One of the movers hurried out to tell Pierrot to knock it off, but the playing stopped him in his tracks. He had an instant change of heart and wished that Pierrot would never stop playing, that he would play for the rest of their lives.
Rose also felt like letting go of her problems. She began to dance to the piano tune, and her breath made puffs of clouds come out of her mouth. Some children peeped at her. The tone of the piano was so coquettish that it made Rose bat her eyelashes and hop lightheartedly from toe to toe. Then Rose pretended she was being blown violently by a gust of wind. She held on to the pole of the street lamp and lifted her body until she was hanging horizontally, as though she were trying to resist the pull of a hurricane. She had been working at that trick for a week. Some children ran across the street to see. It was truly wondrous.
When Pierrot stopped and Rose took a bow, the small crowd began to applaud. A child threw a handful of bottle caps into the jacket that Pierrot had laid on the ground. A man tossed in a rolled cigarette.
Rose and Pierrot stood in front of the window of the butcher shop. There were links of sausages, and the head of a pig was suspended from a hook like a mask. The meat was making Rose ravenous.
“I’ve been all over the city. No one performs the way we do. We’re just as good as any of the acts coming in from European cities. I know we can be stars. Those people are starving to death, and yet they would’ve parted with their pennies if they had any.”
“We got a cigarette out of it,” said Pierrot, lighting it up.
“We need to get the rich people to pay for expensive tickets to see us,” Rose said. “They don’t like anything unless they have to pay huge amounts of money for it. They want what other people can’t afford. It reminds them that they are rich. We need to get their money. They want to see experience and pain up on display—we have heaps of that.”
Rose reached over to take the cigarette Pierrot extended toward her. She exhaled a row of smoke rings that looked like a row of ballerinas in tutus spinning by.
“We’ve got to get ourselves into a big theater,” she continued. “We have to advertise ourselves as a rarity. Expectations are all part of a performance. We have to get everyone worked up. Telling people who will like it is half the work of any show.”
“I love when you talk about taking over the world. How are you going to put this together?”
“I don’t know. I can see it now clear as anything. We’re going to have an army of tap dancers. If only we had some money to invest. What are our options? Rob a bank? Ransom a millionaire? Find a patron?”
They both laughed.
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PIERROT KNEW, like every young man in every bedroom in every apartment in every building on the block, that it would be an idiotic move to get your wife pregnant. They would never be able to afford anything that married couples in the past were able to afford—like a house or food for the baby.
He always made certain to withdraw after they had sex. It felt so good. Each time, he was certain that he would mess up and that he would never be able to pull out on time. He pulled out his dick like it was a frying pan taken off a fire. It always put into stark relief just how ludicrous the actual act of sex was. If you weren’t having sex to have a baby, then it was a really ridiculous and absurd endeavor, wasn’t it?
Rose logically had no desire to have a baby, but she wanted one just the same. Every time they made love, there was nothing on earth she wanted as much as to be impregnated. Everything in her body wanted it. She never said so, though.
Pierrot was afraid to even think of the possibility. And because he was afraid to think of having a baby, he ended up thinking about having a baby. And it was with the thought of the baby looming in his mind that he came inside her that night. He couldn’t tell for the life of him whether he did it on purpose. And he was wondering whether she would think he had done it deliberately and be furious with him. To his surprise, she leaned over and planted dozens of kisses on his face.
Their baby began to slowly exist, like a tiny little footnote kicking at the bottom of a great physics text. A cashew at the bottom of a glass dish.
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ON A MONDAY MORNING, Pierrot went to wait in the unemployment line. This was an acceptable way to spend your day. There weren’t any jobs available. So, instead, life had evolved into these sad rituals. If you didn’t engage in these rituals, you were less of a man. It revealed what a sham dignity was.
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