Lives of the Circus Animals (35 page)
Read Lives of the Circus Animals Online
Authors: Christopher Bram
T
oby woke up in his room on West 104th Street. Sunlight spilled through the blinds, painting yellow stripes over the floor and futon and the sheet that covered the large nude body sprawled beside him: Sasha, the Russian. He lay on his back with the sheet pulled up to his belly button, an arm thrown over his crew cut, the cup of his armpit fizzy with blond fur. His red lips were drawn back from his big teeth in a joyful smile. It took Toby a moment to realize that Sasha was still asleep.
Most of the men that Toby slept with looked better dressed than naked. Not Sasha. He was beautiful naked. Usually Toby couldn't wait to get out of bed the next morning, take a shower, and be “good” again. But not today. Sasha looked so humpy. Toby barely knew himâhe didn't even know his last nameâbut sex last night had been perfect, as hot and mutual and easy as the sex in dreams.
Toby wanted to stay in bed forever, but he needed to pee. He got up and pulled a pair of gym shorts over his cumbersome erection. His clothes were happily strewn over the floor with Sasha's. They both wore Old Navy jeans and 2(x)ist briefs.
Out in the hall Toby saw nobody, but he heard the TV in the living room: a boring Sunday-morning news show. It still felt funny that their home was also their stage. They had given another performance last night, and it went well again, even after the craziness on Friday. But the gunshot wound and ambulance ride felt like weeks ago. It felt like weeks since he'd met Sasha too, but both events were only thirty-six hours old. There had been a reporter in the audience last night, but it wasn't half as exciting as seeing Sasha in the front row. He had come to see Toby. Standing over the toilet, Toby couldn't help sniffing his own shoulder and smelling another man's brand of soap there.
He hurried back to his room, whipped off the shorts, and hopped under the sheet. He crawled against Sasha, laying an arm across his chest, a leg over his middle. He wanted to be here when Sasha woke up. He was amazed by how happy he felt, how joyful.
He heard the front door open and close. There were voices in the living room. Feet stamped over the floor.
A fist knocked on Toby's door and the door flew open.
Allegra charged in, followed by Dwight and Melissa. “Look, look!” They shook a fat tabloid newspaper at him, the Sunday
Post
. “Do you believe this? Do you fucking believe this?”
They all crouched around the futon, paying no attention to the other body.
Across the middle of the front page was a washed-out color photo of a young man on his knees beside an old man on his back. They weren't doing anything dirty. Toby couldn't figure it out until he read the headlineâ“Everybody's a Critic”âand the captionâ“Actor gives first aid to gunned theater reviewer.”
“You're famous!” cried Melissa.
“They talk about you!” said Allegra. “They talk about us!”
“We're all gonna be famous!” said Dwight.
Toby propped himself up on an elbow and opened the paper. Inside was a story, two full pages with black-and-white photos: an old picture of Caleb looking stuffy; a police mug shot of Caleb's mom, front view only, looking drunk; a fancy-dress photo of Kenneth Prager, the wounded manâhe was theater reviewer for the
Times
?âand finally, Toby himself, an ugly old head shotâwhere did they find that?âof a skinny dork with a shaggy
Brady Bunch
haircut. There was no picture of Henry, which surprised Toby and pleased him.
He felt Sasha waking behind him, rolling over, and seeing the people around them. Sasha didn't care. He scooted up behind Toby and embraced him from the back, locking both arms around Toby's chest. “That is you?” he murmured at Toby's shoulder.
Toby turned back to the front page.
“Look at the byline,” said Dwight. “Cameron Ditchley. He must have been the guy who took the picture.”
“See!” said Allegra. “They mention the play. They give the title and the address. We're gonna go through the roof tonight.”
“It's still a showcase,” said Melissa. “We can charge only fifteen bucks, right?”
“Oh fuck Equity,” said Allegra. “We're not legal anyway. People are gonna pay through the nose to see our celebrity here. And that's just the beginning. Everybody's gonna talk about this for
weeks
.”
But Toby stopped listening. He lay among admiring friends, naked under his sheet, snug in the muscular life jacket of Sasha's arms, Sasha's boner nuzzled against his bottomâhe was hard tooâwhile he gazed at himself on the front page of the
New York Post
.
Could the world get any sweeter?
T
his novel was written with the generous help of a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation.
I was also helped by friends who remain my sharpest, toughest readers: Victor Bumbalo, Mary Gentile, Damien Jack, Paul Russell, Ed Sikov, and Brenda Wineapple. My agent, Edward Hibbert, shared both his literary expertise and his experience in his other profession, acting. Neil Olson and Jesse Dorris provided important support and advice. I owe special thanks to my editor, Meaghan Dowling, her assistant, Rome Quezada, and my copyeditor, Shelly Perron.
Even more than on previous books, Draper Shreeve gave me so much here, not just his intelligence, humor, and sanity but also his firsthand knowledge of the world of circus animals. He brought me into that world. I could not have written this novel without him.
C
HRISTOPHER
B
RAM
is the author of eight novels, including
Father of Frankenstein
, which became the Academy Awardâwinning movie
Gods and Monsters
, and
The Notorious Dr. August: His Real Life and Crimes
. He also writes book reviews, movie reviews, and screenplays. He was a 2001 Guggenheim Fellow and received the 2003 Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award. He lives in New York City.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
RAISE
FOR
Lives of the Circus Animals
“A supreme comedy of errorsâ¦. The story encompasses all the joys and sorrows of everyday life, revealing that circus animals are much like the rest of us.”
â
Library Journal
(starred review)
“Anyone whose misbegotten past includes time on or around the boards will recognize the loving accuracy Bram brings to his often hilarious take on love spurned, mismatched, and rearranged on and way-off Broadwayâ¦. Slick, smart, and funny.”
â
Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)
“One of those perfect New York City books that explores the layers of human interaction in the cityâ¦. Like a miniature masquerade, tipping its hat to the conventions of historical fiction by incorporating real-life celebrities with their roman à clef peers.”
â
Genre
“[A] sexy, witty novel.”
â
Detroit Free Press
“This is a very fine novel. Though the characters are often given comic scenes to play out, the writing never holds them up to ridicule. They are all fully realized and fully human, even in their quarrelsâBram writes exceptionally good quarrelsâand that itself is a great and moving accomplishment. His ear for dialogue is pitch-perfect, and he manages contemporary gay-straight gender politics as well as or better than anyone else. I loved it.”
âCharles Baxter, author of
The Feast of Love
“Bram gives us characters to love for their humanity and vulnerability from the outset of a sweetly funny and engaging novel that makes the contemporary New York theater scene spring to life in an imaginative unfolding of the interrelationships of fascinating, often eccentric, always less-than-perfect people being themselves.”
â
Booklist
LSO BY
C
HRISTOPHER
B
RAM
The Notorious Dr. August
Gossip
Father of Frankenstein
Almost History
In Memory of Angel Clare
Hold Tight
Surprising Myself
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following:
“Cotton Blossom,” words and music by Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein II, copyright © 1927 Universal-Polygram Int. Publ. Inc. on behalf of T. B. Harms Co.
(ASCAP). International copyright secured. All rights reserved.
“Some Other Time,” words and music by Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, Adolph Green, copyright © 1944. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.
“The Circus Animals' Desertion” reprinted with the permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, from The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume 1: The Poems, Revised, edited by Richard J. Finneran.
Copyright © 1940 by Georgie Yeats; copyright © renewed 1968 by Bertha Georgie Yeats, Michael Butler Yeats, and Anne Yeats.
LIVES OF THE CIRCUS ANIMALS
. Copyright © 2003 by Christopher Bram.. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © NOVEMBER 2006 ISBN: 9780061856525
The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:
Bram, Christopher.
Lives of the circus animals: a novel / Christopher Bram.â1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-06-054253-5
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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