In one week she saw seven different clowns. On Monday she went to a theater that had paintings of blue skies with white cumulus clouds floating on all the walls.
There was a clown whose act revolved around the use of a spotlight. The spotlight would turn off, and when it came back on, he would be doing something completely different with other props. He changed his clothes in the darkness. He sat on top of a ladder. He lay under a blanket, sleeping. He sat on a chair, reading a novel. He wore a chef’s hat and stirred a pot of soup. Rose found his routine almost miraculous. It seemed as if he were part of the light, like he completely disappeared and reappeared when it went on and off.
Rose watched the artists leave backstage but didn’t spot the clown. Rose knocked on the door to the artist’s dressing room backstage. The clown opened it. He looked tipsy and was wearing pants but no shirt. His face paint had mostly been wiped off, but a ghostly pallor remained.
“I found your act truly transcendent.”
“This was nothing. I used to have a wife who worked the lights. Because we’d been together for so many years, we were so amazingly coordinated. I really seemed like I was supernatural. I wish that you could have seen the act then.”
He poured them each a tumbler of gin.
“But then I cheated on her. At first I thought she was turning the spotlights on and off at the wrong times and in the wrong places on purpose. But then, you know, I realized it was because I’d broken our trust.”
The gin inside Rose’s glass looked like a tiny calm lake. She held the glass to her lips and took a sip. She immediately began to feel relaxed and loquacious.
“I think clowns feel the consequences of things more than other people do,” said Rose. “We clowns are larger than life. We hold a microscope up to things. I think if you want to be a better artist, you have to be a better person. How else would you be able to express innocence—which is what every clown is after?”
The clown nodded. “Thank you for sharing that philosophy. It’s quite useful to me. I’d very much like to see your act.”
“I’m looking for my partner. He’s an absurdist. He’s always doing something wonderfully peculiar, like balancing plates on his head.”
“There’s an interesting act over at the Neptune. A clown who spends all his time in a bathtub.”
“Thanks. I’ll go looking for him.”
“Come back and see me sometimes.”
He winked.
Pierrot went by the pornography studio looking for Rose. He asked about the girl with the black hair who stared right into the camera. They said that her name was Marie but that she only answered to the name Rose. They said that she no longer worked for them. She had arrived at their door out of the blue one day, and then she had left with just as much resolution and as little explanation.
As he turned to leave, Pierrot saw a man with a huge mustache in socks and his boxer shorts eating a sandwich, sitting on a stool. He often played a landlord who extorts his tenants.
“Keep looking,” the man said to Pierrot. “She’s around.”
38
ON THE SECOND DAY
On Tuesday Rose went down to a theater whose name, the Neptune, was painted in blue and white on the light box out front. There were murals in the lobby with paintings of different calm seas with magnificent ships sailing on them. There was only one mural that showed a turbulent sea. On this particular sea, there was a huge ship with broken masts being pulled under the waves. And tiny terrified people in those waves, trying to cling to the flotsam and jetsam while sharks approached them from the rear.
Rose sat in the audience, and when the stage lights came on, a clown was revealed, sitting in a bathtub. He wore a bathing suit and pirate hat and looked out of a periscope, as if his tub were actually a little boat. He was peering through it in what could only be a desperate search for land. It was unclear, metaphysically, whether the water was inside the bathtub or outside it.
He took out a pair of large oars and stuck them into the imaginary ocean and began to row. He put the oars back into the infinite bottom of the tub. Then he pulled out a fishing rod. Casting an imaginary line, he caught himself an imaginary fish. He then took out a gigantic pot to cook the fish in. It surprised the audience that such huge things were coming out of the small tub. The bathtub actually didn’t have a bottom to it, and he would position it above a trapdoor on the stage.
“I’m never sure whether people understand my act. I don’t know whether they think I’m just clowning around. What did you think I was trying to say?” the clown asked Rose later.
“We all struggle with contradictions. Contradictions are marvelous. If you don’t believe that everything contains contradictions, then there is very little you can understand. We know ourselves by embracing what we are not. We become good by taking evil head-on.”
“Exactly!” exclaimed the clown. “You can’t have land without water. You can’t have water without land.”