“Gotta admit it does sound interesting,” Brownie nodded, mulling it over. “Jukebox princes? Yeah. Why not?”
Christopher Chambers
Aardvark to Aztec
From Washington Square
Miranda Wheeler was against adultery in theory. She had been raised uptight and proper, if not churchgoing, her parents nominally Episcopalian or the like, and she had occasioned to sin far more in her mind than in practice. Though not a classic beauty like of film or supermarket fashion magazines, she was not bad to look at with almost always a pleasant smile. Her body attracted male notice and comment even now at thirty-one, and after one kid, causing her some embarrassment and an uneasy glow. Fit and curvy in all the right places, she carried herself with an awkward charm, as if her body were a new pair of shoes that did not quite fit. She worked during the school year as a teacher’s aide at Laurel Elementary, where little Duff Jr. would enter fourth grade in the fall.
Miranda ran into a clown outside the Krusty Kreme. She watched through the cracked windshield in disbelief as he stumbled in sad comedy in front of her car, tripping on his oversize shoes to sprawl with a sorry thud full length onto the sun-faded hood of the Nova. His orange wig lolled against the windshield for a moment like an obscene, alien fruit. Miranda stopped the car. She got out and touched hesitantly the gaudy shoulder of the prone buffoon, his Hot Now — Indulge! sandwich board underfoot. The manager appeared, sweating profusely, and most solicitous of Miranda. He fired the clown after determining he was unhurt. Miranda felt awful.
She offered to buy the clown, whose name was Josh, a cup of coffee at a neighboring franchise. And so Miranda sat at a concrete picnic table overlooking the frontage road, eating Krusty Kremes and drinking coffee with a surprisingly charming, though unemployed, clown. They talked about little or nothing as the world drove by. She could not remember when she had last laughed so.
When school let out the following week, Miranda drove Duff Jr. to her parents in Jackson for a break so she and Duff could work some things out. In the days that followed, Duff left for work, and Miranda cleaned the empty house and read paperback novels, waiting for Duff to come home. Some evenings they would fall asleep watching garishly colored classic films on their new big-screen television. As the days passed, she found herself thinking, and smiling at the memory, and wondering what had become of the clumsy clown.
Miranda’s husband, Duff, a former high school athlete, was senior sales consultant at a local car lot. Duff spent his days lounging among clean, expensive automobiles in a clean, well-lit showroom, getting people into cars. What would it take to get you into this car today? he’d ask. He typically draped the jacket of his pricey suit over a chair, rolled up the starched white sleeves of his shirt, and loosened the knot of his power tie. People are drawn to the appearance of success, he told Miranda, they are made comfortable by the image of a man at ease in his surroundings. And when they are comfortable, they buy.
Duff surreptitiously snorted cocaine in the stalls in the employee restroom throughout the day. He did not approve of illicit drug use in general, but had found the occasional toot gave him an edge in a keenly competitive marketplace. This was not recreation. This was business. Life or death, success or failure. No different than the gridiron and the steroids old Doc Highfield slipped to a few select starters on Laurel High’s state-champ football team in the glory years of the late seventies.
Josh, local college boy and ex-clown, working his way down the blistering street, came hopefully to Miranda’s door, as to all the others, peddling his encyclopedias. Miranda had just finished a lawyerly murder mystery when the knock came at the door. She peered judiciously out at the traveling salesman. Stared in disbelief. He shimmered like a mirage in the heat on her stoop.
“You’re that clown,” she finally said, though his shoes fit, proportional, and his hair was no longer orange. She invited him in. They could not afford a set of encyclopedias what with Duffs erratic sales record and her own meager unemployment check, but it was unbearably hot outside. The dead of June, most languorous month.
Josh stood inside the door, settling into the air-conditioning, his sweat cooling pleasurably. He accepted her offer of a cold drink.
From the kitchen, Miranda, pouring iced tea, called out to him. “Sweet or unsweet?”
“Sweet, please, ma’am,” he replied. This being the South, certain social graces endured.
“So, selling encyclopedias now?” Miranda returned to the room.
“Yes, ma’am.” Josh took the glass from her hand, thanked her, and drank deeply.
Josh was downright shy without the clown costume. The outfit had afforded him a joi de vivre which he was unable to muster as himself, and so he sorely missed his old job. He had not yet mastered the art of small talk, and made up for the lack of it with politeness and his unconscious youth. The conversation that ensued was borne by Miranda then, who tended to talk quickly and without stop when nervous, non sequitur ad infinitum. When she finally paused, she felt a bit lightheaded from her oratory. She fanned herself with a brochure. Josh’s glass was empty, the sample case of Encyclopedia Americanos forgotten at his sneakered feet. Miranda looked at Josh as if truly seeing him for the first time. He was of indeterminate ancestry, sunburned, tall, and handsome in an ungainly sort of way.
In considerable silence, they sat upon the sofa, which had come to Miranda from her parents. She’d covered the horrible thing — upholstered in Civil War battle scenes, a dark brocade — with a cheery yellow blanket. Miranda reached out and touched the boy’s face, a gesture more maternal than seductive. And yet he shivered involuntarily and she felt the shiver course through her like a fond memory, or a low-voltage electrical current. For Josh, this moment seemed his highest dream come true. A full-grown woman in a cool faint before him, her cotton summer dress slightly askew. This was not Playboy, or Hustler even. She was real. Flesh and blood, as they say. There was a moment more of silence. Trembling, Josh wound up and reached out to touch lightly a coffee-colored mole on the low inside of Miranda’s left leg. She sighed in spite of herself.
“No. Please, don’t,” she said, “stop.” But she did not move away.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s like I’m under your spell.” Josh looked away, as if to fight his awful urges. He was painfully aroused, and lyrics from pop songs suddenly true came unbidden into his mind. A high-fidelity system gleamed in the corner, bought on credit from Circuit Circus. “Nice stereo, ma’am.”
“Call me Miranda,” said Miranda. She stood unsteadily and walked across the room. Inhaled deeply. She drew closed the draperies. The cheap sandals on her feet felt awkward and cheap. She kicked them off, sending them sailing into a lamp and Duff s La-Z-Boy, respectively. Miranda selected Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, a recording by the Atlanta Philharmonic. As a child she’d studied briefly the violin, and she still loved the strings. She returned to the sofa slowly, her bare feet gripping the shag, the great hopeful swelling of the first movement all around her. Spring, was it? She had been in school for physical therapy, spring semester, when she got pregnant with Duff Jr.
Duff cringed at the ringing of the phone on his desk. The conversation was brief and hushed. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand, and warily eyed the office door.