Balancing Acts Read online

  ‘Good morning, Mr Fried,’ she sparkled. A top row of false teeth already, alas. ‘You’re out early today. Did you have a pleasant night?’

  ‘Full of adventure, Mrs Cameron. Full of romance and high jinks.’ She turned her pained dark eyes back on her work. ‘Will you be asking that each morning? Because a man of my age, you know, can’t be expected, nightly, to...’

  ‘Mr Fried,’ she said, setting down her pen. ‘We must have started off on the wrong foot somehow. Before things get any worse, why don’t we...’ Her valor was exhausted, her face a silent appeal for aid. Max stood his ground, unmoved. ‘I’d like to help make your stay here a comfortable one. That’s all I’m trying to do.’

  ‘Why do you ask such foolish questions, then?’

  ‘I’ve got to ask,’ she said querulously. ‘I’ve got to...keep track, and then let people know if anything seems...not right.’

  ‘Ah, you report to a higher authority. I should have known. Tell me, Mrs Cameron—I know it’s impertinent, but how old are you?’

  She got pink and began ruffling her fingers through her hair. ‘Fifty-seven.’

  ‘Are you married?’ He had noticed yesterday the wide gold band embedded in the flesh.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In other words, you leave here and go home to the waiting...to a companion, right? In that case, Mrs Cameron, do not ask me whether I had a pleasant night, and I will not ask you.’

  Her blush deepened to near purple, spreading behind the squarish gold-rimmed glasses. He had a twinge of remorse but ignored it.

  ‘Where is the junior high school, please?’

  She told him, with her head bent over the papers on her desk. Max swooped to the door, twirling the cane like a baton.

  ‘Adult education?’ she called out.

  He had to admire her tenacity; silent, he turned to wave and incline his head in an angle of mock benediction.

  It was only a ten-minute ride on the bus. Without her directions he could have walked it in less, and recognized it easily. Fresh brick, rimmed with a broad green lawn, the building struck him as another version of Pleasure Knolls. Institutions for safekeeping, both, and engineered by a committee, to satisfy all and please none.

  He was directed to a smooth-faced young man with longish blond hair, wearing snug denim pants and a plaid shirt with the top three buttons undone. Ted Collins was powerfully built, almost as broad as Henry Cook but hardly apelike. Taller than Max by a head and straight as an arrow, he practically vibrated with energy. The fellow had quite a good grip, too, when they shook hands. Sitting down at his desk, he lit a cigarette. Max took out a cigar to fend off the filthy smell, and said, ‘It’s close to sixty years since I’ve been inside a school.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad you decided to return,’ Collins said affably. ‘Where did you happen to see our notice?’

  ‘I don’t quite recall. Supermarket, drugstore, one of those places.’

  ‘I see. And you’re interested in working with children?’

  ‘I’m interested in working.’

  Collins cleared his throat formally, darted a quick look at Max, and relaxed. Smiled, man to man. He leaned back in his chair with his arms behind his head and stretched out one long leg, resting it on the edge of the desk. ‘Well, let me tell you, first of all, Mr Fried, what we’re looking for. We’re very understaffed, though most people think these suburban schools are rolling in money.’ Absently, Collins stroked a bicep. ‘We need help in shop—woodworking, carpentry, electricity—with math, especially business math, if you’ve ever run a business, for example. Science—setting up lab experiments and seeing that they don’t blow themselves up. Really everything. We can’t pay, and we can use as many hours as you want to give. If you’re around at noon, though, you can get a free hot lunch in the cafeteria. Now, maybe I’ve overwhelmed you, throwing all this out at once. Why don’t you tell me something about yourself, what you’d like to do.’ He took his leg off the desk and leaned forward to stub out the cigarette as he might hammer a nail.

  ‘I am rarely overwhelmed,’ Max replied. Yet he was, dammit, not by the information but by the appalling vigor of the man. He had forgotten. All that strength to spare. Had he ever? He must have. Susie said. He looked over at the lithe, animated hands, itching to grasp, and had a momentary flicker of hatred for this decent boy who probably fucked up a storm every night.

  ‘I was hoping there might be some remuneration.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Believe me, I would if I could. Are you—uh—in a bad way? Because you could go down to—’

  ‘No, no.’ Alarmed, Max scanned his clothing—tweedy and, yes, conservative, today perhaps even archaic, with vest and watch chain, but certainly not shabby? He never skimped on appearances. Appearances were everything. ‘It’s the principle of the thing.’

  ‘I understand.’ Collins slapped the desktop regretfully.

  ‘I can do most of what you’ve mentioned. I’ve run a business, too. Bicycles. But tell me, could you use a juggler?’

  ‘A juggler?’

  ‘Yes. Or how about tumbling? You’ve got a gym, haven’t you? Mats? I could set up a trapeze.’

  ‘A trapeze?’ He tilted his jaw upward, squinting slightly.

  ‘The daring young man on the flying trapeze? Remember?’

  ‘What daring young man?’

  ‘What is this, an echo chamber?’

  ‘Sorry. I—I didn’t expect this. Most of the senior citizens volunteer for cooking, reading stories, you know. Can you really do all that? Where did you learn it?’

  ‘Circus. A life of glamour and magic.’

  The cigarette Collins was starting to light dropped from his lips and rolled along the floor, past the corner of the desk to Max’s feet. Max picked it up. It disappeared up his sleeve. He retrieved it from behind his ear and handed it back.

  The young man gasped and smiled with hesitation. ‘Thanks. How did you do that? Oh, I guess everyone asks you that.’

  ‘I don’t do it for everyone.’

  ‘Look, I’m sure the kids would love it. I’ve got to check it out with the gym teachers, though, to see if they can work it into their program. Everything’s got to be checked out around here, you can’t imagine...Could you—uh—possibly do that again, with the cigarette?’

  Max lost it in his pants pocket and found it behind his lapel.

  ‘Amazing! One other thing, Mr Fried.’

  ‘Yes? You can call me Max.’

  ‘Okay, Max. We need a couple of character references. Just a formality—to check on who’s working with the kids. I’m sure—uh...Can you give me the name of any local people to contact?’

  ‘You mean to see if I’m a decent person?’

  ‘More or less. Nothing personal, you understand.’

  ‘You can start with my neighbor, Lettie Blumenthal. She will vouch for my decency.’ He wrote down her name as well as his own, and their street address.

  Collins studied the slip of paper. ‘Oh, isn’t that Pleasure Knolls, out past Broad Street?’ The zeal faded from his face. ‘Are you—are you sure you can do this sort of thing, Max? I mean, healthwise? It can be strenuous, with the kids and all.’

  He peered intently at Collins, caught his eye and held it fast. ‘Would I offer if I weren’t well? Why, I could walk the wire today if I had the chance. I’ve never felt better in my life.’

  ‘Walk the wire?’

  He paraded two fingers along the desktop. ‘The tightrope.’

  ‘That’s fantastic! I’ve never met anyone from the circus before. Maybe you could come over sometime and tell me about it.’

  Max stood up and held out his hand. ‘Gladly. I’ll even give you an autograph.’

  As he stepped out of the office a mob of youngsters roared past, long-haired, blue-jeaned, and of indecipherable sex, a scary flurry of life like the lions let loose in the ring. He leaned up against a wall till they had gone by, jostling each other with a manic delight. When their noise diminished, he could almost
hear his heart, roused and knocking. Those were the children, his raw material. He felt a twinge of panic in his gut.

  Back at the apartment he fixed his first breakfast, the honeymoon breakfast: black bread with cream cheese, topped with a slice of red onion. Black coffee. He ate it in what Mrs Cameron had called the dining area. He used to eat breakfast in a trailer. John Todd, the born clown—though what Susie had meant by it he wasn’t sure, because John out of the spotlight was a rather somber, though lovable, fellow—John Todd used to fix sausages and eggs, biscuits with honey, for him and Susie, Henry, Freddie, and a couple of the others, on rainy weekday mornings. They curled up in corners of the trailer waiting for the hot plates, the smell of mud on their boots mingling with the aroma of sausages and coffee. He could smell it now. When he was in a good mood he juggled the coffee mugs and tossed them over to John, big and sober at the stove, an ugly face that turned mobile and beautiful under the lights, a giant who had to bend his head under his own roof. John’s pet monkey, Joanna, sat on top of a cabinet, its wizened face screwed up with attention as John caught them by the handles, every one.

  John had always liked Susie but tried not to show it. Once after a wretched fight, Susie took her pajamas and toothbrush and moved into John’s trailer. Max felt like dropping her from the trapeze. How long? he wondered. Days went by. When he caught her by the wrists he muttered things.

  ‘Are you having fun, Susie, you traitor?’

  She would never stop smiling for the crowd.

  ‘I’m going to let you go, next swing. See how much fun that’ll be.’ When she flew back she stuck out her tongue, quick as a flash; that intimate malice nearly broke his heart.

  She came back one night a week later with the pajamas over her arm and the toothbrush in her fist, and began immediately picking up old newspapers and emptying ashtrays. ‘Look how you let things go,’ she said.

  Max was sitting at the table, reading. ‘Oh, so it’s you.’ He got up to face her. He thought over the fine speeches he could make, and then his arms were around her. The whole thing had been his fault anyway; he was an arrogant brute, as Susie had pointed out. What mattered was that she was with him. He never said a word to John Todd either. He liked John, he liked the breakfasts, and he liked harmony.

  When he and Susie got too old to jump and fly, they juggled, dressed in tramp costumes. He loved the way she looked in the baggy brown pants and suspenders, the striped shirt and the floppy hat with flecks of fiery hair escaping. Twirling and tossing balls and pins, they were perfection: after so long, their blood pulsed to the same beat. On a tandem bike, no hands, they flipped cups from front to back till Susie gathered them into the folds of her big plaid jacket and Max steered them out of the ring, waving a battered hat at the crowd.

  But that wasn’t enough—they knew it and so did Brandon. They had outlasted their skills. One overcast day in early November, end of the season, they left. No good-bye party, Max insisted, but after the last show they sent him out on a fool’s errand—drive into town and settle the bill at the saloon—and they set up tables in the tent. John Todd danced with Susie. Max danced with Tania, who did ballet on the wire, and with Gina, an acrobat who was an Apache Indian. And he marveled at the tricks of time and space: that his parents should have fled the fires of a Ukrainian village and traveled westward across an ocean so that he might end up with his arms around an Apache Indian, doing a fox trot. In the trailer, when they packed their bags, Susie held up the blue spangled costume. ‘Now what should I do with this?’

  ‘Keep it, what else?’

  ‘I thought I might give it to Tania or Edith.’

  ‘Keep it.’

  It fit her till the very end—she never got fat or shapeless. They opened a bicycle shop in Greenwich Village with his name and hers in gilt letters on the window, a shop crammed with bikes and accessories, shiny with chrome, and heady with the smell of grease, a shop that drew the neighborhood cyclists, who hung around discussing the lubrication of their gears and the deterioration of their brake shoes, while Max and Susie quietly made repairs. It got so crowded that finally they moved things around to set up chairs, and they brought in a coffee urn. He attracted customers, Susie said; he had an aura. ‘I never realized I married a magnetic personality.’ Not at all, he protested; it was the sight of a good-looking woman covered with grease, changing an inner tube. ‘Max, baby,’ said Susie, ‘you’ve forgotten I’m fifty years old.’ She was beautiful almost to the end, and then she broke apart in fragments. She grew paler each day until her skin was the gray underside of white. The medicine made her red hair fall out, flame by flame, and one evening when he sat near the bed holding her hand, thinking of the hair haloing her face on the grass outside the trailer, she whispered, ‘You know, Max, I used to dye it. This wasn’t my natural color.’

  He sat up with a start. He had thought she was asleep.

  ‘You never knew, after all these years. Isn’t that something? It would have been all gray by now anyway.’

  ‘It makes no difference.’

  ‘I know. I just thought I’d tell you. No secrets. Isn’t that so?’

  There were no secrets. Only that he couldn’t stand to watch her get ugly, and he was ashamed. The sparse white hair and bony cheeks, not to mention the tubes they attached all over, made her a parody of the woman she had been. She didn’t drag on long. He sat by the bed till they led him away. There was no one around to grieve to; however magnetic, he had kept everyone else at a distance. Alone and dazed, he judged life’s offense against him beyond the powers of acceptance. He cursed and condemned and yearned for the feelings of a stone. He nursed his long grievance; its energy kept him alive.

  CHAPTER 2

  IT WAS THE LAST period and she had the quick-exit seat. When the warning bell jangled she almost made it out the door.

  ‘Alison. Come here a moment, please. I’d like to talk to you.’

  She turned and walked sluggishly to the teacher’s desk. Miss French was one of the better ones: she spoke like a human being, not a robot, and let her light-brown hair fall in a careless fluff on her shoulders. She was not quite over the hill yet, maybe around thirty-one.

  ‘About this composition you handed in...I asked you to choose three kinds of work people do and discuss the nature of their social contributions.’

  ‘I remember.’ Alison had a ready stare of passive resistance.

  ‘But you didn’t.’ Miss French removed her blue-tinted glasses. Her eyes were perturbed. Today she had on black tights with a wraparound denim skirt and a work shirt without a bra. Why couldn’t she act her age? She was always talking about social responsibility, wasn’t she? ‘You wrote about race horses, oxen, and Indian elephants,’ Miss French said.

  ‘Yes, well, they work, too.’

  ‘They’re not people, Alison. There’s a difference.’

  ‘That’s my whole point. That’s why they don’t get any respect.’

  ‘But the assignment was...Okay, after you describe their work you say it’s unfair for animals to be put to work for people. But how do you think farmers in other ages would have managed without oxen and mules and horses?’

  ‘Do you think we need horse racing? Do you think the horses enjoy it?’

  ‘Come on now,’ said Miss French. ‘Of course we don’t need it. But it doesn’t harm the horses. Those horses happen to be very well cared for. But that’s not the point. Look, throughout history people have learned to master what’s available in nature, for their basic needs. We could never have progressed to the point we are now without the use of animals.’

  ‘And hunting dogs,’ said Alison. ‘They’re trained to prey on their fellow animals. It’s gross.’

  ‘I’m aware that you’re clever.’ Miss French put her blue glasses back on and smiled with a kind of melancholy. ‘But you’ll never learn anything until you start listening to what’s being said to you. I don’t think you’ve really heard a word I said.’

  Alison gave the impassive stare ag
ain.

  ‘And besides, if you’re so interested in animals and fairness, haven’t you grasped that different species prey on each other? Not with any evil intent—it’s the way the cycle of nature is set up. Take a look around. It’s not one big happy family.’ Miss French held out the assignment.

  ‘Do I have to do it over?’

  ‘Yes. People, this time. How about scientists, newspaper reporters, bricklayers? Really work up an essay.’

  ‘That doesn’t grab me, but okay.’

  She walked home past the shopping center. Groups of kids clustered around the pizzeria and the movie theatre. Traffic thinned as she turned down a side street; the neighborhood became residential, with low, broad houses set far apart on sloping, mostly vacant lawns bearing the October remains or flower beds. There were no sidewalks. In fifteen minutes she reached her own lawn, where Josh’s flower bed was overgrown, faded and waiting for spring. Also waiting for him to come back and do some weeding: he was away in Arizona for two weeks, visiting and checking up on his company’s trailers like an itinerant country doctor. Arizona was trailer heaven, Josh said. He had been there many times.

  She shut the door of her room tightly behind her, opened the window over her bed, and reached to touch the leaves of the maple just outside, before taking the notebook out from under the mattress. The heroine of her newest story was called Alice. Alice was going on fourteen, just a year older than she was. Fed up with ordinary life and in quest of adventure, Alice runs away to lead a life of crime in New York City.

  She soon gets hooked on drugs and mugs people in the subways with an innocent-looking tennis racket, to support her habit. After a painful withdrawal period, a stunning test of will, she triumphs, but goes on to become a teen-aged alcoholic. A member of Alcoholics Anonymous stationed outside a bar tries to save her, but she will have none of their corny, God-fearing methods. Once again she saves herself, emerging from a sodden stupor with renewed will. She moves into an abandoned building (till then she has slept in doorways and on park benches) and assembles a gang of younger runaways, whom she directs in a series of robberies. The young policeman who finally traces her falls in love with her. ‘You are the rarest creature I have ever encountered,’ he tells her one night in the police car. Unable to bring himself to turn her in, he wants to reform her and keep her for himself, but since he symbolizes law and convention, Alice laughs in his face. When he tries to kiss her she spits in his eye. ‘You little tiger,’ he whispers, undaunted. His hanging around becomes a drag, so Alice pushes on, hitchhiking to Ohio in a truck whose driver lost both hands in the Vietnam war and had them replaced by hooks. The truckdriver, named Hal, is drawn to her too, and for the first time in her life Alice has some feeling for a man. Even though Hal’s vocabulary is very limited compared to hers, she can see beyond the surface to the spirit within.