Luster(28)
“Could you throw this out?” he says without looking at me, as Akila comes down the stairs wearing a wig, a green one this time. Rebecca is close on her heels looking wrung-out, but I notice that she has put on mascara and let down her hair.
“Sorry, Pradeep,” she says, smiling with her teeth. I realize she is flirting, and it is so unsettling that I go back up to the guest room, where I try to calm my interview jitters by streaming Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. For a moment it works. In the neighborhood of make-believe King Friday is judging an art contest, but Lady Elaine Fairchilde will not submit to his judgment. She says art is subjective, and technically that is the moral of the story, though it is also implied that everyone in the kingdom thinks her art is bad, which—if she is making art that is meant to be seen by others—is a serious tough-titty, the comfort of audience subjectivity pretty much null when the audience is everyone, and everyone has decided, subjectively, that the art is bad. Then Mister Rogers takes us into a crayon factory, and when two disembodied hands pour yellow wax into a trough filled with holes and the piano accompaniment comes in, it is just too much. I pause it and find the Wikipedia for Pomeranian, so that I can go into my interview with talking points about the office dog, who is, per Wikipedia, one of an extremely horny breed. The guest room is hotter than the other rooms, and so I head downstairs to gather myself, but while I’m on the stairs I hear Pradeep say, a monkey could do this, and all I can see is the back of Akila’s head, the halo of green, synthetic frizz.
“I’m trying,” she says, a tremor in her voice.
“You’re not. It’s simple math,” he says, and I go down there and start looking for the Captain Planet mug, though it is just an excuse to linger. I glance at Akila and she looks upset, though I can sense that my looking at her makes it worse.
“Hey,” I say, turning to Pradeep, my small voice back again. “You can’t—”
“Can you not?” Akila says, and so I don’t. I grab my things and take a bus to Jersey City, where I find that the clown academy is housed in a squat, neoclassical building that, compared with the bagel shops and degraded coworking spaces along the block, appears eerie and slightly outside of time. Inside, it is like a chapel, replete with modern fresco, the imagery familiar only in its rippled triceps and biblical postures, because upon closer inspection every figure depicted is a clown. Above the receptionist’s desk there is an engraving that says, The clown stands on his head and sees the world the right way up. The receptionist is an impossibly chic Asian woman with long, tattooed hands and some sort of head cold. Naturally it heartens me to see some color in the place, but when she escorts me to the waiting room she sneezes and tells me that I’m underdressed. This is an understatement. Per my cursory scan of the company mission statement, the ball pit, break room Ping-Pong, and office dog, I thought the office dress would be casual. But when I step into the room, there are five other applicants combing furiously through their notes. They are all wearing pantsuits and they are all Asian. I sit down and pull the school’s website up on my phone. When the interviewer calls my name, his eyes sweep over me with confused disinterest and it is humiliating, but I feel a vague racial obligation to see it through. So I sit down and immediately there is a mutual feeling of us just going through the motions, though the interviewer, a white man decked out in Tommy Bahama who tells me to address him as Maestro, gives me a rundown of the school beginning with an extremely defensive condemnation of the Ringling Brothers and magic of the lowest common denominator, which includes the decorative—cards and spitting flowers and buzzers—but not, he stresses, the intricate art of tying balloons. This interview seems to be mostly about him getting things off his chest, which is fine because I’m clearly not the front-runner for this job, and the more he talks about the historic model of the Italian buffoon, the more I realize I have misunderstood the requirements of the job. For a brief moment I think that the format of this interview is itself a joke and the successful applicant is meant to call the bluff, but then he goes on a tear about glove puppets and the mime’s blatant appropriation of indigenous clown rituals, and I just feel disappointed in myself for needing this job so desperately and for being as black as I am and for coming unprepared.
He tells me that he’s firing the current receptionist because she is too whimsical with visitors, and I tell him that I thought clowning was supposed to be fun. He leans back in his chair and closes his eyes, which seems a very dramatic response to an extremely unsurprising observation. In the protracted silence, I notice that Anakin the Pomeranian is sitting stoically in the corner, apparently not horny at all. Then Maestro leans forward and places a clown nose on the desk. He asks me to look at it. He asks me if I feel like laughing. When I tell him I don’t he smiles and says that’s because clowning is about interrogating the human condition, that it is art, and that these are serious things. He tells me that the art that matters is the art that is wrought and consumed with great difficulty. He tells me a laugh is easy, and when there is a prioritization of fun, clowning ceases to be art and becomes entertainment. Then he gives me a grave, buzzerless handshake and tells me my time is up. On the bus back, I keep thinking about the nose. About how strange it looked out of context. I don’t mind his condescension, and I can’t remember the last time I laughed.
* * *
When I get to the house it is dark. Rebecca is doing yoga in the living room to a muted video, and I am primed to go feel more nothing in my room, but I see the sofa and find it more attractive than the stairs. I splay on the sofa and watch her, her taut tadasana and uttanasana, and her unimpeachable plank. She is efficient but imperfect, seamless but still apparently holding the form in the front of her mind, the effort to arch her feet and compress her abdominal muscles propelling her out of her pose. She trembles through a half moon, collapses, and shimmers on the mat. She glances at me, but doesn’t ask me to leave. When she continues on into her next pose, I realize I hoped she would. It reminds me of how she undressed in the morgue, and I envy the nonchalance she has about her body.