A Son of the Circus

by John Irving

  “Do what?” Nancy asked; she’d forgotten—she was so frightened of Rahul.

  “Unzip you,” Dhar said.

  “Not too far,” Nancy told him.

  The actor turned her suddenly; he had to stand on tiptoe to look over her shoulder, but he wanted to be sure that Mrs. Dogar saw his face. John D. looked straight at Rahul and smiled; he gave the killer a sly wink. Then he unzipped the back of Nancy’s dress while Rahul watched. When he felt the clasp of Nancy’s bra, he stopped; he spread his palm between her bare shoulder blades—she was sweating and he felt her shudder.

  “Is she watching?” Nancy whispered. “I hate you,” she added.

  “She’s right on top of us,” Dhar whispered. “I’m going to go right at her. We’re changing partners now.”

  “Zip me up first!” Nancy whispered. “Zip me up!”

  With his right hand, John D. zipped Nancy up; with his left, he reached out and took the second Mrs. Dogar by the wrist—her arm was cool and dry, as sinewy as a strong rope.

  “Let’s switch partners for the next number!” said Inspector Dhar. But it was still the slow dance that played. Mr. Dogar staggered briefly; Nancy, who was relieved to be out of Dhar’s arms, forcefully drew the old man to her chest. A lock of her hair had come undone; it hid her cheek. No one saw her tears, which might have been confused with her sweat.

  “Hi,” Nancy said. Before Mr. Dogar could respond, she palmed the back of his head; his cheek was pressed flat between her shoulder and her collarbone. Nancy moved the old man resolutely away from Dhar and Rahul; she wondered how long she had to wait until the band changed to a faster number.

  What was left of the slow dance suited Dhar and Rahul. John D.’s eyes were level with a thin blue vein that ran the length of Mrs. Dogar’s throat; something deep-black and polished, like onyx—a single stone, set in silver—rested in the perfect declivity where her throat met her sternum. Her dress, which was an emerald green, was cut low but it fit her breasts snugly; her hands were smooth and hard, her grip surprisingly light. She was light on her feet, too; no matter where John D. moved, she squared her shoulders to him—her eyes locked onto his eyes, as if she were reading the first page of a new book.

  “That was rather crude—and clumsy, too,” the second Mrs. Dogar said.

  “I’m tired of trying to ignore you,” the actor told her. “I’m sick of pretending that I don’t know who you are … who you were,” Dhar added, but her grip maintained its even, soft pressure—her body obediently followed his.

  “Goodness, you are provincial!” Mrs. Dogar said. “Can’t a man become a woman if she wants to?”

  “It’s certainly an exciting idea,” said Inspector Dhar.

  “You’re not sneering, are you?” Mrs. Dogar asked him.

  “Certainly not! I’m just remembering,” the actor replied. “Twenty years ago, I couldn’t get up the nerve to approach you—I didn’t know how to begin.”

  “Twenty years ago, I wasn’t complete,” Rahul reminded him. “If you had approached me, what would you have done?”

  “Frankly, I was too young to think of doing” Dhar replied. “I think I just wanted to see you!”

  “I don’t suppose that seeing me is all you have in mind today,” Mrs. Dogar said.

  “Certainly not!” said Inspector Dhar, but he couldn’t muster the courage to squeeze her hand; she was everywhere so dry and cool and light of touch, but she was also very hard.

  “Twenty years ago, I tried to approach you,” Rahul admitted.

  “It must have been too subtle for me—at least I missed it,” John D. remarked.

  “At the Bardez, I was told you slept in the hammock on the balcony,” Rahul told him. “I went to you. The only part of you that was outside the mosquito net was your foot. I put your big toe in my mouth. I sucked it—actually, I bit you. But it wasn’t you. It was Dr. Daruwalla. I was so disgusted, I never tried again.”

  This was not the conversation Dhar had expected. John D.’s options for dialogue didn’t include a response to this interesting story, but while he was at a loss for words, the band saved him; they changed to a faster number. People were leaving the dance floor in droves, including Nancy with Mr. Dogar. Nancy led the old man to his table; he was almost breathless by the time she got him seated.

  “Who are you, dear?” he managed to ask her.

  “Mrs. Patel,” Nancy replied.

  “Ah,” the old man said. “And your husband …” What Mr. Dogar meant was, What does he do? He wondered: Which sort of civil-service employee is he?

  “My husband is Mr. Patel,” Nancy told him; when she left him, she walked as carefully as possible to the Daruwallas’ table.

  “I don’t think she recognized me,” Nancy told them, “but I couldn’t look at her. She looks the same, but ancient.”

  “Are they dancing?” Dr. Daruwalla asked. “Are they talking, too?”

  “They’re dancing and they’re talking—that’s all I know,” Nancy told the screenwriter. “I couldn’t look at her,” she repeated.

  “It’s all right, sweetie,” the deputy commissioner said. “You don’t have to do anything more.”

  “I want to be there when you catch her, Vijay,” Nancy told her husband.

  “Well, we may not catch her in a place where you want to be,” the detective replied.

  “Please let me be there,” Nancy said. “Am I zipped up?” she asked suddenly; she rotated her shoulders so that Julia could see her back.

  “You’re zipped up perfectly, dear,” Julia told her.

  Mr. Dogar, alone at his table, was gulping champagne and catching his breath, while Mr. Sethna plied him with hors d’oeuvres. Mrs. Dogar and Dhar were dancing in that part of the ballroom where Mr. Dogar couldn’t see them.

  “There was a time when I wanted you,” Rahul was telling John D. “You were a beautiful boy.”

  “I still want you,” Dhar told her.

  “It seems you want everybody,” Mrs. Dogar said. “Who’s the stripper?” she asked him. He had no dialogue for this.

  “Just a stripper,” Dhar answered.

  “And who’s the fat blonde?” Rahul asked him. This much Dr. Daruwalla had prepared him for.

  “She’s an old story,” the actor replied. “Some people can’t let go.”

  “You can have your choice of women—younger women, too,” Mrs. Dogar told him. “What do you want with me?” This introduced a moment in the dialogue that the actor was afraid of; this required a quantum leap of faith in Farrokh’s script. The actor had little confidence in his upcoming line.

  “I need to know something,” Dhar told Rahul. “Is your vagina really made from what used to be your penis?”

  “Don’t be crude,” Mrs. Dogar said; then she started laughing.

  “I wish there was another way to ask the question,” John D. admitted. When she laughed more uncontrollably, her hands gripped him harder; he could feel the strength of her hands for the first time. “I suppose I could have been more indirect,” Dhar continued, for her laughter encouraged him. “I could have said, ‘What sort of sensitivity do you have in that vagina of yours, anyway? I mean, does it feel sort of like a penis?’ ” The actor stopped; he couldn’t make himself continue. The screenwriter’s dialogue wasn’t working—Farrokh was frequently hit-or-miss with dialogue.

  Besides, Mrs. Dogar had stopped laughing. “So you’re just curious—is that it?” she asked him. “You’re attracted to the oddity of it.”

  Along the thin blue vein at Rahul’s throat, there appeared a cloudy drop of sweat; it ran quickly between her taut breasts. John D. thought that they hadn’t been dancing that hard. He hoped it was the right time. He took her around her waist with some force, and she followed his lead; when they crossed that part of the dance floor which made them visible to Mrs. Dogar’s husband—and to Mr. Sethna—Dhar saw that the old steward had understood his signal. Mr. Sethna turned quickly from the dining room toward the foyer, and the actor again wheeled Mrs. Dog
ar into the more private part of the ballroom.

  “I’m an actor,” John D. told Rahul. “I can be anyone you want me to be—I can do absolutely anything you like. You just have to draw me a picture.” (The actor winced; he had Farrokh to thank for that clunker, too.)

  “What an eccentric presumption!” Mrs. Dogar said. “Draw you a picture of what?”

  “Just give me an idea of what appeals to you. Then I can do it,” Dhar told her.

  “You said, ‘Draw me a picture’—I heard you say it,” Mrs. Dogar said.

  “I meant, just tell me what you like—I mean sexually,” the actor said.

  “I know what you mean, but you said ‘draw,’ ” Rahul replied coldly.

  “Didn’t you used to be an artist? Weren’t you going to art school?” the actor asked. (What the hell is Mr. Sethna doing? Dhar was thinking. John D. was afraid that Rahul smelled a rat.)

  “I didn’t learn anything in art school,” Mrs. Dogar told him.

  In the utility closet, off the foyer, Mr. Sethna had discovered that he couldn’t read the writing in the fuse box without his glasses, which he kept in a drawer in the kitchen. It took the steward a moment to decide whether or not to kill all the fuses.

  “The old fool has probably electrocuted himself!” Dr. Daruwalla was saying to Detective Patel.

  “Let’s try to keep calm,” the policeman said.

  “If the lights don’t go out, let Dhar improvise—if he’s such a great improviser,” Nancy said.

  “I want you not as a curiosity,” Dhar said suddenly to Mrs. Dogar. “I know you’re strong, I think you’re aggressive—I believe you can assert yourself.” (It was the worst of Dr. Daruwalla’s dialogue, the actor thought—it was sheer groping.) “I want you to tell me what you like. I want you to tell me what to do.”

  “I want you to submit to me,” Rahul said.

  “You can tie me up, if you want to,” Dhar said agreeably.

  “I mean more than that,” Mrs. Dogar said. Then the ballroom and the entire first floor of the Duckworth Club were pitched into darkness. There was a communal gasp and a fumbling in the band; the number they were playing persisted through a few more toots and thumps. From the dining room came an artless clapping. Noises of chaos could be heard from the kitchen. Then the knives and forks and spoons began their impromptu music against the water glasses.

  “Don’t spill the champagne!” Mr. Bannerjee called out.

  The girlish laughter probably came from Amy Sorabjee.

  When John D. tried to kiss her in the darkness, Mrs. Dogar was too fast; his mouth was just touching hers when he felt her seize his lower lip in her teeth. While she held him thus, by the lip, her exaggerated breathing was heavy in his face; her cool, dry hands unzipped him and fondled him until he was hard. Dhar put his hands on her buttocks, which she instantly tightened. Still she clamped his lower lip between her teeth; her bite was hard enough to hurt him but not quite deep enough to make him bleed. As Mr. Sethna had been instructed, the lights flashed briefly on and then went out again; Mrs. Dogar let go of John D.—both with her teeth and with her hands. When he took his hands off her to zip up his fly, he lost her. When the lights came on, Dhar was no longer in contact with Mrs. Dogar.

  “You want a picture? I’ll show you a picture,” Rahul said quietly. “I could have bitten your lip off.”

  “I have a suite at both the Oberoi and the Taj,” the actor told her.

  “No—I’ll tell you where,” Mrs. Dogar said. “I’ll tell you at lunch.”

  “At lunch here?” Dhar asked her.

  “Tomorrow,” Rahul said. “I could have bitten your nose off, if I’d wanted to.”

  “Thank you for the dance,” John D. said. As he turned to leave her, he was uncomfortably aware of his erection and the throbbing in his lower lip.

  “Careful you don’t knock over any chairs or tables,” Mrs. Dogar said. “You’re as big as an elephant.” It was the word “elephant”—coming from Rahul—that most affected John D.’s walk. He crossed the dining room, still seeing the cloudy drop of her quickly disappearing sweat—still feeling her cool, dry hands. And the way she’d breathed into his open mouth when his lip was trapped … John D. suspected he would never forget that. He was thinking that the thin blue vein in her throat was so very still; it was as if she didn’t have a pulse, or that she knew some way to suspend the normal beating of her heart.

  When Dhar sat down at the table, Nancy couldn’t look at him. Deputy Commissioner Patel didn’t look at him, either, but that was because the policeman was more interested in watching Mr. and Mrs. Dogar. They were arguing—Mrs. Dogar wouldn’t sit down, Mr. Dogar wouldn’t stand up—and the detective noticed something extremely simple but peculiar about the two of them; they had almost exactly the same haircut. Mr. Dogar wore his wonderfully thick hair in a vain pompadour; it was cut short at the back of his neck, and it was tightly trimmed over his ears, but a surprisingly full and cocky wave of his hair was brushed high off his forehead—his hair was silver, with streaks of white. Mrs. Dogar’s hair was black with streaks of silver (probably dyed), but her hairdo was the same as her husband’s, albeit more stylish. It gave her a slightly Spanish appearance. A pompadour! Imagine that, thought Detective Patel. He saw that Mrs. Dogar had persuaded her husband to stand.

  Mr. Sethna would later inform the deputy commissioner of what words passed between the Dogars, but the policeman could have guessed. Mrs. Dogar was complaining that her husband had already slurped too much champagne; she wouldn’t tolerate a minute more of his drunkenness—she would have the servants fix them a midnight supper at home, where at least she would not be publicly embarrassed by Mr. Dogar’s ill-considered behavior.

  “They’re leaving!” Dr. Daruwalla observed. “What happened? Did you agitate her?” the screenwriter asked the actor.

  Dhar had a drink of champagne, which made his lip sting. The sweat was rolling down his face—after all, he’d been dancing all night—and his hands were noticeably shaky; they watched him exchange the champagne glass for his water glass. Even a sip of water caused him to wince. Nancy had had to force herself to look at him; now she couldn’t look away.

  The deputy commissioner was still thinking about the haircuts. The pompadour had a feminizing effect on old Mr. Dogar, but the same hairdo conveyed a mannishness to his wife. The detective concluded that Mrs. Dogar resembled a bullfighter; Detective Patel had never seen a bullfighter, of course.

  Farrokh was dying to know which dialogue John D. had used. The sweating movie star was still fussing with his lip. The doctor observed that Dhar’s lower lip was swollen; it had the increasingly purplish hue of a contusion. The doctor waved his arms for a waiter and asked for a tall glass of ice—just ice.

  “So she kissed you,” Nancy said.

  “It was more like a bite,” John D. replied.

  “But what did you say?” Dr. Daruwalla cried.

  “Did you arrange a meeting?” Detective Patel asked Dhar.

  “Lunch here, tomorrow,” the actor replied.

  “Lunch!” the screenwriter said with disappointment.

  “So you’ve made a start,” the policeman said.

  “Yes, I think so. It’s something, anyway—I’m not sure what,” Dhar remarked.

  “So she responded?” Farrokh asked. He felt frustrated, for he wanted to hear the dialogue between them—word for word.

  “Look at his lip!” Nancy told the doctor. “Of course she responded!”

  “Did you ask her to draw you a picture?” Farrokh wanted to know.

  “That part was scary—at least it got a little strange,” Dhar said evasively. “But I think she’s going to show me something.”

  “At lunch?” Dr. Daruwalla asked. John D. shrugged; he was clearly exasperated with all the questions.

  “Let him talk, Farrokh. Stop putting words in his mouth,” Julia told him.

  “But he’s not talking!” the doctor cried.

  “She said she wanted me to submit
to her,” Dhar told the deputy commissioner.

  “She wants to tie him up!” Farrokh shouted.

  “She said she meant more than that,” Dhar replied.

  “What’s ‘more than that’?” Dr. Daruwalla asked.

  The waiter brought the ice and John D. held a piece to his lip.

  “Put the ice in your mouth and suck on it,” the doctor told him, but John D. kept applying the ice in his own way.

  “She bit me inside and out,” was all he said.

  “Did you get to the part about her sex-change operation?” the screenwriter asked.

  “She thought that part was funny,” John D. told them. “She laughed.”

  By now the indentations on the outside of Dhar’s lower lip were easier to see, even in the candlelight in the Ladies’ Garden; the teeth marks had left such deep bruises, the discolored lip was turning from a pale purple to a dark magenta, as if Mrs. Dogar’s teeth had left a stain.

  To her husband’s surprise, Nancy helped herself to a second glass of champagne; Detective Patel had been mildly shocked that his wife had accepted the first glass. Now Nancy raised her glass, as if she were toasting everyone in the Ladies’ Garden.

  “Happy New Year,” she said, but to no one in particular.

  “Auld Lang Syne”

  Finally, they served the midnight supper. Nancy picked at her food, which her husband eventually ate. John D. couldn’t eat anything spicy because of his lip; he didn’t tell them about the erection Mrs. Dogar had given him, or how—or about how she’d said he was as big as an elephant. Dhar decided he’d tell Detective Patel later, when they were alone. When the policeman excused himself from the table, John D. followed him to the men’s room and told him there.

  “I didn’t like the way she looked when she left here.” That was all the detective would say.

  Back at their table, Dr. Daruwalla told them that he had a plan to “introduce” the top half of the pen; Mr. Sethna was involved—it sounded complicated. John D. repeated that he hoped Rahul was going to make him a drawing.

  “That would do it, wouldn’t it?” Nancy asked her husband.