The Secrets of a Fire King Read online

  “It would require immense balance,” he said, forcing the laughter from his voice, seeing suddenly that it was important to her, however ludicrous it sounded.

  “It would,” she agreed. “That’s what I mean. And immense concentration. Because you’d have to maintain control, even as you lost control. You’d have to achieve an extraordinary frame of mind.”

  He picked her up, which was easy because she was so lean and light, and because, though thin, he was a gymnast and very strong. He put her down on the practice mat in the front hallway. She went into a headstand almost immediately, her white body lifting into the air. He did the same, so that they faced each other, only inches apart. He nearly laughed at her inverted face, altered by gravity, the cheeks and forehead plumper than usual, and pink with exertion. Then he felt the rough sole of her foot as it ran down his calf, the back of his thigh. He looked up and saw her narrow body tapering into the far point of her toes. Then her legs opened in a graceful V, they lowered very slowly and caught him lightly by the waist.

  “I don’t know if this is going to work,” he said, feeling himself lurch closer to her, caught in the delicate embrace of her thighs. They looked at each other, eye to eye, and it seemed to him that he had never seen another person so clearly. Something about their inverted pose removed all distractions. Françoise had small eyes, with an intensity and quickness that sometimes made him think of a bird. Yet from such a distance her eyes were all he saw; they changed, grew larger, and the darkness of her pupils seemed to draw him closer, then closer still, the most intimate knowledge of her he had ever had.

  “It will,” she said. “I’m sure.”

  But it didn’t. They started laughing, simultaneously it seemed to Marc, though later Françoise insisted he was the one to begin. Either way, once they started they couldn’t stop, and they had ended up falling, gracefully of course, because they knew how to fall. They didn’t try again for several weeks. Then the posture felt more familiar and they didn’t laugh, but it was still difficult, the most difficult thing Marc had ever attempted. That time it was Françoise who moved too quickly and lost her balance.

  “Still,” she said later. “I’m sure now it’s not impossible. It’s just something that will take some work, that’s all. Some time.” She spoke as if they had all the time together in the world, and Marc drew her close.

  “Maybe you should move in here,” he said. He tried to make it sound very casual, for he had observed her independence and didn’t want her to be frightened away. From any angle, he knew he was already in love with her. “It would give us more opportunities.” He ran his hand up the back of her thigh. “To practice.”

  The sun had grown stronger, and Marc stretched his arms against the back of the bench, closed his eyes, imagined that small rays of light pierced like healing needles to his bones. He was very tired. They had been doing this act for fourteen years now, and he was tired. Several times he had mentioned to Françoise that they should quit, but her answer was always the same: She tightened the line of her lips, and worked more quickly at whatever was in her hands.

  “We’re not old,” she said once. She was sewing sequins onto her costume, and the needle began to jab in and out with tremendous speed. Then she threw the garment down and plunged forward into a somersault that ended in a handstand. Her narrow legs pointed to the ceiling, and her short skirt fell around her chin.

  “See these legs,” she said, making small scissor kicks in the air. “These legs are not ready to retire.” She let herself slowly onto the floor. “Besides,” she said, not meaning to be cruel. “It was for you we started this.”

  Well, it was true, that part. Sometime in their middle twenties it had become clear to them both that they would never be famous gymnasts. This was a painful discovery because fame was something they had both expected from their earliest years on the floor. They were both very good, just not quite good enough. Younger and younger people were coming, with firm and supple bodies that bent in impossible ways. They were winning the prizes. Soon Françoise was offered a position as assistant instructor and Marc, realizing that his gymnastic days were at an end, packed the things from his locker and became an apprentice plumber.

  He was a good plumber. He didn’t mind the work, and at first it required all of his attention to learn the intricacies of joining pipes, the tricky dynamics of water. Soon, though, it became routine, and he became restless. He took up juggling, and sometimes he amused the older men by juggling his wrenches, tossing them in high arcs and amazing patterns. “That’s it,” they’d say, spellbound, “that’s it, Marc.” Later, he’d hear them telling the others about it. After work, drinking beer in one smoky tavern or another, they’d hand him things: boiled eggs, spoons, balls from the pool table. He remembered those days as happy ones, some calm equilibrium between the expectations of his youth and the quieter life to come. In his mind it existed as a perpetual summer, though surely it was longer than a summer’s length. He walked home every night through the golden dying light of the solstice, the feel of round, weighty objects in his fingers, and found Françoise, freshly showered and dressed in something loose, pouring wine into clear glasses.

  It ended soon enough. He scarred a marble floor when a wrench slipped through his fingers, and a week later he’d taken out a chandelier with a piece of pipe that flew unexpectedly high. He’d had to pay for that one, and he’d nearly been fired. That was the end of his on-the-job performances. He was back to solid plumbing, though his fingers itched now with the urge to toss small objects in the air. At home he juggled everything: eggs and bananas, matching bars of soap, the teacups Françoise’s parents gave them when they finally married. The great restlessness that had entered him grew into an obsession. He exercised rigorously, morning and night, horrified by the slow softening of his flesh. He arrived home before Françoise and waited, some wild position trembling in his mind. Come, he’d say, as soon as her key was in the lock. He took her hand and led her to the practice mats, without giving her a chance to rest or shower or even put down her purse. Come, let’s try this. He became obsessed with the thought of making love in a headstand. When Françoise, exhausted from a day of teaching, slipped or fell, he lost his temper. He knew it was irrational, but he felt as though everything depended on it, suddenly, that if they could not achieve this thing together then everything else would be lost.

  “We have to do something about this,” Françoise said, finally. They were lying on the practice mats, and Marc was turned away from her, his arms hugged close to his body. In his state of mind those days, he thought she meant they should be divorced.

  “Marc,” she said, touching his shoulder with her callous and chalk-smoothed palm. “Marc, you have to get your life back. This is what I think.” She had stood up, pulling on a black silk robe with a dragon embroidered on the back.

  And so it had begun, their troupe. Over the years the other members had changed, grown younger or older, more or less skilled. Drunkards had been fired, a woman who was flawless in practice but who shattered things in front of an audience was also fired. But always, at the center of it all, were he and Françoise. They went to nearby towns and villages, they performed for the children of the wealthy. Françoise kept her job as an instructor, and he was a plumber all week long. But on the weekends they were transformed, masters of a balancing act they had sustained for fourteen years.

  Now it was Françoise who needed to continue. Eight months ago she had been retired as an instructor, promoted into the management of the school. The day she received this news she had stood before her three-sided mirror for a long time, flexing muscle after muscle and glancing back and forth, from flesh to glass. Then she had turned away sharply, closing the mirrored wings across the flat center piece. She had bought six new suits and had never mentioned her promotion again. Three days later she had found Peter tossing urns in the park, and had invited him to join the troupe.

  Peter’s youthful presence had forced Marc to look around. He notice
d that the sword dancer was slower than others had been and that Frank, the magician, was growing fat. He wondered how much longer they could continue. Yet Françoise showed no signs of stopping. Marc imagined them years from now, he juggling bifocals, false teeth, pill bottles, all the evidence of his age, while Françoise twirled on the trapeze, her hair a blaze of white against the vivid sky.

  The rattling of carts woke him from his pleasant drowsing in the sun, and he looked up. Their lockers were being wheeled across the park. He saw the trunks come first, containing equipment and costumes. Then came the trapeze, dismantled into long poles and bars and ropes. It took four men to carry it, balanced on their shoulders. Finally three men followed carrying the large boxes marked FRAGILE. These were Peter’s porcelain urns, packed in layers of bubble plastic. The man before had used ordinary urns, the cheapest he could fid, but Peter poked around in antique shops and flea markets, looking for pieces that would make the audience gasp as they floated through the air. Between shows he was very careful of them, treating them delicately, hovering anxiously around as they were unpacked.

  Marc stood up from his bench, stretched, and followed the men at a distance across the diagonal of the park. As he had anticipated, they stopped at the edge of the square, at the junction of the two bricked streets, and began to unpack and measure, pausing now and then to point at the sky. In a while the trapeze would go up and Marc would climb up to test it, to check the sway and balance. But now he was hungry. He went into a cafe on the corner and ordered a cheese sandwich and tomato soup, taking some kind of reassurance from the ordinary food.

  When he came out, Françoise and the others were already there. They were all dressed in sweatsuits and tennis shoes, but already Françoise stood at a slight distance from the others, a distance that marked her as the star. And it was true—though they had started the troupe together, it was because of Françoise that it continued. The man who could balance Oriental urns on the nape of his neck or the bridge of his nose, the man whose dancing partner was a bright flashing sword hugged close to his body, the man who could stand on half a dozen eggs without crushing them—all these came together because of Françoise. Every crowd knew this before she ever appeared. The trapeze hung above all the other acts, swaying in the slight breeze that came through the city streets. 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 audible 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.

  “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 flung 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 sweatshirt. 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 scaling 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 flight took her high, near the tops of the buildings, and far out over the 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, flattening 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 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 th
ey 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 find 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 contractions 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 insidious 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.