Lives of the Circus Animals

by Christopher Bram

  “I’m sorry you aren’t either,” said Allegra.

  The idea of working with them often crossed Jessie’s mind. But doing what? She couldn’t act—she was too cerebral. She couldn’t write—she was too self-critical. She couldn’t direct—she was too impatient. She could stage-manage, but it was too much like being the mommy, and she was tired of being the mommy. She sometimes seemed to be everybody’s Stage Manager.

  “Maybe next time,” said Jessie.

  She should be going. They had said everything they had come here to say, and it looked like rain. The sky had been clouding over since noon. The clouds were gray, the grass as green as house paint.

  Allegra sucked out the last dribbles of cappuccino but then leaned back on the bench, not ready to go yet. “Oh life,” she said, watching people pass. “Working on a play makes me itchy. Frisky.”

  “How’re things with Boaz?”

  “Oh, Boaz is Boaz.”

  Jessie assumed they were talking about sex. “I hardly know Bo. But he seems nice. Sexy. In a hetero Nijinsky kind of way.” Then she saw the deliberate, faraway look in Allegra’s eyes. “Oh. Problems?”

  Allegra took a deep breath. “I probably shouldn’t tell you—” She bent forward, folding herself over her crotch. Here was the real reason for the mocha cappuccinos. “I’ve been messing around. With somebody else.”

  Jessie almost said “Frank?” But it couldn’t be Frank. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I won’t ask who. None of my business.”

  “It’s Chris.”

  Jessie shook her head. She didn’t know any guys named Chris. Then she squinted at Allegra, hard. “Chris Jamison? Big butch Chris?”

  Allegra was smiling. “Are you shocked?”

  “No. Surprised,” she admitted. Chris was bulky but beautiful, like Paul Robeson with breasts, while Allegra was so delicate, like a Cuban china doll. “I didn’t think she’d be your type.”

  “I’ll say! She’s a woman.” Allegra laughed. “I mean—It’s not like I’ve never been there. Hey, I was a theater major. And my taste in women friends has always been better than my taste in men,” she admitted. “Except I like men being dumber than women. It makes them easier to be around. Less work.”

  Jessie didn’t know what to say or where to begin. “But you all live in the same apartment.”

  “And I sleep with Boaz, and we still fuck. Which is weird with Chris right down the hall. But it’s not like Chris and I are lovers. We’ve had sex twice—well, one and a half times. It began with a back rub. But she’s sworn off straight girls. They’re nothing but trouble, she says. And I see her point. But I can’t stop thinking about her. I don’t know if it’s love or horniness or preshow jitters. But I’m fixated. She has so much presence. She’s not fat. I know it looks like fat, but when you’re in bed with her, wrapped in her, surrounded, it doesn’t feel fat, it feels—metaphysical.”

  Jessie listened with her chin in her hand, looking sympathetic, suspending judgment, feeling full of human interest, and all the while thinking: Everybody is getting laid except me.

  29

  I am too talented for my own good. What would you do in my shoes? Business or theater? It’s a hard choice. I walk into a room and people know. I am not nothing! I’m someone important. Someone of value. And you know why they know that? Because I’m a positive—”

  “Wait. Stop. Go back.”

  “What?” said Toby.

  “Why did you do that?” asked Frank.

  “Do what?”

  “Shout the line?”

  “Which line?”

  “‘I am not nothing.’”

  “I didn’t shout it.”

  “You did.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “All right,” Frank conceded. “But you overemphasized it. Made it too important.”

  “But you said it was important.”

  “Yes, but—” Frank took a deep breath. “Never mind. Let’s not argue. We just need to find a way to make this scene work.”

  They stood in the big, half-bare living room on West 104th Street. Frank had come straight from the office and still wore a shirt and tie. Toby wore his usual loose jeans and dark T-shirt, his chest stamped ABERCROMBIE. They were working on his monologues and had come to the fourth one, where confidence falls apart and fear bursts into view. Patience was running low.

  Toby shook his head. “Sorry, Frank. I’m in a real crappy mood today. Life sucks. But I need to forget Toby and focus on ‘Toby.’” He made quotation marks in the air with his fingers.

  Frank agreed the problem was there. The hardest role for almost any actor to play is him- or herself. You play yourself anyway, whether you’re Lear or Seinfeld, but you can usually be more accurate when you are pretending to be someone else.

  “All right. Let’s try it again. Wait. Let me—” Frank turned on the lamp by the television. It was only six, but the sky had been clouding up all afternoon, threatening rain without ever delivering. The rooms had grown dark and gloomy. Nobody else was home. Allegra was out, and the others were off at a big catering job.

  “And carry this,” said Frank, taking his sports coat from the chair. He disliked it when actors hid in props, but they needed something here. “And put this on.” He took off his necktie, and Toby knotted it around his neck—it hung like a red-striped candy cane over his T-shirt. “Now pretend I’m Chris. I’m going to sit here like Chris. And I want you to come in and convince me that you have the most wonderful fucking life on the planet.”

  Frank sat in front of the TV. Toby came around the corner.

  “Hey, hi. What’s on? Boy, did I have a great day. Had a great audition. And an excellent job interview…”

  Frank listened closely. But there was no change, no growth. The monologue was as wooden as ever.

  “How about a break?” he said. “Do you know if there’s any juice or soda in the fridge?”

  Toby followed him into the kitchen. “I’m sorry, Frank. I got a grip on the other scenes—I think. But this is the important one, and I have a block about it. I don’t know why. Maybe I’m afraid of expressing too much.”

  “Better too much than too little. We can bring it down later.” Except Toby’s “too much” really was too much.

  “I wonder if I’m feeling too rejected to ‘play’ rejected. Because I really am bummed out this week. I’m overdosing on no.”

  “Here.” Frank handed Toby a glass of orange juice. He disliked mucking around in real emotions—this was theater, not group therapy—but he decided to listen to Toby, on the off chance that he might hear something he could channel back into the monologue.

  “I’m told I’m too white-bread for one part. Or too faggy for another. And then I get dumped by the man I love. New York just chews you up and spits you out. I don’t know why I even moved here. I should have stayed in Milwaukee. They have good regional theater. But if you’re famous in Milwaukee, who are you? You’re somebody who’s famous in Milwaukee.”

  The boy was so naked, so needy. Why would anyone this vulnerable expose his ego to the acid bath of theater? But Frank knew why. He’d been there himself.

  “I’m sure glad I don’t have to be famous anymore,” said Frank.

  Toby stared. “But you never were famous.”

  “No. But I thought I needed to be famous. Before I could be happy. And then I found I could be happy without fame.”

  Was he happy? He waited for Toby to challenge him there, but the boy only nodded obliviously.

  “Well, I don’t have to be famous,” said Toby. “But I won’t turn up my nose at it. It’d make Doyle see how wrong he was.”

  Maybe here, thought Frank. They might find Toby’s missing key in his experience of love gone wrong. “It’s rough,” he said, “being dumped by someone you love. Let’s go back to the living room.”

  Toby followed him. “I saw Caleb this morning. Big mistake. I just dropped in. I should have called. But he hardly noticed I was there. Like I was last week’s laundry.�
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  “Uh-huh. So what do you feel when you tell people things are fine, even though you’ve just been dumped?”

  “But I don’t tell anyone things are fine. Because they’re not.”

  “Right.” Frank paused to think of another approach.

  “I don’t know what I did wrong,” Toby argued. “It’s like he doesn’t want to be loved. Like he thinks he doesn’t deserve it. You’re seeing his sister, right? Is she fucked up, too?”

  They had Doyles in common, didn’t they? “Oh, Jessie is—complex. But I wouldn’t call her fucked up.” And Frank would never claim that she deserved his love.

  “The whole family’s twisted. They can’t love anyone who’s actually there. In the present, in the now. Caleb’s still in love with a dead guy. Isn’t his sister divorced or something?”

  “Yes. Only she never talks about her ex.” Frank had his own theories about Jessie, but he was not going to share them. “They’re an odd pair. Special. Different. And different from each other too.” He thought of Jessie now not as an image but as a sound: her sharp, witty laugh. “She’s smart. Practical and funny. And pretty. But she’s not ready to love anyone at the moment. Which is her prerogative.”

  “Sounds like her brother,” Toby said nastily.

  Frank lifted an eyebrow at Toby. “Maybe Caleb isn’t rejecting love. Maybe he’s just rejecting you.”

  He said it as a joke—he pretended it was a joke, anyway—but Toby looked insulted.

  “No! Absolutely not!” Toby recovered with a scornful laugh. “No way. He accepted me when love was new. When it was fun. But then it turned serious and it put him off. Because he has intimacy issues.”

  “But his play just went down in flames,” said Frank. “He might not have all that much love to share these days.”

  “Uh-uh,” Toby insisted. “He has intimacy issues. It’s a gay thing. You can’t understand, you’re straight.”

  He knew Toby only wanted to shut him up, but Frank hated hearing this line from gay friends. It was even more annoying than when they said, “Just how straight are you?” after Frank made a good joke. But the truth was that Frank didn’t understand gay men. In particular, what did they see in other men? What did women see in men for that matter? Men are so ugly and unlovable. Frank sometimes wondered if a hetero male were simply a self-hating man.

  “What time is it?” said Toby. Almost seven. “Good grief. I have to be midtown at eight.”

  “I thought you were free all evening?”

  “Since it was just me, I thought we’d rehearse only an hour or two. So I made, uh, plans.”

  “You can’t call and tell them you’ll be an hour late?”

  “No, because—Because I can’t, that’s all.”

  Frank was actually relieved their sticky one-on-one was almost over. Even so: “I wish you’d told me. I could’ve made other plans.”

  Such as getting together with Jessie. He knew that she loomed large in his thoughts only because they’d been talking about Doyles. But it was too late now. And it was a weeknight. There is nothing more unromantic during the first weeks of a relationship than seeing your beloved on a weeknight.

  “All right, Toby. One more time then?”

  They went back to the beginning. Frank became Chris again. Toby came out and launched his first speech. And it went better. Toby was in a hurry, which often helped. Then they came to the final monologue.

  “I walk into a room and people know I’m not nothing. I’m someone important, someone of value. And you know why they know that? Because I’m a positive person.”

  The speech raced like water over a flat rock of uncertainty. It was alive. Yes, that’s what the scene needed, real fear. Had Frank frightened Toby with the idea that Caleb was not rejecting love, he was rejecting Toby? Frank didn’t care so long as it worked.

  Toby delivered his last line, “Everything is fine. Everything is great.” He stood there, exhausted, blank. And Frank had an impulse—either as himself or Chris, it didn’t matter—but he got up and set a timid, sympathetic hand on Toby’s shoulder.

  And Toby seized him, hard. He threw both arms around him and held on tight. Frank had never guessed the boy was so solidly built, like a refrigerator.

  But it felt right. It felt good. It felt so good that Frank feared it might not be acting. Here they were, two men in love with a brother and sister, sharing a bear hug of panic.

  “Blackout,” Frank whispered in his ear.

  Toby released him. Frank could breathe again.

  “What do you think?” Toby asked nervously. “Did it work?”

  “Definitely.” So the boy had been acting. Good. An acted emotion is easier to repeat than a real one.

  “It felt right to me too,” Toby admitted. “I’m getting there. I think I have a handle.”

  “Want to try it one more time?”

  “I can’t. I need to shower and shave for my—thing. But tomorrow. Okay? I have a handle now. I’ll be even better tomorrow. With the others here.” And he hurried down the hall to his room.

  Fine, thought Frank. See if I care. But it was good to stop here. They could work on the scene tomorrow.

  Frank was glad to finish early. He could go home to Hoboken. He was glad to have a free night ahead of him. He could watch television, he could listen to music. He needed to save Jessie for the future, when his plate wasn’t so full.

  Besides, it looked like it was going to rain.

  30

  Jessie rode the subway downtown from Columbus Circle. The train was packed at rush hour. Standing the whole way, she found herself thinking first about bodies, then feet, then food.

  When she got off at her stop, Houston and Varick, she heard a sloppy clatter like applause overhead. She timidly went up the stairs toward the noise.

  Rain fell through the sky like a curtain of needles. It bounced all over the sidewalk like marbles. The street was bright with rain, varnished with wet. People crowded together in doorways, looking, waiting, then dashing to the next doorway and waiting some more. Cars and trucks kicked up a dense spray like smoke. The gutters and puddles teemed with bubbles.

  Jessie grabbed a newspaper from a trash can, covered her head, and ran. It was a warm city rain, with a peculiarly sweet smell of iron. Her building was three blocks away on Vandam Street. Fucking Mother Nature, she told herself. But it was only rain, only water. She began to laugh at herself. She was soaked when she reached her front stoop. She shook herself off in the vestibule like a wet dog.

  The neighborhood was a limbo zone of factory lofts, office buildings, and town houses, south of the Village, west of SoHo. Her building was a five-floor walk-up shelved like an old book between two printing plants. There were rumors that Leontyne Price lived in a town house across the street, but Jessie had never seen her.

  She climbed the steep stairs to the top floor.

  Her home was an illegal sublet with no lease, a shower in the kitchen, and a toilet in the hall. But it was all hers.

  The front door opened directly into the bedroom, which was dark. The windows faced air shafts, and the place was in shadow even on good days. There was the loft bed overhead that Charlie had built, strong and solid. He was a better carpenter than a husband. The kitchen was on the left, the living room on the right: a square space with a ratty sofa, a spongy easy chair patterned like a cow, and a stage-prop fireplace from a production of A Doll’s House. The bookcases flanking the mantel were full of videos, mostly old movies taped off cable. Over the mantel hung a framed poster for Venus in Furs, an art nouveau woodcut of a female face in a mink halo. “Like Mame with a whip,” Caleb joked when he gave her the poster.

  Jessie turned on lights, then music, then took a shower. The spray from the faucet joined the soothing crackle of rain outside. She pulled on panties and a sweatshirt so she could be comfortable while she decided what to do this evening. She considered calling Greta, her downstairs neighbor, but Greta was out of town. She was sorry she hadn’t suggested dinner to
Allegra, but she’d reached her Allegra quotient for the day. Sex, sex, sex: that’s all Allegra would want to talk about; Jessie was tired of sex talk. She was sorry that Frank had rehearsal tonight. But she didn’t need anyone. She could stay in.

  There was some broccoli in garlic sauce in a plastic tub in the refrigerator. She sniffed it—it seemed safe—and stuck it in the microwave. She went out to the living room and found the book she’d been reading, Hope Against Hope by Nadezhda Mandelstam. A memoir of Russian poets under Stalin—Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, and others—it had been recommended by Caleb, another of those sad artist biographies he read whenever he was blue. Jessie curled up on the sofa with her bare feet tucked under her bottom and entered a harsh world where people wore rubber raincoats, ate hard-boiled eggs, wrote harrowing love poems, and betrayed one another to the secret police. It sure put things in perspective.

  The microwave began to beep. The phone rang.

  She answered the phone. “Hello?”

  “Jessie?” Rain sizzled like static. “Hi. It’s Frank.”

  “Oh hi!” She was surprised by how pleased she was to hear from him.

  “I was downtown after work. Happen to be around the corner. Thought I’d call to see if you’re free. You eaten yet?”

  “I’m eating now.” But she wasn’t. Not yet. Why did she say she was? “Hey. Why don’t you come join me? Pick up something at the diner on the corner, then come up here and we can eat together.”

  “Oh?” He hesitated. “All right. Sure. Need anything?”

  “No. I’m fine. See you shortly.” Click.

  What was Frank doing down here? He didn’t just happen to be around the corner. He should be uptown rehearsing. He had come to see her, of course. But had he come to talk? Or for more? She was surprised by how quickly her body wanted a larky, friendly fuck.

  She turned off the lamp in the living room, then turned it back on. It was still light outside despite the rain. She didn’t want the room to be pitch-dark, but everything looked shabby in the electric glare. She considered brushing her hair and pulling on jeans. Nyaah. She felt kind of sexy in the sweatshirt that hung over her panties like a miniskirt. But she slid Hope Against Hope under the sofa, for fear Frank would think she was way too serious.