For instance, she expected nothing much of Cyprian, except that he not fall off the chair. For his part, after only one week, Cyprian grew attached to belonging to Delphine. He curled in the cheap rooming house beds, under covers that Delphine had requested be relaundered, as she was picky about bugs. While he nursed his sore muscles, Delphine busied herself with their survival. She mended what they’d torn during their act, planned how long to stay in each town and which to hit next, counted money, if there was any, wrote letters and advertisements to newspapers, decided what they’d eat.
The morning after the flagpole balance, she proclaimed that they had the wherewithal to eat sausage with their eggs and oatmeal. It was necessary, anyway, to fortify themselves for the long practice session they had decided to hold in a cow pasture. They ate slowly, luxuriously, from thick scarred plates. The café owner knew them now and brought extra sugar and a leftover pancake. Cyprian drew a diagram. A stick man standing on his hands on a chair, a random-looking but really very carefully balanced stack of chairs, the bottom chair on the stomach of a woman whose stick arms and legs were supports, whose balloon face smiled out off the scrap of a playbill.
“This will make our fortune,” said Cyprian, solemn.
Delphine looked at the tower of chairs, the line that represented her gut beneath, and forked up another sausage.
NO COWS WERE IN the pasture and the patties on the ground were dry circles. She flung them off like plates and did some stretches, a couple dozen toe touches. Flexed. Hard to begin with, her stomach muscles would soon be phenomenal. Cyprian showed her how to develop them using a series of scientific exercises. Now, as he had to fall hundreds of times before he perfected an act, Delphine calmly yawned as the weight left her stomach. An instant later he crashed beside her. She didn’t move until all of the chairs had fallen away, battering him. He set the chairs up so that if she just held her position beneath she could not be harmed. Time after time, as he fell and fell, memorizing each piece of the balancing trick in his body, she felt the edifice collapse and strike the earth around her. She stayed still. A few times a chair leg came close enough so that her hair was disarranged a bit, but beyond that she was never touched.
THE DAY WAS SPECTACULAR, and Delphine was dressed in a long elegant red skirt that swirled as she walked before the crowd. She did four cartwheels, and ended up sitting on a low, broad table. Cross-legged, she closed her eyes, folded her hands, and meditated to draw out the suspense. Just as the audience began to shift, impatient, she flipped over and became a human table. Cyprian then approached, holding a large wooden tray set up with tea things. On his head and his shoulders he carried an arrangement of six chairs, which he shrugged off, one by one. He sat upon the last chair, put the tray on Delphine’s torso, nodded pleasantly to her. He drew a fork, a knife, a napkin, a herring from his sleeve, and then proceeded to lay out the plate and eat the herring, which he cut into tiny bites and chewed rapidly. When he was finished, he dabbed his mouth, stretched, appeared ready to relax with a smoke and a good book.
At that point, he frowned, he did not look comfortable. He sat in each chair, frowning harder, until he came to the last chair. “Do you mind?” he politely asked Delphine. “I suppose not,” she answered. He then cleared off the tea things and set the first chair on the tea tray on her stomach. Now they needed a helpful member of the audience to pass the chairs up. One by one, leg upon wooden seat, Cyprian balanced the chairs. Climbed higher, higher. Finally, he had the sixth chair balanced and he sat down on it and took a cigarette from his pocket.
That was always when he noticed that he had forgotten his matches on the table, or rather, upon Delphine. (Someone in the audience always hollered the information, proud to make such a discovery.) Someone always offered to throw the matches up, but Cyprian politely declined any help, for already he had taken from his shirt collar a little collapsible fishing rod and unreeled the line. The end was fitted with a bobber, an ostentatious hook, and a sinker that was really a magnet and easily attracted the fixed matchbox.
Once Cyprian had possession of the matches, he slowly and luxuriously lighted his cigarette. Then with many flourishes he pulled out abook, and pretended to regale the assembled crowd with its contents—more or less off-color jokes, which he laughed at, too, and even kicked up his heels, so that the chairs swayed alarmingly and drew gratifying whoops of anxiety from the crowd. Cyprian did not fall, of course. Once he finished his book, he tossed it. Did a handstand, on the topmost chair. Everyone applauded until, most amazingly—and here is where Delphine wished for an accomplice to produce a drum roll—he came down the chairs, headfirst, dismantling his tower by piling each chair onto his feet, hooking one to the next, until he stood on his hands under the chairs, on Delphine’s stomach.
Let us not forget that all of this time she was beneath, wrists locked, neck in a vise, gut clenched, legs solidly planted underneath the feminine red skirt!
Balancing on her torso, with the chairs on his feet, Cyprian craned his neck until his lips met hers. His kiss was falsely passionate, which got a roar from the crowd and had already started a slow burn of resentment in Delphine. The chairs were still balanced above them. They looked into each other’s eyes, and that to Delphine was at first intriguing. But what do you really see in the eyes of a man doing a handstand with six chairs balanced on his feet? You see that he is worried he will drop the chairs.
THEY HOOKED UP with a vaudeville group and traveling circus from Illinois in the town of Shotwell, by the North Dakota border. “This is more my kind of place,” said Delphine to Cyprian, comforted by the horizon all around them. At the end of every street the sky loomed. There had been too many trees surrounding the towns before. The open sky was homey. As well, they met carousing friends. Cyprian knew a few of these people from fairs and other shows, and the first evening, he brought her along with him to the local saloon. The place was a low, dank sty. They sat in a booth in the corner, packed in with three other couples, and were immediately served hard liquor. Up until then, Delphine had never witnessed Cyprian drinking, though at times she detected a whiff on his breath. Presented with a shot glass and a beer, he tried to slug the first back, and choked. Delphine said nothing, just nursed her beer and quietly tipped the shot onto the floor. She was almost ashamed of her fierce contempt for alcohol.
After the first round, two of the other couples got up and danced. That left Delphine and Cyprian, and another two. The men were involved in some deep topic, though, and since Delphine and the other girl were at their men’s left elbows they could not really make an impact on the conversation or start talking to each other. Delphine pretended to watch the other dancers for a while. Bored, she went to visit the powder room, which was anything but a place to powder your nose, then she stepped outside to marvel at the sunset. The sky was roiling, the edges of the clouds were a startling green, and the light behind them an appalling threatful yellow. A man who passed by in the road said that it looked like a goddamn storm.
“What’s it to you?” said Delphine, smiling just because she always smiled at a man, and because she was happy to see a sky that reminded her of home.
“I’m a farmer, that’s what.”
“Well you should come and see our show,” said Delphine. “You should bring your whole family.”
“Does anybody take their clothes off in it?”
“Sure!” said Delphine. “We all do!”
“Oh mama,” said the man.
When Delphine stepped back into the saloon, the other girl was smoking grumpily in the booth and the men were gone.
“Where are they?” said Delphine.
“How the hell should I know?” said the girl. Her lips moved nervously, drinking and smoking, like two limp ropes. Painted with a glossy purple red, those lips gave Delphine a shiver up her back. The girl was ugly, Delphine decided, and that made her mean. Plus, she’d ordered two more drinks and Delphine thought at first she’d ordered one for her. But the girl drank both, one after the
other, right in front of her.
“What’s wrong with you?” Delphine asked.
“How the hell should I know?” said the girl.
Delphine left the saloon and walked back out into the road, where the sky was changing as fast as Delphine herself used to when she was an actress. Not for the first time since she’d left her father, she felt lonely and out of sorts. Perhaps all that space was making her homesick. Maybe it was the beer, but the absence of Cyprian was certainly part of it as well. He was very attentive to her moods, and when she felt blue, she told him. He usually came up with some way to cheer her. For instance, the last time she’d entered one of these slumps he’d picked her pocket, for she always kept some money in an easily unbuttoned side vent of her jacket, and he’d bought her a spray of red hothouse roses. That was a thing she’d never had before, roses. She had dried them and kept the petals in a handkerchief just to remember. Then there was another time he’d bought her a little jar of peanut butter to eat with a spoon. That was a treat. He’d bought her an ice cream on a stick, and he’d also done little things for her that did not require money. He’d picked up pretty stones by the lake, and once a tiny black arrowhead that he said an old-time Ojibwe probably used to shoot a bird. She had tied it on a tiny cord, and still wore it around her neck. Now, Delphine decided that he probably had gone somewhere to buy her a gift. It cheered her to find two dollars missing from the stash.
They were staying in a tent this time. She went back to the camp cot, rolled herself in her blanket, and woke before morning because the storm had indeed come and blown through the tent’s unwaxed canvas walls and gotten her soaking wet. Luckily, the stuff in the middle was hardly damp, and she was able to string up a line between two trees in order to dry it all. Cyprian had not slept in the tent. Irritation pinched the back of her neck. But when he showed up he was so dear, so sweet to her, so fawning and anxious for her affection and, indeed, he had brought her the gift of a daisy cleverly carved of pure chocolate, that her annoyance collapsed. She smiled into his face and he held her to his chest, which was hard as a piece of armor.
“I love you,” she said. It was not the first time she had said it, but there was in her a great tearful lump of emotion that the words unblocked. Tears stung and she reared back, energized.
“Where the hell were you!”
“Nowhere,” he said.
He did not say this to her smoothly or in a manipulating way, but painfully, as though he really had been nowhere. Smoothing her hair back from her face, he kissed her forehead, right below the middle parting. Her hair was braided to either side. She looked, and felt, like a child. Cyprian’s voice was so astonishingly sad that she forgot her need to know and molded to him in a melt of sympathy. His arms tightened, to the point that she had to take tiny little breaths. That was all right. They were sitting underneath a tree. Delphine was always to remember that. Without her knowing what had happened, they were close, so close, and she could sense every fiber of his doubtless love for her singing through his skin and in his thoughts. She felt entirely safe. She did not want to move. He fell asleep, beneath the tree, but his arm stayed tightly flexed. Delphine was content to watch the world wake up around them, the earth brighten, the fields beyond fields of green wheat thrash to life underneath a powerful mirror.
THEY MADE IT ALL the way to Gorefield, Manitoba, before she found out what the nowhere was and why it pained him to have told her about it. This time, at a fancy hotel, they stayed in the bridal suite. The furniture was elaborate, all spindles and spools, and the upholstery looked like tapestries right out of a museum. The rugs were deep and probably Persian, but what did Delphine know. She had splurged on this room because she was curious, once and for all, whether they could fall in love. In a way, they did. Not at first. He kept his eyes shut while they were rolling around, and seemed to be in a state of deep concentration. Though it all felt mechanical, she did not want to disturb him. She was alert, a little bored. His hands sprang off her breasts or he tweaked her nipples in a way that was unthinking, even painful. She wanted to bat him on the head, and was about to give up, when, with a happy groan, he climaxed, or at least pretended to.
Immediately, he eyed her for approval like a dog.
She patted his head. After a while, she turned him to face her. That was when they looked into each other’s eyes and there commenced a mysterious bonding—something that Delphine had never felt before with anybody else on earth. They left time, left space, and just existed in the calm power of their eyes. They did not let go. Delphine felt loving energy rise in her and without any effort Cyprian went hard. She rolled on top of him and then they started moving again. The deeper they stared into each other’s eyes the more each wanted to make use of the other body, the more they loved. The whole thing went on and on until they were exhausted. Still, every time they looked into each other’s eyes, they started again to move, found themselves doing another thing, finding out something new. It was a strange experience, one they didn’t talk about afterward, or, unfortunately, manage to repeat.
TWO DAYS LATER, Delphine went down to the river on a walk. Cyprian had skipped out on her after their performance and had not told her where he was bound. That left her alone to amuse herself, and because she was good at that she didn’t sulk or mope but went to the town’s one point of interest. Delphine sat down on a low bench by the river and watched the river move on by. It was heading north, rapidly, she could hear the current lapping shore, dragging little sticks into it, moving dirt and leaves and fish along.
The night was peaceful, and a few steady lights shone just across on the other shore, enough to see a few feet ahead. Annoyed to hear voices, footsteps, Delphine slipped into the tall brush just beside the bench. She wanted her bench back, and not to have to talk to anybody. Soon, two men walked into the clearing. Once they got to the bench they shut up and then one sat down and the other knelt before him. Delphine was hidden slightly behind the bench off to one side. Although she was immediately intrigued, she couldn’t see what was taking place. Later, when she put it all together in her mind, she realized it was probably good she hadn’t seen it all at once. It would have been too much of a shock. She hadn’t known that men could get together like that.
“Oh my dear fucking God,” groaned the man on the bench. He put a period stop between each word and moaned the last one. His hands flopped out and his legs sprawled. The man on his knees was utterly silent. There was some movement. The man who spoke was wearing a suit, Delphine saw, because now he turned and held the backrest of the bench as he bent over. The kneeling man then stood behind him, white shirt glowing. There was something about that white blaze of shirt. Delphine peered into the smudge of air. The shirt was suddenly gone, the men were half naked, one was moving across the other with a fluid eagerness.
The men kept changing and dissolving. They rolled over each other like fish. Sometimes they were frantic with a small animal’s alacrity, then they slowed into a tenderer pulse. There was no way, now, that Delphine could leave her hiding place, not that she really wanted to. She could not see exactly how the sex was taking place, but she was curious. She put the mechanics together and nodded when she made each discovery. Suddenly she understood that Cyprian was the man who had thrown off the blaze of shirt, and then she did one of those things she often did that surprised her. She walked out of the bushes and cheerfully said hello.
Panicked, the men rolled away from each other. Her numb shock made her wicked. She sat down on the bench, began to talk.
“I was just out looking for you, honey,” she said.
“Delphine, I don’t know what—”
“Christ almighty,” said the other man, scrambling for his clothes.
Delphine crossed her legs, lighted a cigarette, and blew the smoke out gently. As she continued to speak, to elicit polite answers and draw up neutral topics of conversation, a dreamlike hilarity took hold of her. She made a small joke and when the two men laughed reality skewed. No questions ma
de sense, her mind was operating on too many levels. Layers of dark curiosity. Still, she did not acknowledge what she’d interrupted but, wielding an amused power, continued to make irresistible small talk. The three bantered back and forth as they walked away from the side of the river. The men shook hands and went their separate ways. Side by side and gravely thoughtful, Delphine and Cyprian walked back to their own room.
I wonder what will happen once we’re inside, thought Delphine. She had the willful naïveté to imagine that now that this was out in the open she and Cyprian could at last be true lovers. She also had the wit to know this was simpleminded. Nothing at all happened once they got back into the room. It all seemed too exhausting to contemplate. They stripped down to their underwear, got under the covers, and held hands like two mourners, alert and lost, unable to speak.
IN THE NIGHT, deep in the dark, Delphine’s brain flickered on and her thoughts woke her. She let the roil of feelings wash over her and then shook Cyprian until he groaned. She meant to say something cutting about his betrayal, to ask didn’t he remember how they’d looked into each other’s eyes? She meant to ask him why the hell he never told her he was that way, to shout in his face or just wail miserably. But in the second before her voice left her lips, other words formed.
“How do you balance?”
Her voice was calm, curious, and once she asked the question she found that she really wanted to know the answer. Cyprian was also wide awake. He’d never really slept. He put his palms over his face and breathed through his fingers.