nan Darien

Mad about the primate! Nan takes monkey business to the next level

From the moment I first laid eyes on the phrase "service monkey" (the New York Post ran articles last summer about a supposedly disabled man's little helper—a macaque— who bit a child in a Brooklyn grocery store) I knew I had to have one. I thought, At last, an extra pair of hands. I went online and had a breeder ship me a macaque. He's delightful; not since my divorce proceedings have I encountered such a thrilling pageant of chittering and unrest. He has the most bemused expression at all times, and looks exactly like Cole Porter. I named him Love for Sale. I also had a dressmaker run up a tiny bow tie for him in black grosgrain: a-dorcible.

All my friends loved Love right off the bat, and started giving him accessories. Cynthia Rowley gave him a little tuxedo jacket, Anne Slater gave him an eye patch, and Ross Bleckner gave him some sort of studded leather strap which I don't quite understand. Love would fetch us drinks, and dance, and make his special Jocelyne Wildenstein face—utter, utter heaven. You know, there's quite a lot to being a monkey, it's not just bananas.

And yes, Love would do the occasional domestic chore, but it became clear that he was much more helpful as a kind of husband. He was so popular and social that I started to take him to openings and benefits. At the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons' Ciao Ciao Bow Wow gala, he climbed inside Kitty Carlisle Hart's handbag; at the launch of Juicy Couture's swimwear, he re-arranged all the carrots. Fun.

Then he started doing "the nut thing." He'd pick up a tiny hors d'oeuvre—often a nut—and insert it into his own ear, remove it, and then insert it into someone else's ear. Amusing, if a little odd. Cut to the Lenox Hill Hospital Autumn Ball, held in the venerable institution's O.R. Three hundred of us in our best bib and tucker. Amanda Hearst. Charlie Rose. Miller sisters by the bushel. Love, having been a perfect angel all evening, surreptitiously removes the cocktail onion from my drink and wanders off into the crowd to try to effect insertion. He and the onion approach Mario Buatta: no go. Beth Rudin DeWoody also rebuffs him. Then he sneaks up behind Candace Bushnell and places the little wet treasure in Candace's ear. Candace grimaces, shakes the onion out, and, seeing it on the floor, screams, "Oh my God, it's an eyeball!" Three hundred people collectively gasp.

Well, my dear—even my watch stopped ticking. Total hell. And that was when Love gilded his proverbial lily. If you enjoy the Discovery Channel as much as I do, you may have seen a primate, as courtship or display behavior, everting his anus. And that is precisely what little Love—around whom the crowd had circled—did. He everted, and then, bending over the onion, used his newly extended posterior aperture to grasp it as if it were a particularly fragile archaeological Find or rare flower. Then he walked the onion over to me and, bending over again for the release, dropped it at my feet. A "gift."

The rest of my autumn has been comparatively quiet.

Nans Tip of tho Month; I'm updating all my old blouses with epaulets made from clamshells. Absolutely divine! Youdl know me when you see me!