Welcome to the monkey house Read Online Free PDF

said.
    There was heavy clumping on the library stairs. It sounded like a deep-sea diver coming upstairs in his lead shoes. It was Harry Nash, turning himself into Marlon Brando. In he came, practically dragging his knuckles on the floor. And he was so much in character that the sight of a weeping woman made him sneer.
    "Harry," I said, "I'd like you to meet Helene Shaw. Helene— this is Harry Nash. If you get the part of Stella, he'll be your husband in the play." Harry didn't offer to shake hands. He put his hands in his pockets, and he hunched over, and he looked her up and down, gave her looks that left her naked. Her tears stopped right then and there.
    "I wonder if you two would play the fight scene," I said, "and then the reunion scene right after it."
    "Sure," said Harry, his eyes still on her. Those eyes burned up clothes faster than she could put them on. "Sure," he said, "if Stell's game."
    "What?" said Helene. She'd turned the color of cranberry juice.
    "Stell—Stella," said Harry. "That's you. Stell's my wife."
    I handed the two of them playbooks. Harry snatched his from me without a word of thanks. Helene's hands weren't working very well, and I had to kind of mold them around the book,
    "I'll want something I can throw," said Harry.
    "What?" I said.
    "There's one place where I throw a radio out a window," said Harry. "What can I throw?"
    So I said an iron paperweight was the radio, and I opened the window wide. Helene Shaw looked scared to death.
    "Where you want us to start?" said Harry, and he rolled his shoulders like a prizefighter warming up.
    "Start a few lines back from where you throw the radio out the window," I said.
    "O.K., O.K.," said Harry, warming up, warming up. He scanned the stage directions. "Let's see," he said, "after I throw the radio, she runs off stage, and I chase her, and I sock her one."
    "Right," I said.
    "O.K., baby," Harry said to Helene, his eyelids drooping. What was about to happen was wilder than the chariot race in Ben Hur. "On your mark," said Harry. "Get ready, baby. Go!"
    When the scene was over, Helene Shaw was as hot as a hod carrier, as limp as an eel. She sat down with her mouth open and her head hanging to one side. She wasn't in any bottle any more. There wasn't any bottle to hold her up and keep her safe and clean. The bottle was gone.
    "Do I get the part or don't I?" Harry snarled at me.
    "You'll do," I said.
    "You said a mouthful!" he said. "I'll be going now… See you around, Stella," he said to Helene, and he left. He slammed the door behind him.
    "Helene?" I said. "Miss Shaw?"
    "Mf?" she said.
    "The part of Stella is yours," I said. "You were great!"
    "I was?" she said.
    "I had no idea you had that much fire in you, dear," Doris said to her.
    "Fire?" said Helene. She didn't know if she was afoot or on horseback.
    "Skyrockets! Pinwheels! Roman candles!" said Doris.
    "Mf," said Helene. And that was all she said. She looked as though she were going to sit in the chair with her mouth open forever.
    "Stella," I said.
    "Huh?" she said.
    "You have my permission to go."
    So we started having rehearsals four nights a week on the stage of the Consolidated School. And Harry and Helene set such a pace that everybody in the production was half crazy with excitement and exhaustion before we'd rehearsed four times. Usually a director has to beg people to learn their lines, but I had no such trouble. Harry and Helene were working so well together that everybody else in the cast regarded it as a duty and an honor and a pleasure to support them.
    I was certainly lucky—or thought I was. Things were going so well, so hot and heavy, so early in the game that I had to say to Harry and Helene after one love scene, "Hold a little something back for the actual performance, would .you please? You'll bum yourselves out."
    I said that at the fourth or fifth rehearsal, and Lydia Miller, who was playing Blanche, the faded sister, was sitting next to me in the audience. In real life, she's