The Lonely Hearts Hotel(72)

The audience should not have been alarmed. Nothing can really happen when you are dreaming.

Rose went to see him in his dressing room. He was sitting on a long green couch that was against the wall of the room. He was too exhausted to wipe off his white face paint. He had a rag in one hand and a pot of cream in the other, but he kept them separated.

“I get paid practically nothing these days. I guess I’ll have to reconcile myself with the fact that I’m a failure. Why is that always so hard? I wish I could just pack in being a clown.”

“What else could you do now?”

“Did God create us so we can spend our time speculating how much better He is at absolutely everything? He made us in His image, so naturally we want to create from nothing. It’s a maddening task, isn’t it? The reason He doesn’t do anything or take interviews these days is because He’s completely lost His marbles. We’ll go up to heaven and discover that He’s in a straitjacket, no doubt.”

“So you are a religious man? Do you go to church?”

“Obviously not.”

He looked at Rose quizzically.

“I’m not at all who you came here looking for, am I?”

“No.”

“Figures.”

He stretched out on the couch and pulled his jacket over his head to take another nap.

“Nothing really matters on a Sunday,” his muffled voice said from under the jacket. “Everybody gets to have a day off from who they actually are. Don’t you think? Your crimes don’t count, your achievements don’t matter. You just have to curl up in your bed and take a lovely siesta. You are both nothing and everything in your dreams.”

What in the world was Rose doing when she interviewed these clowns other than trying to rediscover a certain innocence that she had once felt? Maybe if she could hear it explained back to her, she could have it once again. A hallucination is no longer a hallucination if somebody else sees it. Then it becomes an apparition.

“Do you want to have sex with me, darling? If not, for the love of God, let me sleep.”

Every time she knocked on a door, Rose was made aware of the fact that she was a girl. Everything she did along the way was something a girl wasn’t supposed to do. She was not allowed to have dignity.

She went home and dreamed that she and Pierrot were underneath the sheet, doing things they had never got a chance to do together.

It was miserable and wet and cold that day, and Pierrot didn’t know where to look anymore. He went to see a private investigator. The man had just come in from the rain himself, as he was still wearing his checkered rain hat. The water from it dripped off the brim and onto the papers and photographs on his desk. The drops of water caused the ink to bloom into small black irises. He smelled like cigarettes.

The investigator said he could help, but he charged. He wrote his fee on a piece of paper and handed it to Pierrot. Pierrot was taken aback by the amount. He could not save up the money to pay him to find Rose. Why was a pauper like him looking for Rose? What would he have to offer her if they did meet? It wasn’t meant to be.

? ? ?

PIERROT LAY BACK DOWN on the mattress in his room. He had spent the little money he had on the one luxury he could afford. He rolled up a bit of tobacco and decided he would never find her. When he lit up the thin cigarette, it made a slight sizzling noise, like the sound of a writer’s manuscript being tossed into the fire.





44


    THE MOON IN C MINOR



Rose heard Pierrot’s piano tune playing in her head every time she walked down the street. It haunted her. She worried it would play in her head until she found Pierrot. She began to frequent all the circuses. She had become an aficionado when it came to clowns. She would wait for them backstage. She brought a notebook along with her, jotting down names of clowns and clues she was able to gather. Rose had dinner one night with Mimi at a bistro. Mimi kept talking about a pianist she had heard playing at the Savoy.

“It’s a laugh. Some of the girls and I like to go. They play old silent films, from when we were little. But the best thing is the piano player. He plays these wonderful tunes. They seem simple, but they put you in a good mood for three days. He’s gorgeous too. Some of the girls try to seduce him, but he’s got his head in the clouds.”

“Oh, right, you’ve mentioned him before.”

After dinner, they kissed each other on the cheek and headed their separate ways home. But Rose didn’t want to go home to her lonely room. It had started to snow, and the flakes were blowing in eddies, like jacks hurled in the air by a young girl. Instead she wandered farther west down Saint Catherine Street, toward the Savoy. Perhaps there was a slight chance the piano player was Pierrot. When she arrived at the cinema, only half the lightbulbs of its marquee were lit, and they were blinking on and off.

Rose looked at the schedule. An old silent film was playing: a sailor falls in love with a party girl who is married to a brute. In the end, he puts her in a trunk and takes her off to the open sea, to freedom. Rose thought that sounded all right, and she paid for a ticket to the late showing. The only decor in the cinema seemed to be little golden stars painted all over the proscenium. To her surprise, the theater was full.

When the lights went down, a girl’s face appeared on the screen. She was blowing kisses. Her face was so white and round, there wasn’t a person alive who wouldn’t compare it to the moon. Her husband didn’t respond to her kisses, but wagged his finger angrily at her. As she was heading to the grocery store with her shopping bag in hand, a friendly sailor on a bicycle began cycling figure eights around her. The sailor put her on the handlebars of his bicycle and they headed down the street, swerving in and out of traffic. How marvelous, Rose thought. She clapped her hands in delight.