Lives of the Circus Animals

by Christopher Bram

  Caleb moved to Manhattan after college and began to write nothing but plays. One was produced at Playwrights’ Workshop. Then another. Both got decent reviews, good enough to encourage him to write a third play. Nobody expected anything different from Venus in Furs. It wasn’t an adaptation of the novel by Sacher-Masoch, but a chamber drama about Sacher-Masoch himself and his marriage to a woman who loved his novel and wanted to live it, a philosophical comedy about writers and readers, fantasy and reality, sex in the head and sex in life. A rave from the Times turned Venus into a surprise hit. The female lead became a star, the show moved to Broadway, and Fox bought the movie rights for a million bucks. My brother, the millionaire, Jessie had thought, which was hard to believe even after he moved from his dinky studio in Hell’s Kitchen to a swank apartment overlooking Sheridan Square.

  That was four years ago. The movie had never been made; a new play had come and gone. “The Times giveth and the Times taketh away.” The joke was Caleb’s.

  Jessie resumed walking. Beyond the gloom of the McAuliffe, just down the street, was the bright oasis of the Booth. Up above, on the corner facing Broadway, art deco letters trimmed in white lights declared: Tom and Gerry. Canvas banners suspended below added “Gorgeous entertainment!” and “Smash Hit!” and “Five Tony Nominations!” On street level, under glass, Henry and the rest of the cast struck happy attitudes in the display cases, their nifty 1930s costumes promising glamour, wit, magic.

  Jessie turned the corner into Shubert Alley and the stage door, behind the magic. It was like visiting the back of a fancy restaurant and seeing the trash cans. Which should have burned away the romance. But knowing the reality behind the illusion only added to the romance for Jessie. She felt deep inside the thing itself.

  The doorman knew her and nodded her through. The white-brick hallway upstairs was deserted. The cast was all in the wings awaiting the curtain call. The play played in the PA system, miked backstage so actors could hear their cues. They were singing the elaborate closing quartet, celebrating the double marriage of Hackensacker and his sister, the Princess Centimillia, to Tom and Geraldine’s identical twins. She caught Henry’s voice declaring his love to his bride.

  I know not who you are, my dear,

  But my love is the best kind.

  Ignorance is bliss, I fear,

  And romance should be blind.

  There is no justice, thought Jessie. Here was Henry Lewse, a genius whose real home was Shakespeare, Chekhov, Shaw, reduced to chattering bad rhymes on Broadway. T & G wasn’t trash, especially compared with the current crop of techno-musicals. Based on the old Preston Sturges movie The Palm Beach Story, the book made up in cleverness for what the music lacked. Still, Jessie couldn’t understand why Henry chose to do such piffle. He wasn’t even the lead, but the Other Man, Hackensacker, an American millionaire of the 1930s, back when a million dollars was a million dollars. He couldn’t sing, but he recited his songs, one a patter song, “How Awful to Be Rich,” which was the hit of the show. Everyone assumed he’d win a Tony next month.

  The loudspeakers filled with the crackly static of applause that grew into the usual standing ovation. Then the actors poured backstage, led by a wedge of beagles. The dogs of the Ale and Quail Club strained on their leashes, snorting and drooling, poking ice-cold noses against Jessie’s legs. She pressed herself to the wall. Human actors followed, a long sigh of performers who stank of sweat and makeup, a harsh smell like wet fertilizer. Henry came last, in top hat, tails, and pince-nez, grousing loudly to the Princess.

  “What a ghastly audience! Who were those people on the right? They chattered even during the songs. I wanted to call out, ‘Excuse me, are we disturbing you?’” He saw her. “Ah! Jessica, mon amie. So good of you to come. Please. Join me in my dressing room. Later, Marge,” he told the Princess.

  Jessie followed him inside and crowded herself into a corner.

  Henry sat at his mirror. “What a night. What an audience. Half the laughs were missing. My timing was all over the place. I felt like an elephant on roller skates.”

  He didn’t offer her a chair—there was no chair to offer. Like most actors, Henry understood the concept of Other People but forgot the physical consequences. Jessie didn’t mind. To see Henry Lewse in an undershirt, his face buttered with cold cream, gave her the same romantic antiromance as her image of trash cans behind the fancy restaurant. She took the Mickey Mouse bag from her briefcase and set it on his table.

  “You got the goods. Excellent. And what did it set you back?”

  “Uh, five hundred dollars.”

  “Hmp. As bad as London. Yet we persist in calling it a nickel bag. Nostalgia, I suppose.” Henry still carried traces of Hackensacker, the character’s humorous humorlessness. “You sure you don’t want a commission? As middle-woman? You spoil me. My wallet’s in my trousers. Go ahead and—Oh drat. Nothing in there but a twenty. I know, because I stiffed the delicatessen delivery boy on his tip. The look he gave me. Do you mind terribly walking me to the cash machine? I do have the money in my account, don’t I?”

  “You got paid on Monday.” Jessie deposited his paychecks, paid his bills, and managed his U.S. bank accounts. She also answered his mail, sent out his laundry, picked up his groceries, and arranged to have his apartment cleaned. And tonight she was his connection.

  “So sorry, my dear. I am such a ditz when I work. Even this deep into the run, when I could do the show in my sleep. Only I can’t sleep, which is why I need this.” He patted Mickey Mouse.

  There was a knock on the door. Miranda, the dresser, was here for his costume.

  “Jessie, darling?” He stood up, holding out hands still covered with cold cream. “Could you?”

  She stood behind him, reached around his waist, undid his buckle, and unzipped his zipper. For a moment, she was Henry Lewse, taking off his/her trousers. Jessie often forgot how short Henry was, only half a head taller than she.

  “What did you think, Miranda?” he asked as he/she/they stepped from Hackensacker’s pants. “Was the audience as bad tonight as I thought? These Friday-night people from New Jersey. They think they’re still at home in front of the telly.”

  Henry was in his early fifties, or maybe later, but he had the muscular legs of a younger man, nicer legs, in fact, than Frank. Henry wore the same brand of boxer briefs as the model over Times Square, which disappointed Jessie. She wanted him to be more exotic.

  She handed his trousers, shirt, and the rest to Miranda, then returned to her corner.

  “Well, no good crying over spilt milk,” he said as he sat back down and took out a handful of tissues. “I’ll put this fucking night behind me and find my feet again over the weekend. Maybe that’s why I was off tonight. The testicles know that we have to do this again tomorrow night and twice on Sunday.”

  That he could say “fucking” and “testicles” indicated he was shaking off Hackensacker. He wiped away the cold cream. The muddy beige mask gave way to a longish, solemn, masculine face. His strong features registered as handsome only from twenty feet away. This close, and on film, he looked his age, especially around the eyes.

  He studied his face in the mirror, then scrambled the front wave of Hackensacker’s dyed hair, attempting to fix his image.

  “If you’ll excuse me, my dear, I’ll just hop in the shower. Only a minute. Meet you outside.”

  “Right. Sorry. Yes,” said Jessie, blushing slightly, afraid that he thought she wanted to see him naked. One could never second-guess the modesty of actors. Not only had she just taken off his pants for him, but she’d already seen him naked, three years ago in London, making love to Vanessa Redgrave in Antony and Cleopatra.

  Out in the corridor, she nodded at Tom, Gerry, the Princess, and the others as they hurried out and headed home. Henry had told her last week how the intensity of living “arse cheek to arse cheek” through rehearsals, previews, and opening night gave everyone cabin fever. They needed a break from one another, an escape from the hothouse of
enforced familiarity. Later they might become friends again, maybe. Out of makeup and costume, these ordinary faces bore no trace of stardom, only a residue of extra thisness, as if they were just slightly more real than ordinary people.

  Finally Henry came out, snugly buttoned into sky blue jeans and a jean jacket, dressed like he probably dressed back in his twenties when he was at RADA and then the Royal Shakespeare.

  “Did you bring Mickey?” she asked.

  He laughed and patted his jacket. “I did not forget Mickey.”

  Jessie was pleased to have made him laugh.

  Although it was a Friday, only a handful of fans stood outside the stage door. There’d been dozens the week after opening night, but they dried up over the following month, and all that remained now were old-fashioned autograph hounds.

  “Henry! Great show!” called out a fortyish man with a precisely trimmed, pencil-line mustache along his upper lip, a John Waters mustache without the irony. He was accompanied by an old lady in a blue-black wig, a long-necked boy with center-parted hair, and a plump young woman in a red velvet cape. They looked like refugees from other decades, but no contemporary person would wait to see live actors come out of a theater. It would be as primitive as hoping to see TV stars climb out from the back of your television set.

  “Yes. Thank you. So nice of you to come. You’re very kind,” Henry muttered as he signed autograph books, a Playbill, and a poster. “Bye now. Thank you. Yes. Bye-bye.” He raised his arm and twisted his hand at them like royalty.

  It was a mingy kind of fame, but Jessie was sorry when she and Henry headed down the street. The farther they got from the theater, the less the chances were that anyone would recognize Henry Lewse. She wanted people to spot him, know him, admire him—and wonder who she was, the mystery woman accompanying the Hamlet of his generation.

  Alas, poor Yorick, he was soon anonymous. Even in the Citibank on the corner of Ninth and Forty-second, where there were always actors and acting students, nobody looked twice at the short, middle-aged fellow in denim who entered his code at a terminal and made pouty fish faces at the screen while he waited for his money.

  7

  Tsk, tsk, tsk went the machine as it counted out the money. Henry took the bills from the slot, a dry thickness of stiff, green paper. Two months in this country and it still felt like play money, the very stuff that he was here for.

  “One, two, three…Oh dear, it’s all hundreds. I hope you won’t have trouble breaking these.”

  Jessie assured him that she’d be using it to pay her rent.

  They stepped back out into the rumble and roar of Ninth Avenue. He wanted to tell her good night, but not yet. His motor was still running too fast. Only the grass would slow it down enough for him to be able to sleep.

  “Friday night,” Henry declared. “How I loathe Friday nights. Everyone else is having fun, but it’s a school night for our profession. Have you eaten yet?”

  She said she had. Sorry.

  “Ah. I’m not terribly hungry myself. I’ll just go home, fry up an egg, and partake of Mickey here. Which way were you walking?”

  She offered to walk him home. They started up the block toward Fifty-fifth Street and his apartment.

  “You don’t have someplace else to run off to? It is Friday. Didn’t you say you had some kind of boyfriend?”

  “Some kind, yeah,” she said with a snort.

  Henry decided she didn’t want to talk about her love life, which was fine by him. He didn’t want to hear about it. Jessie was a nice girl and she did her job well—so well that he could forget about her entirely if only she didn’t moon over him as if expecting pearls of theater wisdom, bird droppings of wit. Americans were such silly romantics, with none of the pride that enabled the English to keep their hero worship discreet.

  “Ah, the city that never sleeps,” he proclaimed as they strolled against the late-night crowd. “They say that travel, like love, makes you innocent again. They obviously never did a theater tour. I’m in a very strange state these days. The play is locked, my performance set. There’s nothing for me to do each night except climb into my role and turn the ignition key. I’m committed by contract to stay on through this award thingy. The Tonys? If I win, heaven forbid, I’m obligated to spend the entire summer in this tedious show. It’s a quandary, a lose-lose for Mr. Lewse.” He laughed at himself. “Just listen to me. Ridiculous, ain’t it? It’s not like I have anything else lined up. And if I’m not working, I go bananas. I might fall in love, find religion, even try to find myself, heaven forbid.”

  Hearing his own giddy chatter, Henry realized he might be bananas already. He should say good night before he made a complete anus of himself.

  They reached his apartment building, a concrete monstrosity back toward Broadway, a postmodern neo-something like a high-rise pigeon coop. He suddenly remembered there was something he needed to ask. “Oh, Jessie. You know that mail thing you set up on my computer?” Yes, she did. The e-mail. “I can’t get into it. What do I click to open my mailbox?”

  “It’s easy. You just move the cursor over to…”

  But he could make no sense of what she told him. “I’m sorry. You know what they say about actors. We remember our lines by forgetting everything else.”

  “If you like,” she offered, “I can show you.”

  “Do you mind? If you’d show me just one more time, I’m sure I’d get it.”

  She looked pleased to be invited up: her eyes remained cool, but her mouth was fighting a smile. Henry feared this was a mistake. He might never be able to get rid of her.

  “You spoil me, Jessica,” he told her in the elevator. “I don’t have much to offer guests. Well, you know my stock better than I do. But I could give you a cup of tea.”

  “I’ll be fine,” she said. “I’ll just walk you through the process and then get out of your hair.”

  Henry had assumed a female assistant would be less complicating than a male one. There’d be no sexual undertones to muddy relations between management and labor. Jessie, however, was a closet Mrs. Danvers. Her worship was discreet, expressed in looks, not words. But it was definitely there, and completely unjustified. After all, she was intimate with the mess of his life, his unpaid bills, dirty underpants, and petty contradictions. Tonight, for example: he both wanted her company and wanted to be alone.

  While Henry searched his pockets for his key, she took out her own key and unlocked the door.

  “Ah, my home away from home,” he sang as he entered and turned on lights. “A canny hole of me own to fart in.” The producers had found this place for him just as they had found his batman, or rather batwoman. The flat wasn’t too awful. Everything was in tasteful shades of gray—carpet, upholstery, walls—with a couple of chrome tables topped with glass. It was as restful as an empty brain. A Nautilus machine stood in the dining room. Henry now turned on the television with the sound off. He needed a silent flicker of life.

  “You know where everything is, my dear. I’ll let you to it. Call me when you’re set up.”

  She promptly sat at his computer and turned it on. The machine was his, but only Jessie used it, for his correspondence, accounts, and money transfers. She was of that generation—their brains are wired differently—but he was still in awe of her ability.

  “Are you sure I can’t offer you some tea?” he called from the kitchen. “Or beer or wine?”

  “No, I’m fine. Thank you.”

  Nothing in the refrigerator looked half as interesting as the bag of grass that he took from the Mouse sack. He poured himself a glass of wine, then rummaged in the drawer and found his rolling papers. Here was a manual task that he handled quite well. He crumpled a tangle of weed, sprinkled it into the fold of paper, licked the paper, and rolled it, slow and tight, producing a joint as neat as a toothpick.

  He brought joint and wine out to the living room. Jessie was still messing at his computer.

  “Something not right, my dear?”

 
“Oh, Henry,” she said, sounding more like a mother than an employee. “You scrambled your files.”

  “Oh dear. This afternoon after you left, I tried again to get into my mail. The thingies kept disappearing.”

  “Files.”

  “I broke them?”

  “No. You just put them into the wrong places. I have to shuffle them back to where they belong.”

  He stood behind her with his glass of wine and unlit joint and watched the various boxes expand and pop, contract and mate.

  “Henry,” she said. “Follow what I’m doing. Just take the mouse, slide it around until the cursor—”

  “The what?”

  “This arrow. See it on the screen.”

  “All righty.”

  “Slide it to the mail icon, then click twice. No. Here. You do it.”

  She stood up. He handed her his wine and joint and sat at the keyboard. He did as she told him. Instantly a new box appeared, an empty box labeled New Mail.

  “What does that mean?” he asked.

  “It means nobody’s written to you.”

  “Oh dear. Nobody writes the colonel. My fucking so-called friends. Or did I give them the wrong address?”

  “Maybe they can’t imagine you plugged into the Net. You need to write a few notes to them.”

  “I suppose,” he said with a sigh. “But tomorrow. This old dog is too fried tonight to do any new tricks.” He noticed her mouth print on his glass—she had taken a sip. “So you will join me? Excellent.”

  She frowned at the wine. “Sorry. I took a swallow without thinking.”