The Lonely Hearts Hotel(70)
After his performance, the release of anxiety was so intense that he went outside behind the theater to throw up three or four times. Rose met him there. He led her back to his dressing room. He was still so exhausted by his performance that before he could talk he had to weep and weep and weep.
“C’était magnifique. Je comprends que ?a puisse vous vider. That was magnificent. I can see how it could drain you,” Rose said.
“C’est ce que fait Dieu, chaque nuit. That’s what God has to do every night on an infinite scale. He invented the whole universe, and now he has to pay attention to it. Otherwise all the stars will go out one by one. We complain that he sometimes doesn’t get around to the things we want him to, but look up at the sky! Always more spectacular, the people say. Always more spectacular. Les gens en veulent toujours plus.”
“Oui,” said Rose.
She wanted to be a full participant in that extravaganza too.
“Connaissez-vous un clown du nom de Pierrot? He’s so very light on his feet, it sometimes seems as though he is floating above the ground.”
“Il y a quelqu’un qui correspond à cette description au Théatre Magnifique. Go try there.”
Pierrot looked up at the night sky. The North Star was twinkling so bright that it was surely a sign. He wished to find Rose. He never really put much stock in the stars. He rather fancied himself a lucky person. He didn’t feel as though he could impose on the universe and ask for any more favors. And should he find himself needing to make a demand or recommendation to the universe, he would have to be in dire straits before doing so. Although he could not call his situation distressful by any stretch of the imagination, he nonetheless looked up at the big night sky and he asked it for Rose.
41
ON THE FIFTH DAY
The clown performing at the Ocean Theater was wearing a wig with hair that twirled upward in roped braids as if he were submerged underwater. He had a deep-sea-diver outfit on. He looked incredibly clunky and ungraceful as he lumbered across the stage in his flippers.
He climbed up the scaffolding to above the stage. He stood on the tiny ledge, and after attaching two ropes to the hooks that were on the back of his outfit, he dove! Right down he went, and then before he smacked the stage, the complicated system of pulleys attached to the ropes yanked him so that he was able to land on the ground with a certain delicacy. He leaped up again and he floated magically through the air with the slow-motion grace of somebody who is underwater. He flipped around. He did a breaststroke. It was beautiful and ludicrous.
He and Rose sat across from each other at the theater’s café, off the lobby.
“All life began underneath the ocean. So I’m giving people a taste of what existence might have been like before civilization.”
“But we were amoebas and tiny shrimplike creatures. We didn’t start off in deep-sea-diving outfits.”
“We all come into this world with an oxygen tube in our belly button.”
“True.”
She put her hands up to her own belly. There had so recently been a sea creature evolving in there, trying its best to get its act together. It had perished under the deep, deep, deep sea.
McMahon had put the word out that he wanted Rose found. Someone tapped McMahon’s shoulder at a restaurant. It was a burlesque woman with a white fur coat and thick black liner surrounding her eyes. Her face was so overdone that he assumed it must be stage makeup.
“What?” he asked.
“I just saw Rose. I swear it’s her. She’s backstage across the street, talking to the clown.”
McMahon stood up from the table, grabbed his coat, hurried out of the restaurant, knocking over a chair on his way, and stomped across the street. He went through the lobby into the main hall and up onto the stage, then tossed aside the curtains and walked backstage. He pushed open the door that had Snoop the Magnificent written on it.
“Was a black-haired girl just in here?”
“Yup. You should be able to catch her.”
Her wet footprints hadn’t dried yet and they headed down the back hallway to the back exit that led to the street. McMahon ran, even though it made his lungs burn. He pushed open both doors. There was nothing in the alley but the wind. And a trembling fourteen-year-old girl with heart-shaped cookies she had made for a performer. She held one out for McMahon. He sneered like an enraged horse.
? ? ?
PIERROT WENT TO THE PUBLIC BATHS. There were dark brown and white square tiles, as if the floor of the pool were a chessboard. A tall, old, skinny man walked slowly, step by step, across the pool, as though he were a king piece. Pierrot took off his towel and walked to the edge of the pool, sat down on the ledge and lowered his feet in. The water was warm and melted his toes. He slipped into the water, closed his eyes and sank to the bottom, where he landed painlessly on his behind. He imagined Rose underneath the water with him. Why she would be there, he could not fathom. But it seemed as likely that she would be there as anywhere else.
He lay on his back, floating in the large bath, his penis like a lily pad.
42
ON THE SIXTH DAY
There was a theater all the way on top of the hill in the park, known as the Beaver Theater. Inside the theater, paintings of forests with deer galloping through them hung from the walls. The curtain was striped green and brown.