Lives of the Circus Animals Read online

  “I got my free hand under your shirt and jacket,” said Henry. “I’m pinching your nipple.”

  “Oh yeah. I’m holding your head in both hands. I’m tracing your right ear with my thumb. Your hair’s cut short. It smells like Old Spice. You use Old Spice because it’s what your father used. Your father’s dead.”

  “Uh-huh.” This line of talk did nothing for Henry’s cock. He brought them back to basics. “Your balls are tightening up. You’re getting ready to blow.”

  “Yeah. Yeah. I am. You?”

  “Getting there, buddy. Gimme a sec.”

  They said nothing for a moment, only hummed and sighed into the phone. Then the playwright announced in a rush, “I’m pressed behind you now, we’re naked, we’re on a beach, my cock is up your ass, your cock is in my hand!”

  “Oh yeah, baby. I’m with you,” said Henry, deciding not to fight the change of scene or break with realism.

  “I’m going to make you come first, and then when I feel your sphincter clench my dick—”

  Henry inhaled a groan, as if he were coming, but only to trigger his friend. There was nothing like a love cry to set off an orgasm.

  “Ah!” the playwright cried. “Oh Toby! Yeah! Ah! Ah!”

  It was beautiful to hear the man climax, but the sound did not finish Henry. He was more stoned than he’d thought. He arched his back and grunted—“Deeper, baby. Oh God. Keep it coming”—but none of his gifts as an actor could carry him across the mind-body divide. Nevertheless, he joined in a duet of moans and whimpers—words fail everyone at times like these—until all that remained was heavy breathing.

  “Thank you,” sighed Henry. “Wow. Thank you.”

  He looked at his cock, so stiff and stubborn and unmoved. Yet he felt some satisfaction, like he’d just moved an audience if not himself. “Your Toby certainly enjoyed getting his ashes hauled.”

  “Toby?” The playwright sounded alarmed.

  “You called me Toby. Didn’t you? Never mind.” Henry decided not to pursue it. A man after orgasm can be testy and unpredictable, even when he was in another bed in another part of town.

  The breathing on the other end shifted from mouth to nostrils, satisfaction turning to a sound like remorse.

  “Thank you,” Henry repeated. “That was most satisfying. Uh, would you like to do this again sometime?”

  “No. Sorry. I’m sure you’re a nice man. But no. Those are my rules. Just once.”

  “Well. You got my number. If you change your mind.” Henry could not resist adding, “You have quite an imagination, you know. You should be a writer.”

  “Good night.”

  “Sweet dreams,” said Henry.

  Click.

  So that was his batwoman’s brother? How interesting.

  Henry lay on his bed, wondering why he should feel so tickled by this discovery. The world is full of secrets; other people’s secrets are so much more interesting than one’s own.

  He closed his robe, tied the cord, got up, and went out to the living room. He vaguely remembered seeing something—and there it was, on top of a dozen books stacked on the sideboard, a play by Caleb Doyle, not Venus in Furs, but the new one, the bomb, Chaos Theory. Jessie must have left it here.

  It was an acting edition in a mauve cover, with no picture of the author. Henry opened it and saw the dedication. Not to Toby but: “For Ben. A wiser, kinder man. In loving memory. 1952–1995.”

  The man died six years ago, which was a century in actor years, though maybe briefer in playwright time. Henry was relieved to learn that Doyle hadn’t been fucking a ghost in his cemetery tonight.

  So who was Toby? Who was Ben? More important, who was Caleb Doyle? This was yet another play about maths—what was it with dramatists and arithmetic nowadays?—but Henry began to read, hoping to get a clue or two about this odd, mysterious fellow with a fondness for tombstones and Old Spice.

  9

  He sat in the dark, an imperfect dark with a leak of street shine projected on his ceiling. Sheridan Square roared eight stories below. It sounded like a day at the beach out there with the buzz of people and surf of traffic.

  Caleb did not turn on the light. He did not want to see himself sitting at his desk in nothing but a T-shirt, a bare-assed geek with a red dick like a piece of garden hose. A last drop hung there like a chilly tear. Ten minutes ago, he’d been depressed and horny. Now he was depressed and guilty. Horny was better.

  He could not believe that he had just shared a very private moment with an anonymous spook. Where the hell did his unconscious dig up that cheesy Catholic fuck fantasy? He hadn’t been to confession since high school. He hadn’t been inside a church in years except for funerals. But jacking off was pure high school. His imagination had regressed to pubescent thrills of blasphemy, nostalgias of sin. Stupid stuff.

  He bent down, picked his sweatpants off the floor, pulled them over his raw middle, and double-knotted the bow. Caleb Doyle didn’t know it, but he was famous for his modesty. Friends joked that not even his lovers ever saw him naked.

  Now it was safe to turn on a light. The fluorescent desk lamp fluttered on, his study appeared: wainscot, wallpaper, casement window, the bookcase stuffed full of books and manuscripts. More books were stacked on the floor, volumes of science and philosophy, newly purchased, but Caleb could read nothing anymore, not even the biographies that were his usual escape, tales of men and women, usually artists, with wonderfully awful lives: Billie Holiday, Scott and Zelda, Caravaggio, Janis Joplin, T. E. Lawrence, and so on. The cordless phone lay on the desk, stranded like a turtle on its back beside the computer. The bulbous peach-colored Mac hadn’t been turned on in weeks. The dark screen was a convex mirror where he now saw a pasty dweeb in a pink undershirt, black-framed glasses, and goatee sitting in an enlarged room like a college teacher’s office.

  The hip strip of beard looked ridiculous. The room looked much too serious. Here was the playwright at home, not a teenager who’d just beat his meat, but a grown man, a middle-aged writer who was turning forty-one next Friday.

  He enjoyed rubbing his nose in the shit of his birthday. He was not letting the date pass in silence but marking it with a party. What a grand act of fuck-me masochism. Turning forty had been relatively painless; he thought forty-one would be easy. He’d decided to throw the bash in a defiant mood, during the brutal high of being trashed by the Times. He wanted to be proud that morons hated his play. The party had been intended as a “fuck you,” not a “fuck me.” But the high passed, exhilaration turned to grief, the failure of the play began to feel like the arrival of middle age. Celebrating the end of youth now seemed as perverse as inviting friends over to watch him blow his brains out.

  Stupid thoughts. Three-o’clock-in-the-morning thoughts. But it was almost three in the morning—2:49 according to the digital clock on the sill. Caleb couldn’t sleep. But a phoned-in orgasm did not induce sleep, it compounded self-pity. He wondered what Mr. 581—the number was doodled on the blotter—made of their little scene. The guy hadn’t batted an eye at Caleb’s program of evening mass and a blow job. Maybe because he really was a good Catholic who lived at home with his mother?

  Caleb regretted using such tacky material. And he regretted blurting out a name when he popped: Toby. Of course he’d think of Toby. The boy was the last good sex he’d had—the last bad sex too. But his first memory was of the good sex, back when he believed that sex was love and love was happiness. His unconscious must miss the little oaf. Caleb hated his unconscious.

  He hated his apartment too—he was gazing through the doorway at the soft shadows of the living room. The crash of lust hollowed him out, and he loathed everything now, even his home. The study was a mess—he needed mess for writing, except he wasn’t writing—but the other rooms were so neat, so pretty. He didn’t deserve this place. When he bought it four years ago, he’d been full of success and felt the world owed him. People called the apartment a penthouse, but it was more like a cottage, a little villa on t
he roof of an old office building over a bay of streets off Seventh Avenue. There was a terrace on two sides, oak floors within, English country furniture—purchased from the last owner—a tiny galley kitchen, and only two bedrooms, one of them now his study. His home was not as large as it seemed, yet he did not feel at home.

  He got up and went out to the living room. Here is where, if this were a play or a novel, Caleb thought, he would pour himself a drink. But he didn’t drink; he never had. He used to congratulate himself on failing to develop a taste for alcohol, but he found one could be just as miserable dry, a drunk of depression, a lush of melancholy.

  He went to the double French doors and opened them. The city roared louder. He stepped out onto the terrace. The night air felt good through his shirt, the cold tiles nicely penitential on his bare feet. The genitals in his sweats drew up into a hard, safe bud.

  High apartment buildings hung on the left and right of the terrace, walls full of dark windows with three, no, four bright squares of brotherly insomnia. Caleb strolled out to the far corner under the water tank on stilts; the angle plunged toward Seventh Avenue like the prow of a ship. The city below was still going strong at three in the morning. Stick figures gathered at the crosswalks in patchy shoals of light, then poured over, passing through identical masses streaming in the opposite direction. On the right, facing the wedge of leafy park around the corner, was The Monster, a cavernous gay bar that catered to the outer boroughs. Caleb never went there. Leaning on his parapet, however, and looking down at the pairs of men coming around the corner, some of them holding hands, he did not feel like Zeus on Olympus tonight but like a sorry ghost watching the spectacle of something he could no longer enjoy.

  Caleb preferred looking down. But sooner or later, he would have to look up and see what stood on the far side of Seventh. Which he did now, gazing past a slate ridge of mansard roof at the two bright billboards over Village Cigars. The upper board featured a gaudy art deco cartoon of a woman in ermine and a man in a top hat, selling a new hit musical: Tom and Gerry.

  The world was too cruel. It was not enough for you to fail, someone else must succeed.

  Caleb hadn’t seen the show, which Jessie claimed wasn’t half bad, for a new musical. It gave her a job, as gofer for the great Henry Lewse, so Caleb couldn’t despise the play completely. Nevertheless, he despised it. A reheated version of an old screwball comedy about life among the harmless rich, it was the perfect piece of gilded crap for this gilded age. This fucking age. It turned them all into whores, even Henry Lewse. Caleb was unimpressed by imported Brits, but he thought even less of Lewse after “the Hamlet of his generation” started peddling his butt on Broadway.

  And the critics who hated Caleb’s play kissed the ass of this one. Like that second-string hack, Prager. “Gorgeous entertainment,” he called Tom and Gerry—his blurb and name now branded over the half-page newspaper ads. “A shapeless, talky, self-indulgent failure,” he said of Chaos Theory—words now carved into Caleb’s brain.

  The billboard hung in the distance, praising one play while it secretly damned another, as fresh as a wound, as permanent as a house. It had gone up only two weeks ago. Caleb stared at it long and hard, telling himself that he’d stop seeing the sign in time.

  You fail, but you go on. You think you’ve overcome failure. But it remains under your feet like the water of a frozen lake where you happily skate. But a sudden change in mood can drop you through the ice into the freezing water.

  Failure spoiled everything. It even spoiled success. His new play was misunderstood—he knew that—but maybe success too was a misunderstanding. Except there he was misunderstood in his favor. Because the worst part, the cruelest thing about this great joke of a billboard across the street—one could almost hear it whispering, “The Times hates your play, the Times thinks you’re stupid”—was Caleb’s fear that Prager was right. Chaos Theory was bad, a pretentious, talky mess, its tenderness phony, its author a fraud.

  “Fuck this!” said Caleb. “Fuck this stupid fucking mind-fucking shit about motherfucking—!”

  He swung his fist against the brick parapet. The blow hurt, but not enough. He grabbed the fist in his free hand so he wouldn’t swing again. He stepped back from the edge. He turned, then turned again and marched down the terrace to the door. He hurried inside and slammed the door, as if the billboard might be following him.

  He began to pace the apartment, snapping on lights, then the television, anything to get him off this vicious train of thought.

  Success was a lie, money was a lie, this apartment was a lie.

  He shook his head, his arms and shoulders, trying to shake this craziness out of his body.

  He should walk away from the lies and return to real life. Except he knew only lies and make-believe, nothing real.

  No. Ben’s illness had been real. And his death. And maybe, just maybe, his love.

  Yet Ben’s love had never seemed as real as his death. Love gained full reality only after it was lost.

  He stopped in front of the television. He stared at it but saw no images, only a conflagration of colors and light. He turned it off and dropped into the soft leather chair. He drew himself into a ball.

  Here was Ben again, in a cubicle of the ICU, a body so wasted it was nearly flush with the mattress, a man reduced to the beeping of a monitor, the clicking of numerals on the IV, an occasional breath fogging the clear plastic face mask.

  This was only hospital porn, a code for sorrow as phony as a twelve-inch dick. The real experience was deeper, more difficult to describe: three years in and out of hospitals, months of hope lost, regained, then lost again. And not just Ben but others—so many others. And not just strangers but people they knew. Yet misery didn’t love company, it hated it. And as Ben became less Ben-like, more alien, less lovable, his death grew more desirable. Until late one afternoon the monitor stopped beeping. His face changed color, the last tension of self relaxing into soft blue shadow. And he was gone. The body was taken out. And he became Ben again. Almost immediately. Because he could be remembered, not just as ill, but also as complicated and human, a large, affectionate, quiet man who had never needed Caleb’s love as much as Caleb needed his.

  That was six years ago. Before money, before success. Caleb thought he’d worked through grief, but he’d merely crossed over it on a bridge of success. And now the bridge had fallen.

  He lay on his side in the chair, closed his eyes, and clenched his teeth. He refused to play this game tonight. He would not use old grief to justify self-pity. That’s all this was. One big pity party, as their mother would put it. He’d become an open wound of self-pity.

  He took a deep breath—and laughed. He actually found a laugh inside his chest, a good, bitter bubble of noise.

  No wonder Toby had left him. Caleb didn’t want his own company either. He wished he could walk out on himself.

  All right, he thought. While you’re picking at scabs, why not dig at that one too?

  “You don’t love me. You love only my success. And now that I’ve lost that, you want to go.”

  “If I want to go, Caleb, it’s because you’re such a shit to be around. I don’t know what you want anymore. If I didn’t love you, I would’ve stopped seeing you weeks ago.”

  “That’s not love. That’s just feeling sorry for me.”

  “Caleb? Why are you trying to hurt me?”

  “Because it hurts me to be with you. Someone who doesn’t know me. Who doesn’t know himself. Who’s mistaken a few weeks of fun for love.”

  Or words to that effect. They hadn’t said any of this so neatly, or all at once either. Caleb could not help rewriting and tightening up their scenes in his head. Toby was not very articulate—he had never even called Caleb “a shit.”

  But Toby was young. He was new to New York. He had escaped his family in Wisconsin. He wanted fun, good times, laughs, sex—he was just discovering the lewd joys of his body—as well as help with his acting career. So what if there was
a streak of gold digger in him? He’d made Caleb happy for a few months. The fucker.

  So Caleb forced the break. He’d needed to make Toby leave, before leaving could cause great pain to either of them. He was glad he’d never asked the boy to move in. He was happy it was over, for Toby’s sake as well as his own. Or no, he was happy only for himself. It was too painful living in the presence of such a cheerful, hopeful, eager youth, someone who simply didn’t get it. What did a twenty-four-year-old know of middle-aged doubt, grief, and failure?

  So was that what was eating at him tonight? He was depressed over losing Toby? More than the failure of his play or turning forty-one or even the death of Ben? None of these causes seemed entirely right. He was only trying them out, like an actor trying out past experiences, looking for one that would give the deepest, most useful pain. Yes, the hurt was real, the pain, only he didn’t know the exact cause. Here was another danger in being a writer. Everything in life seemed to be just an idea, merely a thought. And any thought can be rethought into something else.

  SATURDAY

  10

  A gang of birds whistled and shrieked in the maple tree outside the window on West 104th Street. The sun was bright, the hour early: ten o’clock. A half dozen half-awake actors sat on the pinewood floor or shabby sofa, wincing and blinking, sipping take-out coffee, their faces as rumpled as their clothes. They resembled a pack of nocturnal mammals stranded in daylight.

  “I don’t know,” said Frank. “Can’t we come up with something more interesting for Toby to do than brush his teeth?”

  “What if he were taking a shower?” said Allegra.

  “What if he was taking a dump?” said Dwight.

  Frank groaned. “We want this real, but not that real.”

  Toby sat cross-legged on the floor, smiling, trying to be a good sport but looking as he often looked, like a large, uncertain deer.

  The first public performance of this thing—play, skits, sketchbook, whatever one called it—was Friday, less than a week away. The show was titled 2B, which really was the apartment number, a set of vignettes about roommate living in New York. It was supposed to be slice-of-life, but the script by Allegra’s boyfriend, Boaz, was more slice-of-sitcom. Boaz had just moved here from Israel, and his brain was soaked in bad American television. Frank and the actors were reworking his words in Mike Leigh–style improvisations, hoping to find a few truths, or at least hide the worst clichés.