And then it would stop. Abruptly, mysteriously, it was over. She stood there, pale — exhausted — panting. Her eyes, wide open, saw nothing. Slowly she came back to herself. Then quickly, a little unsteadily, she would walk away from us to collapse on a couch.
These feats of laughter were immediately recognized as bold and striking, far superior to the performances we had become accustomed to; and Clara Schuler was invited to all the laugh parties, applauded, and talked about admiringly, for she had a gift of reckless laughter we had not seen before.
Now whenever loose groups of us gathered to pursue our game, Clara Schuler was there. We grew used to her, waited impatiently for her when she was late, this quiet girl who’d never done anything but sit obediently in our classes with both feet on the floor before revealing dark depths of laughter that left us wondering and a little uneasy. For there was something about Clara Schuler’s laughter. It wasn’t simply that it was more intense than ours. Rather, she seemed to be transformed into an object, seized by a force that raged through her before letting her go. Yes, in Clara Schuler the discrepancy between the body that was shaken and the force that shook it appeared so sharply that at the very moment she became most physical she seemed to lose the sense of her body altogether. For the rest of us, there was always a touch of the sensual in these performances: breasts shook, hips jerked, flesh moved in unexpected ways. But Clara Schuler seemed to pass beyond the easy suggestiveness of moving bodies and to enter new and more ambiguous realms, where the body was the summoner of some dark, eruptive power that was able to flourish only through the accident of a material thing, which it flung about as if cruelly before abandoning it to the rites of exhaustion.
One day she appeared among us alone. Helen Jacoby was at the beach, or out shopping with her mother. We understood that Clara Schuler no longer needed her friend in the old way — that she had come into her own. And we understood one other thing: she would allow nothing to stop her from joining our game, from yielding to the seductions of laughter, for she lived, more and more, only in order to let herself go.
It was inevitable that rumors should spring up about Clara Schuler. It was said that she’d begun to go to the laugh parlors, those half-real, half-legendary places where laughter was wrung out of willing victims by special arts. It was said that one night she had paid a visit to Bernice Alderson’s house, where in the lamplit bedroom on the third floor she’d been constrained and skillfully tickled for nearly an hour, at which point she fainted dead away and had to be revived by a scented oil rubbed into her temples. It was said that at another house she’d been so shaken by extreme laughter that her body rose from the bed and hovered in the air for thirty seconds before dropping back down. We knew that this last was a lie, a frivolous and irritating tale fit for children, but it troubled us all the same, it seized our imaginations — for we felt that under the right circumstances, with the help of a physiologically freakish but not inconceivable pattern of spasms, it was the kind of thing Clara Schuler might somehow be able to do.
As our demands became more exacting, and our expectations more refined, Clara Schuler’s performances attained heights of release that inflamed us and left no doubt of her power. We tried to copy her gestures, to jerk our shoulders with her precise rhythms, always without success. Sometimes we imagined we could hear, in Clara Schuler’s laughter, our own milder laughter, changed into something we could only long for. It was as if our dreams had entered her.
I noticed that her strenuous new life was beginning to affect her appearance. Now when she came to us her hair fell across her cheeks in long strands, which she would impatiently flick away with the backs of her fingers. She looked thinner, though it was hard to tell; she looked tired; she looked as if she might be coming down with something. Her eyes, no longer hidden under lowered lids, gazed at us restlessly and a little vaguely. Sometimes she gave the impression that she was searching for something she could no longer remember. She looked expectant; a little sad; a little bored.
One night, unable to sleep, I escaped from the house and took a walk. Near the end of my street I passed under a streetlamp that flickered and made a crackling sound, so that my shadow trembled. It seemed to me that I was that streetlamp, flickering and crackling with restlessness. After a while I came to an older neighborhood of high maples and gabled houses with rundown front porches. Bicycles leaned wearily against wicker furniture and beach towels hung crookedly over porch rails. I stopped before a dark house near the end of the street. Through an open window on the second floor, over the dirt driveway, I heard the sound of a rattling fan.
It was Clara Schuler’s house. I wondered if it was her window. I walked a little closer, looking up at the screen, and it seemed to me that through the rattle and hum of the fan I heard some other sound. It was-I thought it was — the sound of quiet laughter. Was she lying there in the dark, laughing secretly, releasing herself from restlessness? Could she be laughing in her sleep? Maybe it was only some trick of the fan. I stood listening to that small, uncertain sound, which mingled with the blades of the fan until it seemed the fan itself was laughing, perhaps at me. What did I long for, under that window? I longed to be swept up into Clara Schuler’s laughter, I longed to join her there, in her dark room, I longed for release from whatever it was I was. But whatever I was lay hard and immovable in me, like bone; I would never be free of my own weight. After a while I turned around and walked home.
It wasn’t long after this visit that I saw Clara Schuler at one of the laugh parlors we’d formed, in imitation of those we had heard about or perhaps had invented in order to lure ourselves into deeper experiments. Helen Jacoby sat on the bed and held Clara’s wrists while a friend of Helen’s held Clara’s ankles. A blond-haired girl I’d never seen before bent over her with hooked fingers. Five of us watched the performance. It began with a sudden shiver, as the short blunt fingers darted along her ribs and thighs. Clara Schuler’s head began to turn from side to side; her feet in her white socks stiffened. As laughter rushed through her in sharp shuddering bursts, one of her shoulders lifted as if to fold itself across her neck. Within ten minutes her eyes had grown glassy and calm. She lay almost still, even as she continued to laugh. What struck us was that eerie stillness, as if she’d passed beyond struggle to some other place, where laughter poured forth in pure, vigorous streams.
Someone asked nervously if we should stop. The blond-haired girl glanced at her watch and bent over Clara Schuler more intently. After half an hour, Clara began breathing in great wracking gulps, accompanied by groans torn up from her throat. Helen asked her if she’d had enough; Clara shook her head harshly. Her face was so wet that she glowed in the lamplight. Stains of wetness darkened the bedspread.
When the session had lasted just over an hour, the blond-haired girl gave up in exhaustion. She stood shaking her wrists, rubbing the fingers of first one hand and then the other. On the bed Clara Schuler continued stirring and laughing, as if she still felt the fingers moving over her. Gradually her laughter grew fainter; and as she lay there pale and drained, with her head turned to one side, her eyes dull, her lips slack, strands of long hair sticking to her wet cheek, she looked, for a moment, as if she’d grown suddenly old.
It was at this period, when Clara Schuler became queen of the laugh parlors, that I first began to worry about her. One day, emerging from an unusually violent and prolonged series of gasps, she lay motionless, her eyes open and staring, while the fingers played over her skin. It took some moments for us to realize she had lost consciousness, though she soon revived. Another time, walking across a room, she thrust out an arm and seized the back of a chair as her body leaned slowly to one side, before she straightened and continued her walk as if nothing had happened. I understood that these feverish games, these lavish abandonments, were no longer innocent. Sometimes I saw in her eyes the restless unhappiness of someone for whom nothing, not even such ravishments, would ever be enough.