Monkey in the middle

A love of animals and a desire to understand them is something that hits home for Lisa Brown

Simon is standing in the kitchen sink of his Brighton apartment, taking a bath. It's a ritual he seems to cherish, more than the evening screenings of "The Daily Show" and "Top Chef," more than petting Yoshi the cat, more than his fledging career in sketching.

First, one furry paw. Then his head, tipped toward the flood of warm tap water. Soon, Simon, an 8-pound Capuchin monkey, is hunched under the faucet, his arms crossed across his chest, a fat grin spilling across his cheeks.

"He's a pretty handsome monkey - maybe the George Clooney of monkeys," suggests his guardian Lisa Brown, hefting Simon out of the sink.

"He has a bit of a belly, though," says Adam Dardeck, Brown's husband. From the folds of a big, white towel, Simon extends his stomach obligingly, and smiles again, before catching a visitor staring. It is not, it should be said, an insubstantial belly. He turns away, coquettishly.

In the wild, Capuchin monkeys - a lithe, fast, fiercely intelligent breed - are lovers, not fighters. The rain forest of South and Central America, their native habitat, is a wild, violent place; they survive on plants, bugs, and shellfish, opened with the judicious crack of a stone. Bed is a pronged bough, far from the reach of dangerous predators. A "bath" is a slapdash grooming, at the hands of a friend or a relative.

But Simon has never set foot in the jungle. He was born in captivity and has spent much of his life with Helping Hands, a national nonprofit organization based in Boston. Eventually he will be sent to assist a patient suffering from spinal cord disease or a similarly degenerative muscle disorder.

For now, he is serving an apprenticeship at the center of a decidedly untraditional family: one man, one woman, one cat, one monkey, one small apartment. And the occasional foray into the big, cold world outside.

"So many friends have told me, 'Oh, I've always wanted a monkey,' " Brown says. "They think of Marcel, for instance." Marcel, the pet from the television show "Friends," fetched beer and doughnuts on command.

"I've worked around monkeys long enough to know that's not how it works," she says. "Monkeys are a hell of a lot of smarter than the dogs and cats in our lives. Having Simon here requires training, and patience - he needs real stimulation."

Simon's eagerness to learn makes him a natural fit for Helping Hands, which trains Capuchin monkeys to be live-in companions to people with impaired mobility. Capuchins are "natural tool users," says Megan Talbert, the organization's chief operating officer, so they can quickly adapt to a handful of chores, from operating a television, to scratching an itch, to flipping the pages of a book.

"Most of all," Talbert says, "the number one gift is companionship - the bond they form with humans. It's real love."

Family dynamics

Brown, 31, met Simon in the winter of 2002. She'd volunteered at Helping Hands for 10 months, and then, when a position opened up, she transitioned into full-time work. Co-workers remember that Simon and Lisa instantly developed a strong bond, so much so that when Simon went out on an early placement, Lisa became visibly distressed.

"Lisa's relationship with Simon is very interesting to me," says Jennifer Novak, a former employee at Helping Hands. "Monkeys don't decipher the difference between cats, for instance, or dogs. Everyone's in their troop, and they rank them how they're going to rank. Lisa's the same way with animals. She shares that dynamic. Her and Simon? They were simpatico."

As it turned out, Simon's initial placement wasn't a perfect fit, and he was sent back to the Helping Hands center, where Brown was waiting. "It was as if no time had passed," Novak says. "Simon leapt right into Lisa's arms. And they just stared at each other - they were just perfectly and totally happy."

In 2006, Brown began work on a one-year master's program in animals and public policy at Tufts University. When she left Helping Hands that year, she brought Simon to the Brighton apartment she shares with Dardeck and Yoshi.

The application process at Helping Hands is intense, and it includes background checks and extended training. But for Brown and Dardeck there were more serious obstacles. For one, they would have to find room for an animal that, in Brown's assessment, is "not like having a cat and maybe not as much work as having a child, but somewhere between that."

And where would Dardeck, 31, fit into the intense relationship between Brown and Simon? Capuchins are used to ranking large groups of peers into a specific hierarchy, by order of power and respect. There is a king of the heap, and then there is everyone else.

"Of course, I had some reservations," Dardeck says with a laugh. "It was unclear where I'd fit into the pecking order." But the day Dardeck agreed to give it a try, Brown says, she was no longer nervous. It was a gift - "there was no greater expression of love, that I can think of," she explains. A year and a half later, friends say, it is hard to separate Dardeck and Brown and Simon from the small, tightly-knit family they have formed.

"It's a deeply personal relationship," says William S. Lynn, the program director for the master's program in animals and public policy at Tufts. Lynn met Brown when she interviewed for the program, and the two have remained close. "When you see Lisa with Simon, you recognize all the signs of a loving parent from her. And all the signs of a happy sibling from him."

Soul mates

With Lynn's help, Brown has spent the past few months transcribing the messy particulars of life with Simon - from cognitive development to diaper training to the place of the monkey in modern culture - into writing, both as a columnist for Ethos, an animal ethics blog (practicalethics.net/blog), and for her own popular project, animalinventory.net.

At Animal Inventory, Brown looks at the larger picture: How do humans understand animal-kind? How do we portray creatures in art, in the movies, in music, and in the press? The blog is busy and bustling, but colored by what Lynn calls "deep moral sensibility."

"She recognizes there's a person in those eyes," he says. "Lisa has arrived at a very complex understanding of the variety of ways we interact with animals, and she expresses it beautifully."

Brown says she did a good deal of research into other animal-related blogs and found only "bits and pieces of what I'm trying to do with Animal Inventory. Some people have a focus on natural, for instance, or popular culture. I'd like to connect it all.

"That animal on TV is not an abstract thing," she says. "It's a symbol, or it's an accessory, or a representation of something 'other.' I'm searching for a kind of perspective, and Simon is a source of inspiration."

He is also a force unto himself - a pint-size, frizzy-furred tempest of personality. As a visitor watched, Simon created a wild post-impressionistic portrait, pausing occasionally to punctuate a pencil stroke with a low, happy grunt. He likes Jon Stewart, it turns out, and hates violence. (Once, Dardeck says, a "Daily Show" episode turned mock-rough, and Simon rushed to the television, slapping at the screen with both paws.) He loves zippers and shoelaces, which he painstakingly unties.

Sometimes, when he's feeling affectionate, he'll pick through Dardeck's hair, or slip into a sleepy reverie in Brown arms, his belly pointed skyward.

"For a long time, I've been trying to formulate a blog entry about soul mates," Brown says. "No one ever really talks about the possibility that we can develop that connection with animals - a connection where two beings understand each other in a way no one else can."

She pauses, then adds, "I can have a checklist. I can say, 'Simon is cuddly. I like that.' Or, 'He's inquisitive, and I like that.' But it's not the sort of thing you verbalize. It's the sort of thing you just know is there. Simon and I have found another way to communicate."