Everything You Came to See

by Elizabeth Schulte Martin

  “They did?”

  “No, not really. But it was fine. Why are you even worried about it? Didn’t you say you weren’t feeling so great? You should let yourself rest.”

  Adrienne shrugged. She waved her remote at the television, where a reporter in red lipstick stood in front of an airplane that was so blackened and twisted it looked like a giant fly, crushed by a swatter. The volume was low, but she left it on.

  “In other news, we went out for a drink after the show—well, everyone but the clowns, who are broke, and Seamus, who’s a non-participating asshole—and Lorne punched Remy in the eye.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Not at all,” said Caleb, massaging his own feet. “Remy had, like, two beers, and you know what a lightweight he is. He said something about the camels screwing each other or something, and he would not let it go, and finally Lorne was like, ‘They’re brother and sister!’ and punched him right in the eye.”

  “Oh my God. And Remy didn’t retaliate?”

  “He tried, but Azi basically put him in a bear hug until Lorne left. You should have seen it … or maybe you shouldn’t have. God, Azi’s strong. Remy was so pissed he almost cried.”

  “Are you writing up Lorne?” she asked. Richard nudged her hand with his beak to let her know he would like to taste her fingernails, please. She held her hand out and he closed his beak gently over the tip of her index finger.

  “Eh. Honestly, it was kinda funny. ‘They’re brother and sister!’ I mean, Remy had it coming.”

  Adrienne was more worried about Lorne. He did not quite connect actions to consequences in the way that most people did, even though he seemed reasonably intelligent and he’d always been kind to her. She remembered a time that he had offered to take her coat when she arrived at the circus, which she thought was so polite of him. But rather than hang it up, he threw it on the ground—not maliciously, but because he really didn’t know what he was supposed to do next. Adrienne had chalked this up as “kinda funny,” but now that she thought about it, Lorne had seemed irritated at the last rehearsal as well.

  “He can’t go around doing stuff like that,” she said.

  “Alright, alright, I’ll say something. Don’t you go lecturing him.”

  “Why not?” she asked.

  Her husband smiled, apparently amused that this wasn’t obvious to her. He crawled into bed next to her still partially dressed—T-shirt, suit pants, and sock-feet.

  “You’re so nice all the time. It’ll be too harsh coming from you. Besides, I’m his boss.”

  Richard moved to make room for Caleb and squawked to express his distaste.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Caleb, offering his own fingers to the bird in supplication. “Anyway. Are you feeling better?”

  Adrienne reached for the remote on the nightstand and clicked the power button. The images of talking heads and hideous plane wreckage collapsed into a black screen.

  “Yes,” she said. “I feel much better.”

  She tilted her chin to meet his lips with her own, feeling the pulse of her migraine thrumming in her temples, not excruciating, but constant. She wasn’t lying. She did feel better. She just didn’t feel like herself.

  Notes For A Show About An Angel

  I’d like to forget about the farmer show. It gets laughs, and Seamus likes it, but after performing it a couple times, it’s already feeling so cheap. Just another show about people getting hurt. I love the laughs, I do, but goddamn, do people laugh at anything else?

  I’m thinking about all those Chaplin bits Christiakov made me watch. There’s this skit called One a.m., and it’s, like, half an hour of Chaplin, drunk, trying to get up to his bed. It’s him falling down the stairs, getting in fights with himself, getting eaten by a bed that folds up into his wall. And yeah, it is good, because Chaplin was good, but the story is stupid. A drunk trying to get up to his bed? Who cares about this guy? Who cares if he ever makes it? The audience can laugh, laugh, laugh, but the show never makes you feel any different about drunk Charlie. Nothing moves inside you.

  But what if it’s not a drunk trying to get to his bed, but an angel that’s trying to get back up to heaven? What if the person struggling is innocent? What if they are holy? I could probably rip off a lot of the blocking from One a.m., but it would be such a different show from Chaplin’s if I just slapped a set of wings on Kylie.

  I’ll have to teach her how to fall so she doesn’t bust her skull.

  I want to see. I want to see if I can make people laugh because they want good things to happen for someone. I want to see if I can take all this schadenfreude and burn it.

  CHAPTER 6

  TWO WEEKS HAD PASSED SINCE opening night, and they had run the farmer show a total of six times. Henry was already bored of it, ready to move on. But performing in a circus was different than busking on his own—he couldn’t just change things up when he wanted, and that frustration, along with the heat, and the guilt he felt over his brother’s unanswered letter, had him feeling pretty crummy.

  The letter was the first thing Henry thought of when he woke in his trailer, in sheets drenched in sweat. It was the last thing he’d thought of before he fell asleep with towels soaked in ice water draped over his neck and wrists. Andre, Andre, Andre. Back from the dead.

  In so many words, Andre’s letter said:

  Dear Henry,

  I am working in a factory packing recordable cassette tapes in a city you have never heard of, in a country you didn’t know existed. I’m sorry that I left you alone. But just think of all the times you left me alone. You and Mom. You could have helped me but you didn’t. Now, I am staying in this country you didn’t know existed for a while, but I’ll be coming to the States for a few weeks and I need you to go back to the house with me.

  Your brother,

  Andre

  P.S. I called home. Hung up whenever Dad answered, but finally got Frankie. He gave me your PO address. Wouldn’t say much else.

  He knew Andre expected him to write back—he’d been careful to print the return address neatly on the envelope as well as in the letter itself. Henry was anxious that he would miss him if he waited too long to reply, but at the same time, he didn’t want to see his brother at all. The letter also forced him to think about the possibility of more letters—he imagined a day when a letter, making the same accusations, would arrive from Frankie: Why didn’t you protect me? After all, he’d set up the PO Box a year ago, with the express purpose of giving Frankie a way to reach him. Henry had written a letter to Christiakov, telling him he couldn’t stop worrying about his brother, and Christiakov had set up the address, sent the information to Frankie through his high school, and continued to pay for it each month. Frankie hadn’t written him once, though, and Henry wondered if he had, if he would have ignored him, as he had so far ignored Andre.

  He let his fingers graze the envelope as usual as he washed up for rehearsal, but what was a soothing ritual a week ago had become a painful habit, like biting his nails down to the quick. He put the letter back in the drawer and turned his thoughts to angels with gauzy wings swooping across the center ring. He would try to convince Kylie that they should do the angel show instead of the farmer show. He would get her support first and then go to Seamus for his approval.

  Kylie had been civil enough to him in spite of what happened opening night. She kept insisting “we’ll be friends,” even though her friendliness came off a little strained. During rehearsals, they argued, and outside of rehearsals, they were too polite. But even if she wasn’t exactly his friend, Kylie was a reasonable person. She would definitely see the merit in this new act.

  Henry grabbed his notebook and hurried out the door of the trailer, wearing jeans and his clown nose and carrying his shoes and shirt along. He needed to feel the air on his skin. The miserable heat was getting to him.

  WHEN CALEB LEFT HER THAT morning, Adrienne was asleep in bed, naked, except for a slender white gold bracelet he’d bought for her. She w
as sprawled out, taking up nearly the entire bed, her left leg draped over a pillow, her right arm spilling over onto the nightstand next to the bed. She was bent at all the right angles, at all the right joints, and Caleb wanted to paint her, with the light just as it was, coming through the blinds in white stripes.

  If someone were going by appearance alone, they would never accuse Caleb of being an artist, or even someone who could appreciate the difference between a Rembrandt and a paint-by-number. His dark suits and receding hairline probably evoked “insurance broker” or maybe “compulsive gambler,” but every other Sunday, he was at the Saint Louis Art Museum, wandering, his hands clasped respectfully in front of him, a well-behaved spectator.

  He liked the Modernists. There was a beautiful collection of Max Beckmann at the museum, and he could stand for the whole afternoon, quietly looking at one Beckmann piece after another and feeling like if Beckmann weren’t dead, there might have been someone in the world who would have understood his way of seeing things. Even though managing Feely and Feinstein was a far cry from being an artist, or even a curator of art, Caleb had come to realize the job as one that required a certain kind of sight—insight, maybe, or perhaps more accurately outsight, the ability to see the thing as strangers saw it: with their hearts, and from a great distance.

  Beckmann had seen the circus the same way that Caleb did. Akrobaten and Der Traum looked like paintings of dirty toys dumped into a frame. All the clothes and objects looked as if they were once cheery, bright colors that had become dull and waxy with use. The people in the paintings seemed propped up at strange angles like marionettes. It was at once nostalgic and nightmarish, and when Caleb watched his own performers in the ring, this was exactly what he saw.

  Once, early in his marriage, he brought his brushes and canvas to the museum and tried to recreate the Portrait of Valentine Tessier. The woman in the painting reminded him of Adrienne, the way she gazed off to one side, and it wasn’t quite clear if her expression was flirtatious or suspicious. She was tall and blond, cat-eyed with high-arching brows, sophisticated and surly-looking.

  Caleb had started a lot of paintings but had never finished a single one. Mostly he was glad for this, because artists, like his performers, seemed self-absorbed and pathologically unhappy. A high price to pay for good hands. But sometimes, when he saw Adrienne like she was now, he wished there was some way to share it with someone, to show them what it was like to see her in the morning, through the lens of his love, beautiful and sleeping and draped in light.

  He shut the door and let her rest though she had been sleeping a lot lately. She had an appointment to go to the doctor and find out if her headaches were just headaches, or something else. Some-unmentionable-thing else. She’d told him, holding his hand in bed before they fell asleep, “This has happened before. It’s always a false alarm,” but she must not have really thought this, because she’d eaten nothing but hot coffee and pickled herring since she saw the news about that plane going down.

  BECAUSE THE CIRCUS WOULD BEGIN its tour in one week, Caleb’s first order of business for the day was to get signatures on travel paper work. When he arrived at Feely and Feinstein, Caleb found things not going as smoothly as they had started. It was unseasonably hot and the performers were so sweaty they were sliding right off their equipment and each other.

  Henry was all worked up. It seemed he and Kylie had been arguing for quite a while before Caleb had walked in. Henry paced around Kylie, who stood with her arms crossed. His movement stirred the dust from the dirt floor and made everything look mired in a dreamy, gritty haze.

  Remy, whose eye was still mottled purple from the jab Lorne had taken at him at the bar, was talking to Azi on the opposite side of the ring, both of them politely trying to ignore the clowns’ argument. Lorne, however, sat on the first set of bleachers and watched like he was attending a matinee. He seemed to have a stake in all this, too, but Caleb wasn’t sure what it was.

  “If you think the show needs to be ‘enlivened,’” Kylie said, “why don’t we put in the horse? It requires hardly any extra work and hardly any extra money.”

  “Because. Horses. Aren’t. Funny.”

  The girl ticked reasons off on her fingers: “The horse is available. The horse is trained to perform. A horse doesn’t require us to learn entirely new stunts and new choreography. A horse doesn’t require new props or costumes.”

  “She’s a very good horse, Henry,” Lorne said. “I can get her to do about anything you’d like. She’s the great-great-great-granddaughter of the Horse of a Different Color—you know, from The Wizard of Oz? A very special animal.”

  “Fuck your horse!” Henry shouted. “Why don’t you do your job, Kylie, so the horse can be a horse and not a prop?”

  Lorne shook his head, flattening his thin hair in even, angry strokes. Then, Kylie spotted Caleb.

  “Caleb, tell him. Tell him he’s an idiot,” she yelled.

  Caleb held up his hands to indicate that he was not a part of this argument. He didn’t moderate fights, period, because there were too many of them and getting involved only dragged them out. Seamus was officially the artistic director, and he’d given Henry a bit of power letting him script the farmer act. It was up to Henry to hang on to that power, if he could.

  Caleb told them, “I don’t give a shit if you have a horse in your show or not, as long as it doesn’t cause any legal problems.”

  Kylie looked miffed at this response, but rather than argue with him, she continued yelling at Henry. “You’re not listening to me. I can’t learn a new show,” she said. “I’m still learning the one we do now. I’m not comfortable being more than a few feet off the ground in the silks. I’d have to learn this all from scratch.” She reached for Henry, but Henry pulled away with a fierce jerk of his shoulder.

  “Then I’ll climb it. I’ll be the angel,” he said.

  “Or we could just do the totally successful act we’ve been doing!” she said, moving close to him again.

  Jesus, Caleb thought, you’ve got to stand down a sec, kid. Just when he thought he might have to break his own rule and step in, Azi walked over and stilled Kylie by resting a hand on her shoulder.

  “Henry,” he said. “There’s no sense in arguing about it before you talk to Seamus. Getting the costumes and props you want—that means money and time he must agree to.”

  Henry stopped shaking. He sat down, folded his hands around his knees. “Alright,” he said. “I know. It would be a lot of work.”

  The conversation was over then because the German girls arrived to help Azi with a hoop of flames that was rigged to combust clockwise but wouldn’t light past six o’clock. The clowns sat silently. They really did look like dirty toys in a frame, their sweaty skin smudged, their anger straining the angles at which they held themselves.

  IN HIS OFFICE, CALEB SPENT too long staring at the summer itinerary. The tour dates were in an arc of cities across the Midwest and Great Lakes regions: St. Louis, Galesburg, Chicago, Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, Toledo, Detroit. The map on his desk showed little red rings around these cities, making a chain from the Mississippi to Lake Ontario. Two months on that little red chain had never seemed long to him before but, looking at it now, the chain seemed to stretch out unreasonably far from his home and wife. And this year there was an extra link in the chain that would take him even further. Feely and Feinstein could only call itself an “international” circus because of an occasional appearance in Toronto. This year was a Toronto year.

  He had a scheme to capitalize off this show in Toronto: as part of his strategy to resurrect the circus, he intended to pilot a new kind of show, one without animals, with a focus on showmanship. He thought he would find the most receptive audience for this in Toronto, where the shows billed as cirque had plots, beautiful costumes, masterful staging, and human-only casts. And they sure drew a crowd, sans animals, sans freaks.

  The Toronto show would not be a tent set up in a mall parking lot. Instead, they were b
ooked at a club known for fringe performances: the campy, the lewd, the bizarre. He didn’t want Feely and Feinstein to play to audiences like that every night, to young people who had stomachs full of craft beer and an overly developed sense of irony, but he wanted to show Seamus that they were versatile, that they could put their show on any stage with just a few adjustments. He knew exactly how the show would work, but kept the exact plan and venue under his cap, where he seemed to be keeping a lot of things lately.

  It was in Toronto, watching such a show five years ago, that he’d met the Russian. He had white hair and friendly eyes, a lanky body that made it hard to place his age. They stood next to each other in the audience, and whenever one of the performers did something exceptional, or the plot took an unexpected turn, the Russian would elbow Caleb and say, “How about that, my friend?” If anyone else had done this to Caleb, he would have found it irritating. But there was something magnetic about the white-haired man, who introduced himself, after the third or fourth elbow to Caleb’s ribs, as Luka Christiakov.

  They’d gone to a bar and Caleb drank black and tans while the Russian, an old clown, drank water. They talked circus, and Caleb told him all about Feely and Feinstein. How, when he worked out the season’s budget, he was always convinced it would be their last year of operation. Somehow, though, by pennies and the skins of their teeth, they made it through one more show, one more week, one more season. And he told him about the Feelys themselves, how Seamus persisted that there would always be a place for the circus as it was. How Seamus was just like his old man, Conall, in that one way, resistant to anything new.

  They talked about the nouveau movement. If Beckmann shared Caleb’s vision of the circus as it was, then Luka Christiakov shared Caleb’s vision of what the circus could be. No elephants. No canned music. Just skilled performers and a darn good story.