The Secrets of a Fire King (11 page)

Even when Peter threw the delicate urn, its pattern of blue and white spinning to a blur as it rose and fell again, all eyes lingered on the empty trapeze. This was why they came, this was what they waited for. And Françoise was very good. She didn’t disappoint them.

Now she was tugging the stabilizing rope of the trapeze into place, glancing up occasionally to gauge the angle. Marc did the same on the other side, and after a moment she climbed the rope ladder and lifted her weight onto the bar. Swinging, she turned her head and frowned slightly, as if listening to some barely audi-ble vibration. Then she called down to him and had him pull his supporting rope six inches tighter.

When she was on the ground again he went over and put his hand on her shoulder.

“Are you all right today, darling?” he asked, thinking, even as he spoke, that it was a mistake to say this. She had repaired her makeup, and she turned her face toward him. There was a knack she had of making herself go expressionless. He’d seen it countless times when she climbed up to the bar, a smile on her lips but the eyes, if you looked closely, unreadable. She was like that now. Gazing at the straight, emphasized eyebrows, the mouth touched with orange, the eyes clear and edged with black, he had the impression he was looking at a mime. Hers was a face capable of assuming any expression, but for the moment it revealed nothing, nothing at all.

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“Of course I’m all right,” she said. The small smile. “Shouldn’t you be getting ready?” She looked at her watch. “We’ll start in just a quarter of an hour.”

There was always an instant when Marc, wearing green tights and a green felt hat, perched on a unicycle with balls and eggs tucked all through his clothes, felt he could not go through with it. He had felt this way even in the beginning when he still enjoyed the actual performance, the wonder in the faces of the children, the amusement in the expressions of adults. Lately he had not felt any joy, though. He was tired. It seemed the moment on the sidelines became longer and longer. And then he was out there, jerking through the square on one wheel, filling the sky with a blur of spinning objects, his hands flashing as though they were unconnected with himself. Once he finished he placed the eggs carefully in a basket, then went around the crowd with his hat held out. The city paid them, of course, but this revenue covered lunch and dinner, and drinks when they were done.

Peter had added a new trick to his routine, something he had been practicing all week with plastic buckets. He fl ung the urn high into the air and then leaped from his perch on a milk crate, spun himself in an aerial somersault, and caught the urn just before it brushed the ground. Marc was impressed. He glanced over at Françoise. She was standing next to her trapeze, her arms folded gracefully, her long fingers white against her black sweat-shirt. She watched Peter intently as he bowed and bowed again.

The other acts were less successful. Jack dropped his sword on the cobblestones twice, and Frank failed to make one of his coins disappear. Finally it was time for the trapeze. The initial crowd had grown and was spilling over into the side streets, pushing close to the metal base of the trapeze. Marc urged people to step back, glancing now and then at Françoise, who was scal-ing the rope ladder to the swing. She grabbed the trapeze and secured it with one bent knee. Then she was on the bar, testing it, pumping like a small child on a swing set, except that her fl ight took her high, near the tops of the buildings, and far out over the
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cobblestones. He had seen her do this a thousand times, more, but it still gave him a clutch of fear when she rose against the sky like that, a clear dark line, resting with such a delicate grace upon the bar. He had never seen her fall from the trapeze, not even in practice.

“If I ever slipped,” she’d told him once, “I could never do it again. I have to believe that it’s impossible for me to fall. Otherwise I couldn’t go out there without a net, over all those sidewalks.” Now Françoise, agile, lowered herself until she was resting across the bar on her hip bones. Slowly, slowly, she stretched her arms out, until she was balanced across the bar in a graceful arc, her narrow arms extended. She looked like a bird etched against the blue sky. Marc rubbed his palms against his thighs and listened to the murmurs of the crowd. Looking around, he saw all eyes fixed on Françoise. For an instant he was amused by the people around him, their parted lips, their bodies relaxed and vulnerable as they gazed up at his wife. Soon, Françoise would begin to lean forward. Slowly, so very slowly, she would lean into a fall, while the crowd below grew tense, stiffening their bodies and clenching their fists, or pressing their hands against their cheeks. He had seen it so many times, Françoise gazing out to the sky as if nothing was wrong, slipping, slipping, until she plunged straight down. The crowds always gasped at this point, and Marc hated them then. This was why they came, really, not for the miracle of balance, but for the possibility that she might fall, fl attening onto the street before their eyes. But she did not. Her feet were clever hooks that caught her at the last moment. She hung, upside down, while the people around her sighed, from relief and disappointment, and clapped.

He had seen it a thousand times, so often that it was the tension from the crowd which signaled to him that she had begun her slow dive. He looked up then. But something was different.

Françoise was not gazing straight out over the heads of the crowd. Instead, she was looking straight at Marc, something she had never done, not once in all the times he had seen this. He looked back. Her exaggerated eyes were steady on his, even as she moved in imperceptible degrees down and down. His breath
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quickened. He felt the hard tiles of the plaza beneath his thin-soled shoes. If she were to fall—but she never fell, not Françoise.

Still, she was staring at him, her gaze no longer expressionless.

The intensity of her look reminded him of all the times they had tried to make love upside down.

Once they had done it, only once. Hands clasped behind his head, he had stayed as still as possible while Françoise twined herself around him like a vine. He had felt himself letting go, he had felt himself falling, and he had opened his eyes to fi nd her staring at him. They were so close that he could see only her eyes, and he had stared into them, steadied himself even as his body moved, judging the moments of her pleasure in the minute con-tractions of her pupils, the flutter of her eyelashes.

Now their eyes connected in just that way, despite the space of air between them, and her intentions were revealed. Marc knew before it even began that her toes would stay straight and pointed. That, unchecked, her dive would be straight down, straight toward the hard shiny tiles. Or to him, if he could catch her. He stepped forward, never taking his eyes from her. She was falling, slowly, so very very slowly, and he watched her coming toward him by minute degrees.

The moment came; the balance shifted, she was plummeting to him like something shot from the sky. He stepped forward, bracing himself for the weight of her familiar body. Dimly, he heard the gasps and shrieks of the crowd, but his eyes never left Françoise, her agile body shaped like a Chinese character against the blue parchment sky, her eyes dark with concentration, fear, and, he had time to think, a certain pleasure in what they were attempting to attain. It was her eyes he focused on, lifting his arms to her, hoping that the years of the past could balance them both against this moment.

The Way It Felt

to Be Falling

The summer I turned nineteen I used to lie in the backyard and watch the planes fly overhead, leaving their clean plumes of jet stream in a pattern against the sky. It was July, yet the grass had a brown fringe and leaves were already falling, borne on the wind like discarded paper wings.

The only thing that flourished that summer was the recession; businesses, lured by lower tax rates, moved south in a steady progression. My father had left too, but in a more subtle and insidi-ous way—after his consulting firm failed, he had simply retreated into some silent and inaccessible world. Now, when I went with my mother to the hospital, we found him sitting quietly in a chair by the window. His hands were limp against the armrests and his hair was long, a rough dark fringe across his ears. He was never glad to see us, or sorry. He just looked calmly around the room, at my mother’s strained smile and my eyes, which skittered nervously away, and he did not give a single word of greeting or acknowledgment or farewell.

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My mother had a job as a secretary and decorated cakes on the side. In the pressing heat she juggled bowls between the refrigerator and the counter, struggling to keep the frosting at the right consistency so she could make the delicate roses, chrysan-themums, and daisies that balanced against fields of sugary white. The worst ones were the wedding cakes, intricate and bulky. That summer, brides and their mothers called us on a regular basis, their voices laced with panic. My mother spoke to them as she worked, trailing the extension cord along the tiled floor, her voice soothing and effi cient.

Usually my mother is a calm person, levelheaded in the face of stress, but one day the bottom layer of a finished cake collapsed and she wept, her face cradled in her hands as she sat at the kitchen table. I hadn’t seen her cry since the day my father left, and I watched her from the kitchen door, a basket of laun-dry in my arms, uneasiness rising around me like slow, numbing light. After a few minutes she dried her eyes and salvaged the cake, removing the broken layer and dispensing with the plastic fountain that spouted champagne, and which was supposed to rest in a precarious arrangement between two cake layers held apart by plastic pillars.

“There.” She stepped back to survey her work. The cake was smaller but still beautiful, delicate and precise.

“It looks better without that tacky fountain, anyway,” she said.

“Now let’s get it out of here before something else goes wrong.” I helped her box it up and carry it to the car, where it rested on the floor, surrounded by bags of ice. My mother backed out of the driveway slowly, then paused and called to me.

“Katie,” she said. “Try to get the dishes done before you go to work, okay? And please, don’t spend all night with those dubious friends of yours. I’m too tired to worry.”

“I won’t,” I said, waving. “I’m working late anyway.” By “dubious friends” my mother meant Stephen, who was, in fact, my only friend that summer. He had spirals of long red hair and a habit of shoplifting expensive gadgets: tools, jewelry, pho-tographic equipment. My mother thought he was an unhealthy influence, which was generous; the rest of the town just thought
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he was crazy. He was the older brother of my best friend, Emmy, who had fled, with her boyfriend and 350 tie-dyed T-shirts, to follow the Grateful Dead on tour. Come with us, she had urged, but I was working in a convenience store, saving my money for school, and it didn’t seem like a good time to leave my mother. So I stayed in town and Emmy sent me postcards I memorized—a clean line of desert, a sky aching blue over the ocean, an airy water-fall in the inter-mountain West. I was fiercely envious, caught in that small town while the planes traced their daily paths to places I was losing hope of ever seeing. I lay in the backyard and watched them. The large jets moved in slow silver glints across the sky, while the smaller planes droned lower. Sometimes, on the clearest days, I caught a glimpse of skydivers. They started out as small black specks, plummeting, then blossomed against the horizon in a streak of silk and color. I stood up to watch as they grew steadily larger, then passed the tree line and disappeared.

When my mother was gone, I went back inside. The air was cool and shadowy, heavy with the sweet scent of flowers and frosting. I piled the broken cake on a plate and did the dishes, quickly, feeling the silence gather. That summer I couldn’t stay alone in the house. I’d find myself standing in front of mirrors with my heart pounding, searching my eyes for a glimmer of madness, or touching the high arc of my cheekbone as if I didn’t know my own face.

I thought I knew about madness, the way it felt—the slow suspended turning as you gave yourself up to it. The doctors said my father was suffering from a stress-related condition. They said he would get better. But I had watched him in his slow retreat, distanced by his own expanding silence. On the day he stopped speaking altogether I had brought him a glass of water, stepping across the afternoon light that flickered on the wooden fl oors.

“Hey Dad,” I had said, softly. His eyes were closed. His face and hands were soft and white and pale. When he opened his eyes they were clear brown, as blank and smooth as the glass in my hand.

“Dad?” I said. “Are you okay?”

He did not speak, then or later, not even when the ambulance came and took him away. He did not sigh or protest. He had slid away from us with apparent ease. I had watched him go, and this
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was what I knew: madness was a graceless descent, the abyss beneath a careless step.
Take care
I said each time we left my father, stepping from his cool quiet room into the bright heat outside.

And I listened to my own words; I took care, too. That summer, I was afraid of falling.

Stephen wasn’t comfortable at my house and he lived at the edge of town, so we met every day at Mickey’s Tavern, where it was cool and dark and filled with the chattering life of other people. I always stopped in on my way to or from work, but Stephen sometimes spent whole afternoons and evenings there, playing games of pool and making bets with the other people who formed the fringe of the town. Some of them called themselves artists and lived together in an abandoned farmhouse. They were young, most of them, but already disenfranchised, known to be odd or mildly crazy or even faintly dangerous. Stephen, who fell into the last two categories because he had smashed out an ex-lover’s window one night, and had tried, twice, to kill himself, kept a certain distance from the others. Still, he was always at Mickey’s, leaning over the pool table, a dark silhouette against the back window, only his hair illuminated in a fringe of red.