Mark would’ve liked to have taken his love and locked him in a room, kept him there, thrown away the key. He would put a line into the King’s mouth: “I have set myself in agony upon your strangeness.” “Was the Queen strange?” Grace asked. “I don’t know,” Mark answered, “but it’s a play on your highness.” “Oh,” Grace said, “very funny.” Possession is nine-tenths of the law, but would the law cover Mark’s keeping his love locked away in a room in Providence. “The law doesn’t cover what you want it to cover,” he said sullenly.
Grace would be the Infanta and Mark the little Dwarf, although he toyed with playing both the King and the Dwarf. What constituted the most hideous costume and overall design for the Dwarf was under discussion. Something has to be missing. Something has to be hanging from his chin. One of his eyes must be out of the socket or blinded. He would have to have tiny hairy hands without fingernails. Dirty matted hair. Sores, running ones. An enormous nose. Or a face with no nose at all. A head much too large for its pathetic body. No proportion, Mark would play the Dwarf on his knees, like Jose Ferrer as Toulouse-Lautrec.
The woman who said trouble was her middle name was raging down the end of the bar. “You have a beautiful face, a man loves you. You have a face like a monkey, you only get screwed. Screwed. It’s better to be old. You don’t care about that. None of that. Can’t be fooled anymore.” Mark studied Grace’s face. “You’re pretty, but your nose is a little too big. You’re not perfect, there’s something just a little bit off about you.” He kept studying, and Grace said only Christ was perfect, and she didn’t mind. She also didn’t mind being called pretty, if she could use it to her advantage, although the advantages were weird. Take the Infanta. Her beauty is almost a trick. And connected to evil. “And your lower lip should be fuller,” Mark continued, “the better to beguile.” “And you’ve got too much lip,” Grace said, “it makes you lopsided. That’s what makes you perfect to play the Dwarf. But imagine if you were really ugly, with a face only a mother could love.”
The Infanta never really had a mother, unless you count a woman dying for six months as your mother. Grace thought of Ellen in the mental hospital, and how she didn’t really have a mother, either. It was when Ellen called Grace mother that Grace decided to quit that job because, as she told Mark, I’d only end up hurting her. They said goodbye when Ellen was lucid, but Ellen couldn’t understand that it was goodbye forever. She touched Grace’s hair and for the first time in Grace’s life she was moved to sadness for someone else. It made her feel impotent, then angry, that big empty feeling. No one loved her, Ellen, or the Infanta. And it’s your right to be mean or crazy, “The King didn’t even stay with the Infanta on her birthday,” Grace complained. “He was busy taking care of the state,” Mark teased. Even though he’d said she wouldn’t have to memorize anything, the Infanta’s role was growing and Grace was beginning to think that Mark should play it. “I’ll never learn it all.” “Ah, you’re a natural,” he said. And she said, “When I hear that word, I want to dye my hair black.”
Late at night Grace couldn’t memorize her lines and stared into space and then out the space through the window. The empty streets had a ghostliness that was part of night, and there wasn’t anything necessarily worse about the night than the day, except for the darkness, which was only natural. The day dyes its hair, too, she thought, that’s why it’s weird and why I like it, even if it’s scary. Under cover of night. The dark. The guy at the bar talking about those murders in Providence. A man stalking women, one after another. Mark and she had been arguing about the end of the Dwarf, his death, and whether or not he had to die, or if it could end differently. Grace said he had to die, and Mark thought maybe he could be put on a respirator and the Infanta forced to confront the consequences of her actions before he died. But then you couldn’t use the last line, Grace argued, and that’s when the guy at the bar yelled at them about just talking about death like that when real people were being killed, not storybook dwarfs, and who cares anyway, and Mark talked about wanting to give people hope and the guy said he was hopeless, just another artist. “Real murders take place in the real world,” he yelled. “What’s real?” Mark yelled back. Later in her room Grace wasn’t convinced about anything. He said real murder in a menacing way. Real murder committed by real people out there. Out there. “Or even in here,” the guy added. Mark was sure he was a cop, undercover, bent on scaring the demimonde. There’s épater le bourgeois and there’s épater la scum. Dying of a broken heart is different from being murdered, and she doubted that anyone really died because of love. It seemed so stupid.
After the Dwarf and the Infanta, the flowers had the biggest parts. Carmen, a transsexual, wanted to be either a violet or a tulip, but because of expediency, she would play all the flowers, in one. She can make her own costume, Mark said, anything she wants. “The flowers are vicious little snobs,” Carmen said, preparing to recite her lines: “He really is too ugly to be allowed to play anywhere we are.” “He should drink poppy juice and go to sleep for a thousand years.” “He is a perfect horror, and if he comes near me, I will sting him with my thorns.” In Wilde’s story the violets don’t actually speak but reflect that the Dwarfs ugliness is ostentatious and he would have shown much better taste if he had just looked sad. Carmen said Wilde was right, ugliness does look like misery and Grace said he wasn’t saying that. And Mark said he was saying that the reason the Dwarf was despised was because his imperfections made him stand out, and given his lowly origins, he’s supposed to be invisible.
It adds up, it doesn’t add up. The flowers are snobs, and they’re part of nature, but then so is the Dwarf, whom they disdain. Ugliness is kind, beauty is cruel, yet the Dwarf also succumbs to the beauty of the Infanta, because beauty is always beyond reproach, innocent. “Can beauty be innocent and cruel at the same time,” Grace wondered aloud to Mark. “Maybe,” Mark said, “beauty is as ambiguous as evil and ugliness and innocence.” Grace told Mark that she had the feeling that getting old means that you’re taken over and forced to forget your innocence. Mark couldn’t believe that Grace thought of herself as innocent. She said she wasn’t talking about sex, and what had that got to do with innocence anyway. To Grace, innocence meant the time before time counted, when days were long, when summer stretched ahead of you as a real long time and you could do nothing and that was all right. The time she went to summer camp and it seemed like forever. Innocence meant not seeing how ugly things were. Innocence meant that you think of yourself as doing the right thing, even if it looked wrong. Innocence meant you were never going to die and no one you loved would either. Innocence meant you’d never grow old because you could not really be touched. Maybe she meant damaged, she couldn’t get damaged. You could still leave, turn away.