Balancing Acts

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  He swallowed hard. ‘I’m not used to sleeping around.’

  ‘I’ll help you.’

  ‘In there.’ He nodded towards the bedroom. ‘I need room.’

  ‘Certainly.’ She rose, statuesque.

  He was reluctant to come alive. And afraid. Not of any mechanical failure, God knows it had been stored up long enough, only afraid that the closeness might kill him, reminding him. He couldn’t survive that. Afraid, too, because alive, now with her marvelous hands all over him, was so much more strenuous, pleasure so rich to the famished senses. He put his hand between her thighs and felt his fingers might flame up. His barricades were collapsing; he wanted to hide under the pillow, not to confront himself so bare and unshielded. ‘I’m scared,’ he said to the dark. She said nothing, but leaned over him, overwhelmingly present as no one had been for him in years. Her presence, a benevolent shadow in that dark, comforted him, quickened him. He moved into it. And oh, how he had lost the sense of what it was all about! No memory or fantasy was remotely like the real thing, like this real body beneath him and surrounding him. Who did not remind. Oh, no. In every way different, lavish and newly enchanting. His old grievances slid away; only the pounding heat remained, ageless.

  ‘Oh Max, oh Max,’ she kept saving, heaving. When it was over she even cried. He licked her tears.

  ‘We should have done this before, Max.’

  ‘Never mind that, we’ll do it again. Sleep now, sweetheart. Stay right here.’

  He slept late. Waking to the warm body, he felt his heart race in astonishment, and for an instant it was Susie, the years in between a bad dream. When he saw the fair hair and plump shoulder he remembered. Not disappointed, though. Other. And for once, a night with no revivals of the past; no need, for once, to scale dim canyons up to present daylight. That alone a great gift. As he watched her back rise and fall with even breaths, she stirred and turned around.

  ‘Hello, Max.’ She was smiling.

  ‘Good morning. This is awfully strange, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t see anything strange about it.’

  She could look good and even smile, first thing in the morning. He was more fortunate than he deserved. Tentative March sunlight seeping through the blinds made pale stripes on her arms. He touched.

  ‘I’ve been watching you,’ he said.

  ‘Is that so?’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Well, if you’ve seen enough I could get up and make us some breakfast.’

  He put his arm around her. ‘Not yet. Stay awhile.’

  ‘And how do you feel now?’ she asked. ‘Hung over?’

  ‘No, peculiar.’ He touched her cheek, wanting, in a heat of embarrassment, to thank her, but he couldn’t speak those words. He held her a long time.

  She kissed his lips. ‘It was...what can I say, Max? Beautiful.’ She got out of bed. In broad daylight her size and smoothness were intimidating. Incredible that he had been there a few hours ago. And could return. The very prospect generated a mild vertigo.

  He watched her enfold herself languidly in the royal-blue robe—ah, she might have been an elegant stripper—then lay back listening to the jiggling of the coffeepot. The click of cabinet doors opening and closing. He did feel peculiar. His body was spent, drained of energy. Not used to it, that was all. He reached out and touched her side of the bed, still warm. Maybe he really hadn’t the strength. Maybe, just now, she had expected...again. Maybe already disappointed? Ah, shit! Why did he always doubt and destroy? He never used to be that way. Since Susie he had forgotten what a friend was, lost all touch. He had made her happy, for Chrissake! Grumbling at himself, he rose and dressed, to go and be in the same room with her.

  Lettie was making pancakes, flipping them expertly and aligning them on the griddle in neat rows of three. Her austere concentration was seductive. Her coffee smelled strong, the way he liked it.

  ‘I wonder how Alison is,’ she said. ‘After all, she was the one who wanted to spend the night with you.’

  ‘But not like that!’ He stroked her rear.

  ‘Max, how much do you know about little girls?’ She laughed. ‘Not much.’

  ‘Okay I’ll be nicer to her in school Monday. You think I was too tough, don’t you?’

  ‘Can she help it if she goes for older men? Here, would you take in the syrup and butter, please?’

  ‘You ought to know.’

  ‘Well! There’s a difference. And these cups too, if you-don’t mind.’

  He liked her taking possession of his kitchen and giving orders. He had always admired an enterprising woman.

  After her second cup of coffee she said, ‘I have to go back to my place and do a few things. I didn’t come prepared to stay so long. Do you think I can make it to my door without anyone seeing me? They’ll call me the whore of Pleasure Knolls.’

  ‘Pleasure Knolls is right, for once. That’s exactly what’s needed here. They say full services provided, don’t they? The staff should provide it for everyone. Oh, but Vicky. Forget it.’

  ‘Don’t underestimate her. Vicky happens to be married to a very sexy-looking man.’

  ‘You don’t say.’

  ‘Listen, Max, I’m going to get dressed. Should I come back, or maybe you’d rather be alone? I know you like your privacy.’

  He was contemplating his nearly empty coffee cup while lighting a cigar. He paused to blow out the match, and planted the cigar between his lips. Lettie stood with her and on the doorknob, waiting. ‘Of course,’ he answered, ‘come back.’

  ‘Oh,’ she sighed, ‘that I should feel this way again, at my age.’ She peered down the hall and darted away.

  He sat amid the remains of the breakfast, smoking. Only twice while he lived with Susie had he had another woman. It hadn’t made him feel guilty, only strange, like a traveler in an alien place. The time she went off to John Todd’s trailer for a week he was furious, and in revenge set out to seduce a new girl helping in a dog act. He disliked dogs, especially the small cute kind, and he disliked hearing them yelp as she smacked them around and gave commands in a thin, brittle voice. But she was available as hell, a jittery, hot-eyed kid, so he hung around for a couple of days; it was not hard to impress her. In bed she was angular and bounced around, with a patter of phrases he had a hunch were ready-made to be recited in that brittle, eager tone. At the crucial moment she faked it, he was sure, as if she had learned what to do from a book. It was so unlike making love with Susie that he didn’t think of it as making love at all. A screw. He could forgive himself the first time, but when he went back for more it was with self-disgust. At least John was a real person; he envied Susie her good time.

  And Lydia. He relit the dead cigar. After all these years, he still grinned when he thought of it. He used to believe it happened only in books, till it happened to him. Largeboned, dark, and sultry, she rode horses with a group of Bulgarians who, rumor had it, kept her happy. He had never paid much attention. He was close to forty and had enough on his mind. His parents had recently died, one soon after the other, without having seen him in five years. He had sent his brothers money to save the delicatessen, money down the drain but he felt he owed it to them. And there were twinges in muscles that used to obey without complaint. Brandon, sick in bed, asked him one night as a personal favor to go around with a message; the boy who usually did that had influenza too. The illness was devastating the show, making each day a struggle to improvise. When he got to Lydia’s he found her in bed under the covers, bright-eyed with fever.

  ‘Oh, you too?’ he said. ‘Sorry to bother you. There’s a change for tomorrow. The run-through’s at ten instead of nine. Do you think you’ll be able to make it?’

  She flung back the sheets and got up, stark naked. Her skin was dark, her fingernails and toenails painted forest green. He gaped like a boy. She was the most stupendous body he had ever seen. ‘How would you like a drink?’ she offered.

  He was crazy to accept, but how could a man walk out on that? Just a quick drink. He had never bee
n given a drink by a naked woman before. It made all the difference: every common movement, from fetching the bottle and ice to raising her glass and saying, ‘Cheers,’ took oh a halo of fascination. She began to ramble about things she liked to have done to her in bed—Susie was modest in speech; he had never heard a woman talk that way—and then she lay on the bed, opened her legs, put her hands beneath her breasts, and said, ‘Give it to me, Max. Come on and give it to me.’ So he gave it to her. It didn’t take more than a few moments. Closing the door behind him, he blinked in the darkness outside and continued his rounds. He felt oddly renewed, as if he had had a vacation from real life.

  A few days later, recovered from his own case of flu, he told Susie, thinking she would find it as droll as he did. How profoundly mistaken he was. ‘But can’t you see, it would have been cruel to say no.’ For that feeble crack she hurled a full ashtray at his head. The sheer needlessness was what got her. Not like her and John Todd years ago, she pointed out, when Max told her she was a spoiled bitch and could pack her bags anytime. He practically sent her over there. And had she ever said a word about that skinny adolescent with the dogs? Okay! But what inspired him this time? Was he nothing more than an animal? she wanted to know. What was he, anyway? Was this—this creature so irresistible? She hadn’t a brain, everyone knew that. Just a...Susie wouldn’t stoop to say it. Max couldn’t justify the sudden need, but there had been something, he tried to explain. Some...need. That bad a need? Susie shouted. There must be something wrong with her, then; she didn’t know about such overpowering needs. When at last—weeks!—she was friendly again, he teased her. ‘Why don’t you ever say, “Give it to me, Max, please,” in a hoarse voice?’ ‘I’m not so desperate,’ she replied with her best regal air. Oh, but God almighty, she was, for him. Without the words.

  He sighed and reached for his cup, but the coffee was bitter on his tongue. The cigar tasted rotten too; he stubbed it out. He didn’t feel like the man who had done those things. Perhaps he wasn’t—the memories endured while the body’s cells were sloughed away. Lettie’s breakfast, like Lettie herself, had been delicious, but it lay dead on his chest like a stone. He was worn out from that business last night with Alison and her father. Foolish to have let her keep coming around—she was really none of his affair. He would go and lie down. But as he moved to rise, a pain like a knife blade ripped across his chest and out toward his shoulder. Heartburn tenfold—the strong black coffee could do that. Dr Small had said not to. It passed, though. He tried once again to get up, but his legs wouldn’t support him; he dropped back in the chair, holding his breath. Something was coming. Ah, there: another slice, up and down his arm; he winced, and then no more pain, just all the juice drained out and his vision fading. Gray clots over everything. So, there it was. What he had wanted, but now he wanted to fight it off. Only his body was useless, stiff with fear. Pills in the bedroom, oceans away, forget it. How ignoble, this dying in a hard kitchen chair in front of a knocked-over coffee cup. And unfair: he wanted to do it with her one more time. Just one more time, Lord—was that asking so much? But already he could feel life ebbing. Ah, now he knew what it was like. Quite simple, really. Cut loose and drifting. No touch. Out of reach...His mind scattered, bits of colored glass at the end of a tube. Blue spangles far up, if he could only reach...Amid the debris, faintly, a knocking at the door. Oh if you love me hurry.

  ‘Max! Oh, my God!’ Clutched at him and let go in fright. On the phone. Hurry, sweetheart, was all the mind he had left. The white light was racing out of him, and he aching to call after it and demand it back—but as in dreams, from his mouth opened wide to scream, no sound would come.

  CHAPTER 8

  ‘HEY, ALISON! OVER HERE!’ It was Franny calling above the blur of voices in the cafeteria. The air was thick with the greasy smell of hamburgers grilling. The kids on line in front of her had grayish scoops of mashed potatoes on their plates, the hollowed-out tops filled with brown gravy like little volcanoes with overflowing lava. Franny was at a table near the windows, with Hilary and Karen and the boys from Max’s group. Nick, of all people, was standing up waving an arm in the air, doing some sort of routine. She put an apple and a dish of green jello on her tray and went over.

  ‘Nick can do this great imitation of Fats Fox,’ Franny said, her long feather earrings swaying as she tossed her head. ‘Watch him, Al. Do it again, Nick. Please!’

  Nick had Fats’s midwestem accent exactly right: ‘There will be no run-een in the gym,’ he said, in a tone that mingled irritation and helplessness. ‘Do you want to go down to Mr Barry’s office?’ Mr Barry was the principal. Nick even managed to seem chubby, with his hands flat on his slouching hips. When his jaw dropped and his eyes rolled upward in dismay, he looked so absurd that she had to laugh with everyone else. ‘No more hog-een of that basketball, Alison,’ and he punched her lightly on the shoulder. Hilary and Franny collapsed in giggles.

  ‘All right, that’s enough fooling around,’ Hilary said. ‘Alison, we’re having a meeting. To decide about Max.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Here. First sign this.’ Bobby handed her a card. ‘After Fats told us, I cut history to go out and get it.’

  ‘A real hero!’ Franny pulled a lock of his hair, and he slapped her hand away.

  On the front was a cartoon drawing of a man in bed, his legs up in traction, with crossed patches of bandage on his forehead and arms. Inside it said: ‘Hear you’re laid up, Well, don’t be blue, Just hurry on back, The gang misses you.’

  It made her want to puke. Didn’t they understand that Max’s sickness was invisible? He had no bandages. They had all written their names in different-colored pens, some adding little messages and drawings. Karen had made a stick figure on a trapeze with a crutch, and Bobby’s was spelled wrong: ‘Hope you have a speedy recovery.’ The whole thing was a messy scrawl.

  ‘Well, come on, Alison, sign. We still have to decide on the present.’

  In a small space between the broad flourishes of Bobby’s signature and the stiff wiry lines of Elliot’s, she wrote ‘Alison’ in tiny block letters, not her real handwriting. Maybe he wouldn’t notice it. She could see him looking at the card and shrugging one shoulder. ‘Aha,’ he would say with a sarcastic grunt. ‘It appears the gang misses me.’ If he lived to see it.

  ‘How about flowers, something like that?’ Bobby asked.

  ‘He’s not the flowers type.’

  ‘Oh, Alison knows all about it, as usual. Why, did you ever ask him?’ Elliot sneered.

  Karen said she heard somewhere that flowers use up the oxygen in a room. ‘He might have trouble breathing.’

  ‘Flowers are too common. We ought to get something more personal, like maybe a book.’ Nick was looking at her as he spoke. It was funny how ever since Max had chosen him to demonstrate all the new tricks, Nick had begun giving his opinions on every subject, looking you straight in the eye too.

  ‘A mystery,’ she suggested.

  ‘Oh, no, Alison,’ Hilary said. ‘He would think mysteries are dumb.’

  ‘Listen,’ Bobby said. ‘If everyone brings a dollar tomorrow I’ll cut lunch and go to Korvettes. I’ll think of something when I’m there.’

  ‘I’ll go with you,’ Franny volunteered. ‘Boys don’t know how to shop alone.’

  ‘I wonder,’ said Karen, ‘if he dies and they have a funeral, if we’ll all get invited. I went to one once, my uncle’s. It was really weird. They don’t dig the hole while you’re there. They have it all ready. And you leave before it’s all filled up.’

  ‘Yeah. My father says a heart attack in a man his age is no joke. He tried to do too much. He thought he was hot shit.’

  She stood up. ‘Elliot, you’re such a creepy idiot. And besides, your father is a dentist! He knows teeth, not hearts.’ Grabbing her tray and knapsack, she left them gaping and ran to the girls’ room. She pressed her fists over her eyes till the tears were forced back, and then slipped out a side door and ran home. If Wa
nda was there she would tell her she felt sick. She did, too—the hollow space had gotten to her head.

  There was a note on the kitchen counter: ‘Went to get my hair done. Back around four-thirty. Mom.’ Josh was gone too. He had left early this morning for three weeks in the Northwest. When he kissed her good-bye in the kitchen he murmured, ‘Now no more cutting, remember? And no funny business like the other night, either.’ She had to think of her mother, he had whispered. Keep an eye on her.

  She shut the door of her room. Maybe she would never go back to school again. She could pretend to be very weak, and have a private tutor. She could stay in her room forever, reading and writing—you learned more that way anyhow—and after a while she would forget about how she had gotten him upset and sick, possibly killed him. The people in stories could not really be hurt, no matter what you made them go through. Alice had gone on long enough—soon she would start a new one. It could be about an invalid child, like the boy in The Secret Garden, except she would not make her get better in the end. She could sort of fade away, like Paul in Dombey and Son, who didn’t have enough vital spirits. But first Alice had to be finished; she pulled her out from under the mattress.

  Alice follows the dark trapeze artist up to the high platform. From there the wild swoops and swings seem even more glorious. She watches his muscles flex and tighten for the perfect timing of every change, and longs to be suspended, like him, from that bar, feeling her body stretched and taut, the rush of air past her face. To fly is her true destiny. He agrees to teach her, and she learns so fast that after only a few weeks he promises her a small part in a performance. The great day arrives. Warming up, Alice swings back and forth a few times, and each time they pass high in the air he smiles encouragement at her. In a state of trance, she listens to the music for her cue. The moment approaches: she will leap to him and he will catch her. She should be concentrating on the timing, but she is too caught up in the swiftness of flight to think clearly. She leaps a split second early. His arms reach out for her, two inches too far. In a panic, she stretches up towards him, to grasp and tug at his fingers, something she was taught never to do. Never pull, just grip firmly, he always warned. But she can’t stop herself. There is no net. She hears the thudding crash of their bodies and the roar of the crowd, then loses consciousness. When she wakes up she has a broken arm, a broken leg, and dozens of bruises. But the trapeze man, they tell her, has suffered far worse injuries. No one will say exactly what. They look at her with cold anger, and leave her alone in her hospital bed. They ostracize her.