Miracle (44 page)

Low keening sounds came from her throat as she shoved the canvas aside and attacked another one, then another. She would destroy what his talent could create, just as he’d tried to destroy her. Without putting it in so many words, he’d blamed her for everything that had gone wrong with his life. Her birth had killed his beautiful Ellen; raising a child without her had put too many emotional and financial demands on him, especially after the back injury; he would have been happier with a son, whom he would have trained to be a professional clown like him.

It enraged her to think that she’d grown up trying so hard to compensate for crimes she’d never committed, and that even now Pop lurked in the back of her mind, telling her that she was no good, that no one could really love her, that she could never succeed at anything important. He’d imprinted his dark, fearful world on her so deeply that she was always wary of being captured by shapeless specters. She couldn’t fight them because she couldn’t name them.

And here was the evidence of his selfish lies.
His
world
could be cheerful and confident when he wanted, but he’d never shared it with her. He had hoarded these happy images and put them on canvas, leaving her with nothing but blank spaces to be filled with hardship and self-doubt.

She ripped into the next canvas, punching it with her fists, spitting on it, hating the smiling clown. Throwing it aside, she stiffened in shock at what she found behind it.

Her own portrait stared back at her. He must have painted it from memory after she’d made one of her early visits from college. She recalled the brindle sweater and soft white blouse she’d owned. It was a flattering portrait, devoid of hostility on both his part and hers.

Dazed, Amy set it aside and looked at the next one, another portrait, this one taken from an old photograph she had loved. It was a man and a tiny girl in matching clown suits. The photograph had been taken against a backdrop of half-constructed circus sets, but in the painting Pop put him and her against an empty slate of white tinged with pink.

She went through every canvas in the room. She found portraits of the mother she had known only from photos; she found portraits of Maisie; she found other portraits of herself—as a child, as a teenager, as a young woman. All were painted with a sensitive, even loving, touch.

Why, Pop, why
? she wondered desperately, tears streaming down her face.
Does this mean that you didn’t hate me? Is this the only clue I’ll ever have
? She gathered the family portraits and carried them to the living room. As darkness closed in she turned on a lamp and arranged the portraits along the sofa, where she could look at them as a group.

She felt confused and lost; redefining Pop meant redefining herself. But she still didn’t know who he was, and never would. His puzzle was maddening, unsolvable. She dialed Mary Beth’s number in Atlanta, hoping for a cynical bit of advice to put the dilemma in perspective. But there was no answer. She finally recalled that Mary Beth was in New York hawking her interview show to a convention of station managers. This was the year Mary Beth hoped to go national.

She can’t help you, anyway. Listen to yourself. For the first time, really listen.

Amy moved restlessly around the house, sorting through her emotional turbulence, her fists pressed to her temples. Pop hadn’t destroyed her, that was the important thing. She could be whatever she wanted, despite him. How he had viewed her in his life and paintings was only
his
reality, not hers. He had never known who she really was. He had treated her one way and painted her another, so what did his opinion matter? What did anyone’s opinion matter, except her own?

She locked the house, got into her rental car, then rested her head on the steering wheel and took deep breaths. She fought a smothering sensation. The summer heat seemed heavy with fear, but also with excitement.

Do it
, the new voice inside her urged.
You know you can do it. It doesn’t matter how he judged you. You aren’t the person he created. Don’t live in that person’s image anymore. Find out who you really are. What have you got to lose
?

The audience at Live Wire was patient on Monday nights. They had paid their discount cover charge knowing that they were going to be subjected to a stream of rank amateurs or third-rate professionals with nothing better to do between paying jobs.

Amy remembered the small in-town club from the early days when Elliot was touring and would stop by Atlanta to see her after one of his weekend bookings. He and she would go to Live Wire to watch the beginners make idiots of themselves. Elliot had loved to play the magnanimous Big Name, doling out advice and hope, getting up on stage to do a few minutes of material for the surprised, cheering crowd.

She was glad that Elliot was three thousand miles away tonight.

As she angled between people at the bar her legs quivered so violently that when she looked down she could see a tremor in the skirt of her print sundress. Her shoulders
itched under the thin white jacket she’d put on to make the dress look more formal. Hives. She was getting hives.

In a little office down a hall hung with autographed photos of comics mugging for posterity, she found a squirmy little man in sport clothes who climbed over his desk and grabbed her in a hug. “How ya doin? Long time no see! Lawd-dee, it’s been years since you and the Elliot-man dropped by!”

They rocked from side to side. Her nervous stomach began to rebel. “I’m fine, Irving. Irving … can you put me into the lineup for tonight? Anywhere. I’ll take the graveyard if I have to. I just want five minutes to do some material I wrote.”

“You? Writing gags for yourself? What happened to Elliot? What’s going on? You? Amy? When did this writing thing start?”

“It’s a long story. Can I get into the lineup?”

“Sure! It’s open-mike night. You can have all the time—Amy? Are you all right?”

“Fine. Excuse me. Thanks for letting me in. I’ll be back in a minute. I just have to go throw up.”

She spent the next two hours huddled in a chair in the ladies’ room, alternately clutching her stomach and going over the jokes she’d listed on a paper towel. She told herself that she’d survive, even if she bombed. Bombing was part of the business.
Nobody
, not even the top comics, escaped it all the time. The important thing was to prove that she could get up on stage and not make a fool of herself. Or at least not too much of a fool.

At ten-thirty Irving sent one of the waitresses to get her. “You’re on after the next guy finishes,” the girl told Amy between quick puffs on a cigarette. “Hey, does this smoke bother you?”

“Nah, I always look like Dracula on a day pass.” Amy splashed cold water on her wrists and stared at herself in the mirror.
You’re good. You can do this
. She walked out of the rest room on wobbly legs. An eerie sense of panic rose in her chest, and she almost headed for an exit. A comic was twisting balloons into animals, and his giraffe popped two feet from her ear.

She bolted into the short, narrow hall that led directly up on stage. Trembling, she tried to take slow breaths. A stockbroker was on stage telling stockbroker jokes. The audience wasn’t laughing. Soon they wouldn’t be laughing at her.

The stockbroker finished quickly. Amy leaned against the wall and shut her eyes. Irving squeezed her shoulder on his way to the stage. “You okay?”

“Sure!” Her voice was an octave higher than usual, with a squeak like a reedy clarinet. She couldn’t recall her first two jokes. She began to take small steps backward. With any luck, she’d be gone before Irving got the introduction out of his mouth.

But he was too fast. He bounded to the microphone. “Here’s an old friend of mine who just dropped in tonight to try out a few jokes. Please welcome Amy Miracle.”

Only the worst coward would run at that point. She thought about it, but her feet began moving forward. She climbed a short ramp. She stepped onto the stage’s varnished wooden floor. The lights surrounded her. The applause was polite.

Somehow she ended up front and center. Her throat had a knot of fear in it. She wrapped both hands around the mike’s slender metal post and simply stared at the audience, unable to speak. They stared back. After twenty or thirty seconds the waitresses stopped to stare, too.

Oh, Lord, this was hopeless. The Catatonic Comic. Someone in the dark, intimate room began to snicker. It wasn’t a pleasant sound, but at least it broke the monotony.
Go for the sympathy element
, Amy thought desperately.
Just tell the truth
.

She leaned toward the mike and croaked. “Y’all terrify the hell out of me.”

To her shock, they laughed. She found a bored face and scrutinized it. The man watched her with his head tilted to one side in a quizzical way, as if someone had just goosed him.
Well, go on, go on. Make me laugh
.

“Suburban people are real scary,” she continued, her voice cracking. The man chuckled. Why? She hadn’t said anything funny. What was this—some kind of
Twilight Zone
episode? She stepped closer to the microphone and peered over it warily. “Suburban people have their own gangs. Oh, I know—you think I’m just paranoid. But I’ve seen ’em. Those women in jogging suits, walking in packs, with their little headphones. Are they
really
just listening to ‘Thin Thighs in Three Hundred Years?’ Or are they casing your station wagon? Do you want to go out some morning and find your hubcaps missing and a Barry Manilow tape on the front seat?”

This time the laughter was no fluke. The bored man was sitting on the edge of his seat, grinning. She couldn’t think about it too much or she’d freeze again. She had to keep careening ahead, jabbering about whatever came into her mind. “I’m also scared of furniture salespeople. They hang out in gangs, too. You know how frightenin’ they can be. You walk in and there they are, trying to look nonchalant, leaning against the furniture, with measuring tapes hanging out of their pockets. You try to ignore them—you get real nervous, but you’re trying to be cool and just walk on by. But they won’t let you. It’s ‘Hey, mama, want to see some sofas?’ or ‘Check out
this
credenza, baby.’ Oh, you can try to detour around them—take the long way through the dining-room sets—but they’ll only laugh. They know nobody can find their way out of all those fake rooms alone.”

People applauded. The man with the bored face was nodding to the woman beside him. They were both chuckling.

Amy took a deep, disbelieving breath. She knew she’d be frightened the next time she got up on stage, and the time after that, and probably the thousandth time. But obviously fear could be funny. “You know what else I’m afraid of? Big words that sound embarrassing. Like ‘mastication.’ What is that—having oral sex with yourself?”

The man with the bored face nearly fell out of his chair laughing. She stared at him with adoration.
Pick the toughest person in the room and concentrate on him
, Elliot often told new comics.
When you own him, you own the room
.

She owned the room. She owned her future. She could deal with the rest.

“You want a
what
?” Elliot bellowed at the top of his lungs. Then he went to the soft-drink machine in one corner of his office and kicked a dent in the diet cola.

Amy had expected his reaction. Her newfound confidence didn’t desert her. “I want the writing job you offered me a couple of months ago.”

“Why?”

“Because I just put my father in a nursing home and I need the money.”

“So you think you can crawl back—”

“I’m not crawling. Either you give me a job or you don’t. I’m a damned good writer, and you know it.”

“You want a favor? Go rub a lamp.”

“I want a
job
. And actually, I want to be your friend again. I remember when we liked each other a
lot
. You don’t have many friends left, and I’m willing to try to help you—but on my terms.”

“You greedy, arrogant—”

“Here are my terms. I won’t sleep with you, I won’t act as your gopher, and I won’t play Nurse Ratched when you’re determined to get stoned, because that hardly ever worked anyway. But I
will
be your best writer and your best friend, and I’ll stand by you while you get professional counseling.”