Lives of the Circus Animals Read online

  “Actors have this magic thoughtlessness,” she said. “I don’t. Which was my problem as an actor, both back in college and the classes I took at HB. I’m not saying I’m too smart to be an actor. I’m just too conscious. Too rational.”

  She was asking for it now, but Caleb still said nothing. He remained deep inside his head.

  “Working out a new scene?” she said irritably. “Lost in your next big project?”

  He produced a heavy sigh. “I told you. There is no next project.”

  “All right. We don’t have to talk about it.”

  “Nothing to talk about. I haven’t written a word in months. I can’t imagine why.” His sarcasm wasn’t bitter but cold and smug; Caleb could be so damned righteous in his suffering.

  “You will again. Just give it time.”

  “Hm.” And he turned away and looked out the window.

  All right, she thought, he’s not writing and can’t talk about it. She understood that. But she was determined to get his attention. So she played a dangerous card.

  “Frank says Toby’s really good in this play they’re doing.”

  He didn’t even blink. “Good for Toby.”

  “You’re coming, aren’t you? To see it?”

  “Not this weekend. Next weekend. Maybe. I have my wonderful party this weekend, remember.”

  She sniffed. “I get Toby a part in a play, and you don’t want to even see it? Because he’s in it?”

  “I’m not afraid of seeing Toby.” He knotted up a corner of his mouth. “And you didn’t get him the part. Frank cast him.”

  “Yeah, but Frank met him through me.”

  “How is old Frank these days?”

  He was only changing the subject, but Jessie hated the condescension in his tone. “I thought you liked Frank?”

  “What’s not to like?”—implying that there was nothing to dislike either.

  “You should’ve gone to his show, Cal. It was good. Last night was the last night, so you missed it. But Frank’s a smart director. It was wonderful watching those kids do theater. And Show Boat is really interesting, more complex than I ever gave it credit for…”

  Caleb zoned out again.

  She angrily dug her wireless from her pocket and beeped it on.

  Caleb winced. “Who you calling?”

  “Just need to see if there’s anything from Henry.” She did it solely for effect. Henry had called yesterday, but that was a rare event. She’d brought the phone today for effect as well, a prop to remind herself that she was indispensable to someone.

  There were no messages, of course, not even one from Frank. She turned off the phone and shoved it back into her coat.

  “Henry left the weirdest message yesterday,” she said. “Asking about you.”

  “Me?”

  She’d forgotten about it until now, it made so little sense. “He wanted to know if you were Doyle the playwright.”

  “Probably wants me to write a play. With a fat part for him.”

  “Actually, he wanted to know if you could explain algorithms.”

  “Huh?”

  She laughed. “That’s what he said. I don’t get it either.”

  “Jesus. You use a couple of half-assed math metaphors, and people suddenly think you’re Einstein. What does Henry Lewse want to know about algorithms for?”

  “Beats me. Maybe he just likes the word. Or maybe it’s his way of saying hello. You’ve never met, right?”

  “No.”

  “You should. I think you’d like each other.”

  He drew another heavy sigh. “I have nothing to say to Henry Lewse. I’m so tired of actors. All actors.”

  “Henry’s not like other actors. He’s different. He has a brain. He has soul. He’s a serious artist. I think you’d find you have a lot in common. What if I brought him to your party on Friday?”

  Caleb stared at her. “Haven’t you heard yourself go on and on for the past half hour? Bitching and moaning about your crazy boss. Selfish and self-absorbed? The idiot savant? The pothead?”

  “He’s not a pothead. He just needs grass to help him sleep.”

  “A lot in common, huh? Yeah. Right. The pathetic failure and the happy sellout.”

  “Henry didn’t sell out.”

  “What else do you call it? The man sold his soul for a Broadway fucking musical. What’s next? A sitcom? Hollywood Squares? He’s kissed his artistic ass good-bye. He just doesn’t know it yet. Or maybe he does and that’s why he needs to get stoned to get any sleep.”

  Jessie glared at her brother. Henry Lewse was hers. Only she had the right to trash Henry.

  “No,” she said. “You have tons in common. Yeah, Henry’s spoiled. But no worse than you. And no more self-absorbed. I’m sorry your play tanked, I’m sorry you’re so unhappy. But that doesn’t give you the right to be so righteous and pissy about everything.”

  “I’m not pissy. I’m depressed.”

  “You…geniuses.” It wasn’t the right word but no other word came to mind. “No matter how much success you get, you want more. You and Henry both. If you’re not bitching about failure, you’re bitching about success.”

  “I haven’t had any success to bitch about lately.”

  “No. Your play cratered. And it was a good play. I liked it. But you’ll write others. You call yourself a failure, but us peons would kill to have the kind of success that you call failure.”

  He was silent. He gave her an apologetic look, but didn’t apologize. “You don’t understand. Success doesn’t make everything all right. It makes you vulnerable. You wonder why you wanted to do any of it in the first place. It doesn’t take away our right to complain. I have plenty to complain about. Look at me. I’ve got no boyfriend, no job, no work in progress, nothing.”

  “You have a million bucks.”

  “Not anymore.” He looked angry that she mentioned his money, then embarrassed. He nervously glanced around to see if anyone could hear. “It was never a million,” he whispered. “Not after all the commissions and taxes. Since then it’s just dribbled away.”

  “Your penthouse hasn’t gone up in value?”

  He opened his mouth, then closed it. “But what’s money? Work is what counts. But you need success to keep working. I don’t know if I’ll ever get another play produced. Which makes it impossible to write a new one. I don’t know what to do with my life now. The only thing I can count on is that I’ll get an obituary in the Times.”

  “Which I won’t!” cried Jessie. “And I’d kill for a Times obit.”

  He stared at her. And he laughed. It was a mirthless, dry laugh, but justified. She had to laugh with him.

  “Listen to us,” said Caleb. “How the hell did we get here?”

  “You started it. Trashing Henry.” Even after laughter, however, she remained angry. She felt protective toward Henry, hurt that Caleb didn’t take her seriously, and, despite herself, resentful that her name never would appear on a Times obituary page—probably.

  “You’re hardly a peon,” said Caleb. “You’re smart and talented and hardworking. Henry Lewse is damned lucky to have you.”

  But he did not look at her as he spoke, as if embarrassed to say such things to his own sister.

  13

  The jazzy rhythm of wheels quickened, grew louder, then died away, leaving only suburban sounds, birdsong and lawn mowers. They stood on the platform in Beacon. There was a smell of cut grass, sickly sweet like marzipan. The smell worried Caleb, as if he’d forgotten to mow the yard, a chore that he hadn’t done in years.

  He was relieved that Mom wasn’t waiting for them in the parking lot. He hadn’t told her what train they were taking, insisting they’d catch a cab. Being driven by his mother would’ve made him feel like a kid again, helpless and dependent.

  “What a dump,” grumbled Jessie during the cab ride. “Welcome to Loserville. Next door to the capital of the world, but people carry on like they’re out in Bumfuck, Iowa.”

  The homely o
ld landscape flowed by: service stations, minimalls, their old high school—a brick box with smokestacks like a factory. Jessie became more animated, repeating cracks that she’d said a million times before. Caleb had recognized long ago that his sister often spoke in order to stop herself from thinking.

  They turned a corner onto a shady street of stout houses on short lawns, an old working-class neighborhood where nothing seemed to change except the makes of automobiles in the driveways. The cab ground to a stop in front of a white house with a glassed-in porch and heavily banked tulip beds. The grass was already cut—Mom did it herself now. She took care of the garden too. The tulips were in full bloom, segregated zones of scarlet, yellow, and mauve.

  “I’ll get this,” said Caleb when Jessie opened her purse. “Out of my millions.”

  The cab drove off, and they stood side by side, brother and sister facing a house that looked as wholesome as milk, as pretty as a funeral. They started up the driveway.

  The louvered door opened. And there she stood, in a work shirt, designer jeans, and big smile. She wore no lipstick today but must’ve been to the hairdresser recently. Her hair was waved, the gray washed away in a uniform shade of beige.

  “Hello, dears,” she called out softly, for fear of disturbing the neighbors. “Did you have a good ride up?”

  Caleb got to the door first.

  She touched his shoulder gently and kissed his cheek. “Happy birthday, Cal.”

  “And a happy unbirthday to you.”

  She rolled her eyes, as if this old joke were too original for her. “I can’t say I like this, dear.” She fingered her own chin. “Makes you look like a billy goat.”

  “Just being fashionable.”

  She waved him through, then kissed her daughter on the cheek. “Jessica. You look good, dear. You’ve lost weight?”

  “Not an ounce!”

  They could never make other people understand why this quietly composed, seemingly harmless woman drove them nuts. But then Molly Doyle wasn’t other people’s mother.

  The house was furnished in Ethan Allen from three decades back. The family room bookcases were stuffed with old paperbacks, the mysteries their mother read as obsessively as she once smoked Salems—she had quit smoking five years ago. Hanging on the walls were shelves crowded with knickknacks: ceramic thimbles, dainty animals, blue-eyed Hummels, the tchotchkes that first appeared when Jessie went off to college, then metastasized after their father’s death. They had been a shock after Mom’s years of blunt practicality, an eruption of preciousness. Jessie once made a crack about this mob of fragile doodads, and Mom blithely replied, “Well, I don’t have to worry about grandchildren breaking them, do I?”

  She was very subtle. Calm and reserved, reasonable and civil, she hated the theatrics of confrontation. Caleb often wondered what would’ve happened if they’d had a more dramatic mother, a good loud Italian, say. Would he and Jessie have avoided theater?

  All that remained of their father was a single photo on the mantel, a handsome, hawk-faced man in a knit sports shirt. He’d been a cop in New York City before they were born, then a cop up here in Beacon. Mom displayed no pictures of him in uniform. He left law enforcement when they were kids to manage the local golf course. Bobby Doyle had been a friendly, noisy, sociable guy, a man’s man who preferred the company of men. He could be a doting, sentimental daddy when Caleb and Jessie were little, but he hadn’t known what to make of them as teenagers. Caleb remembered him as sometimes irritable, often well-meaning, always baffled.

  The dining room table was prettily set, but there was no aroma of food from the kitchen, only the house’s peppery smell of old flowers. The last traces of cigarette smoke and Old Spice aftershave had faded years ago. Mom must have picked up something ready-to-serve at ShopRite.

  “Come on into the kitchen, kiddos. You can tell me what you’ve been up to while I get things started in the microwave.”

  He and Jessie each took a diet soda from the refrigerator and sat at the Formica-topped table. Caleb liked the kitchen. It was the room where he felt most at home. These were his roots, he told himself, a faintly shabby lower-middle-class kitchen with floral curtains and a mint green refrigerator from the 1960s.

  “Old-fashioned midday Sunday dinner,” said Mom without a speck of irony as she popped open plastic containers. “Usually I just have a soup and sandwich alone. So. Tell me. What have you two been up to?”

  Jessie looked at Caleb with her eyebrows skewed together, daring him to go first.

  “Oh, the usual,” he said. “Writing. Errands. Meetings. Nothing special.” But he couldn’t be completely dishonest. “I got to say, writing is very hard now. After the last play did so badly.”

  “But you got paid, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah. But not nearly as much as everyone hoped.”

  “You’ll do better next time. I just know it. And Jessica? How are things with you?”

  She didn’t understand; she didn’t have a clue. She thought playwriting was just another job where you worked for a fee and sometimes got a bonus. But theater was a foreign world to their mother. She had never even seen one of Caleb’s plays.

  Molly Doyle hated the city. She grew up in Queens but left when she got married. She knew New York chiefly through the eyes of her cop husband: a city of criminals. She had learned to tolerate her kids’ living there but refused to visit, not even for a performance of her son’s work. Caleb had come to accept this, treating it as eccentric, even amusing. His therapist insisted he must resent his mother. But he didn’t. Part of him, in fact, was relieved that she never saw his plays. He feared she wouldn’t understand. Or worse, that she would.

  Jessie was telling a story about working with Henry, in a boastful manner, with none of the resentful notes that Caleb had heard on the train.

  “Nice, I’m sure,” said Mom. The name Henry Lewse meant nothing to her. “I forget. I know you told me, but is he married?”

  “No. But I’m safe around him. He’s a famous homo.”

  “Hmp.” The noise was meant to sound calm and worldly but came out as a judgmental squeak. “Are you seeing anyone?”

  Jessie shrugged. “Not at the moment.”

  “Now don’t cut off your nose to spite your face. Men are hopeless,” Mom admitted. “But good company now and then. And you don’t have to marry them. Not anymore. Just because you-know-who turned out to be a stinker…”

  The microwave began to beep.

  “Here we go. Get your plates. Let’s move to the dining room.”

  Jessie angrily cut her eyes at Caleb as they got up. He could almost hear her thinking: do you fucking believe this? But he was most struck by her refusal to mention Frank. As if she were protecting him. Once Mom started asking about Frank, it would poison the poor guy for good. Caleb liked Frank. He did. He suspected Frank didn’t like him, but that was fine with Caleb. In fact, he admired Frank for not liking him.

  Mom never asked Caleb if he were seeing anyone, but that was fine with him too.

  They all sat at the table. Molly poured wine for herself and Jessie, then asked Caleb if he’d like some. “It is your birthday.”

  “Why not?”

  They did not say grace. Their mother still went to mass, but talking to God at the table, even in the privacy of her family, must strike her as too public and melodramatic to be completely sincere.

  “So cheers,” she said, raising her glass. “Again, dear. Happy birthday.” She took a deep swig. She enjoyed the glass or two that she allowed herself each day.

  There was the click-click-click of utensils as they ate.

  “It’s nice to have both my kiddos home today,” Mom declared. “Especially when one is turning—how old?”

  Caleb frowned. “Do we have to keep track? Forty-one,” he confessed. “Doesn’t that make you feel old?”

  “But I like getting old,” she claimed. “I have a good life now. A nice life. I enjoy the peace and quiet.”

  Caleb wanted to sc
off. Except she did seem content. She appeared perfectly happy with her gardening, her mysteries, and her solitude. A weirdly self-sufficient mother, she was satisfied with a visit from them every month or so. She refused to take money from Caleb. Social Security and her two pensions gave her everything she required, thank you very much.

  Yet anyone who was truly content would be more open to life. Wouldn’t she? She would acknowledge the past now and then. Molly Doyle never talked about her childhood in Queens, which Caleb knew had been hard. She never discussed her years as a cop’s wife. She didn’t talk about their father at all. She avoided all mention of the dead. She never alluded to Ben either. And she had liked Ben, she liked him a lot, much to Caleb’s surprise. He used to bring Ben up here and they would flirt, his mother and his boyfriend. Big and husky and masculine—more masculine than Caleb, anyway—Ben enjoyed talking to women. He brought out a side in Molly that her children rarely saw, friendly, flippant, smart-ass. And she liked the fact that Ben was a teacher—he taught math in a private high school—a more grown-up career in her eyes than playwriting.

  She was sorry when she heard Ben was sick. She was stunned when she heard he died. She almost came to town for the memorial service. She called at the last minute to say she’d decided against it. It wasn’t her world, she said. She’d feel like an intruder.

  Caleb was annoyed to find himself using Ben again. It was a strange memory to direct against his mother, although it didn’t feel entirely like an accusation. He shifted his wineglass over to the left of his plate so that he’d drink more slowly.

  He noticed Jessie scowling while she chewed, still fuming over the mild jab about her divorce. It was up to Caleb to get a conversation going or they’d pass the meal in silence.

  “How about you, Mom? What are you up to these days? The yard looks good. The tulips are coming up nicely.”

  “They are now. No thanks to Mrs. Gagliano’s dumb pony of a dog. Her Great Dane, Percy. He thought my flower bed made a very pretty bathroom. I kept having to chase him off as the bulbs began to sprout. I had words with Mrs. Gag.” She chuckled. “I told her, in no uncertain terms, that if she didn’t keep him on a leash, her Great Dane was going to be great danish.”