“Hmmm. Well, it’s easier to rent a hotel room without a menagerie. Sometimes an imaginary animal can be just as effective as a real one.”
“The Mother Superior said that I was dancing with the devil. But it was kindness and love and warmth and compassion that I was spinning about with. I was welcoming those things with big open arms into the orphanage. I wanted that kind of warmth.”
“Of course. We clowns must tame some of the great metaphors of the world.”
“I’m looking for a partner who I used to work with when I was very young.”
“Describe him to me.”
“He’s a daydreamer, always has his head in the clouds.”
“There’s a clown at the Velvet who’s always half asleep.”
Pierrot went to the zoo. He passed by the different glass exhibition cases. He never could spend too much time with reptiles. They seemed so lacking in compassion, hardly part of an animal kingdom characterized foremost by its penchant for feeling sorry for itself and fretting about what tomorrow would bring.
He stood in front of the swans. Rose had always liked swans. This was the type of exhibit she would come and look at. He remembered the big angel wings that they wore when they were in the Christmas pageant that had changed his life. He threw a small chunk of stale bread into the water. The swans, unaccustomed to being fed in those bleak times, spread their wings and rose up toward him in one movement like a wave.
43
ON THE SEVENTH DAY
The tiny theaters were hard to find, the ones that seated only a hundred spectators at a time. One such establishment was on top of a spaghetti restaurant. Patrons would sometimes smell the sauce cooked in huge vats and get hungry during the show. The owner of the restaurant took the lids off the pots at opportune moments so he would be sure to get the post-theater crowd.
? ? ?
ROSE ARRIVED LAST MINUTE at this theater on a miserable day with freezing rain falling from the sky and hurried to her seat. The spotlight revealed a clown and a bed in the middle of the stage. The clown was dressed in polka-dotted pajamas and a nightcap. He kept opening his mouth and making incredible yawning noises that sounded like an elephant had suddenly been alarmed. Then he picked up a teddy bear and clung to it amorously and dropped into bed and underneath the covers. He put a night mask over his eyes.
He then got out of the bed, not removing the mask, as if he were sleepwalking. He got on the bicycle with his night mask. He began riding his bicycle backward. He was riding it right alongside the edge of the stage, coming dangerously close to falling off. The audience gasped.
He climbed up a ladder at the side of the stage. A child in the audience yelled at him to wake up. He proceeded to walk the tightrope with his night mask on. He ended up in the middle of the rope and began making his outrageous yawns once again. Then he lay down on the tightrope and fell right back to sleep, as unself-conscious of his height as a cloud.
The audience should not have been alarmed. Nothing can really happen when you are dreaming.
Rose went to see him in his dressing room. He was sitting on a long green couch that was against the wall of the room. He was too exhausted to wipe off his white face paint. He had a rag in one hand and a pot of cream in the other, but he kept them separated.
“I get paid practically nothing these days. I guess I’ll have to reconcile myself with the fact that I’m a failure. Why is that always so hard? I wish I could just pack in being a clown.”
“What else could you do now?”
“Did God create us so we can spend our time speculating how much better He is at absolutely everything? He made us in His image, so naturally we want to create from nothing. It’s a maddening task, isn’t it? The reason He doesn’t do anything or take interviews these days is because He’s completely lost His marbles. We’ll go up to heaven and discover that He’s in a straitjacket, no doubt.”
“So you are a religious man? Do you go to church?”
“Obviously not.”
He looked at Rose quizzically.
“I’m not at all who you came here looking for, am I?”
“No.”
“Figures.”
He stretched out on the couch and pulled his jacket over his head to take another nap.
“Nothing really matters on a Sunday,” his muffled voice said from under the jacket. “Everybody gets to have a day off from who they actually are. Don’t you think? Your crimes don’t count, your achievements don’t matter. You just have to curl up in your bed and take a lovely siesta. You are both nothing and everything in your dreams.”
What in the world was Rose doing when she interviewed these clowns other than trying to rediscover a certain innocence that she had once felt? Maybe if she could hear it explained back to her, she could have it once again. A hallucination is no longer a hallucination if somebody else sees it. Then it becomes an apparition.