Hierarchy of the Circus

He is listening to Rosa eat persimmons, sticky and reeking of fall, sunset colored fruits the size of walnuts.

His first question of the day is: “What are you eating?”
The sound of her methodical chewing has woken him. He already knows what she’s eating. He wants to hear her say it.

She has a routine: bite, slurp, swallow. He listens to the handful of sounds. When he speaks she jumps lightly beside him. She had hoped he was asleep.

He has spoken as a signal–to let her know he is awake–he is listening–as though sleep had removed him from her world entirely.

She answers with her mouth filled, juice and fruit flesh moving on her tongue: “Oh! Did I wake you?”

She sounds as though she is pleading or afraid. Rosa rarely seems comfortable around people, even him. Last night he had fallen asleep wondering if she would carry her timid nature into motherhood–would Rosa sudden when her children called to her in the night?

Once, he had liked to watch her through key holes, cracks in doors and the slats in boutique dressing rooms. He found her quiet, careful movements beguiling. Now they troubled him. They should have subsided, he thinks, by now.

In bed this morning: his eyes closed, he listens to her eat fruit thoughtlessly. She turns a pages in the novel she is reading, scratches her leg for a few seconds. With his eyes shut, he feels his way through the sounds, knowing she is using the last three fingers on her left hand, leaving the persimmon in her mouth, clenched between her teeth. He notes the extra slurping sounds as she holds the fruit there, sucking juice before it can drip down her chin onto the sheets.

He doesn’t remember becoming conscious, he only knows he has become so– his mind has turning from the dreams that are totally his own to Rosa. And at once he is awake, despite closed eyes.

He is thinking of how beautiful she is, thin and fragile in varying shades of warm red: white with peach undertones, a mellow pink. Last night she had startled him by emerging from the bathroom with a surprisingly shade of red nail polish on her toes. It clashed with her pale hair, a weak red the color of a peach tea.

The book she is reading as of late, was bought from a second hand book shop in Greenwich Village. She has been visiting this shop for years, since before they left the city. A coffee shop in the front portion of the shop with a wrickety balcony of ancient books tacked on as an after thought can keep her for hours.

Once Rosa had attended book groups, four of five women crowded around the little wooden tables in the front of the shop, discussing classics few others could get through.

Rosa has, for as long as he’s know her, sold her lumpy, strange art work, on crumbling, yellowed paper backs that smell like mildew and crackle, water logged, with every turn of a page.

She buys only two things–books and more art supplies to create sculptures which look, he thinks, like pie crust gone terribly wrong.

Once the sculptures are solid she paints over the “dough” and tosses in things–empty spools of thread, knitting needles and chop sticks, forks and once, even antique medical equipment, forceps and torn bits of fabric from a medical gown.

She earned more from that sculpture than from any of the others. Rosa likes Rauschenberg, the layers upon layers of crumbling artifacts. But Rosa’s sculptures are less chaotic, more subuded. Rouschenberg looks like fun and Rosa’s art looks like a surgical tray after an amputation.

She alternates her purchases every month, methodically: books for one, supplies the next—this month she bought boxes of books that she still hasn’t unpacked, wooden crates from The Strand, Housing Works, a shop on 13th Street, and the coffee shop and bookstore on Henry Street. Every time he walks by the crates the smell of mildew and rubber cement make his eyes water.

Rosa reattaches every spine with glue, and, when the spines and covers are so badly damaged they cannot be mended, she makes new ones with an exact-o knife and magazine cut-outs.

“Why do you do that?” He asked. “Nobody reads them but you.”

Rosa doesn’t look up but gently smooths thin layers of glue onto the flaccid cardboard of a tattered cover.

“I’m saving their lives,” she says, her voice small. He rubbed her back, afraid to move away from her but not knowing why. Finally he can’t stand the stench of glue and must retreat.

The book she is reading in bed this morning is small, hued in tones similar to a compost heap, rotting blues, greens and browns. The title is The Changeling. A girl with long hair dances on the cover, or maybe screaming–he’s forgotten which; Rosa told him once.

The girl is trapped in some sort of perpetual motion. He originally perceived the still of the girl to be locked in merriment but it might be anguish instead. He has had plenty of time to think about it, lying in bed this morning, quietly spying on Rosa with his eyes closed.

He opens his eyes now, slowly. This time he will keep them open and rise from bed.

Rosa puts the book down cautiously, finishing her persimmon and droping the pit of amber pulp into an empty coffee mug on her bedside table. She licks her fingers.

“I need to go into Manhattan,” she says. It’s unexpected; he nods without giving thought to the particulars, those irritating complications that will be undoubtedly be attached like a wedding dress with a long train.

Rosa goes to Manhattan twice a month–the second Friday and the last Wednesday, to meet with potential buyers for her art, talk to an agent over coffee and run by the lower East side gallery that is currently showing a collection of her work.

She goes to Manhattan alone and he cannot imagine what else she might do. Wait to come home again, he assumes.

On these days, Rosa drives herself to the train station and catches one of the hourly trains into Grand Central, navigating the inner city subways and street crowds alone.

He works in the city. Every week day he catches a seven a.m. train. He works on 5th and 42, which is an easy commute that he hates. He’s at work by eight, his fingers chasing each other across a dusty key board. By five he catches the same train home, running nose to nose with the Hudson.

He spends most of the time thinking about the weather he never sees–there are no windows in his office. New York City, as far as he’s concerned, is a room in which he spends eight hours a day. The hallway to this room is very long, but he walks it every day, and then takes the same long hallway out again. His office is at one end of the tunnel, Rosa is at the other.

He hates the city. He can’t imagine why Rosa would want to go there when she didn’t have to. Couldn’t she conduct her business via telephone?

When he first met Rosa they were both living in Brooklyn–even Brooklyn was too close for him. Rosa has always kept this space outside of the city, a small-town studio for her artwork.

She grew up in the Midwest, but a point in the Midwest so close to the South he can’t help but think of it as that. He also can’t ever remember the exact name of the town. Sometimes even the state muddles into another–Missouri or Mississippi, or maybe that was wrong all together and it was Kansas or Kentucky? Where ever it was it was a green place with hills and ancient, dense trees. She never says aloud that she misses those things, so he can’t be sure how she feels about it. He assumes she must prefer the country to the city, growing up so far outside of one.

“Is your book set in New York?” He asks, thinking that’s what inspired her sudden desire for a trip in to Manhattan. It is not the second Friday or the last Wednesday. There is no reason for her to go.

She looks confused and pulls her bare legs tight bneath her lacy night gown. Her light eyebrows knitting together, the skin beneath them pale pink.

“No,” she says slowly, turning. “Massachusetts.” She gets out of bed and drops her feet to the floor. She says nothing else. It’s so silent he can hear her feet smack against the tiles as she walks to the bathroom.

From the bathroom she listens through the half closed door, lathering soap onto her skin in half circles.

“Why do you want to suddenly go to Manhattan?”

“Change of pace,” she says. “And, I have some work to do, some people to meet. I’d just go for a few days” her voice is barley audible. He sits up in bed. He has now been awake for nearly ten minutes, he estimates.

“A few days,” he repeats, rising from bed and walking toward the bathroom.

He pats Rosa’s back and moves behind her, moving his hand beneath her night gown. Rosa startles–a cat’s jump, even though she saw him coming. He moves his hand, this time placing it firmly on her waist: it’s without curve, like a child’s.

He uses his hand to guide her to the side, out of his way, reaching for the medicine cabinet.

The mirror has begun to fog blindly from the water Rosa has used to wash her face. She uses very hot water. He leaves finger prints when he touches the glass, which reveals the smooth shining surface of the mirror as he pries it open. It groans, the warped metal constructing the skeleton of the cabinet, its supporting sides bent and rusted, an acidic orange, sick and bubbled, barley supporting the medicine bottles and cosmetic cases within.

“A few days? In New York?” He asks dumbly. It is a genuine question. “You mean you’d stay for more than just this afternoon?”

Rosa clears her throat.

“I just thought it’d be neat to be there. To be in the city for that kind of thing. I don’t know.” She shrugs. Her shoulders are very narrow. For whatever reason he sees the word sparrow in his mind, as though it’s written in the air. Rosa is both: narrow and sparrow.

Not looking at him she says, “When I got up this morning I read the strangest article in the The Times.” He watches her face as she speaks. She is examining her finger nails. “It was about the Big Apple Circus,” she continues. “Apparently the person who is the ring master isn’t allowed to be called that.”

“Why not?” He asks. Rosa moves her finger to her mouth and bites at the nail a little.

“Apparently they haven’t been there as long as the original ring master. But the original ring master too old to do it anymore. He can’t move around easily or give orders. So, the younger ring master does everything–introduces the animals and acrobats, but the other guy is still around, so the young person is called the host or hostess, I can’t remember if it was a lady or a man, the new ring master.”

He stares at her for a moment. “That’s a weird story. Is that what the article was actually about?”
Rosa looks up suddenly, jarred.

“What?” She asks.

“The article,” he repeats. “Was the point actually that this person had to call themselves host or hostess for reasons of circus politics?”

Rosa meets his eyes in the mirror, looking forward instead of to the side.

“Oh,” she says, “no,” it was just a side comment. One sentence, really. I just thought it was strange.”

He laughs and kisses her cheek.

“You focus on the weirdest things sometimes,” He tells her.

She shrugs again. “It just doesn’t seem right, if one person is doing all the work.”

He changes the subject after a moment’s pause. “Where will you stay? I could go with you,” He says. “The City. Bet it’ll be crowded so close to Christmas. I know how you feel about it.” Rosa meets his eyes in the mirror again.

“What do you mean?” She asks.

“Oh, nothing, I just know you prefer the country, that’s all.” She stares at him in the mirror then breaks into a strange smile.

“You don’t have to come with me,” she tells him, looking at him in the still foggy mirror, drops of water sliding down the glass.

When they had moved from Brooklyn to her studio full time, they collected dull, base brown cardboard boxes broken down by city ordinance and bound together with twine. They had reconstructed them, breathing life back into the deflated, and stuffed them full of flatware and sweaters, toiletries and books. Rugs had been rolled, pictures were removed and leaned against the now naked walls they had once covered, only white boxes marking their former places.

They had emptied out both of their apartments and combined both sets of boxes, his and hers, in the back of a moving truck. It had rained the day they moved, warm rain on cement, puddles collecting as they carried lamps with wrapped cords and empty drawers outside. They drank beer with their feet dangling off the back of the truck, happy–everything had the promise of being unpacked, of a future.

Her studio was hour up the Hudson, a green, opulent ride in summer; gray, stone-dead in winter: a converted barn a mile from one of the grandiose mansions and wood and rock fences. It had been, once, a great building, stalls for horses or cows, windows with gray arches and heavy stone ledges beneath that could double as benches.

Now, however, the clean-up job done to turn the barn into a living space left it looking too sparse and orderly. The heavy stone more ruminant of a monastery than a home; with heavy, unfinished doors, the wood splintered and dark as coffee or fresh mud.

It was all the space they had never had in the city, enough to do cartwheels, to roller skate on the wooden and stone floors, if they had wanted to. Instead Rosa would lie on the floors in a narrow stretch of sunlight, the yellow beams casting a patchwork quilt of light, her feet bare.

It didn’t feel so much inspiring, she often confessed, as it did overwhelming.

It seems as though he can’t remember their life before they moved away from Brooklyn. It’s like his brain has fogged over like the bathroom mirror. Had he met her at a bar or a party? A friend of a friend or waiting for the L train? He couldn’t ask her. Men can’t ask women questions like that, he knew. Once there had been many mutual friends in Brooklyn and New York.

When they had first moved they had tried to keep up with them all, squeezing in drinks after work, catching the eight o’clock train home instead of the six. But once winter hit New York it was dark by five, the train ride home inky, and the trees dark smudges whirling by. He couldn’t take all that winter darkness, the cold lights and loud noises of the city bouncing off the icy surfaces. He had only wanted to be home– to see Rosa bent over her art table in the window, her hair warm with the light of the studio behind her. Their friends eventually gave up.

He volunteers to drive Rosa to the train station. There’s no reason for him to go into Manhattan today. It’s a weekend, Rosa tells him several times.

“You might even be bored,” she adds sliding into the passenger seat.

“You always over-pack,” he tells her, lightly touching her nose with his pointer finger as he closes her door. Rosa gave a sigh and a soft smile. She says nothing.

He drives toward the outline of West Point, the red brick building directly across the Hudson, staring back evenly at the city bound congregated on the train station platform.

“We should go visit West Point.” Rosa nods.

“Sure, sometime.”

“We’ve lived her a year and never gone,” he tells her. Rosa shrugs.

“We always mean to do a lot of things and don’t seem to get around to them, don’t we?” She says wistfully.

He looks over at her. “Are you okay?”

She looks startled again. “Sure,” she says. The car has stopped. She opens her door while he pulls the keys from the ignition and begins to get out, retrieving her heavy, over-packed suitcase from the car’s trunk.

He waits on the platform with Rosa. She keeps straining and turning her neck to see down the track. He holds her hand while they wait, her suitcase sitting on the ground near her feet. Her hand is very cold and it’s noisy on the platform.

Something has happened to the usual trash receptacles. They’ve been removed. Black garbage sacks are tied to the chain links of the fence, a simple but sturdy knot of the plastic onto metal securing them. The loose bottoms of the bags are blowing in the wind like kite tails trying to take off, their tether catching at the last minute, ripping them down from the sky.

When the train comes at last there is a rush of air. The woman standing next to them is reading a book. The pages begin to flutter madly, chaotically trying to find no page in particular, it blows Rosa’s hair back from her face as she picks up her suitcase.

As she moves toward the open train door there is the slight resistance from his hand clasping hers. She looks at him, smiles, and pulls her hand lose. She holds his eyes for a moment before breaking eye contact and using her now free hand to push a few strands of hair behind one ear. The wisps catch his eye for a moment–they have never looked more red.