The Night and the Show

The night he saw her again was an outdoor performance of the aerial ballet in the park. Single-point trapeze artists in ropes and bungees swung from trees lit to neon filigree. In the crowd, the woman from the past balanced on one leg while scratching the back of her calf with the other foot. The straps of her sandal would scratch nicely. She may have looked over, and so quickly disappeared. A pink boat came out of the trees. Inside a performer rowed. The oars spooned the warm air, back and forth.  He watched on one foot, as she had. The skiff hovered in the night air, and blue branches fingered above. He scratched high top sneaker grommets and laces over his itchy calf. After a time, the rowing stopped. The oars retreated. The aerialist sank down in the boat, a vampiress settling into a casket of good Transylvanian dirt. (Like seeing her, like metaphors, a stake in the heart of that night). The lights dimmed. The boat floated to the ground. The departing audience brushed by. Those with the best seats in the house, children on shoulders, gazed down at him like royalty borne by servants as he stood his ground, wobbling on one leg, a die nicked and rounded to come up snake eyes, or midnight, come what may. Differently shaped was the woman he’d seen. She seemed “planed by infinity.” He could not say what that meant exactly, but it was about his memory of her standing, balanced on one foot, scratching the back of her leg with her other foot. About the planes of her face, the angle of her nose. It seemed all of it was carved from space following lines of force that blocked her out in masterful strokes of chalk or chisel, then receded into an infinite one-point perspective of never-quite meeting train tracks. He was shaped by the nicks and dings of the passing people, a blizzard of blows.  And if, later that night, one of the children did a drawing of the night and the show, maybe he would appear in the crowd as she had, but drawn flat and stark, a Byzantine icon with startled eyes and one leg.

Across the park twin teeter-totters, one of them Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo, and the other Elsa Lanchester and Charles Laughton. Up and down, no problem, fat man, tiny woman, the density of Elsa and Frieda making it, if anything, harder for Diego and Charles to get back down. For a long time nobody else saw this, and Elsa and Frieda played along, Frieda as a painter in her own right, and Elsa as an actress in her own right. Frieda a bedridden miniaturist with an iron rail through her uterus. Elsa the Bride of Frankenstein, a smorgasbord of ham.  But every once in a while, Frieda and Elsa stopped at the bottom, just sat there, and Charles and Diego were stuck, kicking at the air as if atop invisible donkeys, see-saws, hee-haws that wouldn’t obey. All others heeded their commands, but their little partners, they just wouldn’t play along. You could see Frieda and Elsa looking over at each other, smiling and waving and laughing. This playground scene in the park could launch a critical analysis: film, painting, desire, big and tiny, monumental murals and the charming miniature, the star turn versus the supporting role. But just hold down your end. Squat on the playground, rest your knees on the warm blacktop. Keep them hanging, for a spell. Maybe Diego and Charles kind of like it up there, or can learn to.