MAX FRIED STEPPED OVER the threshold. He set down his navy-blue beret on a gleaming Formica surface and surveyed his new residence. His last, was it not? Its kitchen glistened whitely; every fixture ready and waiting, deceptively virginal. Neatness he liked, but this was antiseptic, reeking already of the purity of the beyond.
All along the counters at arm level he found chrome rails that recalled the hospital from which he had been ejected less than an hour ago. Stuffed in a taxi by his delectable Puerto Rican nurse, Carmela Velasquez, after a month of wry verbal dalliance, and carried to this four-story beige brick building of recent and styleless design—Pleasure Knolls Semi-Service Apartments for Senior Citizens. The knoll was a mild, well-groomed slope on which the building sat in a posture of apathy, uncheered by a warm late-October sun. Max’s predilections were urban; driving up the Sawmill River Parkway, he had observed with loathing the wide swatches of Westchester green, buffer zones between clutches of low-roofed commerce. But aesthetics were a luxury at his age. He had no choice, they told him: his heart would not survive another city mugging. Dr Small had arranged everything. Too kind.
‘I can assure you, Mr Fried, it’s no nursing home. It’s a health-related facility. You’ll have your own apartment and all the privacy you want. But there’s a trained professional staff, and you can get meals prepared if you like. It’s more comfort than you’ve had, and not expensive either. You’re lucky they had an opening.’
‘Yes, I suppose some poor fool dropped dead.’
Dr Small cracked his knuckles loudly. ‘Our social worker, Miss Tilley, went out of her way to find this for you.’
Thank you too, Miss Tilley. He opened a canary-yellow cabinet. Smooth white plates, cups, soup bowls—service for four. No wild parties expected, obviously. He advanced to the living room: all suitably autumnal, brown and orange, squarish chaste sofa, wing chair and ottoman with matching rug. Landscape with grazing cattle hanging on the wall. As he stood up on the ottoman to take it down, he could almost touch the low ceiling. Big windows overlooked the back lawn, west, giving good afternoon light—the plants, at least, would thrive. Traffic curled on skeins of road in the middle distance, too far off to be noisy. He drew the curtains and moved along through a doorway. A broad double bed! What did they expect? The decorator, with a burst of unprecedented abandon, had chosen a crazy-quilt spread in hues of bright red and blue and purple. A setting for merriment. Well, it was a comfortable bedroom, unobjectionable, and better than he had had most of his life. He tossed his jacket on to the bed before proceeding to the bathroom, which, offering a medley of orthopedic devices, reminded him of the physical therapy room he used to pass, strolling through the hospital corridors. Hollowed-out people in faded bathrobes doing peculiar exercises; gleaming chrome and wincing faces. He would look away, remembering other antics—ropes and bars and wires, nimble bodies defying the rigidities of bone. He might be shuffling through a corridor in bedroom slippers, but once, oh once, he wanted to shout in protest, he had cavorted on a tightrope in trim silver shoes and been mad for a woman. He did tell Carmela, about the tightrope, not the woman, and she said coolly that she was not surprised; she could see it in the muscles. And for all his joking innuendos, she had managed to embarrass him.
Now he shoved aside a few movable bars near the toilet. Thank God he could still piss without this contraption. Welcome, the inaugural piss.
In the living room armchair, he nudged off his shoes and put his feet up on the ottoman. At eye level, six feet off, waited an empty TV screen. Was this his future, then night after night falling asleep in the chair, burning cigar holes in the rug, stumbling at last, sleepily, on to the therapeutic mattress? Man acclimates. Not to raging hunger, though. Where was his future grocery store? The smiling information lady downstairs, peppy as a wind-up toy, had promised to tell him everything he needed to know. A large order, he had retorted. Very well; soon he would give her an opportunity to be useful. Meanwhile, he closed his eyes.
He was wakened by a knock on the door. He knew no one, wanted no one, yet there stood a woman built on the grand scale, draped into bright-yellow print, with curly gray-blond hair circling a capable face.
A prettiness mellowed by experience. She looked him over; he made a slight bow.
‘I’m your next-door neighbor. My name is Lettie Blumenthal and I came to say you can always come in for a cup of tea. I like to be on good terms with my neighbors. Provided, of course, you’re a decent sort of person.’
‘Come in, come in, Lettie Blumenthal.’ Max shook her hand, large but oddly delicate. ‘Thank you for your invitation, which I accept immediately, as soon as I put my shoes back on. I assure you I am a decent sort of person.’
She stepped inside and gazed around his living room. ‘Why is the painting on the floor?’
‘Have a seat, please.’ His breath faltered when he bent over to tie the laces. Always, so he couldn’t for a minute forget. ‘My painting is down because its theme did not suit my sensibilities. I prefer a human scene. Cows, I’ve never felt any rapport with. Do you know what I mean?’
Her knees moved apart; as she smiled, her face broke into furrows, miraculously becoming a face he could talk to. ‘I know exactly what you mean. I was a city person too. In fact, I’ll tell you right off—I was a chorus girl, way back when. Can you believe it?’ She was laughing heartily now. ‘But in the year I’ve lived here it never occurred to me to take the cows off the wall.’
He laughed in return and studied her more closely. Under the mass were good bones. Her features were fine also, shrewd and firm, with light, clever eyes. He walked over to where she sat solidly on the sofa like a flowering plant, and extended his hand once again: ‘Max Fried, trapeze artist and all-round stunt man, decent and ravenous. Would you have, in addition to the tea, a sandwich?’
‘My kitchen is overflowing.’
Hunger appeased, Max spent a good quarter of an hour in the late afternoon reading the orderly bulletin board opposite the welcomer’s desk. From time to time he glanced surreptitiously at Mrs Cameron to see if she was observing him. She was, equally surreptitious, but less hostile.
‘We have a men’s group, Mr Fried,’ she ventured at last, ‘that meets twice a week for a Great Ideas of Western Man discussion.’
‘Thank you,’ said Max. ‘I am not in quest of great ideas.’
‘Perhaps if you could tell me whether you’re interested in something specific...’
‘If I knew what I was looking for, Mrs Cameron, I would be out finding it. I know better what I do not want. I am reading for enlightenment, to get an impression of the texture of life in this community, henceforth my own, for better or worse, till death do us part.’ That did the trick. Mrs Cameron bent her head quickly back over her Newsweek.
The prospects were staggering: a Dramatics Group, currently doing a Jerome Kern retrospective, pinochle and poker games, jewelry-making, needlepoint, Chinese cooking, Introductory Spanish (no need; he had had that in the hospital), watercolor painting, woodworking. A man could waste months in self-improvement. He jotted down the hours and locations of the poker games and was about to give up, when a three-by-five card in a low corner caught his eye. ‘SENIOR CITIZENS,’ in easy-to-read block letters. ‘Volunteer positions open in Roosevelt Junior High. Share your skills with children.’ He copied the address. Skills he had in abundance, but he wanted them to pay.
As he tucked the slip of paper into his breast pocket a siren whined just outside, rising to a horrendous pitch before it trailed off. He turned back to the desk—this time she was frankly scrutinizing him. ‘Ambulance?’
‘Police,’ she said, and smiled. ‘They’re just a block away. You’ll get used to it.’
‘I suppose I have no choice. Now, Mrs Cameron, there is something you can help me with.’
She rose, levitated by eagerness. ‘Yes, Mr Fried?’
‘I require a grocery store.’
‘Oh, yes. Just around the corner on the right, across the street and down half a block, is the supermarket. It’s open till seven. We’ve also got a bus every morning at ten that goes to the main shopping center. You can have a nice leisurely lunch there—a lot of people do that. But for now, we have several shopping carts available, if you’d like one.’
Her lust to assist charged the quiet air, depressing Max. ‘Isn’t there a plain dingy grocery, the kind with old cornflakes and a numbers game in the back, where I can get canned enchiladas and brush away a couple of roaches?’
‘Mr Fried, the supermarket has everything you could possibly want.’
‘Not everything, Mrs Cameron. But no doubt an elegant sufficiency. All right, lead me to a shopping cart.’
She opened a closet. ‘You sound like a highly educated man, Mr Fried.’
‘Hardly. I am an autodidact.’
She hesitated, as though it might be an arcane perversion. ‘A what?’
‘Self-taught. Little formal schooling. I left home at a tender age—an old, old story.’
‘That sounds interesting. Perhaps you could give a talk one Friday night to the Fruits of Life Experience Group.’ Behind the thick glasses her lashes fluttered like moths in their final agonies.
Max spun the cart around on one wheel with the tip of his right forefinger. He twirled his cane in a series of elaborate flourishes and bowed. As he opened the front door he flicked his head back over his shoulder. Her face was glassy, open-mouthed. ‘Who wants to lecture to a bunch of fruits?’ he called, and fled.
On his return he stopped to knock at the door next to his own. When Lettie opened, he thrust at her an enormous bunch of green grapes. ‘Seedless.’
Her surprise lasted only an instant; she took them and tilted her head to bite off two. ‘They’re delicious.’ She gave him a curious glance. ‘Thank you. But you really didn’t have to.’
‘My pleasure. Well.’ Max tipped the cart into motion, then turned back. ‘Look, I bought a bottle of Scotch—come on and have some with me. I’ve just got these few things to put away first.’ He could hardly believe himself; that hadn’t been the plan at all. The plan had been merely the grapes, so he wouldn’t need to feel indebted.
She came along readily. She was an excellent woman—helped him shelve his groceries and drank her Scotch like a pro. It was he who couldn’t meet the demands of the occasion. Halfway through the second bag he faltered.
‘You know something?’ he said to her. ‘Why don’t we stop and sit down for a while? To tell the truth, I’m a little tired. I must have walked too fast.’
‘You sit down,’ said Lettie. She waved him to the living room, brandishing a head of lettuce. ‘Go ahead, I’ll finish. Next time why don’t you have them deliver?’
He sat obediently and put his feet up. Listening to her snapping cabinet doors and crumpling bags, he was mortified. He felt as if he were made of paper, not flesh. Parchment—if he moved, if she so much as touched him, he might crackle and turn to dust.
‘I’m leaving the door open on purpose,’ she said on her way out. ‘I’ll be back with something.’
In less than ten minutes she reappeared bearing a tray. ‘It’s nearly seven-thirty, Max. You’re not going to start cooking.’
Watching her, lush in her bright yellow and setting down her thick aromatic soup with a steady grace of motion, he had to acknowledge that, even in decline, there were some sights worth hanging around for. ‘Maybe you’d like the TV, Max? Good Times is on tonight. A very nice Negro family. You’ll enjoy it.’
He gave in.
‘You don’t need me to stay, do you? I guess you’d rather be alone now.’
He nodded; the amenities were too much effort. No way to treat a lady, but he would make up for it later. After the soup he turned off the TV. A nice family indeed, though far too good to be true, with all that tender love, that fine consideration, amid poverty—not at all what he remembered of poverty. He undressed: a disgrace for a grown man to go to bed at eight-thirty. Sitting on the bed, he looked at his pale legs, luckily still strong enough to have gotten him back here. Flying and balancing had kept his flesh hard and compact, if not his heart. In the tumbling acts and the pyramids he used to stand in the second tier. He was not heavy enough to be on the bottom—the support down there was Henry Cook, who resembled a large ape. Max would leap from the highest seesaw and do a double somersault in the air, hugging his knees tight and concentrating on the center inside him, where Susie taught him to imagine a core of white light. He would compress all his energy around this light, which flashed a sustaining beam as he soared through the air, then land on the hairy shoulders of Henry Cook and uncurl his spine to the sound of applause. Four more drumrolls, four bars of ascending music, and Freddie Case came dropping on him like a bag of cement. Freddie never fully mastered his balance. After the thud he would teeter, and Max had to grip his ankles with reassuring fingers till Freddie stopped wobbling. One terrible day Freddie Case fractured his hip falling on Max. They gave him a paperwork job, keeping track of bookings. Max had to force himself to look Freddie in the eye, though Susie and everyone said it wasn’t his fault.
He had done it all in his time, walked the wire, tumbled, juggled. Brandon Brothers was too small a circus to afford specialists; they changed costumes hastily in a screened-off corner of the tent, giving the illusion of a host of performers. Except he had never fooled with the animals, never developed any feeling for them. And he didn’t clown, only that one time when they put him in to replace John Todd, groaning in his trailer with a wretched case of poison ivy. He bombed. He did what he had seen John do countless times—set off firecrackers, dropped his pants, shook the paper flower that became a dragon then a bird then a flower again. Polite applause but no big laughs. He didn’t have it in him. Susie confirmed it later. ‘Since you asked for the truth, Max, you were dead.’ He was a young man, oh, maybe forty. Susie loved him. They were outside on the damp grass after dinner. He lay flat on his back puffing on a cigar, watching clouds. ‘I know I was dead. But what did I do wrong?’ ‘Nothing in particular. You just weren’t funny. A clown is born that way. Not you—you’re no comic.’ Susie lay down on the grass beside him. She had red hair that circled her face like a halo of fire.
He was too tired to make up his new double bed. Drowsing, he lay back and instantly slept. He dreamed he was on the wire, climbing uphill to Susie waiting for him high on the platform, her public smile a gleam of red and white. She wore blue spangles, glittering, glittering, and pretended for the crowd to be smiling encouragement at Max, while they both knew he cared for nothing but the pressure of the air around him, the feel of the wire beneath is foot, the core of white light inside. Susie beckoned; he glanced around. Faces in the crowd burst on his eyes like exploding rockets: Miss Velasquez, Miss Tilley, Mrs Cameron, his older brothers who died in their beds after a lifetime working in the delicatessen. Then he lifted his foot expertly, pointing and reaching for the taut wire. That central place in the cushion of the big toe had to touch first, for an infinitesimal fraction of time; toe, ball, heel. Perfect alignment or there was trouble. He looked up to Susie: her blue spangles reflected the bright light inside him. He took another step, shot a glance at the crowd. Their faces were tense and anxious. Mrs Cameron, Miss Tilley, all of them were shaking their heads. No, Max, no! Susie waved, leaning towards him and stretching out her long slender arms, the drumroll ascended around his ears, somewhere an elephant trumpeted gloomily, and the center of his toe mistook the wire, touched a sixteenth of an inch to the left. He teetered like Freddie Case used to teeter, swung the balance pole, got ready for a hop in the air to try again, better this time, but before he could hop, a fiery pain cut through his chest and upper arm. Susie reached out her arms, her painted smile shriveled to a small O. The crowd rose, gasping mightily. He lost the wire. He fell, and fell and fell.
He woke in a sweat and switched on the light. Where was he and what for? What was this cheerful bedspread for? Susie was dead of leukemia. Freddie Case was dead. John Todd lived retired with his son in Montana. It was a quarter to five in the morning. When he stood up—surprise—he felt better. The weakness had passed and there were no aches anywhere. He ran a hot bath, and while he waited lit up a Corona Corona. He stepped in cautiously, holding an Agatha Christie, since Susie’s death one of his favorite nocturnal companions. The water was as hot as he could stand it. With his pores absorbing the numbing heat, he dropped ashes in little clumps on the rim of the tub. One fell in—he flicked at it with a finger and watched it darken, disperse, then disappear, graying the water.
He had to get out, do something. Start something, a semblance of life. But the schools didn’t open till nine. He had no appetite, nor any inclination yet to deflower that kitchen. To kill time he finished his mystery and watched an educational TV program. Great Ideas of Western Man. It was possible to register by mail and take a test at the end for course credit, he was informed. On the elevator down to the lobby he noted for the first time the chrome rails, vertical and horizontal, also a great idea. Necessity the mother...He nodded toward the front desk. ‘Good morning.’
‘Good morning, Mr Fried,’ she sparkled. A top row of false teeth already, alas. ‘You’re out early today. Did you have a pleasant night?’
‘Full of adventure, Mrs Cameron. Full of romance and high jinks.’ She turned her pained dark eyes back on her work. ‘Will you be asking that each morning? Because a man of my age, you know, can’t be expected, nightly, to...’
‘Mr Fried,’ she said, setting down her pen. ‘We must have started off on the wrong foot somehow. Before things get any worse, why don’t we...’ Her valor was exhausted, her face a silent appeal for aid. Max stood his ground, unmoved. ‘I’d like to help make your stay here a comfortable one. That’s all I’m trying to do.’
‘Why do you ask such foolish questions, then?’
‘I’ve got to ask,’ she said querulously. ‘I’ve got to...keep track, and then let people know if anything seems...not right.’
‘Ah, you report to a higher authority. I should have known. Tell me, Mrs Cameron—I know it’s impertinent, but how old are you?’
She got pink and began ruffling her fingers through her hair. ‘Fifty-seven.’
‘Are you married?’ He had noticed yesterday the wide gold band embedded in the flesh.
‘Yes.’
‘In other words, you leave here and go home to the waiting...to a companion, right? In that case, Mrs Cameron, do not ask me whether I had a pleasant night, and I will not ask you.’
Her blush deepened to near purple, spreading behind the squarish gold-rimmed glasses. He had a twinge of remorse but ignored it.
‘Where is the junior high school, please?’
She told him, with her head bent over the papers on her desk. Max swooped to the door, twirling the cane like a baton.
‘Adult education?’ she called out.
He had to admire her tenacity; silent, he turned to wave and incline his head in an angle of mock benediction.
It was only a ten-minute ride on the bus. Without her directions he could have walked it in less, and recognized it easily. Fresh brick, rimmed with a broad green lawn, the building struck him as another version of Pleasure Knolls. Institutions for safekeeping, both, and engineered by a committee, to satisfy all and please none.
He was directed to a smooth-faced young man with longish blond hair, wearing snug denim pants and a plaid shirt with the top three buttons undone. Ted Collins was powerfully built, almost as broad as Henry Cook but hardly apelike. Taller than Max by a head and straight as an arrow, he practically vibrated with energy. The fellow had quite a good grip, too, when they shook hands. Sitting down at his desk, he lit a cigarette. Max took out a cigar to fend off the filthy smell, and said, ‘It’s close to sixty years since I’ve been inside a school.’
‘Well, I’m glad you decided to return,’ Collins said affably. ‘Where did you happen to see our notice?’
‘I don’t quite recall. Supermarket, drugstore, one of those places.’
‘I see. And you’re interested in working with children?’
‘I’m interested in working.’
Collins cleared his throat formally, darted a quick look at Max, and relaxed. Smiled, man to man. He leaned back in his chair with his arms behind his head and stretched out one long leg, resting it on the edge of the desk. ‘Well, let me tell you, first of all, Mr Fried, what we’re looking for. We’re very understaffed, though most people think these suburban schools are rolling in money.’ Absently, Collins stroked a bicep. ‘We need help in shop—woodworking, carpentry, electricity—with math, especially business math, if you’ve ever run a business, for example. Science—setting up lab experiments and seeing that they don’t blow themselves up. Really everything. We can’t pay, and we can use as many hours as you want to give. If you’re around at noon, though, you can get a free hot lunch in the cafeteria. Now, maybe I’ve overwhelmed you, throwing all this out at once. Why don’t you tell me something about yourself, what you’d like to do.’ He took his leg off the desk and leaned forward to stub out the cigarette as he might hammer a nail.
‘I am rarely overwhelmed,’ Max replied. Yet he was, dammit, not by the information but by the appalling vigor of the man. He had forgotten. All that strength to spare. Had he ever? He must have. Susie said. He looked over at the lithe, animated hands, itching to grasp, and had a momentary flicker of hatred for this decent boy who probably fucked up a storm every night.
‘I was hoping there might be some remuneration.’
‘I’m sorry. Believe me, I would if I could. Are you—uh—in a bad way? Because you could go down to—’
‘No, no.’ Alarmed, Max scanned his clothing—tweedy and, yes, conservative, today perhaps even archaic, with vest and watch chain, but certainly not shabby? He never skimped on appearances. Appearances were everything. ‘It’s the principle of the thing.’
‘I understand.’ Collins slapped the desktop regretfully.
‘I can do most of what you’ve mentioned. I’ve run a business, too. Bicycles. But tell me, could you use a juggler?’
‘A juggler?’
‘Yes. Or how about tumbling? You’ve got a gym, haven’t you? Mats? I could set up a trapeze.’
‘A trapeze?’ He tilted his jaw upward, squinting slightly.
‘The daring young man on the flying trapeze? Remember?’
‘What daring young man?’
‘What is this, an echo chamber?’
‘Sorry. I—I didn’t expect this. Most of the senior citizens volunteer for cooking, reading stories, you know. Can you really do all that? Where did you learn it?’
‘Circus. A life of glamour and magic.’
The cigarette Collins was starting to light dropped from his lips and rolled along the floor, past the corner of the desk to Max’s feet. Max picked it up. It disappeared up his sleeve. He retrieved it from behind his ear and handed it back.
The young man gasped and smiled with hesitation. ‘Thanks. How did you do that? Oh, I guess everyone asks you that.’
‘I don’t do it for everyone.’
‘Look, I’m sure the kids would love it. I’ve got to check it out with the gym teachers, though, to see if they can work it into their program. Everything’s got to be checked out around here, you can’t imagine...Could you—uh—possibly do that again, with the cigarette?’
Max lost it in his pants pocket and found it behind his lapel.
‘Amazing! One other thing, Mr Fried.’
‘Yes? You can call me Max.’
‘Okay, Max. We need a couple of character references. Just a formality—to check on who’s working with the kids. I’m sure—uh...Can you give me the name of any local people to contact?’
‘You mean to see if I’m a decent person?’
‘More or less. Nothing personal, you understand.’
‘You can start with my neighbor, Lettie Blumenthal. She will vouch for my decency.’ He wrote down her name as well as his own, and their street address.
Collins studied the slip of paper. ‘Oh, isn’t that Pleasure Knolls, out past Broad Street?’ The zeal faded from his face. ‘Are you—are you sure you can do this sort of thing, Max? I mean, healthwise? It can be strenuous, with the kids and all.’
He peered intently at Collins, caught his eye and held it fast. ‘Would I offer if I weren’t well? Why, I could walk the wire today if I had the chance. I’ve never felt better in my life.’
‘Walk the wire?’
He paraded two fingers along the desktop. ‘The tightrope.’
‘That’s fantastic! I’ve never met anyone from the circus before. Maybe you could come over sometime and tell me about it.’
Max stood up and held out his hand. ‘Gladly. I’ll even give you an autograph.’
As he stepped out of the office a mob of youngsters roared past, long-haired, blue-jeaned, and of indecipherable sex, a scary flurry of life like the lions let loose in the ring. He leaned up against a wall till they had gone by, jostling each other with a manic delight. When their noise diminished, he could almost hear his heart, roused and knocking. Those were the children, his raw material. He felt a twinge of panic in his gut.
Back at the apartment he fixed his first breakfast, the honeymoon breakfast: black bread with cream cheese, topped with a slice of red onion. Black coffee. He ate it in what Mrs Cameron had called the dining area. He used to eat breakfast in a trailer. John Todd, the born clown—though what Susie had meant by it he wasn’t sure, because John out of the spotlight was a rather somber, though lovable, fellow—John Todd used to fix sausages and eggs, biscuits with honey, for him and Susie, Henry, Freddie, and a couple of the others, on rainy weekday mornings. They curled up in corners of the trailer waiting for the hot plates, the smell of mud on their boots mingling with the aroma of sausages and coffee. He could smell it now. When he was in a good mood he juggled the coffee mugs and tossed them over to John, big and sober at the stove, an ugly face that turned mobile and beautiful under the lights, a giant who had to bend his head under his own roof. John’s pet monkey, Joanna, sat on top of a cabinet, its wizened face screwed up with attention as John caught them by the handles, every one.
John had always liked Susie but tried not to show it. Once after a wretched fight, Susie took her pajamas and toothbrush and moved into John’s trailer. Max felt like dropping her from the trapeze. How long? he wondered. Days went by. When he caught her by the wrists he muttered things.
‘Are you having fun, Susie, you traitor?’
She would never stop smiling for the crowd.
‘I’m going to let you go, next swing. See how much fun that’ll be.’ When she flew back she stuck out her tongue, quick as a flash; that intimate malice nearly broke his heart.
She came back one night a week later with the pajamas over her arm and the toothbrush in her fist, and began immediately picking up old newspapers and emptying ashtrays. ‘Look how you let things go,’ she said.
Max was sitting at the table, reading. ‘Oh, so it’s you.’ He got up to face her. He thought over the fine speeches he could make, and then his arms were around her. The whole thing had been his fault anyway; he was an arrogant brute, as Susie had pointed out. What mattered was that she was with him. He never said a word to John Todd either. He liked John, he liked the breakfasts, and he liked harmony.
When he and Susie got too old to jump and fly, they juggled, dressed in tramp costumes. He loved the way she looked in the baggy brown pants and suspenders, the striped shirt and the floppy hat with flecks of fiery hair escaping. Twirling and tossing balls and pins, they were perfection: after so long, their blood pulsed to the same beat. On a tandem bike, no hands, they flipped cups from front to back till Susie gathered them into the folds of her big plaid jacket and Max steered them out of the ring, waving a battered hat at the crowd.
But that wasn’t enough—they knew it and so did Brandon. They had outlasted their skills. One overcast day in early November, end of the season, they left. No good-bye party, Max insisted, but after the last show they sent him out on a fool’s errand—drive into town and settle the bill at the saloon—and they set up tables in the tent. John Todd danced with Susie. Max danced with Tania, who did ballet on the wire, and with Gina, an acrobat who was an Apache Indian. And he marveled at the tricks of time and space: that his parents should have fled the fires of a Ukrainian village and traveled westward across an ocean so that he might end up with his arms around an Apache Indian, doing a fox trot. In the trailer, when they packed their bags, Susie held up the blue spangled costume. ‘Now what should I do with this?’
‘Keep it, what else?’
‘I thought I might give it to Tania or Edith.’
‘Keep it.’
It fit her till the very end—she never got fat or shapeless. They opened a bicycle shop in Greenwich Village with his name and hers in gilt letters on the window, a shop crammed with bikes and accessories, shiny with chrome, and heady with the smell of grease, a shop that drew the neighborhood cyclists, who hung around discussing the lubrication of their gears and the deterioration of their brake shoes, while Max and Susie quietly made repairs. It got so crowded that finally they moved things around to set up chairs, and they brought in a coffee urn. He attracted customers, Susie said; he had an aura. ‘I never realized I married a magnetic personality.’ Not at all, he protested; it was the sight of a good-looking woman covered with grease, changing an inner tube. ‘Max, baby,’ said Susie, ‘you’ve forgotten I’m fifty years old.’ She was beautiful almost to the end, and then she broke apart in fragments. She grew paler each day until her skin was the gray underside of white. The medicine made her red hair fall out, flame by flame, and one evening when he sat near the bed holding her hand, thinking of the hair haloing her face on the grass outside the trailer, she whispered, ‘You know, Max, I used to dye it. This wasn’t my natural color.’
He sat up with a start. He had thought she was asleep.
‘You never knew, after all these years. Isn’t that something? It would have been all gray by now anyway.’
‘It makes no difference.’
‘I know. I just thought I’d tell you. No secrets. Isn’t that so?’
There were no secrets. Only that he couldn’t stand to watch her get ugly, and he was ashamed. The sparse white hair and bony cheeks, not to mention the tubes they attached all over, made her a parody of the woman she had been. She didn’t drag on long. He sat by the bed till they led him away. There was no one around to grieve to; however magnetic, he had kept everyone else at a distance. Alone and dazed, he judged life’s offense against him beyond the powers of acceptance. He cursed and condemned and yearned for the feelings of a stone. He nursed his long grievance; its energy kept him alive.