Love Monkey Read Online Free PDF

in the back pages. The small ads.
    â€œSingle white female, facial deformity, seeks man 29–40. 5’11" and above, in good shape.”
    This woman has a facial deformity, and I don’t meet her height requirement. Us, afraid of commitment? Women can’t commit to one drink with the greatest guy on earth if he’s one inch shorter than they are. I read somewhere that Manhattan does not have the highest proportion of single people in America. We came in second. First place went to a county in Hawaii. Party town, USA? The place where moist young college grads come to celebrate panting youth? No: a former leper colony. Does Facial Deformity Woman place an ad, in, say, Canker Sore Illustrated ? No. She picks the most upscale, Gucci-and-Harvard paper in the country for her personal ad, then she sits back thinking: George Clooney will be calling any minute.
    Liesl buzzes me around five. I don’t jump her, although she is sexy in a beige tank top with matching bra straps peeking out on the sides. And light makeup. This matters: it’s a Sunday, and she’s a feminist. Not a default feminist as in, “Well, I’m a woman so I guess I have to be one, don’t I?” but a real one who writes angry letters to the Times to call attention to their insidious sexist language. This is the New York Times we’re talking about, the paper that made “white male” a surprisingly effective insult.
    I love the way she looks, all blue eyes, fair skin, medium-blond hair. She looks like the führer’s wet dream, and why not? She’s German. Half German, anyway. She was born here; her mother fled East Berlin in the fifties. I picture my friends—the Cohens and Rabinowitzes, the Meyers, the Shapiros, the Fleisch-, Good-, and Kuntzmans—freaking when they meet her.
    â€œI like your place,” she says, looking around as though she’sthinking of renting it. “Oh, my. Those, flow ers,” she says. “Time to change them.”
    I look at the windowsill: oh yeah. The flowers. From The Dinner. They look like I feel.
    I’m in the middle of watching a Brian Wilson special on TV. I start to tell her about it. Maybe she’s a fan.
    â€œAnd who is Brian Wilson?” she says.
    Who is Brian Wilson? He only wrote “Good Vibrations,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” and “Don’t Worry, Baby.” I can see not knowing who Brian Wilson is if you also don’t know who Mozart was. But this girl definitely knows who Mozart was. And she grew up in the time of Brian, not in eighteenth-century Austria.
    It gets better: she hasn’t even heard of “Caroline, No.”
    â€œ ‘Caroline Knows’?” she says. “I thought it was ‘God Only Knows.’ ”
    At times like this, I look to a higher power for guidance. Luckily I have His image on the wall: Bogart. The poster shows him sitting at a typewriter. Next to him stand two guys pointing guns at him. He ignores them and keeps typing. That picture says it all. The film was called In a Lonely Place. He plays a jaded writer, a guy so hard-boiled that he cracks jokes when he finds out a girl he knew slightly has been murdered. My favorite line is when his detective buddy tells him he has recently gotten married. Bogey just says, “Why?”
    Not only was Bogart great for the part, but the girl who makes him fall in love and confront his emotions for the first time is played by this withering blonde, Gloria Grahame. She was clever and hard, a girl who could say it all with a cocked eyebrow or a flared nostril. Bergman in Casablanca ? Please. A clinging bore who fawns over that twinkle-toes do-gooder Laszlo. Where’s the mystery in her? Give me Gloria any day. In every movie you get the feeling that she could be capable of anything. And in real life she was: she married the guy who directed In a Lonely Place , that weirdo Nicholas Ray. Then dumped him. Then she married his