“Friends.”
“And not the kind who fuck each other.”
“Agreed.”
“Good.” She set down her pumpkin heavily, its thud and her good coinciding. “Now, what else is there that friends do?”
Her kitchen had banged-up wood cabinets and wallpaper that reminded him of bed-and-breakfast sheets. The place wasn’t her, but you could see how she’d exerted herself against it in little ways, her pretty mixing bowls and denim apron on a peg. Big Boggle was with the cookbooks on the fridge top, a duck skull she must have found on a hike was on the window ledge over the sink. She’d hung a pull-up bar in the doorway and a string of prosperity hens from the bar. She played Bessie Smith and warmed up empanadas she’d made with minced lamb. She had a homemade chimichurri.
He carved his own face onto the pumpkin. She seemed amused. “It’s Dennis,” he explained.
She looked back and forth. “I suppose it is.”
At noon, he sat with his iPad in the Lexus and talked to Dr. Jordie. She was at home, in a living room — he saw an adult son walk behind her with a cereal bowl. She asked how he was in a tone that indicated small talk, not therapeutic concern, and pretended not to observe that he’d hidden himself in a car.
“I might not be able to pay for ski camp after all,” he said. “I’m sorry. I haven’t told Tina.”
“Ski camp might have been ambitious,” she said in her Terry Gross voice. “Tina had to promise Owen he wouldn’t have to go.”
He opened his mouth to say he didn’t know what to say and couldn’t say even this.
“It’s been a rough week,” Dr. Jordie said. There was a wobbling view of her chin and blurred arm skin as she scratched something off the laptop screen. “Owen refused to go to school. He refused to eat or shower. Tina was making any deal he’d take.”
The clown thought his face looked relaxed in the little frame superimposed on Dr. Jordie, but he felt a sour pain in his saliva glands, as if they were being squeezed. He’d been made to believe Owen wanted to go to ski camp. Now he scrubbed away his image of the boy watching ski videos on his phone and intuiting potential future freedoms. A yipping alpine skier dropping through blue sky — he’d thought maybe Owen had glimpsed his own secret man, and not a bad one. Behind his face, where the therapist couldn’t see, the clown scrubbed at the free skier, until the white snow and red Gore-Tex rinsed away except for a few persistent smears.
Meanwhile, he’d missed a few sentences. “... got or gave himself a bloody nose and refused to hold it closed,” the therapist was saying. “He sat there in English class with blood dripping onto his shirt.” She paused for him to react.
“Was it a lot of blood?” the clown said.
“We talked at some length about it. He said he wanted to show them what a freak he is.”
“He’s not a freak.”
She smiled to indicate that the reply to follow was worth her fee. “That’s actually not for us to say, Dennis. He feels like one — but the crucial thing isn’t that. It’s that he wants to show everyone. He wanted his whole class to know who he is.”
The clown felt like a dummy for not using Lauren’s bedroom as she’d offered. It was finally a little cool out and the windows were fogging up. He’d imagined she didn’t really want him to see her room — her unmade sheets, the twisted-up workout clothes flung to the floor. Like the blazer he still had on, his bedroom furnishings were selected to match the Lexus: king mattress made of some proprietary foam, tall vase of reeds in the corner, woodblock prints of some samurai character talking to the breeze. Guests to his bedroom were rare and left knowing no more than he let them.
Dr. Jordie’s son walked by again, this time wearing a towel over his neck. So they had a pool. He imagined the son facedown, afloat on his own bleach-clean blood. “Very intimate in its way,” Dr. Jordie was saying. He thanked her and PayPalled the fee.
When he came back into the kitchen, Lauren was the Terminator mom. Witches and arched cats made of sunlight shined through the blackout paper into the room. “How did I do?” she said. She had on Linda Hamilton’s black tank top, utility belt, and sunglasses, and a water gun. “Sarah Connor, 1995.” She did a one-arm pull-up on the bar in the kitchen door and landed looking at him. Maybe she thought he’d gone outside so he could cry, but there was no scrutiny in her eyes, only attention. “I’m going to smear on some greasy war-zone-looking shit later. Do you do Halloween?”
“I was thinking,” he said before he could stop himself, “of being a scary clown.”
“Classic. For a party or for the kids?”
It felt like the fog from the Lexus was coating his skin. He shouldn’t have said anything. Halloween was Monday, any parties would be tonight. She attempted a second one-arm pull-up with no luck. “Do you have your costume yet? You should have got it when we were at the party store.”
“I have it,” he said. His voice was weird. “From last year.”
“Wait a second.” She squeezed out another pull-up with two arms and thudded to the floor. “You’re not one of those clown prankers, are you? Is this a thing you do every year?”
He instructed his face not to do anything, but she was already grinning and shaking her head. “Holy shit.”
“I’ll be right back,” he said.
Up and down her street were Hillary-Kaine signs, yes on Prop 200, yes on Amendment C, plastic gravestones, broom-crashed witches, jack-o’-lantern leaf bags, Love Trumps Hate. He got the kit from the back of the Lexus and carried it in. He laid it in a kitchen chair and undid the clasps. He set the wig between the pumpkins and showed her his greasepaint and his sponges, his red curtain-cloth pants with their ragged patches, his floorboard-slapping shoes, his shirts with their bloodstains and chipped buttons, his long stained teeth, his yellow metal nails. He didn’t look up at her the whole time. He couldn’t. He searched for more things to show her, so he could delay meeting her eyes. He unscrewed the contact case, so she could see the jaundiced snake-eye floating in its sterile cup. It scared him how violently it shook.
Finally he had to look up, so anxious now he couldn’t pretend otherwise. “I’m glad to know you, Dennis,” she said. She laughed. “I’ve known some geeks, I mean I thought I was a connoisseur...” She picked up the wig (“May I?”) and pressed it on over her Sarah Connor do. She giggled as she fluffed it up, brushing loose plaster dust from the Rocking Horse basement or else trapped flecks of bone. She Jokered up her smile but couldn’t hold it. Her giggling quivered the whole wig. She held one of the jack-o’-lantern knives, classic Bates Motel grip. “So you stalk around like this? People must flip out. I’d straight-up mace you before you could say ‘punked.’ I hope you’re safe out there.”
He laughed, but it was not his Lexus laugh. It started sociably enough, a laugh at himself, at how he must look, but it cracked down the middle when it reached his belly and something wet and maniacal blurted out of him. Lauren blinked and put a hand on his shoulder. She looked him in the eye, trying to see if he was crying or what. Whatever it is, let’s hear it, she seemed to say. He didn’t know what to do.
He started to say something but was laughing again — bilious, hot, disgusting, straight from his gut. It was mirthless and too loud and chicken flavored. She was backing away from him now (“You okay, Dennis?”), the wig sliding off her head.
“Give me the knife,” he said.
To his surprise, she did, the safe way, gripping the blade and offering him the handle.
“You said you wanted me to show you,” he said. It was the clown’s voice, not Dennis’s. “I’ll show you, then.” It terrified him what he was saying. He had to stop for breath between each word. I’ll show you. I’ll — show — you.