Lives of the Circus Animals (12 page)

He was surprised that Doyle still lingered in his head, a man he'd never met. But there he was, right behind Toby. And behind Doyle was his sister, Jessie, Henry's little assistant, like a lining up of planets, an omen of high drama. What kind of drama, Henry couldn't guess. If he were a nobler, more sentimental soul, he'd want to reunite the two lovers. But that plot felt old and hackneyed, with no fun and games for poor old Henry Lewse.

A
nd how did that make you feel?”

“Guilty. Stupid. I had no business lashing out at my mother. My sister didn't help matters, but I can't blame Jessie. We need her more than she needs us. Our mother, I mean. But I should be glad of that. I wish she took my work more seriously, but I agree with her too. Because it's not real. None of it.”

“What isn't real?”

“My work. What I do for a living. My so-called living.” He took a breath. “Which is why I want to give up writing and theater. It's time that I do something real.”

Seeing your therapist was a terrible way to start the week, and ten in the morning far too early. The mind was too scattered, the tongue too loose. Caleb surprised himself by leaping so soon from his visit home to this new idea.

Dr. Chin, however, took it in stride. “And what do you want to do instead?”

“Shouldn't you be asking
why
I want to give it up?”

She laughed, a light, musical titter. “Oh, there are so many reasons not to write or act or paint. But okay then. Why?”

Caleb was annoyed by her first question, which was the right question, the hard one. “I could give a hundred reasons,” he said. “But the real one is that my circus animals have deserted me.”

“But you broke off with Toby. He didn't desert you.”

“I don't mean Toby. I mean my bogies, my writing demons.” Why did people always bring up Toby? “There's a poem by William Butler Yeats. ‘The Circus Animals' Desertion'? Where he says he gave his heart to the theater, but he's all burned out and his animals have run off. It's
the poem with the lines ‘I must lie down where all the ladders start,/In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.'”

“I think I know that one. Vaguely. The way I know most poetry.” She laughed again, this time at herself.

Caleb had been seeing Dr. Chin once a week for almost a year. She was a psychiatrist of no particular school, eclectic and pragmatic. He thought of her as “the Laughing Therapist” or sometimes “Dr. Chin, Medicine Woman.” She was Chinese, but the southwestern look of her office—Georgia O'Keeffe on the wall, Navajo blanket on the sofa—suggested wisdoms of the Far West rather than the Far East. His mockery of her included fondness and respect. He'd gone through all the usual phases in the therapeutic relationship: angry resistance, giddy infatuation, bitter disappointment. Now he felt at ease with Chin, relatively. She was so transparent, willing to make mistakes and admit them, open in her uncertainty, without guile or harsh judgments. She could be flaky, especially when she wasn't paying full attention, but there were occasional flakes of gold in her musings. Caleb was rarely tempted to lie to her.

“Maybe you should go
there,
” she suggested. “The foul rag-and-bone shop.”

“Toby? No. Toby isn't the problem. Toby is just a symptom.”

“You still believe that he was using you?”

“Or something. He wasn't there for me. He barely knew me.”

“‘Using' is such a slippery concept,” said Chin. “We all need help from other people. Certainly other people have helped you.”

“Yes. But I always knew who they were, and why they were helping. We helped each other. Or maybe we used each other. But we never called it love. We never mistook it for romance. Oh, I don't know. Maybe I'm just not ready for another boyfriend.” He frowned and looked away. “I brooded all weekend about Ben.”

“That's nothing to be ashamed of.”

“But his death was six years ago. I feel like I'm using
him
to justify self-pity.”

She thought for a moment. “A little self-pity now and then is no crime. You've been through a very painful experience. It's natural that it reminds you of other painful experiences.”

“But I'm measuring Toby against Ben. Which isn't right. I pretend
the old love was clear and solid, but I know it wasn't. It began as half-love, make-believe love. Then Ben became sick, and I had to live up to that love.”

“Like the couple in your play.”

Chin hadn't seen
Chaos Theory
. She disliked theater, distrusted it, which was another reason why Caleb respected her. Unlike his mother, however, Chin read his plays.

“Yes. Yet another way that
Chaos Theory
is about me and Ben,” he admitted. “But I was using Ben there too. His spells of dementia in the hospital? I gave them to a schizophrenic. I made them funny. And then I gave my feelings of helplessness to the wife. I made us straight. Which is more universal, you know. More commercial.”

“We've been through this, Caleb. You do nobody any good by punishing yourself with these accusations.”

“I thought your job was to make people confront the worst.”

“In most cases, yes. But some of us
use
the worst in order to avoid looking at things that
can
be changed.”

“I'm not fishing for—oh, not compliments, but the it's-okay-be-nice-to-yourself stuff. I hate hating myself. It's boring. But there's nobody else to hate. Except Toby. Only I don't hate him, not really. And Kenneth Prager.”

There was a long pause from Chin.

“The reviewer at the
Times,
” Caleb reminded her.

“I remember. I thought we'd finished with him too.”

“Just a hack, I know. But I can't find anyone else to blame. Except the jerk producers who insisted we open the play before it was ready. Jesus. I finally write an honest play. I make up for a phony play about sex with an honest play about love, and I get kicked in the teeth. Rejected. By a hack at the
New York Times.
It's like you said last week. That he was trashing my life with Ben.”

“I didn't say that! I said that for
the world
to reject your play
might
feel like they were denying your experience with Ben. Or words to that effect.” She returned to her notes. “I have no idea who this reviewer-reporter-critic person is. And he is not the issue here.
You
are the issue.”

Her vehemence surprised Caleb, confused him.

She cleared her throat. “Let's get back to Toby.”

“Do we have to?” He tried to sound humorous.

“You said Toby was just a symptom, not a cause. You mean your breaking up with him was just a symptom?”

“No. My falling in love with him. He's a blank. A kid. There's no
there
there with Toby.”

“You once said that he was half saint, half whore.”

Caleb snorted. “I'm not so sure now about the saint part.”

Chin smiled but waited for a serious reply.

“All right,” he conceded. “It's true. I was in love with him. But it was like loving a dog. It was all about me, not about him.”

“And you blame him for that?”

“No. I blame myself. Or if I blame him, it's only because I was disappointed there was nothing in him to love. Just a blank, an empty space, like an empty stage. Most actors have that, you know. It's where they play their parts. This big hole that they need to fill with make-believe and fame.”

She said nothing but sat there, thinking.

“You think I mean a different kind of hole?”

“What? Oh.” Her eyebrows twitched. “It sounded like the sexual side of the relationship was fine. And holes are holes.” She sighed. “No, I was wondering about your fear that he was using you, combined with your decision to stop writing plays.”

“It's not a decision, it's an inability.”

“Maybe.” She placed her finger over her mouth.

Caleb frowned. “You're saying I
want
to fail? In order to test Toby's love? To see if he'll love me even if I were a flop?”

“It's an idea.”

“But I'm not in love with him now. And I'm already a failure.” He began to laugh. “So what would the point be?”

“You're right. There can't be any possible connection.” Her sarcasm was as light as a feather. “But we'll continue this next week. I see our time is up.”

Of course. He should have sensed the end approaching. Chin regularly finished sessions like this, with a new, often pesky notion for Caleb to worry around in his head over the coming week.

As he stood up he could not resist saying, “Shouldn't you be encouraging me to get
out
of art? What's Freud's line? Artists are just
weak souls who retreat into fantasy and hope to find there ‘honor, fame, wealth and the love of beautiful women'? Or men in my case.”

“You're being silly. You know I have the highest respect for art and artists.” She opened the door for him.

“You once told me that books and art and plays are nothing but elaborate coping mechanisms.”

“I cannot believe I said ‘nothing but.' There's nothing wrong with a good coping mechanism. See you next week.”

Almost every Chin session ended like this: in a parting volley of unanswered questions and charges. Caleb's head buzzed like a hive as he stepped out on West Tenth Street, their last words orbiting around him as if they'd just had an argument. He liked Chin, he trusted her. But sometimes, for a minute or so, after a final exchange like the one today, she reminded him a bit of his mother.

The sun was bright, the air soft, the street deserted. When he arrived here an hour ago, this quiet block had been dotted with men and women in business suits walking their dogs before they left for work, animals of various sizes and breeds, like four-legged ids on leashes. Now the dogs were locked indoors, asleep and dreaming; their owners were out in a useful world of money. Caleb had no chores or duties, only the challenge of spending another day in his own sorry company. Chin was often the social highlight of his week.

Her suggestion that he wanted to fail in order to test Toby was pure bull. He wasn't in love with Toby. He probably never was.

Love, love, love. Why did everyone always want to talk about love? Even psychiatrists. People wanted songs about it, novels, operas, plays. All of Caleb's plays had been love stories:
Chaos Theory
was about schizophrenia and love;
Venus in Furs
was about literary imagination and love; and
Beckett in Love
was about, well, Samuel Beckett and love. Caleb wished he could write instead a play about quantum mechanics or non-Euclidean geometry. Something pure and abstract, no words, only numbers. There would be no people onstage, only spheres and cubes and tetrahedrons. He wouldn't have to trouble himself with actors.

L
ook at these figures, Frank. Oo-hooo! A Monday-morning sell-off. These clowns don't know shit. Watch the numbers fall. Dumb rats desert a sinking ship. Churchill here. Davey! No, no, no, man. We're not gonna sell.
Au contraire.
I'm planning to scarf up another ten thousand shares when it gets below twelve.”

John Churchill sat at his computer, talking to Frank, to callers, to himself. The mike cord of his headset was invisible. He had called Frank over for no discernible reason, unless he just wanted someone to see him at full throttle. Anybody hearing his torrent of words would think they were in the noisy hubbub of a trading floor, but Taurus Capital was otherwise quiet, a long white space with a high ceiling and polyurethaned floor. They were off lower Broadway, in a SoHo loft that was probably once the home of an artist and full of wet canvases and loud music. But money moved in and changed everything. Even Frank wore a necktie here.

“Don't wuss out on me, Davey. You need balls of brass. The dotcoms are not dead. Take it from me, a real dot-commie. Now what about the other hundred Gs you wanted to throw in the pot?”

Churchill was a young/old forty, with salt-and-pepper hair and French cuffs. He spoke like a construction worker, but it was only Ivy League macho: Harvard Business School. Frank knew firsthand that real blue-collars save foul language for real anger and pain. All day Sunday, whenever the lunacy of actors mucking around in their psyches had become too much for Frank, he told himself, Thank God I go back to real people on Monday. But an hour of John Churchill was enough to remind him how unreal most real people are.

“Candy-asses. Sheep. The world is divided between people who
lead and people who obey. You're a smart guy, but you'd rather take orders than give them.” It took Frank a beat to understand Churchill had finished his call and was talking to him. “What do you want?”

“You called
me
over,” Frank reminded him.

“Oh yeah. That's right. I wanted to ask—” He shuffled through a stack of papers. “We spend way too much on Stein. An arm and a leg for one damned temp, sweetness. Darling. How are you?”

Another phone call elicited a whole new personality.

“Oh, baby. You know that's not my department. Where are you? Sweetness. Don't call me during class. Wait until recess. You want Mrs. Cutler to confiscate your phone again? We'll discuss this with your mother. Pets are her department. Love you, darling. This dickhead agency.” He found the bill from Tiger Temps. “You've had Stein here four months and you still pay them a percentage? Not smart, Frank. Not smart at all.”

“Sorry. Yes. We should fix that. We
could
hire her full-time and give them a finder's fee.” Which Frank had proposed three months ago, but he knew better than to remind Churchill of that.

“I hate paying those scumbags another dime. But she'll stay? I don't want to buy her and have her quit on us next week.”

“She likes it here,” said Frank. “You give her a raise, and you still save money.” Frank had started here the same way, hired as a temp, then sold by the agency to Churchill—like a leased Lexus.

“Do it, do it, do it,” said Churchill. “You should've done it months ago. Would've saved me a shitload of money.”

“My mistake,” said Frank. “I'll take care of it immediately.” He turned and headed back through the white room.

His official title was “office manager,” but he was only a secretary. There were six employees at Taurus Capital, and all were treated like secretaries. They researched the new companies and processed the numbers, but Churchill made the decisions. The man was right, however: Frank did prefer to take orders—here anyway. It was a nice change from the acting life, where he had only himself to blame when things went wrong. It was good to have a boss who could be the target for all bitching and moaning and complaining.

He walked past Donald, Kim, Tony, and Pavel clacking away at their
computers or mumbling into their headsets. Leslie Stein had the desk in the far back corner, farthest from the windows.

“Hey, Leslie. For what it's worth, good news from Mr. C.”

She didn't look at him but held up one finger, asking him to wait while she finished whatever was on her screen. Frank stayed on his side of her desk, in case her activity was non-work-related. He didn't like to embarrass his charges.

Leslie was not what you'd expect in an investment boutique like Taurus. She dressed in black, wore brown lipstick and red nail polish; her face was full of piercings. Frank wondered if she wore body jewelry downstairs.

“All right, Frank. Done. What's the whoop from Church Lady?”

Frank reported that Churchill was finally hiring her full-time.

“Big whoop. But good. I need the moola. Now I can pay the printer and get my chapbook out of their warehouse.”

Leslie was what she looked like, a Downtown poet. But she was good with numbers and not bad on the phone. Her real gift was she didn't give a damn. She had the jadedness of a woman with too many divorces and love affairs, but she was only twenty-five.

“Sorry it took so long,” said Frank. “Churchill worried that you might split, but I assured him you were happy here.”

“Like a pig in shit,” she muttered. “No worse than my other jobs. And here I got another artiste to keep me company.”

“Or ex-artiste,” he reminded her.

“Hey, I'm going to a club tonight with friends. You want to join us? We can celebrate my whoop-de-do promotion.”

“Thanks. But I got rehearsal tonight. Your friends go clubbing on a Monday?”

She shrugged. “They got their own hours. I usually drop out around one. But we're going to a performance piece and it starts early. Ten. Leopold and Lois. An anti–kind of nightclub act.”

“Performance piece,” Frank grumbled. “A fancy name for half-assed theater.”

“That's right. You prefer full-assed theater.” She snickered through her pierced nose. “So should I come see your show?”

“Might be too white-bread for you.”

“No skin off my ass. Just thought it'd be a good way for me to know you better.”

“But only if you let me see your chapbook of poems.”

“I don't know, Frank. They might be too scary for you.”

They often flirted like this, in a cool, bored, just-for-practice manner. Under different circumstances, if he hadn't met Jessie, he might have pursued Leslie. He
was
her superior, but not that superior. He suspected there was little to gain here except sex. Which was not unattractive. Frank was hornier at the office than he ever was while directing a play or even acting in one.

“And how's your kiddie show going?” she asked.

“Going, going, gone,” he told her. “We did it on Friday and again Saturday. So it's finished.”

“Sorry I missed it.” She spoke in a brutal deadpan.

“It went well,” he argued. “It went very well.” He wanted to defend the show but knew he'd be wasting his breath.

“Must be a big relief to have it over. No more Mister Rogers, huh? No more visits to Munchkinland.”

“Yeah. One down and one to go. Then I can have a life again. But congrats on the raise,” he told her. “For what it's worth. Later.”

Frank strolled back to his desk, needing to get away from Leslie before he said something stupid and indignant about
Show Boat.
Because he was proud of what he'd done. But Leslie would never understand. Leslie was way too cool.

He pulled out his chair and settled into his corner. Yes, one down and one to go. Thank God. It had been totally crazy this past month, jumping back and forth between two shows and this job. Now
Show Boat
was over. There would be no more breaking up afternoons with two-hour trips to P.S. 41. No more overload of activity, the rush and confusion. Life would be simpler. And Frank was sorry. He already missed the craziness. Which was ridiculous. God knows how he would feel next week when he also finished with
2B
.

He needed to call Tiger Temps but decided to call Jessie first. He wanted to hear her voice. She hated to be called at work, but he had a good excuse today, two in fact: she had left a message on his machine last night, and Allegra had asked him to ask a favor.

The phone was picked up on the second ring. “Henry Lewse,” a forceful female voice declared.

“Jessie, hi. It's Frank.”

“Oh. Hi.”

“Sorry I didn't get back to you last night. Rehearsal ran late.”

“Oh. No problem.” She did not sound happy to hear from him, which hurt his feelings. He was much too sensitive about her.

“Your visit to your mom went okay?”

“The usual shit. I can't talk now.”

Her voice was low, almost a whisper.

Then Frank heard music in the background, a Big Band number from the 1940s, and a clank like the banging of a radiator.

“Henry's already up?”

“Oh yeah. Up bright and early today. Working out on his weight machine. So I can't talk.”

“Quickly, then. Allegra wants to know if you can bring your brother to the play. She hopes to get a quote from him if he likes it.”

“That's so Allegra,” said Jessie. “Well, I already asked him. He said he'd come. But not this weekend. He's got his party on Friday. Remember? Maybe next weekend?”

“Okay. Sure. I'll tell her.” Frank was surprised she'd already invited Caleb, but he was more concerned about something else. “Does that mean
you're
not coming on Friday?”

“I'll try. But Caleb might want help with his party.”

“I thought we were going to his party
together
?”

“Oh yeah. That's right. I forgot about your play. So you can't be there till late, right?”

“Maybe I can't be there at all,” he said.

“Oh, Frank. Don't be like that. I'll come to your show. I'll come Saturday. But come to Caleb's party. You really should.”

“I'll try. Look, I better go.” He was afraid of what else he might say. He couldn't understand his temper today. “Let's talk later. All right? We'll get together
sometime
this weekend. All right?”

“All right,” she said uncertainly. “I got to go too. Oh, quickly. Before I forget. How was it Saturday?”

“It went well. Even better than on Friday.”

“Oh good. That's wonderful. They must love you there. Kids and parents both. Sorry. I got to go. But we'll talk later. Bye.” Click.

Before he could thank her or stop her or say anything else.

Frank loved Jessie, and she was worth loving, but she didn't make it easy. He gripped the receiver like a blackjack, then returned it to its slot, very gently, like he could never harm a fly.