Her mother’s freaky ways embarrassed Jennifer, but intrigued her, too: grownup life might not be as boring as it mostly seemed in this nowhere place. Everything was so desperately flat and common here, you knew just what was going to happen every minute — even out at the malls and the pool, the only halfway exciting places around, you could guess what people were going to say as soon as they opened their mouths, it was like they were all in a play or something, just reading their lines, it was very depressing — but it didn’t need to be that way, and her unpredictable mother was at least, spooky as she was, a case in point. Bruce was another and a more reassuring one than her mixed-up mom. He flew in and out at will, this town having no claim on him, nor any other either, he was as free as the wind like everyone should be, like Jennifer would be when she got out of here, she could hardly wait. Bruce seemed to know and do or have done everything, he was very wild and very wise at the same time, and yet somehow tragic, too, like those beautiful guys in the movies who always died young, though Bruce would not die young, he was already too old for that, and a good thing, too, because Jennifer loved him madly and wanted him around when she was ready to escape this dump, before or after she finished high school, she really didn’t care, what was all that junk good for anyway? Bruce had lots of lovers, Jennifer knew that, but unlike her best friend Clarissa who, when she wanted something, wanted all or nothing, Jennifer did not mind sharing. Clarissa was a real problem. Bruce was a college friend of both their fathers, Clarissa having always called him Uncle Bruce, though they weren’t related, which Jennifer thought was childish, especially now after she’d got her period, but for Clarissa it was a way of trying to own him somehow, and teasing her about it only tended to make it worse. She and Clarissa were the closest of friends, they went everywhere together, planned to leave here together, too — bosom pals, they once joked when they went to buy their first bras together, and in truth, no joke, they were — but because of Clarissa’s possessive attitude, Bruce stood between them. That afternoon at the barbecue, for example, when she and Bruce posed for Clarissa’s little brother’s make-believe camera and Bruce was hugging her in a way that sent a tingling all the way to her toes, she knew it was making Clarissa mad as all get-out and Jennifer was sorry about that, but she just couldn’t help it. She could only hope he wouldn’t let go, it was magic.
John’s friend Bruce, who so willingly joined in little Mikey’s play that day, was perhaps the only person out there who did not know who was being caricatured, and so missed half the point, or more, but then no one got it all, not even Trevor who knew what no others present knew but who had never, it being against his wife Marge’s principles, posed for a family portrait, much nuance thus lost on him as well, this being, as Gordon himself would say, the fate of all art, even of the amateur backyard variety: to become, stripped of nuance, a caricature of itself. Gordon’s wife Pauline, who knew what Trevor knew but was not so curious about it (that lady was the main attraction around here, why shouldn’t Gordon take her picture?), but who was not present in John’s backyard on that day, or on any other day for that matter, would not have known what nuance was, though she would have enjoyed the little boy’s portrait of her portraitist husband as clown and taken it in whole, feeling flattered that something of her private world had been so publicly noticed. But then: had Pauline fallen in love with a clown? No, nor, whatever others might think, married one either, though that was another story. Love was for heroes, giants, and wizards, of whom she’d had some in her mouth maybe, between her breasts even, and up her Sodom-and-Gomorrah, as Daddy Duwayne called it, but none in her life, that strange thing that went on outside the holes in her body. When it came to romance, that old true-love lottery, Pauline had drawn the short straw: suck that, kid! as her fairy godfather was wont to put it in his pedagogical sessions on the floor of their filthy trailer. Where, many years ago, in the scattered iconography ripped from stolen magazines that aroused her crazy tutor’s red-eyed zeal, she had glimpsed a way out. She was nineteen when she finally approached old Gordon and asked him to help her. She knew him only by his shop window with all the glitzy photographs of make-believe families and fairytale weddings, his moony face in the dim shadows behind it, but she assumed he had a swollen spunk-sack that needed relief like any other man and they could strike a deal. Her best years were over, had been since her sixteenth birthday, she knew that — reality-training was one deprivation Pauline had not suffered — but she felt she had one last chance to make her fortune, or the nearest thing to it she could ever hope for, before she turned twenty and it was all over. Her body was ripe enough if a bit beat up (you could brush that out) and she had no pride, but she needed a photographer and Gordon was the only one in town. So she put her best summery dress on over nothing, hid behind the sunglasses a boy had bought her the year before at the Pioneers Day fair, all the wages she had got on that occasion, and screwing up her courage, pushed in, jangling bells, and announced she wanted her picture taken. “Hey, Pauline! Whatcha doin?!” someone yelped as though goosed. It was that little high school boy Corny. She hadn’t noticed there were other people in there. Her sunglasses maybe. Or just too nervous. Corny was with his dad, who was wearing his crisp white jacket from the drugstore, shiny black pens periscoping out of the breast pocket like secret cameras. And there was a girl there, too, thin and pale, dressed mostly in black, with her hair in tight dark ringlets around her parchmenty ears and funny little teeth in her smiling mouth like rows of tiny white corn kernels. She didn’t look all that well. “This is Pauline, Dad! From school! We’re getting passport photos, Pauline — Dad’s sending me to Paris! For graduation!” Big surprise. Corny’s heart-shaped face under its wispy blond cap was pink as a valentine, poor boy. His father stared at her through his thick lenses as though examining her through a microscope, gripping the lapels of his white jacket in a pose she recognized from the family photo in the window out front. Pauline stared back, but wished now she had her underwear on. The bells over the door still seemed to be ringing, but they probably weren’t. “So, uh, how’s it goin’, Pauline, for gosh sake? Where ya been?”