Only Christos was unimpressed.
“You’ve made us a proper circus now, Rhona. Entertainment, nothing else. Once I was an artist. Now I am a whore.”
Kathryn tapped Leon on the knee and mimed at him, “I’m an a-a-artist.” He tried to hide his smile from Christos, who was ticking off the things he despised about the booth shows.
“Stupid costumes, an audience that wants to eat hot dogs and chatter to each other more than look at what they have paid to see, fake stories, the way I am supposed to smile all the time. Smile, smile, smile, you say. I have nothing to smile about in that glass prison with those monstrous people staring at me.”
“It’s just a job, Christos. And it won’t go on much longer,” Leon said.
“You know I nearly died after the accident, Leon, but I took the chance of destroying my health to continue with my wing project. My art project. We’re more than circus clowns! You, Leon, Kathryn, of all people, should understand. We are the posthumans. What we do should have meaning.”
Kathryn was silent, staring at the floor. Christos cuffed Leon’s head as he left the room in the way of a parent with an errant child.
“He always forgets,” Kathryn said after Christos had slammed the door behind him, “that he is the only one of us who chose to be this way.”
Soon after their conversation, Christos began turning up late or pretending to have technical difficulties with his wings to delay going onstage. It wasn’t long before he missed a complete performance. Two weeks later Yuri crept backstage three nights in a row to explain that Christos was unwell and would have to pull out again. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’m sure he will be better soon.” Christos declined to be examined by Minh. It was exhaustion rather than illness, he claimed. He needed rest.
“He’s perfectly fine,” Rhona said on day four. “Tell him he’d better get back onstage even if he is far too important to be performing with us. He can shove his art up his ass. This is business, and he’s under contract.”
At the end of a month of Christos’s snide comments about the show and failures to perform, Rhona burst into the private room of the hotel where the Wonders were staying in Berlin. Everyone leaped from their chairs, terrified they were under attack, save Christos, who did nothing but raise his eyes to Rhona.
“So you say you can’t perform tonight because you’re exhausted? Enough of your bullshit, Christos. You fail to go onstage one more time, you’re out, and I take my percentage of your fees plus the penalties that are written into your contract and good-bye. You’ll have”—she pulled out her screen—“about four hundred and thirty-seven thousand dollars left in your account.” She glared at him.
He ignored her. The armchair where he sat balancing a plate of cheese and crackers on his knees creaked as he recrossed his legs. He was getting fat. No exercise, eating all day. Stubble bristled on his softening jaw.
“I’m ordering you to perform tonight. It’s only a couple more months, then you’re free to fuck over whoever you like. Don’t do it to me.” Rhona didn’t take her eyes off him. She had a glare honed by growing up in a van beside the lion cage. No animal or human could outstare her. Christos closed his eyes.
When the hour came for his performance he refused to go on. Rhona ordered again that a third of the ticket price be refunded to every audience member.
“What the hell will I say to the press this time?” Kyle asked as the group, minus Christos, crammed into the elevator to their floor in the hotel. He was seething. He had knocked on Christos’s door and tried opening it, but Christos had locked it from the inside. Even Yuri was shut out and pacing the corridor.
“Say he’s dead, for all I care.” Rhona mashed her finger into the elevator button and the elevator, as if in protest, jerked to a start. “We are so close, so fucking close to the finale. I’m not going to let him ruin it. That was my last warning. He’s out, he’s finished.”
She was up late on the phone to her lawyers instructing them to draw up the termination-of-contract documents.
“I’ll say it to you too, Leon. Fuck him,” she told Leon first thing the next morning when he found her bleary-eyed in the room adjoining their suites, still dressed in the clothes of the night before. She lifted her cup and drained the last of the coffee. “I’m going to strip Christos of every fucking cent. I made that man. I took him from obscure art galleries and measly grants and shady doctors to this. He’s too old to compete in the art world now. He’s fucked himself over and I’m not rescuing him this time.”
“But, Rhona, he’s not well.” Minh had come in behind Leon. She rested her elbows on the mantelpiece, yawning and stretching her toes to the front, ballerina-style. Leon could smell the minty shampoo in her damp hair. “He’s still recovering from the surgery after the accident. Something like that affects your mind as well as your body. And he’s Christos!”
“I couldn’t give a shit, Minh. He’s pushed me too far. I’m tired. I knew I was taking on a lot with this project, but . . .” Rhona tapered off and rubbed her bloodshot eyes. “I’m tired, that’s all. We’re nearly at the climax and he pulls this. I’ve invested millions already in our final performance. Kyle and I have been planning it for months and Christos wants to ruin it. Well, he can fuck off right now. If he’s been out for a while his absence at the gala won’t be so obvious.”
Minh straightened up.
“We can’t let this happen,” she said.
Leon wanted to offer a suggestion but this kind of thing, dealing directly with people, was his weakness. Minh had been so crotchety with him lately that he’d locked the door of his study and started haunting marriage-counseling websites. “If he’s made up his mind, what can we do?” he asked.
“Let me fix it. Rhona, you know I’m right,” Minh said as if she hadn’t heard Leon speak. He reached for her but she pushed his hand away.
Kathryn appeared in the doorway, a cup of tea cradled in her hands. “What’s going on?”
“Rhona’s actually fired Christos this time.”
Rhona stood up and shook her head. “I can’t take his tantrums anymore. He’s ruining our reputation. The three Wonders are two Wonders half the time anyway, and I refuse to pay him for nothing.”
Leon saw the look that passed between Minh and Kathryn. For all the complaining Kathryn did about Christos, she was the one who defended him when others attacked. She was the one who would defend any of them.
“One more chance, Rhona,” Kathryn said. “We’ll talk to him.”
After a minute of staring out through the window at the blooming roses in the beds at the side of the hotel driveway, Rhona sighed so hard and with such a shudder it could have been mistaken for a sob. “One chance. One only. I simply cannot take his shit any longer. So much for my Enchanted Circus.”
“We tried every argument and all Christos did was stare at the floor,” Minh told Rhona and Leon later. “We said, what about the transformative power of art? You are changing people’s lives. ‘It’s not art,’ he says. What about the money he’d need for his next project? ‘I’ll find it another way,’ he says. On and on until finally Kathryn blurted out, ‘Don’t leave me.’ He lifted his head then. She said, ‘You told us we were family. Don’t abandon us.’ I think that’s what did it. And we said we would all have turns helping with his wings. To show him that we respect what he does for his art. Yuri’s told me about it and I think it’s much harder than we’ve realized. Plus Yuri can’t take much more of Christos swearing and shouting.”
The next night Leon and Kathryn had the job of inserting a wing each on condition that Christos not emit a single word of complaint. It was a strange and strangely moving activity, taking the wire wings, those large fragile insects, into their arms, holding the posts above the bulbs of the joins between their gloved thumbs and forefingers and easing the bulbs into the ceramic lilies. Leon closed his eyes, as you do when your fingers try to read surface marks invisible to the eye. He held his breath as he concentrated on feeling, knowing,
the moment when the bulb had clicked into the join. “Not yet, not yet,” Christos cried as he heard Leon release his breath in a sigh of relief. The muscles in Christos’s back convulsed. “It’s not in properly. We have to try again,” he said, and he heaved in a lungful of air and let it out in a gust. “Again, when I have relaxed my muscles enough to make the connection.” Leon had never realized before how every stage of inserting and manipulating Christos’s wings depended on an almost superhuman level of muscle control.
Rhona softened her stance as Christos, despite his moods and outbursts, worked hard for the next month. Kathryn held her tongue, and Yuri dodged the worst of Christos’s temper. All they had to do till the end was keep the peace.
AFTER THEY RETURNED to Overington and the storm had settled, Kathryn had Leon and Minh to her apartment. She poured them a gin, lime and soda, and they toasted Yuri, the buffer who saved them so often from the wrath and rants of Christos.
“We have to make Christos be kinder to Yuri though. Imagine spending twenty-four hours a day with Mr. Pomposity. Mr. I’m-an-artist-and-you-are-a-peasant. Sometimes I worry Yuri will leave. I think I’d be more devastated than Christos.”
“You’d be crabby too if you’d had the kind of surgery he’s undergone, Kathryn.”
“Sweet as always, Minh. But let’s face it, he was an arsehole well before we met him.”
“Maybe. But one who loves Yuri, even though he doesn’t always show it that well.” Minh reached around Leon’s waist and into his jacket pocket, feeling around for the tissues she had put there before they left the apartment. Leon couldn’t help placing his own hand on the outside of his pocket to experience the sensation of her slender fingers moving around inside in a gesture of such intimacy and ease. “And Yuri’s found his own work, the photography. He disappears to do that when he needs to. He’s so talented.”
“I know,” Kathryn said. “Still, Christos is a fool—no, a dunderhead, the way he treats Yuri like a slave. Yuri’s our baby brother. He’s the real angel here.”
Kyle appeared in the doorway. He stood there, smiling at the three and smoothing his hair on the left side with the heel of his hand in an unconscious gesture Leon had seen a million times. Pressing the hair flat against the head again and again as if he could contain some unruly thoughts that threatened to escape.
“Do you want a drink, Kyle, or are you just going to stand there staring at us?” Kathryn said.
Kyle pushed himself away from the doorjamb and strolled over to the couch. “Thanks for asking.” He sat down beside Kathryn and sank back into a plump scarlet cushion while she mixed him a drink on the tray on the coffee table. The housekeeper brought a fresh bucket of ice and was gone before anyone had a chance to thank her.
Leon could see that Kyle was making an effort not to accidentally brush against Kathryn as he caterpillared forward on the couch to receive his drink. Was this confident PR man actually nervous around Kathryn?
They lifted their glasses. The filtered light caught curls of lime peel in luminous movement as if they were live creatures swimming between the bubbles in the glasses. The four drank in silence, gazing out through the windows of Kathryn’s apartment at the clouds shifting shape in the milky pink sky of sunset. In the distance one of the elephants trumpeted. The other answered with a muted call. The understory vegetation Leon had seen being planted when he first arrived at Overington had now formed a dense hedge. Ashy green blueberries swelled beneath the dappled shade of a stand of red spruce and maple trees. The four-pointed stars of partridgeberry flowers in their distinctive pairs glowed against the glossy leaves trailing the ground.
They drank another glass while the light faded in the garden. When Kathryn stifled a yawn, Minh stood and stretched and said she was going to her studio to finish some work. She was gone before Leon had time to stand up. He said his good-bye to Kathryn and Kyle and was halfway across the common room before he realized he had left his phone beside his chair.
Kyle was talking in a low voice as Leon walked back up the carpet runner of the hall to the doorway. Leon hesitated. He was reluctant to interrupt, but he needed his phone, and so he stood swaying in his indecision, trying not to listen. Kyle’s voice stopped, then started, stopped, then started, a dogged drilling tool. In the third pause, as Leon was turning to leave, thinking he would call Kathryn and ask her to bring the phone to the apartment, Kathryn spoke.
“Kyle—”
Kyle’s interruption was inaudible, a low buzz. Leon heard the swish of Kathryn’s cape and a hollow tap as one of her heeled slippers clacked on the parquetry floor.
“I like you, Kyle—”
Again the buzz. Two quick clacks, as if Kathryn was edging backward. Or perhaps she was moving toward him. Perhaps it was the mating dance of to and fro, attraction and fear of rejection. How could Leon know, and why was he even pondering this when all he had wanted was to pick up his phone? It was time for him to stop hanging around behind the doorway.
“No, really, Kyle, you’re a pal, but . . . Anyway, we have to work together. Let’s keep it—”
Clack, clack. Now Leon was sure she was stepping away. He decided to go into the room, help break up the awkward moment. He rounded the doorway, hand on the architrave, and caught sight of Kyle standing close to Kathryn, closer than Leon had seen anyone to her, face-to-face. She must have been able to feel his breath on her lips. Shockingly, Kyle reached up and placed his hands around the back of Kathryn’s neck, as if to pull her face toward his. She reared away, almost unbalancing as her slipper heel caught the edge of the rug, then righting herself.
“I’ve asked you not to touch me. I don’t like being touched. I do like you, but not in that way. I’m sorry.”
Leon had to speak, to make his presence known before they saw him standing there. “Hello? Um, I left my phone.”
When they both turned to him, at such a speed he barely saw their heads move, Kyle’s face was so full of emotion Leon felt as though he was seeing three or four faces struggling to take control. What a terrible mistake. Why hadn’t he waited, or gone to the apartment and called? For a second he watched the turbulent performance of Kyle’s features. By the time Kathryn had squeezed behind the couch and begun to poke around the chairs for Leon’s phone, Kyle’s face was composed again, but his arms had dropped as if broken at the shoulders.
“Have to keep moving.” He smiled at Leon, the super-sincere toothy smile he could produce no matter what the occasion. “I’m out of here. Catch you later, Kathryn.”
“Yeah, okay, sure.”
Kyle pulled out his phone and began scrolling through screens as he sauntered past Leon and out the door.
“Found it.” Kathryn held up Leon’s phone.
“Great, thanks.” He would pretend he’d seen nothing. He took the phone from her.
“So, Leon, shall we forget about that . . . little scene?”
“Of course,” he said.
But he would never forget Kyle’s face in that moment, the wretched expression caught between grinning and grimacing.
FOR THE LAST couple of weeks, Leon had been working with a ghostwriter on a book commissioned by Kyle, who had heard about Leon’s library of self-help titles.
“Mate, do you think you could knock one of them out?” Kyle had asked. He often called Leon “mate,” and occasionally tried out “no worries” or “she’ll be right” with an upward inflection as if he was practicing a foreign language. “We’d get you a writer, of course.”
Leon supposed it was worth a try. He must have read hundreds of them. And it would pass the time.
“We’ll get a presale, market the hell out of it. This can be an ongoing income stream when we’ve shut down.”
The ghostwriter’s appearance was suitably spectral. He was in his fifties, with long thin blond hair. When he dipped his head to read or write, the hair closed in a lank curtain around his face. “What I do,” he told Leon, “is listen to you talk and channel you into lively accessible prose.”
“Hearts would be logical. Broken hearts? Mending hearts?” the ghost asked. “Tell me your story. There has to be plenty of material in that. How did this all start?”
They worked on the book in the tiny study Leon and Minh had used when they were looking for Susan, a recorder on the desk between them, the ghost’s pen poised over his pad. As yet, the book was a collection of chapter titles with almost no content: “Three Keys to a New Heart,” “Broken Is a Way to Mend,” “Unblock Your Emotional Artery,” “Healthy Habits for a Healthy Heart.”
“So, Leon,” the ghost said, “all this physical stuff you’ve told me is great, but maybe you could give me a bit more about your emotional journey. You know, so we can take the physical and make it a metaphor. How about you think about it and we try again tomorrow.”
Minh caught Leon on his way to the gym. He was wearing his rank old shorts, monster running shoes that seemed to be made to walk in space, and the chest brace that had been designed by Howard for him to wear whenever he exercised.
“You’re wearing the brace,” she said dully. “I always hated that brace.”
The first night Leon had spent in Minh’s cottage, when he was still anxious about his first sexual encounter after the surgery, he’d pulled away like a shy bride from Minh. They had been lying on the couch, kissing and stroking each other.
“Back in a moment,” he said.
He’d hurried to his apartment, fitted himself out and slipped through the dark hallways and the garden to Minh’s cottage. She had turned off the lights and opened her curtains onto the garden. The moon was a silver curl above the lions’ hill. Maisie and Maximus were asleep, two black mounds leaning together under the grassy fringe of their open-walled summer shelter.
The Wonders Page 18