She was silent for awhile. “I know,” she finally said.
“Then why—why won’t you—”
Nepenthe breathed deeply, then exhaled.
“Can you imagine what our kids would look like?” she asked.
Webern went to the drugstore one dusty afternoon in Starkville, Mississippi. The store was empty as he pushed in the door; bells jingled. He glanced around, but the place looked just as deserted as he had hoped. An old man drowsed at an ancient cash register, and three empty stools stood along a soda counter piled high with bundled newspapers and dog-eared back issues of the Saturday Evening Post. A few flies buzzed at the store’s single grimy window. Webern slipped down one of the aisles toward the back of the store. He passed the Band-Aids and cotton swabs, the toothpaste and the ear plugs. His pockets, heavy with change and wadded bills, felt heavy. He had no idea what this was going to cost.
In the back of the store, Webern found them, lined up in brightly coloured tins the size of cigarette packs. Dean’s Peacocks—Merry Widows—Romeos—Seal Tite—Le Transparent. Who knew there were so many different brands? And what could the differences between them possibly be? Were there different colours? Shapes? Sizes? Webern stared at the label for the Sheik of Araby, which pictured a turbaned man riding a horse across a windblown desert, and the 3 Pirates, which proudly bore the image of a cutlass in its sheath. For the prevention of disease. Shadows: as thin as a shadow, as strong as an ox!
Webern began to reach for a tin, then glanced furtively behind him. His hand slipped up to rub his hump instead. The Tiger Skin Rubber Company. Blood rose to his face. He lingered on Mermaid Brand (perfection maid!) for a long moment, then grabbed a box at random and strode back toward the front of the store. He reminded himself he’d never come back to this place again.
The nearer he got to the counter, the slower Webern walked. The metal container warmed in his hand, and he stared down at his feet, watching the floor boards. When he placed the tin on the counter, the humiliation roared over him in a wave. The old storekeeper started awake, and he and Webern read the brand name on the package at the same time: Napoleons.
“Could you ring me up, please?”
Webern reached into his pocket for the money. He pulled out a dollar, and a hail of change rained to the ground. As he scrambled around, stomping on dimes and quarters, the storekeeper reached into the pocket of his wrinkled shirt to withdraw a corncob pipe and a pack of matches. By the time Webern finally had his money together, the storekeeper was puffing away, his wrinkled lips working around the amber stem. His rheumy eyes moved slowly from the tin to Webern, then back again.
“You’re not from around here, are ya boy?”
Webern stared at the tin as the storekeeper’s claws closed around it. “Listen, I’m kind of in a hur—”
“Well, if you were from around here, you’d know I don’t sell sailor caps to whippersnappers.” The tin disappeared beneath the counter. “Shame on you, boy. What would your mama think?”
“I’m not a child,” he said. The words came out as a squeak.
“Oh, come on there, sonny.” The storekeeper smiled slyly. “You can’t be much more than three foot tall.”
“I live on my own.”
“Oh, you do then? What’s your address?”
“I don’t have an address, I’m with the circus. We’re just passing through. Now please—” Webern gestured at the counter, then glanced over his shoulder nervously.
“With the circus, are you now? You got any identiformation that says so?”
“Just look at me!”
“You look like a boy, from where I’m sitting.”
Webern rubbed the toe of his shoe against the tile floor. He couldn’t go back to camp empty-handed. Webern looked up at the storekeeper, who in turn grinned down at him. His wizened face reminded Webern of a shrunken head Dr. Show had almost bought just outside of Tuscaloosa.
“Okay,” Webern finally said, “how can I prove it to you?”
“What is it you’re supposed to do in this ‘circus,’ sonny?”
“I’m a clown.”
“Well then—” The storekeeper slapped the Napoleons back down on the counter. “—better get clowning.”
The storekeeper removed a little envelope from the tin and handed it to Webern. His old bones creaked as he leaned back contentedly.
“You know how to do up all them balloon animals?” The storekeeper tapped his pipe against his single front tooth. “Make mine a poodle.”
Webern looked down at the little envelope in his hand. TEAR HERE. He looked up again. The cashier blew a smoke ring into his face.
Webern slowly unfurled the Napoleon. He’d expected it to feel dry and powdery, like the rubber gloves doctors had always snapped on before sawing off his body cast or aligning his spine. But this rubber was slick, greasy, even. Webern wiped his fingers on his jeans, took a deep breath, and inflated the tube. Even he was surprised at how obscene it looked: milky white with a nipple-shaped protuberance at the tip.
Lubricant left dark patches on the wooden countertop; the Napoleon kept slipping out of his hands. Webern cursed, holding the reservoir tip down with one elbow as he struggled to twist the poodle’s legs.
“Havin’ a little trouble, there, are ya, boy?” The cashier slid a candy jar toward him. “Maybe you’d ruther have a bit-o-honey instead.”
“I’m good, thanks.” The rubber squeaked as Webern squeezed the air out of the poodle’s tail. He knotted the latex into bubble-paws. Somewhere a bell jingled.
“I reckon you’ve proved it well enough,” the cashier continued, a little uneasily. “You’re with the circus, sure.”
“Oh, no, I’m just getting started.” Webern twisted the poodle’s neck.
“Why don’t you just take your farmerceuticals and get along, then? Compliments of the house.”
“I never leave the stage in the middle of a performance.” It sounded like something Dr. Show would say. Webern double-knotted the balloon poodle’s nose, and, with a flourish, presented it to the cashier. “Now, good sir, I believe an apology is in order,” he intoned.
“Mister, what’s that funny little man doing?”
Webern turned around. Two little girls in party dresses stood in the doorway of the drug store, eating Fudgsicles and watching him. Webern looked from the poodle to the oily splotches on the counter to the cashier. He grabbed the tin of Napoleons and sprinted out of the store.
Brunhilde knelt at her collapsible dressing table, trimming her golden beard. The scissors moved swiftly around her chin, her sideburns, even the nape of her neck. They whispered as they snipped. But, when the hair fell, not a single strand escaped her. She pinched the trimmings in a single tuft between the thumb and forefinger of her left hand, and, as soon as she finished, swiftly wrapped tiny locks—only three or four hairs each—around equally tiny cards. Printed with her name and the date, these cards proclaimed the samples “GENUINE LADY WHISKERS.” Her task completed, Brunhilde shut the shears and slid them back into the triangular holster she wore on the belt of her dressing gown. Then she placed the hair cards in a small brown envelope. At the next show, she would offer them for sale.
Once, not so long ago, Brunhilde would never have considered hawking her wares in such a disgraceful manner. But that time was over now. She had lost the crowds that would pay any price to see her long ago, in the firebombing. She had also lost her glockenspiel and her teacher’s metronome, the stages on which she’d danced—the Grimms’ Tales and the cuckoo clock, the kid gloves and the dainty suede boots, the thick carved headboard of her childhood bed with its scenes of villagers sleeping. She had lost her home, her parents, and their bodies, of course.
After that terrifying night of screams and fires, when she’d huddled against a low stone wall and prayed for the last time, she’d passed several years sleeping in the ruined mansions
of her parents’ friends, relying on the hospitality of near-strangers. She knew all along it couldn’t last. So when her married cousin offered her a place to stay in New Jersey, the offer seemed too good to be true. She knew now that it had been.
Brunhilde had disliked the little house from the start, with its small, high windows and its artifacts of American kitsch—tea cozies sewn to resemble calico cats, a tiny wooden outhouse in which rolls of toilet paper were stored. She spent her mornings idly circling job advertisements in the paper. When Cousin Lisle and her husband left for the workday—he was a bond man, she a substitute teacher—Brunhilde wallowed on the sofa until they returned. At night, she lay awake in the trundle bed beneath a comforter stitched with tiny sheep in slippers, craving knackwurst and her native tongue, or thrashed with nightmares, seeing again the ruins of her home: a shattered window, a blackened tablecloth, her mother’s bloodied glove. Then, out one afternoon in the town’s drab park, she had met Schoenberg, bent over a miniature easel.
“Say you’ll pose for me. You must allow me to sketch you, at the very least,” he insisted. “I’ll have you know, it’s a high honour indeed. As a rule, I only paint self-portraits.”
He’d offered her fame, fortune, a return to her former standing, and what’s more, his undying dedication to her career. He even tried to address her in his pitiful German until she begged him to stop. She was only the second member to join his little troupe—Al had already signed on—but when Schoenberg spoke of the future, her heart had lifted. Such promises! Silken tents filled up with pillows, performances on the stage, a journey back to Europe in a few years, when, he hinted, she might find her homeland miraculously restored. Of course, now that she saw him for what he was, an escapist so deluded that perhaps even he believed the wild fantasies he spun like straw into gold, she wondered how she could have been so naive. Yet it was impossible to hate him. Once, and only once, the two of them had wandered together through the corridors of a funhouse until they came to a place where their own reflections surrounded them, elongated and rubbery, bulbous and distended. In that room, Schoenberg had kissed her, and before she regained her sense enough to slap him away, a feeling had overcome her, a dizzying sickness, as though, against her own will, she had passed beyond those mirrors into a land of marvellous impossibilities. It was in this realm, she suspected, that Schoenberg dwelled at every moment of his life.
Brunhilde smoothed her neatly barbered beard and reached under the dressing table for her Dresden suitcase. Opening it up, she ran a reverent hand over the photographs she had shellacked inside, then removed a tube of depilatory cream from the tangle of clothes and squeezed a dollop out onto her finger. Slowly, tenderly, she massaged it into the hollow between her breasts. In Germany, she had been the Girl Esau, but in America, the customers liked their bearded ladies smooth and feminine everywhere but the face. She rubbed a bit more cream onto her forearms and the knuckles of her hands, then considered the tube for a moment. Enrique had stayed behind in Lynchville. Would Dr. Schoenberg finally call his circus kaput if another act—say the animal taming—also fell to tatters? Would he finally perform a disappearing act of his own?
Brunhilde imagined tiger fur in the sawdust, Hank’s resignation—the last straw. In her mind, Schoenberg stood over a burnt-out campfire, wet logs and char, while the remaining circus players slept in their tents. He unlocked the yellow Cadillac, and drove away to a new city where he would live alone under a new name, a new set of pretenses, a place where no one could track him for payment of any kind. He would have to see the necessity of it, deluded though he was. He would finally have to understand. Only a child would choose a warped mirror over one that showed him the truth.
Had it not been for the distractions of love, Webern couldn’t have stood what was happening to the circus. The day after the revelation of the empty cashbox, the players had gone about their business as usual. They rolled up sleeping bags, cleaned out the tiger cages, slurped bad coffee, and burned their fingers smoking cigarettes down to the last puffs. They drove five hours, set up camp in a new town, ate, threw their paper plates in the fire, and slept uneasily amid the drone of the cicadas, the woolly darkness that muffled their dreams. The next morning, Webern went to the main street to tack up advertisements, and when he came back his heart lifted at last: Al, Eng, and Vlad and Fydor were hoisting the orange canvas up the big top’s centre pole, and the fabric, filthy though it was, gave off a kind of radiance that warmed him like hope.
The show there drew a decent crowd, and by the end of the evening the cashbox wasn’t empty anymore. But something had changed. The players didn’t debate the merits of a late night visit to the liquor store versus a local moonshine till, and they didn’t loudly argue about what had drawn the biggest laughs or who upstaged whom. Instead, they scattered as soon as the show was done, as if the fact they were still putting out the effort embarrassed them. Webern took Nepenthe to a malt shop in town, but it was already closed. He folded a flower for her from a piece of red cellophane he found blowing in the street.
Lately, Schoenberg had more or less retired to his tent, only emerging for performances or when they packed up to leave town. He’d given up driving the Cadillac, preferring instead the company of the tiger cubs, Fred and Ginger, and the high-piled supplies that bounced along in the red trailer behind the Jeep. He made a strange sight when they opened the door, invariably slouched against one metal wall like a broken doll or a prisoner. Webern couldn’t understand why he’d prefer it in there, with the dismantled bleachers and rolled-up posters, the air thick with the smell of the cats’ straw, but Schoenberg said it helped him think, that he required solitude to draw his plans.
If solitude was all he really wanted, then Schoenberg was a lucky guy, because he was by himself nearly all the time now. He almost never talked to Webern around the fire, and he didn’t even give him orders much anymore. Webern missed the hours he’d spent trudging off to the grocery store with a list written in that unmistakable flourishing hand, the afternoons he’d wasted raking the sand in the ring while Dr. Show looked on, calling instructions into a bullhorn.
Webern had always thought that if he could get away, just for a few hours, he would come up with clown acts that would take the shapes of his dreams, that he would rival even the greats whose feats he’d read about in library books: Joey Grimaldi, Weary Willie, the Fratellini Brothers, Otto Griebling. But now that he had the time, he didn’t use it. Instead, he whiled it away with Nepenthe, bringing her lime popsicles and thumbing through the books she carried in her trunk when she didn’t feel like talking. Though Freud and the poets featured in the heavy volume Modernism and You weren’t much like the fairy tales of his childhood, it was comforting to lie by the side of Nepenthe’s kiddy pool, surrounded by pages open like friendly wings. Sometimes, though, he had to look up at her, slouched there in the icy water, a peach pit rolling on her tongue, and wonder just what exactly she was thinking.
Dear Bo-Bo,
I’ve never been happier than I am right now, and I’m still pretty sad. It’s just like you always used to say: “Every rose has thorns, every burger’s got bones.” This postcard is from Medicine Lodge, Kansas. Hope you are well.
Love, Bernie.
Webern stamped the postcard and turned it over. On the front was a picture of an old lady waving a hatchet, standing in a splatter of broken glass. Definitely the kind of thing his grandma would appreciate. He leaned his head against the Cadillac’s window and watched the fields fly by. A barn drifted past, its skeleton visible through the chinks in its boards. Beside him, Vlad controlled the steering wheel while Fydor inspected a map. The Cadillac felt wrong, all wrong, without Dr. Show driving it.
Although they never discussed it, Nepenthe and Webern both knew that things had changed once he bought the condoms. As if it were a joke, they started to imitate a married couple. For awhile, she stopped calling him “kiddo” and used “honey” instead; he started kissin
g her on the cheek when he came home. One afternoon, he even came back to discover her washing his clothes in her kiddy pool.
“You take such good care of me,” he said tenderly.
“I found a flea,” she retorted. “I figured it was probably yours.”
Webern still turned his back when she changed, but he did it willingly now, without waiting for her to insist. He knew it was only a matter of time.
But still, the night they finally lost their virginity, Webern wasn’t prepared at all. As usual, he fell asleep beside Nepenthe on top of the sleeping bag, and sometime later he half-heard her splash into the icy waters of her kiddy pool. Webern moved through vague, dim dreams that floated like clove smoke around his head until sometime around five in the morning, when he woke to Nepenthe’s kisses.
“Hey,” she whispered. Wet tendrils of her hair dangled in his face, but she was dressed in her pink chenille robe, and the thick fabric felt warm and dry beneath his hands. Webern kissed her back, and soon she lay beneath him on the floor of the tent. He reached for the tie of her robe. Nepenthe stared up at him, the beginnings of a scowl showing in the cracks around her eyes. But she didn’t push him away as he loosened the knot. He thought it was sweat he tasted, then realized it was tears.
“It’s all right,” he told her.
“Oh, sure, all right for you maybe.”
“What?”
“Forget it. Just do it quick, like a Band-Aid.”
Webern undressed her. Nepenthe didn’t move. She lay stiffly on her open robe, her arms at her sides. Webern looked down at her body. The scales, flat and silvery-pale, caught the early morning light like plates of mica. In the show, Nepenthe appeared onstage naked except for a loin cloth, stitched from green leather to resemble a swamp leaf, but she always lay on her stomach. Now Webern saw her breasts for the first time. The nipples, wrinkled pink, reminded him of dried rose petals. He leaned down to kiss her hip and noticed the initials ER embroidered on her underpants.
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