Adios, Scheherazade

And Roscoe was afraid she’d found one.

Sitting there at the dressing table, looking into his hurt and tired eyes, he thought back to the first time he’d ever made love to Margo, and how he had foolishly believed that that bliss could go on forever.

The circus had been playing Madison Square Garden in New York City, and everything was the same as usual until the night Margo’s favorite horse, frightened by a firecracker thrown by a mischievous child, jumped awkwardly from his platform and broke his leg. He’d had to be destroyed, of course, and it hadn’t really surprised Roscoe, later that night, to see Margo sitting brooding in the last booth of the little bar a few blocks north of the Garden where Roscoe had been spending his own lonely nights since the circus had come to town.

Roscoe knew Margo slightly, and he knew about what had happened to the horse, Champion, so he went over to commiserate with her, and she invited him to sit with her at the table.

She was already more than a little drunk. “You have a kind face under your clown makeup,” she said. “I’m not used to men looking at me the way you are.”

“How do men usually look at you?” he asked her.

“You are a clown, aren’t you?” she said.

“Well,” he said, “Betsy still isn’t talking to me.”

“Which you probably deserve,” she said.

“You would say that,” he said. “We have people coming out for Thanksgiving, too. Pete and Ann. How can we have a fight in front of other people?”

“So you’ll make it up tonight,” she said.

“I am feeling kind of horny,” he said.

“For Betsy?” she said.

“For something with a cunt,” he said.

“Betsy has a cunt,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “She’s gone to the store again. She’s always going to the store. Every time I turn around Betsy’s going to the goddam store. I’m in the wrong business. I ought to open a store.”

“I know you’re in the wrong business,” she said. “Besides, Betsy has to buy things for Thanksgiving dinner.”

“What the hell have I got to be thankful for?” he said.

“Don’t you love Betsy?” she said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I honest to God don’t know. I try not to ask the question, if you want to know the truth.”

“You used to love her, didn’t you?”

I used to want to fuck her all the time, if that’s what you mean. She was a freshman when I was a junior, and she was a local girl up there in Monequois, she didn’t live on campus at all. She lived with her parents and her brothers.

I’m not going to use quotation marks any more. If I’m going to talk about Betsy and her family and how we met and all that shit, what do I need Roscoe and Margo for?

Why don’t I start again, try again?

Not with Circus Lust, though. I don’t know anything about the circus, I can’t write that shit. Even Spack draws the line somewhere. Dick told me about that guy that was ghosting for him, that guy whatsisname out in Denver, and he did this book with the Martians suddenly landing in the middle of the book, sex scenes between Earthwomen and Martians, all this weird stuff out of nowhere, the first half an ordinary sex novel and then insanity after that, and they rejected it, Spack rejected it, and Dick had to get on the phone with Spack and say it was just an experiment he’d been trying and he wouldn’t do it any more. And they had to find another ghost.

They had to find another ghost.

I can’t do a book about a clown married to a bareback rider who’s fucking a lion tamer on the side. I just can’t do it, the whole thing would turn into farce and stupidity and I’d be out on my ear.

Betsy must think I’m hard at work on the book. All I do is type.

She was a blind date. A friend of mine set it up, he said she was a local girl. I said, “Will I score?” and he said, “How do I know?”

We went to a movie, The Miracle Worker, about Helen Keller. Four of us, two couples. Afterwards, I did a pretty good imitation of Helen Keller myself, because basically I was bored stiff with this blind date chick and I had the feeling I wasn’t going to be making out very much at all. We sat in the back of Howie’s car, driving out of town to a bar on the old Montreal road, and she kept making conversation, doing freshman-type talk about how exciting everything was. The campus, and the teachers, and the classes, and the basketball team. I barely knew we had a basketball team, but this chick had tried out to be a cheerleader. If we’d had a football team she would have gone nuts for that, too, but we didn’t have a football team so she was limited to basketball. Which is too bad, in a way, because basketball players aren’t sex symbols like football players, they’re too long and lean, they look like illustrations of sinews in anatomy class, they’re almost as overspecialized and sexless as track stars. If we’d had a football team, maybe Betsy wouldn’t have settled for me.