The Lonely Hearts Hotel(96)

FINAL ACT


There was a clown who was dressed as a shooting star, who rode his toy gangster car across the stage. He spotted a lasso on the ground. He got off his bicycle and picked it up. He kept throwing the lasso up into the air, up toward the ceiling, over and over again. The lasso kept falling right back down. And then, finally, it got stuck up in the air. It was affixed to something above in the rafters that could not be seen. He pulled on it as hard as he could, but no matter how hard he tried, whatever it had caught would not budge.

He began to climb the rope and found himself upside down and tangled in it. Another clown came in with his dog. That clown took the rope in his hands and both men began to pull together. The dog took the rope in his mouth and he began to pull too. Then the other clowns came out. They all began to pull the rope. Three of the chorus girls climbed up on the rope in order to pull harder. Finally, with everyone pulling, it slowly began to budge.

And from above the curtains, the most enormous and lovely papier-maché moon began to slowly descend as the clowns fulfilled what they promised to do in the advertisements for the performance: to bring the audience the moon.

Rose’s greatest theatrical gift was her stage presence. It was evident when she tiptoed out onto the stage in sparkly slippers. She had on her head a triangular hat with a little pom-pom glued on top. She had on a silk jacket with big polka dots. She had on a skirt that jutted outward, little white pom-poms attached to the edge of it like snowballs that were attached to a dog’s chin. She had wires attached to a great big bear puppet that was behind her.

A piano and a bench were suddenly rolled onto the stage with none other than Pierrot seated at it. He was wearing a loose white clown outfit. He had a ruffled white collar, large black pom-poms for buttons, and pants that drooped down at his feet like melting candles. His face was completely covered in white face paint, except for a tiny little black tear on his cheek.

Rose’s face was similarly covered in white face paint, except for a red dot on either cheek—just like the ones on her face when she was found in the snow as a baby.

Pierrot began to play the tune he always played. Rose began to dance her funny dance. When she danced elegantly, so did the bear. Every time she leaned forward, it seemed as though the bear was certainly going to swallow her. But then Pierrot played higher on the scale of the piano and the bear changed his mind and began to dance elegantly behind her.

Pierrot had been working on this peculiar score for years now. It was his magnum opus. He had been working on it since he was a little boy—perhaps he had been playing the same tune since he first put his long fingers on the piano keys. And that night onstage, he finished it.

For the last bar, Pierrot paused for a moment and tapped the keys delicately, as if he were trying to wake someone from a deep sleep. Paper snowflakes came down one by one from the ceiling. It was quite lovely.

When the stage was covered in paper snowflakes, and Pierrot stopped playing the piano, Rose and her bear took a bow. The heavy, heavy curtains tumbled down like lava on the side of a volcano. And the show was over.

? ? ?

THE AUDIENCE WAS QUIET. There was a hush. They were not sure what they had just seen. They did not want to breathe. They did not want to clap, because their applause would mean the show was over and they did not want it to end. Then it came. A wonderful sound. They applauded joyfully.

The audience was filled with a hundred nine-year-olds dressed in furs and fancy pearls.





57


    JIMMY’S ONE-POINT PERSPECTIVE



Jimmy wasn’t sure what to think about the clowns. He felt a little bit weirded out by men who had chosen clowning as a profession. He only regarded being a murderer or a politician as sufficiently masculine. He was so cautious of betraying any emotion or sign of weakness that he felt alarmed by these men who just paraded about in front of an audience, weeping and farting and dropping things.

He did, however, like the chorus girls. There was something so odd about them. Some of them weren’t even pretty. A few of them had no chest at all. They weren’t the sorts of girls who he would have working at the Romeo Hotel. He liked the show, though. It started reminding him of his past, when he was a little boy in the whorehouse.

He looked at the faces of different chorus girls to see which one he was supposed to kill. But none of the girls seemed to have the face of someone who had managed to get such a large sum on her head.

He looked at Caspar and raised his hands as if to say he didn’t know who their mark was.

“You’ll know her when you see her,” Caspar said.

They believed in all sorts of omens—anyone who had been around a lot of deaths always did. You came to think of superstition as common sense. They both believed that you could spot right away when someone had a price on their heads. They had a weird aura, like saints in medieval paintings.

Jimmy leaned back into his seat and the last act commenced, wherein right before his eyes, a moon began to be lowered down on cables. This was going too far. He turned to Caspar, whose mouth was open and who seemed stunned by the enormity and reality of this moon. McMahon was out of his mind. Montreal had gone too far this time, Jimmy thought. It must be the cold. Everyone who traveled there said they couldn’t put into words how cold it got and how miserable they had been trudging through the snow. They would often hold up their feet for him to get a look at how their shoes and boots had been destroyed. They seemed a little bit mad when they returned from Montreal. But it was as if they had caught just a touch of madness—like the flu—that passed after three or four days. He could only imagine what living through an entire winter would do to you.