Everything You Came to See

by Elizabeth Schulte Martin

  Remy shouted from the scaffolding, “Hey, look at this guy! Nice of you to show up, Baratucci.”

  Seamus chuckled, stroking his chin with his gloved fingers. “What a bunch of consummate professionals.”

  A loud crash kept Caleb from returning either Seamus’s or Remy’s snarky remarks, as the lantern Jenifer was swinging hit the ground. The lamp oil spilled, creating a small ribbon of flame that snaked along the dirt floor.

  “Oops!” she said, jumping from Azi’s shoulder and running for the fire extinguisher.

  “Way to go, butterfingers,” said Vroni, who remained perched on Azi’s other shoulder.

  “Well, get off your ass and help me put it out!” said Jenifer.

  The newly hired clowns, Henry and Kylie, had, up until now, been holding their own quiet rehearsal in the north corner of the tent, away from the hub of action. Kylie paused for a moment to watch the scene, but Henry motioned for her to continue. She seemed annoyed but went back to their practice.

  Kylie, whom Caleb had offered a job shortly after hiring Henry, was a graduate of a theatre program in San Francisco that offered a clowning arts “emphasis.” She was the first college graduate he’d ever hired, and her audition and portfolio had both sparkled, in Caleb’s opinion. And here was this guy, who Caleb suspected was not even out of his teens, trying to boss her around.

  A short woman with a helmet of white curls rushed toward his wife then. “Adrienne!” she shouted. Adrienne, who seemed a little pleased with all the chaos, was nearly knocked over by Sue, the circus’s poodle trainer.

  “Adriennnnne!” the rest of the performers yelled out together, unable to resist doing their best Rocky impersonation.

  Adrienne thrust her plate into Caleb’s hands to hug Sue, whose dogs swarmed and circled them as the two women embraced. Sue was in her early forties, only seven or eight years older than Adrienne, though the white hair made her look older. Adrienne and Sue had been especially good friends when Adrienne was still performing with the troupe as the resident giantess, taking lunches together, coming up with weird hand jives to pop music, teasing Azi by occasionally replacing his lighter fluid with glitter-spiked Kool-Aid.

  Adrienne pinched one of the white curls on Sue’s head. “Still wearing your hair like this? I though you wanted to be a brunette.”

  “Ah, people think it’s funny,” she said. Caleb offered her a cookie, which she took.

  “You could wear a wig,” said Adrienne. “It’s not all about the audience.”

  “It is kinda all about them, Adrienne,” said Caleb, thinking about their tight budget, his duty to make the circus stop hemorrhaging money. He hadn’t told his wife about their precarious position yet because Adrienne was Adrienne, and it made her an absolute lunatic to have something to say and not be able to say it, to want to take an action and not be able to take it immediately. Playing card games with her was like being in hell—she always went out of turn, always blurted out her hand. She couldn’t know about Feely and Feinstein tanking. All the performers would know within the hour, and the sinking morale would seal the circus’s fate.

  He felt guilty, though, keeping it from her. These were her friends. Besides, Adrienne may have had a big mouth but at least she was honest, almost 100 percent of the time, and he wished he could be honest with her in the same way.

  Sue waved off the suggestion of a wig. “They give me headaches. Besides, this is me, really. It’s authentic.”

  Again, their reunions were interrupted by noise. Someone laughing—but not a laugh that Caleb was familiar with. He turned to see Azi, bent forward, hand at his mouth. He straightened quickly when he realized he was getting looks, especially from Vroni and Jenifer, whose eyes had narrowed, cat-like and disapproving.

  He let out one last muffled chuckle, and then Caleb saw the source of his entertainment. Henry was pretending to sleep standing up, while Kylie tried to keep him from slumping to the side. When she would finally get him propped up, his knee would cave beneath him, and he would topple, stiffly—but when Kylie caught him, his body went soft as a worm’s, impossible for her to hold on to. It was disorienting to see a body move like that, and the only possible reaction was to smile at how weird he looked and how miserable Kylie seemed.

  Adrienne linked arms with Sue and moved toward the clowns to get a better view. She’d advocated for Henry to Caleb when he was considering whether or not to bring the boy on. He’d told her that the boy was talented, but that he had a bad feeling about him, like he might also be crazy. Adrienne had given him a sidelong look. “Oh, and suddenly crazy is a problem? Is he a good clown or what?”

  Of course, Adrienne was right. He had to hire the boy. To let him go would be negligent, and Caleb was anything but negligent. He couldn’t have cared less that Henry seemed like he could use a break. If that was all Henry had to offer, Caleb would’ve told him to take a hike. What Caleb couldn’t turn away was an excellent clown. During his audition, the boy had stabbed himself in the back with a fork for twenty minutes, splashing spaghetti sauce all over the stage and twisting his cartoon-back, never slipping out of character. It was absolutely bizarre the way he could move his back like a face, and funny, too. Caleb had needed to pinch his mouth closed with his hand to keep from laughing.

  Any decent clown could play to an already excited crowd, but from Caleb’s perspective, the clown’s primary job was to stir the energy in a room of people who were not yet engaged with the show. Which was exactly what Henry had done at his audition and what he was doing at the moment, drawing all the energy in the circus tent to him and Kylie.

  When they finished running through the skit, Henry held up a hand to acknowledge Caleb. He noticed Adrienne, too (because who couldn’t notice her), but he turned away quickly and ran to guzzle water from a hose that someone had stolen from the animals’ quarters and hauled into the tent.

  “Good job, Caleb,” said Adrienne quietly, before liberating herself from Sue’s side and stepping forward to extend her hand to Kylie.

  “Oh, I’m … I’m really sweaty,” said Kylie.

  “That’s okay,” said Adrienne, and Kylie reluctantly shook her hand.

  “Hey. I’m Kylie,” she said, the red flush beneath her freckles deepening.

  “Adrienne.”

  “I’ve heard about you,” she said.

  Caleb smiled. Adrienne no longer performed, but she was still Feely and Feinstein’s queen.

  Adrienne told Kylie that she looked forward to seeing their show, then went to greet Henry, who had his back to them all, overly focused on the hose. She laid her hand on his shoulder and bent forward to say something that Caleb couldn’t hear. Even though he didn’t quite catch Adrienne’s words, he assumed she’d complimented him because he saw the boy’s mouth form a “thank you” before he looked away from her. Though he hadn’t known Henry very long, Caleb recognized that the boy was being uncharacteristically humble and evasive and he felt a jolt of jealousy.

  But the feeling subsided quickly, and he felt so ridiculous for entertaining such an idea that he laughed out loud to himself.

  “Are you finally losing your mind, Caleb?” said Seamus, landing a light jab in Caleb’s shoulder.

  “I think so.”

  “What are you giggling about?”

  “The clowns, I guess.”

  “Yes, I think they’ll do great. I’m going to talk to that boy, see what kind of act he wants to do. Could give them quite a bit of ring time if he’s got a good plan,” Seamus mused.

  Caleb thought it was unfair to ignore Kylie, who was also pretty clever in their skit, but he nodded and said nothing about it, knowing that Seamus had already made up his mind. Henry did seem to be the one directing the action. Besides, he didn’t want to argue with Seamus. He was sold on the clowns, and Caleb was too satisfied by that to split hairs over who did the selling.

  AFTER ADRIENNE HAD FINISHED PASSING out cookies and Caleb made a game plan for the year with Seamus and the rest of the performers, he a
nd Adrienne called it a day. In the closed space of their car, Caleb could smell Adrienne’s magnolia bath powder. It wasn’t an unpleasant scent, but it made him slow down. Caleb couldn’t quite explain how, but the flower smell meant trouble, maybe because she used it as a kind of aromatherapy for when she felt down.

  “Adie, is there something on your mind?” he asked.

  “Hm,” she said, as if she was trying to recall. “I haven’t felt so well, lately, I guess.”

  “Like … physically?”

  He hoped, he really hoped that she hadn’t convinced herself again that she was pregnant. It was too sad for him to see her fantasize about the realities of her biology taking a vacation. He knew when they got married they would not have children, and he was entirely at peace with it. She, on the other hand, seemed deeply grieved by this fact, and he had tried to fabricate some comfort for her. “The universe will work something out for us,” he’d told her once, but she’d taken it as a prophecy. Saying it had made him feel guilty, made him feel he encouraged these fantasies that always ended up hurting her.

  “Yes. I feel weird, I guess, physically. But also … Nancy called and told me that Curtis is coming to town. And that he asked for my address.”

  “She didn’t give it to him, did she?”

  “She said she didn’t.”

  Curtis was Adrienne’s ex-husband, and while Caleb tried not to vilify a man he’d never even met, the things Adrienne told him about the guy made him seem like scum, like absolute shit, shaped to resemble a human being. Which was probably how everybody’s wives’ ex-husbands came off, but Adrienne never actually bad-mouthed Curtis. Still, he came off like a creep in subtext.

  At the red light, Caleb stroked the soft white hairs on Adrienne’s forearm. “He doesn’t know where we live, he doesn’t know where you work, he doesn’t know anything about us.”

  “I know. It’s all in my head, but I don’t like the idea of him here,” she said.

  “You’re right. It’s in your head. There’s no reason not to feel safe. You got me, all right?”

  She sighed dramatically, and her unintentional insult made him chuckle.

  “I see. You’re saying that I’m not a mighty protector?”

  “It’s not that.”

  “I see how things are,” he said.

  “No, you’re totally a mighty protector. I feel very safe,” she assured him. It was funny to hear from her, given that she was almost seven-and-a-half feet tall, riding in the car completely folded over so her face hovered an inch above the dashboard. She realized this, too, and smiled back at him, which was what he’d hoped for.

  Caleb happened to know that for protection, in addition to his mighty self, Adrienne had a sleek little handgun in a hatbox on a shelf in her closet. It was the one thing she was not honest about, the one thing she kept hidden. Caleb had found it and, perhaps having to prove to himself it was real, he’d taken it to the range one day while she was at aerobics. But he never let on that he knew about it. In her heart, she was a pacifist, and he knew she wanted him to think of her in these terms, as a woman who believed that birds and trees and car keys had souls, and everything was precious and that there was never a need for any sort of destruction. The notion that she counted an expensive killing tool as part of her personal property did not fit into the image.

  And this was just as well, because Caleb preferred not to think of this part of his wife, either, the part that was anxious—and armed.

  CHAPTER 3

  BEFORE OPENING NIGHT BEGAN, HENRY who liked each other, and neithersat in his trailer at something like a dressing table (it was really a metal shelf, where someone might keep their tools in a garage). He rubbed a thin layer of white grease paint over his skin and dabbed a flesh-colored shadow beneath his cheekbones. He lined his eyes with black and pinched his nose into a rubber bulb that was as shiny and red as a maraschino cherry.

  He’d been sleeping in that trailer for the past three weeks, and he planned to keep sleeping there until the circus headed out of town. Of course, he’d expected to sleep in a trailer, but he had thought that the trailer would be air-conditioned and connected to some kind of water supply. Right now, his trailer was neither of those things, because no one lived in the trailers until they started moving. The other performers lived in St. Louis during the winter and had apartments, and so there was no reason to spend the money making the trailers habitable when they were still performing shows locally. Henry had not yet gotten a paycheck and had no money for an apartment. It would have been no problem, if it wasn’t so unseasonably hot.

  It was almost time to go on, and so he stretched, but Caleb interrupted him before he got very far.

  “Here’s a revised order for the acts tonight,” he said, trying to catch his breath. He looked for a place to put a blue scrap of paper, dropping it eventually on Henry’s dressing table among dirty tubes of makeup, a magnifying mirror, and a handful of toys that came from several years’ worth of Happy Meals.

  “Thanks,” said Henry, not looking up from his stretch.

  “On a scale of one to a thousand, how much does that position hurt your nuts?”

  “Five,” said Henry. “Until you distract me, and then it’s more like thirteen.”

  “I just spent an hour photocopying this set list, and another hour running around giving it to people in this weird heat, and you’ve got something snarky to say to me because you’re in the middle of your special breathing exercises or whatever?”

  When Henry didn’t respond, Caleb lingered in the doorway, scratching his beard and jingling the change in his pocket.

  “Sorry, I don’t mean to be rude,” said Henry, thinking he might be waiting on an apology. “It’s just, I gotta go sit on my neck in a minute and I don’t want to go on cold.”

  “No, no, you’ve got a right to be annoyed. Seamus is the one who changed the order at the last minute, though, not me.”

  He was halfway out the door, but then popped his head back in. “My wife says to break a leg, but she couldn’t make it tonight. She isn’t feeling well.”

  Henry raised his head. At the rehearsal, she’d encouraged him. He could smell the cinnamon from the gum in her mouth when she’d said his comic timing was impressive. “I love how patient you are,” she’d said. “I can’t wait to see your debut.” The giantess wanted him to succeed. He’d looked forward to having one person in the audience rooting for him and not secretly hoping for him to make a mistake. Now she sent her apologies through Caleb.

  “Oh. That’s too bad,” said Henry. He tried to hide his real disappointment behind polite disappointment. “Is she okay?”

  “Oh, y’know. Women have these mysterious headaches when they’d rather not be somewhere. She’ll recover.”

  THE SHOW STARTED WITH THE Flying Delaflotes. Caleb watched as Lola entered the ring first in silver underwear and a space helmet. The speakers quaked with Also sprach Zarathustra as she ascended the scaffolding. It was Seamus’s policy that the show should always start with the most beautiful girl and the most dramatic music possible. Lola was beautiful, with her honey-colored curls and her aerialist’s body, but she seemed to have a hard time getting up the ladder with the helmet on. She had to lean her head back to keep it from clanking against the ladder, and even so the helmet hit the metal ladder twice, making a sound as loud and open as a brass bell. Caleb squirmed in his seat as the people around him fanned themselves with programs and looked at each other for a clue as to how to react.

  Lola’s brothers, Remy and Chuck, followed her to the top of the scaffolding in their own silver leotards and space helmets. As the trumpets swelled, all three removed their helmets with a flourish because, thank God, it would be impossible to do an aerial act with them on. Those were Seamus’s idea, too, or the Delaflotes, who waved now with rigid arms and forced smiles, would never have agreed to it.

  But when Lola finally took her trapeze and flew, she did look like something stellar, a white-and-silver flash against the d
ark of the tent. Between the hands of one brother and the hands of the other, she seemed free from the normal rules of physics. When her body went up, it stayed up for an impossibly long time; while she tumbled, she was a swirling galaxy, a child’s sparkler cutting runes into the darkness.

  Later, the clowns would do their transitional improv, Caleb’s favorite circus tradition. The kids wouldn’t miss a beat, climbing that scaffolding in their own space helmets, clank-clanking all the way to the top.

  Caleb felt it so keenly, the whiplash, the breathlessness of being jerked between the beautiful and the absurd. He shared this only with Adrienne, but in these moments, watching these performances, he felt a sense of relief that he had not become a museum curator. No gallery could generate this kind of dynamism, nothing still and contained in such a space could move him as this did.

  BEFORE HE LEFT HIS TRAILER, Henry closed his eyes. He kept his hands on the grain of the wood paneling until he found the door, groped for the handle, and opened it. This was a game he played as a kid, the blindness game, where he pretended that he had suddenly lost his vision and tested himself to see if he could enjoy the world without it. Now he did it because he was nervous and couldn’t bring himself to meet the eyes of strangers—not yet, not until he was performing, safely in the skin of his character.

  He stepped out of the trailer, eyes still closed. The night air was cool. The smell of fried dough, the sound of drunken voices, and the giggles of children led him toward the tent.

  He heard a man say, “What’s with the clown? Is he high or something?” Popcorn crunched beneath his feet, and he ran his hand along the side of the tent until he felt the opening. A large hand pulled him inside.

  “What is wrong with you?” asked the owner of the hand.

  Henry smiled, though his legs were still shaking. Even with his eyes closed, he knew the hand belonged to Azi; only one person in the troupe had hands so massive. Azi also had the biggest muscles Henry had ever seen, though his high cheekbones and thin, arching eyebrows made him look strangely delicate from the neck up. He drew the eyebrows on; as a fire-eater he had burnt his real eyebrows off repeatedly, and they now refused to grow back.