Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse

“If that happens,” Joe said, “will you tell me his name then?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“You’re a smart lady,” he said. “And pretty, too. Are we still on for tomorrow night?”

“I am if you are,” I said, “And if you don’t mind being with someone who has spent the day in thirty tons of garbage.”

“Stop,” Joe said. “You’re getting me all excited.”

I laughed and so did he. It had been a long time since I’d met a man who made me laugh with him instead of at him. Even so, I felt a tickle of anxiety in my chest as I flashed on the image of him charging into a fire.

It’s just another day at the office.

We agreed to meet at my house the next night for our date, and then we said our good-byes.

I parked the Jeep in the driveway. Monk and I got out and saw Mrs. Throphamner on the other side of my low fence. She was in her backyard, kneeling on a rubber pad in the wet mud, toiling over her patch of vibrant roses. They were blooming, and the fragrance was overwhelming.

“Your roses are beautiful,” I told her.

“It’s hard work, but it’s worth it,” she said, holding a little shovel in her hand.

“They smell wonderful.”

“Those are the Bourbons,” she said and pointed her shovel at the large, raspberry-purple flowers. “The Madame Isaac Pereire variety. They’re the most fragrant rose there is.”

I opened up the trunk, we got out the groceries we bought on the way home, and we carried them into the house.

“Do roses bloom all year?” Monk asked me.

“They do in her yard,” I said. “Mrs. Throphamner constantly switches them out since she started her garden a few months ago. She likes lots of color all the time.”

While I unpacked the groceries, Monk got the water boiling and insisted on making dinner for the three of us. I didn’t argue. It’s not often I get a night off, and besides, I knew he wasn’t going to leave a mess for me to clean up.

When Julie got home, I helped her with her homework at the kitchen table while Monk prepared what he called his “famous” spaghetti and meatballs. Pretty soon, though, Julie and I were too captivated by Monk’s unusual preparations to pay any attention to textbooks.

The sauce was out of a jar from Chef Boyardee (“Why bother competing with the master?” Monk said), but he made his meatballs by hand (gloved, of course, as if performing surgery), carefully measuring and weighing them to ensure that they were perfectly round and identical.

He boiled the spaghetti noodles, poured them into a strainer, and then selected individual noodles, laying them out on our plates to make sure they were equal in length and that we had exactly forty-six noodles apiece.

When we sat down to dinner, Monk served us our spaghetti on three separate plates: one for the noodles, one for the sauce, and one for our four meatballs each. We barely had room on the table for all the plates.

“Aren’t the noodles, sauce, and meatballs supposed to be mixed all together?” Julie asked.

Monk laughed and shook his head at me. “Kids—aren’t they precious?”

And then he took a noodle on his fork, wound it around the prongs, stabbed a meatball, then dipped it all in the sauce and put it in his mouth.

“Mmmm,” Monk said. “That’s cooking.”

After dinner, we each relaxed in our own way. Julie went to the living room to watch TV. I sat at the kitchen table, sipping a glass of wine and leafing through an issue of Vanity Fair. And Monk did the dishes.

I like reading Vanity Fair, but I’m thinking of canceling my subscription anyway. There are fifty pages of ads before you even get to the table of contents, it sheds an endless number of subscription postcards all over the house, and the magazine smells like a cheap hooker. Not that I’ve ever smelled a hooker, cheap or otherwise, but I imagine they’re drenched in perfume.

“The night is young,” Monk said. “Let’s party.”

I was sure I’d misunderstood him, dazed as I was by the wine and perfume.

“Did you just say you wanted to party?”

“Call Mrs. Throphamner; ask her to come over and watch Julie.” Monk pulled off his apron and tossed it on the counter in a show of devil-may-care abandon. “We’re going clubbing. I mean that in the party sense, not the baby-seals sense.”

I set down my magazine. I couldn’t imagine why Monk would want to go somewhere filled with loud music and writhing people pressing their sweaty bodies against one another.

“You want to go dancing?”

“I want to go to Flaxx and talk to Lizzie Draper, Breen’s mistress,” Monk said.

“You sure you don’t just want another look at her enormous buttons?”

“I think I can turn her,” Monk said.

“You really believe Lizzie is going to help us get her super-rich lover?” I said.

“It’s worth a try,” Monk said.

I knew what was really going on, and I told him so. “You’re desperate to try anything that could help you avoid rummaging through mountains of trash tomorrow.”

Monk gave me a look. “Hell, yes.”

The interior of Flaxx was industrial chic—lots of exposed beams, air ducts, and water pipes against sheets of brushed aluminum, corrugated metal, and scored steel. The spinning, multicolored lights in the ceiling reflected wildly off the silver surfaces, creating a kind of retro psychedelic effect.

Lots of twentysomething men and women, trying their best to look disaffected and cool, lounged on deeply cushioned, brightly colored divans the size of king-size beds. They’d come here straight from their offices and cubicles, dressed for success but with their garments loosened to show off the cleavage, piercings, or tattoos that proved they were still bad boys and girls. They came to escape one grind by indulging in another; that much was clear by the way some of them danced and made energetic use of the divans.

Monk tried to avert his gaze from the grinders and the gropers, but it wasn’t easy. If he looked away from the dance floor, he saw the divans. If he looked away from the divans, he saw the flat-screen monitors on the walls, which showed music videos that featured a lot of coy, soft-core, girl-girl action. I didn’t find it very shocking. Lesbian sexuality has become a very stylish and hip marketing tool to sell everything from lingerie to underarm deodorant. In the process, it has lost its shock value and edgy eroticism. Well, at least to me. Certainly not to Monk.

The music was loud and percussive and pummeled my body and ears. I liked it and found myself swaying instinctively with the rhythm, but Monk winced as if each beat were a beating.

“This is a bad, bad place,” Monk said.

“It seems pretty tame to me,” I said.

“Oh, yeah? Take a look at that.” He motioned to a bowl in the middle of one of the tables.

“What?”

“Mixed nuts,” he said gravely, implying all manner of danger.

“So?”

“Cashews, walnuts, peanuts, almonds, all in one bowl. It’s a crime against nature.”

“We can call the Sierra Club on our way out.”

“That’s bad enough, but to put them out in a bowl for people to share . . .” He shivered. “Think how many hands have been in that bowl, strange hands that have been”—that’s when his gaze fell on one of the couples on a divan—“God knows where.”

Monk quickly looked away from that shocking sight and back to the bowl. He gasped and staggered back.

“What?” I said.

He couldn’t bring himself to gaze again at whatever had offended him. All he could do was jerk his head in