Caleb closed his crossword book, enfolding the medical pamphlet in it. “If you think you are the first person that Vroni and Jenifer and I have seen lose their mind in a circus trailer, then you have another thing coming. Usually we’ve made it through at least one show, but hey, you’re an amateur. I know it. This is what I expect from amateurs. So what exactly is it that you think I should do? Kick you off? If I did that to every performer that Vroni and Jenifer provoked, we’d never have a show.”
This set them off again, the German girls, and they were back to cackling.
“Amateur?” said Henry. He looked for other words to follow this, but there weren’t any. Amateur. It was a kick to the chest.
Kylie climbed back on the bus then with a handful of black-eyed Susans. When the trailer started rolling, Henry had no choice but to do what Caleb said and sit down. Almost immediately there was another note in his lap in Kylie’s cursive:
What am I, then?
BEFORE THE GALESBURG PERFORMANCE, HENRY realized that he had grabbed Adrienne’s lime-green makeup bag instead of his own when he’d packed. He had a brief moment of panic, mostly because his brother’s letter was tucked in that bag, but he assured himself that Adrienne would take care of it for him, and Kylie let him use her makeup, which was better quality than his own and of which she had a pretty ridiculous abundance. He thought he was deftly avoiding the subject of whether or not they were dating, and he could tell she didn’t want to press it while they were stuck in close quarters, dependent on each other for professional success. But when he had asked to use her makeup, she’d gotten so uncomfortable she ended up just shoving half a dozen tubes and compacts into his hands, and running off to the bathroom, as if desperate to end their conversation.
In Galesburg, they performed in an open lot next to a mall and couldn’t quite get the lighting right in the tent. This was fine with Henry, who could see the faces of his audience clearly for the first time since he’d joined Feely and Feinstein. They were mostly small faces, children with loud, honest laughs.
The Galesburg show was a good show, even though Kylie wouldn’t smile at him.
The Chicago show was a different story.
This was a big show, the biggest yet, and he’d worked, and starved, and worked some more to get here. He’d walked the streets with an apple in his hand trying to entice someone, who was always busy, into giving him five minutes of their life, so he could show them how an apple can be a world.
He’d left his little brother alone with his father because he wanted to do these things, and now here he was, taking a fake punch from a girl who probably should’ve knocked him out for real. He flipped backward, the icy white lights in his eyes, and in that blind moment it occurred to him that if he had written his brother back, Andre might have been here watching him right now.
According to Caleb, Chicago was the biggest show he’d do on the tour, and though the tent was not quite filled to capacity, Henry knew that there were more eyes fixed on him now than there had ever been before. And of these hundreds of eyes, none of them belonged to his brother. All he could think about, as he landed, legs-up, against the bales of straw, was how much he regretted this. If he’d written something—a couple words on a wadded-up napkin would have worked—he could have shown Andre how things had changed since they’d last seen each other.
The show went on and on, a bright blur, Henry trudging through the routine without listening for the audience’s reaction. He was supposed to cry now and be interrupted by the sounds of stomach rumbling. But he found that the corners of his mouth would not turn down and he couldn’t make his eyes squint. And then, when the stomach rumbling sounds came over the speakers, he couldn’t snap his face into surprise. The Chicago crowd tittered in confusion. Henry felt their frustration building, but he couldn’t give them what they were looking for. His muscles would simply not respond to his mind’s commands. When he tried to look sad, he made a gasping noise instead, and when he tried to look surprised, his face went slack.
He caught a glimpse of Kylie. She wore her favorite nose, bulbous and shiny. She looked at him sidelong, and he saw a brief glimpse of her panic—but her jaw tightened with determination, and she turned toward the audience with a dramatic expression of woe.
Amateur. He was an amateur.
He fumbled on. When the carrot top sprouted from the ground, he only watched it, stupefied. He didn’t lose his hat or spring straight up off the ground or close his own gaping mouth with his hand. He just stood and stared. Finally the audience began to laugh genuine laughs, but only because Henry looked lost. They didn’t know if his behavior was an act or not. They didn’t care.
Finally, the act found its end, and Henry ran backstage, where he bent over the bars of the elephant’s enclosure and threw up into the straw. Kylie went straight to a corner to change into her clown garb, the white bodysuit with red marabou around the neck, wrists, and ankles. She did not ask him what was wrong or if he was alright, but once she was dressed, she stood and glared at him as she tied her hair in two ponytails, little brown pom-poms on either side of her head. His stomach kept heaving.
He heard the tent flap open and the voices of Azi and the German girls. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the shimmer of Azi in sequins and Jenifer and Vroni’s whiteface. Henry heard the slosh of water, Chuck Delaflote following them with buckets to extinguish the fire at the act’s end.
“What’s wrong with him?” Azi asked. “He’s not in costume.”
“How should I know? He just started puking for no reason,” Kylie answered.
Henry tried to lift his head and assure Azi that he would be ready in a minute, but the warm saliva gathering in his mouth told him he’d better not move.
“We’re going on, Henry. You have to hurry,” said Azi.
Jenifer dipped her head to look at his face. “Oh, mein armes Kind!” she said, patting his shoulder.
“Don’t touch me,” Henry managed to say, wiping the vomit from his lips with his sleeve and leaving a smear of white makeup on his shirt.
“Don’t worry,” said Kylie. “I’ll get in on the act. You don’t really need both of us out there.” She picked up the fire extinguisher that Henry normally used.
Now it was Azi’s crooked face next to his. Henry could smell the lighter fluid on his breath. “You’re alright, then?” Azi asked.
Henry nodded. “I’ll be out.”
Azi and the German girls walked out into the ring then, Chuck right behind them. Kylie stood on deck, waiting for her cue. When it came, he heard her say, “Really, Henry. We’ll be totally fine. Sit this one out.”
He tried to move to get his costume, but the room still spun. The elephant’s feet shifted in the straw, and Henry heard its loud sniffing, then felt the tip of Tex’s snout, like a finger, poking him in the back. Then he felt the whole trunk lying on his shoulder. “Ah, God, you are so weird and gross,” Henry told Tex. He did find her skin strange, but in truth, it was comforting.
Ambrosia was tied near the elephant pen. She also began inching toward Henry, her hooves clicking against the hard concrete beneath the hay. The shoes seemed to make it hard for her to lift her feet, but Henry might have imagined that, since things seemed to be moving in slow motion. He thought he might have imagined that she was moving at all, since she had never let him get too close, not even when he filled her water trough or offered her an apple.
But no, he wasn’t imagining it. She was right there, craning her neck to smell his cheek. Lorne was right. She was a special animal. Henry thought he had never felt anything as soft as her nose. Her breath smelled surprisingly pleasant, and the puffs of it against his face seemed affectionate. It was consoling, but he wished for something more, for a human understanding.
Henry ran the tips of his fingers down the length of her nose. “You’re too nice to make a joke out of,” he said, and thought of Adrienne, who, like him, had spent time as a fool for the entertainment of others. Who Caleb had left and who might fe
el as abandoned as he did at the moment.
He heard Kylie’s fire extinguisher: shooooosh. Shouts of laughter followed.
Christiakov was right. Audiences came for blood. So why had they even bothered? Why had Christiakov bothered training him, and why did Henry bother now? Why did he ruin his back and study his face for hours? Why did he bother analyzing the titters of the crowd, thinking, This one has to be perfect. I’m a phony if this isn’t perfect?
Why was he doing this at all?
He still felt nauseous, but by putting his arms around Ambosia’s neck, he was able to get to his feet. He couldn’t get back in the ring. No, he was done with that, at least for tonight. What he had to do was get away from Feely and Feinstein. What he had to do was see Adrienne. There was a cacophony of inner voices berating him, telling him that he had done everything wrong, that he could never make it right. The one right thing he could think to do was to be with Adrienne. She did not want to be alone; he could be her not-alone. He could handle at least that much.
CHAPTER 12
CALEB LEANED AGAINST THE GLASS of the payphone that stood on the fairgrounds, about fifty yards from the circus tent. It was a strange, desolate place out here—the Chicago show was actually in a town called St. Charles, about thirty miles outside of Chicago, and the tent was set up in the same space that hosted Hog Fest and Mud Bowl and the Bacon Olympics and any number of other redneck events that probably drew bigger crowds than Feely and Feinstein had tonight.
The show had begun—they were probably well into the aerial act. He’d wanted to call Adrienne earlier, but she was at her doctor’s appointment, discussing treatments, all the drugs that sounded to Caleb like dinosaur names: bromocriptine. Octreotide. In fact, all the words that Adrienne and her doctor used to discuss her condition sounded vaguely monstrous and otherworldly: adenoma. Somatotrophs. In a matter of weeks, they had gone from calling it “something else” to identifying the names of the cells that made up that something else.
Over the phone, Adrienne had cried because her wedding ring was cutting into her finger. It was red, she said, so red that it looked like it might be bleeding under the ring.
“It isn’t, honey,” he told her. “You’re probably just puffy from the stress and the heat.”
“No, Caleb. I’m growing. I’m growing again.”
Caleb rubbed at his face. “Are you taking the octreotide?” he said.
“Yes.” She sniffed. “The nurse gave me the last one at my appointment, but I’ve done all the rest.”
The octreotide had to be injected beneath Adrienne’s skin every eight hours. The doctor had started the regimen as soon as she’d gotten the results back from her MRI. He wanted to treat her “aggressively,” he’d said. For now, the octreotide, then, another surgery to remove the tumor, then, they’d radiate the hell out of the thing, and then, another medication. With any luck, it would never grow back again. But for now, Adrienne stuck herself with needles. She didn’t ask Caleb to do it for her—she’d done it for herself before, she said. Not only would she not allow him to give the injection, she wouldn’t let him watch either and locked herself in the bathroom.
“You’ve got to give it a chance to work. So you went up a ring size. It’s no big deal. It’s a ring size.”
“You didn’t go up a ring size in a month,” Adrienne said. “Honestly, Caleb, I’ve seen pictures of people who can’t control this, and I swear to God, I’m going to have fingers like corn dogs.”
He grinned at this analogy. “You won’t let me see those pictures. So I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said.
Then he told her he had to go because there was someone waiting to use the phone. He would call her tomorrow, on the road to Indianapolis. He was startled at the sadness he could hear in his own voice and hoped Adrienne could hear it, too, so she would know how he felt.
“Okay,” she said. He heard a flap of wings. Richard was in her lap. “I’m sorry to cry on the phone. And I’m sorry about the painting,” she said.
“Don’t worry about the painting.”
“I’m going to take off my ring. If they have to cut it off, I’ll die. Those nurses will laugh at me, and I’ll be so humiliated.”
“Do whatever you need to. We’ll get it resized when I get home.”
“And I’m going to have your painting restored,” she said.
“What, like it’s a Rembrandt? No, honey. I’ll just start over.”
He said good-bye, then, and hung up the phone.
As Caleb walked to the tent he thought about how, once, he interviewed a performer, and instead of asking her questions from an interview form, he asked her questions that he wanted to know the answers to. He listened to her digress, divulge too much about herself, and he ended up loving her. That was the joke between him and Adrienne. She was the reason why he interviewed people the no-frills way that he did now—because he didn’t want to end up married again.
He’d conducted this interview at Bill’s Caribbean Steakhouse. Conall Feely was dead, and Seamus found himself in possession of his father’s circus. He had just offered Caleb the position of circus manager, and Caleb’s first task was to hire a new act (“Something kinda sideshow. But not too freaky,” Seamus had said). He was directed to the steakhouse by a customer at the Hanky Panky Party Shop, who had spent a drunken birthday there and sworn he’d seen a giantess on their stage. So Caleb had thought, why not check it out? At least he could treat himself to a steak.
When he saw Adrienne, he knew she was exceptional in spite of the kitsch and the gimmicky parrot on her shoulder. She sang and danced and talked to the parrot and the audience. She told jokes and took on the personas of several different characters, relaying the memoirs of a giantess raised in the jungle, who finds out that her real father is a gorilla. The hug of her suit barely smoothed the contours of her crotch, and he thought of that part of her as magnified, bigger, and more accessible than a normal woman’s. He wondered if any man had ever filled her, really, and he imagined being the one, the only one, who could.
By the time she had finished her act and met him at his booth, he was drenched in sweat. She slid into the red Naugahyde booth across from him, and sat sideways, stretching legs still encased in silky stockings across the booth. This was purely utilitarian—her legs would not fit under the table—and not meant to entice Caleb. But it did. Up close, she was even more unbelievable. He was afraid that she would not be interested in the job he was sure he would offer her, but he tried to look confident. She put her parrot down on the branch of a fake palm tree behind their booth and offered Caleb her hand.
“I’m Adrienne Lee,” she said. “And this is Richard.”
“Caleb Baratucci,” he’d said. “And you have to cut me some slack because I’m a little new at this.” He tried to discreetly tuck more of his shirt into his armpits to hide the darkening fabric. Luckily, he was a little handsomer then, or so he liked to think. He was always a little thin on top when it came to hair, but he got compliments on his eyes.
“Well. Then we’re both new at this. And nervous. I do think we oughtta keep our voices down. My boss doesn’t know you’re here to poach me. And I’d like to keep my job here. In case you decide against poaching me, that is.”
Caleb looked around. The people around them couldn’t help but glance at them out of the corners of their eyes. Adrienne’s boss didn’t seem to be among them. Caleb’s steak sat cold and nearly whole in front of him.
“I guess the first thing I should ask is why do you want to be in the circus?”
Adrienne Lee began pulling the pins out of her hair, massaging her scalp with one hand as she plucked with the other.
“Well. I have a very specific skill set. Which mostly involves not having any real skills and just being what I am. And what I am is a circus act, isn’t it?”
Her curls fell down around her face, and he could see her youth, the girlishness that hid behind her size, her brassy singing voice.
“How ol
d are you?”
“Twenty-four.”
“How long have you worked here?”
“Not long. A few months, I think.”
“And before that?”
She sighed, and he could tell he was steering his questioning down a path she didn’t want to go.
“Before that, I was married. I’m a divorcée, and the truth is, I just want to get out of town. I’d love to go to St. Louis. My ex-husband’s been trying to sweet-talk me back to him, and I think it would be best if I left town before I start thinking that would be a good idea.”
“So you don’t have … like a portfolio I could look at?”
She shook her head. “This is it, Caleb. This is what I have to offer,” she said, gesturing toward the stage and then to Richard. When she said Caleb’s name, his heart hammered its way into his throat. Above them, a yellow-and-red stained-glass lamp cast its mellow light on Adrienne’s skin, and the place smelled of wine and the bloody middles of steaks, and of her, a scent he eventually came to recognize as magnolia powder. He felt drunk on these things, absolutely senseless.
“Would you really go back?” he asked, lowering his voice. He said it quietly, because even as he said it, he was unsure he wanted to expose himself like this.
“Excuse me?” she said, leaning forward to hear him better.
“Would you really go back to your ex-husband?”
Her face changed then. This question was not part of the interview, and it wasn’t one of idle curiosity, and she knew it. She didn’t say anything for a moment, thinking about it.
“No,” she answered. “I don’t think I would. He left me when I was down.”
“I’m sorry,” said Caleb. “I know it’s none of my business.”
“Do you know how a person becomes a giant?” she asked.
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