside. Besides, whoever heard of gold lamé woven in a yurt? Still, the man could spin a tale so tight you’d believe in fairies and futures if he said so.

He gave me the cigar-smoking blue cat on our honeymoon in Bermuda. The next day, in a storefront on Queen Street under the cruise ship’s shadow, I saw a shop offering stuffed kitties with each purchase of a box of Cuban cigars. He got the cigars; I got the fuzzy fake.

Every anniversary, David added another to my collection. One year a teddy bear with aviator glasses squatted on top of a box of Godiva chocolates with David’s itinerary to China and Japan clamped under its paw. He got his adventure; I got to stay home with the toys.

Silly gifts went both ways. Before we married, he told me his greatest childhood joy was tub time with his little rubber ducky. How it quacked and burbled in the soapy water. One day his mom tossed his ducky to their new pup. It never quacked again. He told that story with such boyish helplessness my insides melted. Each year I’d tuck a little rubber ducky on top of his present.

This anniversary—only two days ago—I gave him a bright red ducky with horns. I giggled when I saw devil-duck at The Museum Store in the Millbury Mall but David ripped it off, held it at arm’s length, and let it drop to the side table. He was equally dismissive of my gift: An autographed copy of Nabokov’s “Lolita.”

When I had searched Barnes and Noble for something suitable, I blushed at Nabokov’s first paragraph. “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta”

I wished for firelight, wine, and soft caresses. The way he once read to me.

I wandered into the bathroom. No rubber ducky in sight. There, pinned to my stuffed platypus, another note. “Got my ducks in a row. See you in court. Christ, get a life! Lose some weight.”

Back outside, I searched in a radius under the bedroom window for the rest of my furry friends. I found the blue cat, without his cigar, wedged in the oleander. Three others drooped from the wisteria. Careful not to ruin my pantyhose, I found all fifteen. Once dusted off, they weren’t in that bad a shape. I brushed loose leaves from my sweatshirt, hugged them to me, and headed back to the car.

David thought he’d taken all I treasured, leaving me with trash, but isn’t that always what we’re stuck with in life—details and absurdity? I had my plush pets, the house, and the surprise I rushed home to show him. A letter received at work from Auntie Ruth’s solicitor in Melbourne. There, with the death notice, was a generous check, a fortune, made out to me—only me.


About the Author
Joyce Finn is a freelance writer in Boston who has lived in Australia, S. Africa, and Bermuda. Her short stories and travel articles have been published internationally and one play performed in Bermuda.