One of the reasons I left my ex-husband, the circus clown, was all the shopping.
You’d think once you married a circus clown, you wouldn’t have to do that anymore. Shopping. Tromping up and down the mall, trying on dresses in those little fluorescent horse stalls, attempting to be pretty so some guy will like you. First, you were married now, so some guy did like you, so you could relax. Second, that guy made his own sequined hats and his mother sewed all his polka-dotted overalls and ruffled collars, so why the hell was he ever going to want to shop?
Circus memorabilia, that’s what. Books and programs and newspaper clippings. A three-hundred-dollar poster of a grinning Victorian clown with enough teeth to eat your face off. An old, frayed photograph of a man in a handlebar mustache posing next to an elephant in tights.
No, the man in the handlebar mustache was the one in the tights, and they bagged at the knees, and the picture was cracked like a spiderweb and faded almost to nothing, and it cost twenty-seven-and-a-half bucks, and finding it took an hour and forty-five minutes of John wandering the aisles of the antique mall, flipping through baskets of old pictures. Not talking to me as I followed along.
Now he looked up from the basket, flashed the photo at me, and smiled. I smiled back.
“Great.” I tried to make it sound sincere. “Can we go now?”
“Just a few more minutes.”
John’s face pointed back down into the basket of old pictures, and I moved off, wandering past display cases of Star Wars action figures in their original boxes, pulp fiction paperbacks, jewel-red carnival glass goblets. I wished there were something I wanted so I could enjoy shopping, too. Antique shops smelled like dust and must and made me lonely. Made me want, but not for things. Made me want the kind of husband who would want something—anything—other than things. At the end of an aisle was a headless mannequin wearing a 1950s dress with Joan Crawford shoulder pads and rhinestone buttons. I would have liked to wear that dress, but I didn’t want to take the time to try it on. In the corner of the room, by the door marked bathroom, was a corkboard papered with flyers: garage band looking for a bassist. quiet cat-lover seeking roommate. rebuilt harley for sale, frame slightly warped. A badly photocopied cartoon of a worm looped into the shape of a heart with the caption true love. Everyone wants something.
I met him the summer after my second year in college. I was nineteen; he was thirty-one. He was six-foot-two, with dyed auburn hair and John Lennon glasses. When he told me what he did for a living, he opened his briefcase and brought out pictures of himself in white-face clown makeup with a red-glittered nose and jeweled feathers on his sequined hat. The clown makeup made his face look feminine. Not completely feminine, but some blend of feminine and masculine that looked beautiful. That Halloween, he dressed up in drag. Regular drag, not clown drag, with lipstick, with foundation over his perpetual five o’clock shadow, with nylon stockings. A long blond wig draped in loose coils down over his wide man’s shoulders. Sitting there in the restaurant booth, I couldn’t stop staring. He looked so different. So enticing, and I wasn’t sure why.
He batted his mascara-black lashes and made an exaggerated limp-wrist gesture at me, his voice a sing-song: “Well, my dear, you have got to see my new gown; it’s simply divine!”
In a way, he was mocking my sex, but I didn’t care. He was a six-foot-two man who looked like a woman and I wanted to kiss him.
Kissing John in his lipstick wasn’t as exciting as I thought it would be. As I brought my face up close to his, breathed in the sweet smell of perfumed powder, the illusion fell away, and he was just him. Underneath the woman’s makeup, or the clown makeup, or the charming smiles of his everyday face, he was a little boring. When I thought about how he wanted to marry me and take me on the road and teach me the ancient art of clowning, I tried to forget that he wasn’t really into anything except going to the circus and shopping for memorabilia. And that I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend the rest of my life with a man who rarely thought of asking me what I’d like to do.
But I wanted to fall in love and none of the guys I knew gave me the kind of zing I got tonight just looking at him, a funny, hot shame that lit up the underside of my ribcage like the kick-up of flame from a barbecue.
That was what it felt like—shame. I didn’t understand it. And I didn’t understand why I liked it. But I liked it.
And just look at him: sitting there with his legs crossed, the coils of hair pressed under his nylons, the way the gauzy blue drape of the dress fell across the dark scrabble of hair on his chest. I could imagine him out shopping for that dress. Slipping secretly into the men’s changing room to try it on.
In seventh grade, my best friend Kristin said real girls loved shopping and feathering their hair and Duran Duran and horseback riding, but shopping was boring and horses smelled like poop. Still, I didn’t like disappointing people.
Kristin was the tallest girl in class. I was the smallest. She had broad shoulders and a big nose and looked like the seventh-grade girl version of Boy George but with a bit less makeup. When she didn’t like what I was wearing, which was often, she made her priss face, squeezing her lips into a sour little strawberry and pointing them at my old jeans and T-shirt.
“Can’t you do better than that?”
I kind of hated her, but I liked having a best friend. It’s an invaluable thing to have when you don’t know how to talk to the kids in your class and are mortified anytime someone notices you’re by yourself. Trips to the mall to follow behind Kristin as she tried on denim skirts and plastic sunglasses were a small price to pay for not appearing friendless.
Kristin was the one who told me Tom, a boy in our class, was gay.
She rolled her eyes at me. “Oh, come on. Just listen to his voice.”
Tom did have a voice that sounded different. Something thick and almost cloying about it, a gob of honey at the back of his throat. And there was the way his eyes looked, that odd mix of boy and girl in his eyes. Exotic. A weird sort of beautiful. As I looked across the classroom at Tom, I felt a tiny hint of warmth stirring just under my ribcage.
Kristin made her priss face at Tom. Her voice was low and flat and full of distaste. “He’s a total fag.”
That stirring again, hotter this time. Like pleasure could be shame or shame could be pleasure.
Kristin turned to me. “So, let’s go to the mall this weekend!”
Always the mall or horseback riding. It bugged me that she never asked me what I wanted to do, and the last thing I wanted to do was go shopping with Kristin. Trying on outfits while she stood by giving my choices the same priss face she’d just been giving Tom. But at least the mall didn’t smell like horse poop.
I did want to love shopping. My best friend Kristin loved shopping. My mom loved shopping. Mom and me out at Mervyn’s department store, Mom grinning as we clinked through hangers draped with silver-studded jeans and neon pink tank tops. Mom telling me, “Ooh, now this would look sharp!” She always used words like sharp. And slacks. Kristin would never say slacks. Still: Mom’s big grin, the way her eyes arced into pretty crescents when she was having fun and she thought I was, too. There was no one I wanted to enjoy shopping with more than Mom.
I tried, but I just couldn’t do it. I hated every kind of shopping. Clothes, books, CDs, jewelry. Faded photos of acrobats on giraffe-neck unicycles. The circus is certainly an exotic subject, and John got so thrilled when he found something new for his collection, but, once you’ve seen one antique iron-jaw mouthpiece with the tooth prints still intact, you’ve seen them all.
If only John didn’t so enjoy having me there wandering around the antique stores with him. During every jump we made from one town to the next, following the route of the circus, there were antique shops we’d never been to before. I supposed I didn’t have to go along with him. I could stay in the van in the hot sun and read a book. Or take a walk and see what I could find. The thing is, all I could find were shops. That’s all people wanted to do, shop. And usually we were pulled off on the side of the highway at some antique mall the size of an airplane hangar and there was nothing around for miles but weeds and road.
Of course, this was all an excuse. So I wouldn’t have to speak up. One of these days I would speak up. I’d say, “You know what? I hate shopping. There it is: I hate shopping. And today you’re going to take me to a museum instead. Or hiking. Or to a movie. And it’s going to be a movie that has nothing whatsoever to do with shopping.”
Yes, one of these days, I was going to do that.
Having an affair with a gay man made the shopping easier. John and I had been married for fourteen years by this time, and, now when he went wandering up and down the aisles looking for cartes de visite of women straddling tigers, I at least had something to think about.
A fabulous artist who painted himself in dresses. The exhibit, which I’d seen on a trip to Portland, Oregon, visiting family, was called “Mythos.” Greek mythology all done up in 1930s Hollywood gowns. It was magnificent. A portrait of the artist as Medusa, a chic art deco ingénue with carefully coiffed snake hair, a man’s body wrapped up in the slink of cream-colored satin and tulle. Man hands with red nails and diamond bracelets. The elegant cut of a masculine jawline under a mouth soft with red lipstick.
This was nothing like the half-convincing drag John had done on Halloween years ago. The Medusa in the self-portrait was the perfect mix of woman and man, and it was the sexiest thing I’d ever seen.
By affair I mean that the artist and I had a secret online relationship. And by secret I mean not secret. I did tell John about it. Some of it.
“Remember how I told you I saw that art show out in Portland?” I said.
It was the off-season at the circus, and we were sitting around the living room. By living room I mean circus room, one of the many circus rooms in the house, with framed circus posters on the walls and shelves of books and circus movies. John sat sprawled on the couch with piles of circus programs all around and a pad and pen for taking notes. For me to take notes. By now I’d been emailing back and forth with the artist for nearly two months. Offering to help catalog John’s collection made me feel slightly less guilty.
“Yeah,” I tried again, “that art show? Remember? How I told you?”
John’s eyes pointed down at the circus program in his hands. He leafed through pages slowly, gently.
“So, I loved that art show so much,” I said, “I wrote the artist a fan email.”
John said, “Mm.”
“He was so nice,” I said, “that he wrote back.”
John said, “Mm.”
My heart rolled in my chest. Already the thread of my emails with Stephen—wasn’t that a nice name, Stephen?—spooled out and out. All the things I was learning about this man, how his grandmother taught him to notice the way objects absorb and reflect light, how he’d been fat as a kid and had never really felt attractive. Personal things, opinions, the kind of talk I rarely got out of John. How luxurious to have someone to really talk to.
But I was keeping it secret. Why was I keeping it secret?
“So, yeah, guess what? We’ve been emailing back and forth,” I said. “A little.”
John said, “Mm.”
“We talk about art and life and,” I said, “art.”
John said, “Corner missing on page nineteen,” and I wrote it down.
“He lives in Portland, Oregon, and works at some famous bookstore,” I said.
John looked up from his stacks of programs, his eyebrows high on his forehead. “Powell’s Books?” he said. “That place is amazing! It’s three stories high!”
He started telling me about some circus books he’d bought there once, and I let the rest of the conversation go.
Eight months of emails with this man I’d never met, never seen except in paintings of himself in a dress. Eight months but it wasn’t a secret, not really, because periodically I mentioned his name to John in passing in order for it not to be a secret. And Stephen and I lived in different states and we were just talking and Stephen was gay, so it’s not as if you could really call it an affair, could you; it’s not as if he were going to fall in love with me or anything.
I suppose you could say I might fall in love with him. But that love thing—I just wanted to feel it, not necessarily do anything about it. I just wanted to have it.
Eight months, and the things I told him. How inadequate I felt all the time. How I hated shopping and didn’t understand fashion and beauty and wished I had someone who could just tell me how to look good. How I wasn’t in love with my husband.
Took me the whole eight months to get around to admitting that. It was July again, a full fifteen years since I’d met John, and we were home in Wisconsin while the circus was on a summer break. I was alone in the computer room. By computer room I mean circus room—another of the circus rooms—and I sat surrounded by stand alone shelving units full of antique circus shoes and big papier-mâché costume heads from old circus parades: a clown head, a bird, the three little pigs.
Even now, knowing what I wanted to say, I couldn’t say it outright:
You know how when you’re a kid, Christmas has that feel of magical happiness? I remember when I grew up and realized that the feeling wasn’t the same anymore. It took me a long time to be okay with that. That’s kind of how my marriage is. It took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that the feeling is gone. I’ve tried to find it again, but I think it’s like the magic of Christmas. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.
A tingle went out to my fingertips as I wrote that word, gone.
I knew right then, sitting there under the watchful gaze of papier-mâché pig heads, that I was making the decision to leave.
For fifteen years, this had been unthinkable. To leave. The dread of confrontation, the shame of divorce, the fear of setting out on my own. But here, now, with the word gone under my fingers, with racks of clown shoes all around, some fashioned to look like feet, with big white toes and corns painted red, I felt a lightness inside. If I left him—when I left him—I’d never again have to set foot inside an antique store. Wouldn’t it be lovely if I could just live the rest of my life in cyberspace, in the place where I’d met and gotten to know Stephen? No body to clothe, no home to furnish, no reason to ever go shopping again.
After I left John and moved back to California where I grew up, my mom and I went out shopping. I was ecstatic.
I was thirty-five years old and a free woman with a new life ahead of me. I wanted to look good. I wanted to reinvent myself, as Stephen did in his paintings of himself in women’s clothes. Mom said, “Wouldn’t it be great to do a little shopping? We have all day; the sky’s the limit.”
This was going to be fun.
Maybe.
Unfortunately, the stores were as overwhelming as they ever had been, racks and racks of stuff I didn’t know what to do with. The jeans were boot cut and straight leg and low rise and high rise and curvy cut and I didn’t care, and I didn’t know what size I was since I’d spent the last fifteen years wearing mostly leggings I’d had since high school and old T-shirts that used to belong to my brother. When I wasn’t wearing plaid clown pants and bow ties. Clown costumes look fine when you’ve got no shape and you’ve got no boobs and you aren’t trying to impress anyone with your great sense of style and good looks.
Mom made happy crescents of her eyes as I stood in front of the full-length mirror by the changing room, modeling a blazer in bright orange paisley. She grinned at me and I grinned at her, but I had no idea if I liked the blazer or not. No matter what I tried on, it looked the same. A bunch of fabric doing what fabric does to bodies. Hanging there. How the hell was I supposed to know what looked good?
Mom held up a black blouse that looked as if it was made out of the spandex version of burlap. “Try this next! I think this is going to look sharp!”
She kept talking as if we were buying fun new clothes for my trip to visit my aunt and cousin in Portland, but we both knew the one I wanted to look good for was Stephen. Back in the alternate universe of my old life, two months ago, admitting that I didn’t love John had led to my admitting that I wanted to leave, which had led to Stephen saying sweet and supportive things, which had led to me admitting I had a little crush on Stephen, which had led to Stephen admitting, amazingly, that he had a little crush on me, and now I was on the verge of flying up to Portland to meet him in the flesh for the first time.
It was ludicrous. Impossible.
Standing in front of the full-length mirror in the black blouse made out of the spandex version of burlap, I struck a model pose, hip out, three-quarter turn. The skirt Mom had picked out was blue and straight to the floor, with buttons running all the way down. I wondered if it made me any less of a new woman, having my mom pick out my clothes, but I just couldn’t figure it out on my own. What did it matter? I was a new woman. This was a nice outfit. I did a twirl. I looked slinky. I looked good. This wasn’t ludicrous.
How many illusions can you hold on to at once?
I stepped back into the little changing stall to take it all off.
Off through the spitting rain, umbrella up, new shoes quick along the leaf-plastered sidewalk. Off in my new outfit—the blouse made out of the spandex version of burlap and the blue skirt with the buttons running all the way down—off to meet Stephen in person for the first time.
Portland was rust-orange trees and skies as gray and heavy as wet newspaper. I was late. My body was a corked-up bottle of champagne, all sparkle and pressure inside. You could say that pressure was the thrill of what was surely going to be a fantastic encounter with the man I very well might spend the rest of my life with, but you’d probably be laughed off the stage. I was scared he wouldn’t be there. Scared he would. Scared I wouldn’t recognize him and would stand at the doorway to the coffee shop like a dolled-up doofus.
Lately Stephen and I had graduated to talking on the phone, and, just the other night, I’d remarked casually, again, that I didn’t know beans about fashion and beauty, that I just wished I had someone who could tell me what to wear to look good. This was, of course, a preemptive strike. Because what if we met and he was disappointed? I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be disappointed. I’d put too much hope into this thing to be disappointed. But Stephen was an artist. With a critical artist’s eye. I was not at all certain that my mom’s sense of fashion was any better than mine. I was also completely and utterly a girl. What if he didn’t like what he saw?
At the doorway to the coffee shop, five minutes late, seven at the most, I stopped. I tried to do that thing where you take a deep breath and center yourself, but my center was a frantic fizz of champagne trying to bust its way through the cork. The cork was in my throat. What if I throw up? That’s it. I’ll walk in, in my nice new clothes, and throw up on the doormat. Stop. Calm down. It’s important to make a good first impression.
I took another breath. I grabbed the knob. The door opened with a jingle bell.
Quick pan through the crowded coffee shop, left to right, then left again, and, yes, there he was, across the room at a table with one empty chair. Looking so weirdly real in his regular jeans and man’s button-down shirt. After all my gazing at his face in his paintings, here he was in the flesh, Stephen, six-foot-four, with dark hair, a little mustache, and a soul patch.
I took another deep breath. I was ready. I looked good. I exuded confidence. By which I mean I practically ran down the ramp, across the room, and threw myself at him, grabbed his hand, pumped it up and down, dropped it, then flopped into the empty chair, and leaned in way too close. Stephen stood immediately, as if he might flee the scene.
He said, “Would you like some coffee?”
I didn’t need any more energy coursing through my bloodstream.
“Iced mocha,” I said. “One shot.”
After my energetic entrance at the coffee shop, we’d actually relaxed with our mochas and had a nice, if odd, afternoon. What do you do when you’ve been sharing the depth of your soul with an artist who paints himself in dresses? You go to the gallery. Where, after all this time, the painting of Medusa looks so small. You look at his art, you look at other artists’ art, and you talk about art, a comfortable topic that doesn’t get too close to the freak-out that’s going on inside both of you.
But later, as we sat having dinner at a table for two, without the illusions of Medusa and Venus and Eros between us, things felt weird. Stephen made rivulets through his pile of Pad Thai with his chopsticks, looking at the noodles, then looking at me. He was too quiet. So of course I was filling that quiet up with anything I could think of.
“Pad Thai,” I said. “I guess maybe that just translates to ‘Thai noodles.’ That seems strange, that there would be a food named after an entire country.”
“American cheese,” Stephen said.
He smiled, but it was a pained smile, his lips stretched flat across his face.
I tried to be casual. “Whatcha thinking?”
He just flashed more of that smile, and then went back to playing close encounters with his pile of noodles.
“American cheese, that’s right,” I said. “Although that term was invented by the French. Fromage Americaine. It was actually originally called ‘Home Plate Cheddar.’”
I was making this up. I didn’t know what else to say. The champagne inside me was gone. In its place was Portland sky, that heavy gray, like a slab of wet newspaper.
Stephen looked at me, looked at his noodles.
“Alright,” I said. “What?”
A little surprise, that tiny take-charge popping out of my mouth.
He looked up again. “If,” he said.
I was starting to get impatient.
“Okay,” he said, “it’s just that you could look so much better.”
Our first date. Me all dolled up in my new outfit. And Stephen was saying, you could look so much better.
It was the rudest thing anyone had ever said to me.
I was so relieved.
Stephen’s body went all sheepish, and his shoulders tried to swallow up his neck. “Well,” he said, “you told me you wished you had someone to tell you what looked good,” he said, “and, well, you’re so pretty, but you could use just a little,” he said.
“What are you trying to say?” I said.
“What would you think,” he said, “if I took you shopping?”
My arch nemesis.
Shopping.
But if that was all.
I could handle it.