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She told me then that only a month before, when she had been ill with a virus, a couple she knew had come by to make dinner for her. After the meal they said they wanted her to watch them screw. So she did. She sat up on the bed with a temperature of 102, and they took off their clothes and went at it on the bedroom rug—“And you know what they wanted me to do, while they were making it?”

“No.”

“I had some bananas on the counter in the kitchen, and they wanted me to eat one. While I watched.”

“For the arcane symbolism, no doubt.”

“The what?”

“Why did they want you to eat the banana?”

“Man, I don’t know. I guess they wanted to know I was really there. They wanted to like hear me. Chewing. Look, do you just suck, or do you fuck, too?”

The real McCoy! My slut from the Empire Burlesque—without the tits, but so beautiful!

“I fuck too.”

“Well, so do I.”

“Isn’t that a coincidence,” I said, “us running into each other.”

She laughed for the first time, and instead of that finally putting me at my ease, suddenly I knew—some big spade was going to leap out of the bedroom closet and spring for my heart with his knife—or she herself was going to go berserk, the laughter would erupt into wild hysterics—and God only knew what catastrophe would follow. Eddie Waitkus!

Was she a call girl? A maniac? Was she in cahoots with some Puerto Rican pusher who was about to make his entrance into my life? Enter it—and end it, for the forty dollars in my wallet and a watch from Korvette’s?

“Look,” I said, in my clever way, “do you do this, more or less, all the time …?”

“What kind of question is that! What kind of shit-eating remark is that supposed to be! Are you another heartless bastard too? Don’t you think I have feelings too!”

“I’m sorry. Excuse me.”

But suddenly, where there had been fury and outrage, there were only tears. Did I need any more evidence that this girl was, to say the least, a little erratic psychologically? Any man in his right mind would surely then have gotten up, gotten dressed, and gotten the hell out in one piece. And counting his blessings. But don’t you see—my right mind is just another name for my fears! My right mind is simply that inheritance of terror that I bring with me out of my ridiculous past! That tyrant, my superego, he should be strung up, that son of a bitch, hung by his fucking storm-trooper’s boots till he’s dead! In the street, who had been trembling, me or the girl? Me! Who had the boldness, the daring, the guts, me or the girl? The girl! The fucking girl!

“Look,” she said, wiping away the tears with the pillowcase, “look, I lied to you before, in case you’re interested, in case you’re writing this down or something.”

“Yeah? About what?” And here he comes, I thought, my shvartze, out of the closet,—eyes, teeth, and razor blade flashing! Here comes the headline: ASST HUMAN OPPY COMMISH FOUND HEADLESS IN GO-GO GIRL’S APT!

“I mean like what the fuck did I lie for, to you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, so I can’t tell you.”

“I mean they didn’t want me to eat the banana. My friends didn’t want me to eat any banana. I wanted to.”

Thus: The Monkey.

As for why she did lie, to me? I think it was her way of informing herself right off—semiconsciously, I suppose—that she had somehow fallen upon a higher-type person: that pickup on the street notwithstanding, and the wholehearted suck in her bed notwithstanding—followed by that heart-stirring swallow—and the discussion of perversions that followed that … still, she really hadn’t wanted me to think of her as given over wholly to sexual excess and adventurism … Because a glimpse of me was apparently all it took for her to leap imaginatively ahead into the life that might now be hers … No more narcissistic playboys in their Cardin suits; no more married, desperate advertising executives in overnight from Connecticut; no more faggots in British warmers for lunch at Serendipity, or aging lechers from the cosmetics industry drooling into their hundred-dollar dinners at Le Pavilion