THE REMIX:
ARIA FOR THE CLOWN’S WIFE
She is not well. She is not well at all, the singer, as she watches the clown in baggy pants frowning and flopping about on the stage. The hat, the acrobatics, all so strangely solemn and so familiar and so depressing, no wonder she shrinks at night under high summer heat and strange dreams. In her nightmares, a gaggle of Pierrots emerges from a single station wagon. Pink tongues extend and lace collars pull.
When Creighton sleeps beside her she tries to keep the horrors at bay. She tries to swat them away, shield her son from the memory gnats that swarm these cheap hotels. But long nights on the road wear her down, raucous talk till dawn, white face paint dripping from chins and lips and noses. Long nights on the road and the makeshift stages, the gestures of Pierrot to Pierrot, the language of soundless articulations, of words born of cotton glove and shadows thrown across the seedy hotel blinds. Long nights of Pierrot locked inside invisible boxes, of the laughter, always the laughter, always the audience and the performance made more for the mute than anyone else. Long nights where he weeps and her son weeps and she turns her face away, rolls back into the deadening dreams again.
She says to her clown, How I’ve dreamed—ruffles and polka dots. Champagne and rubies. Homes filled with glass and copper and a sturdiness that’s lost in this life at sea. How I’ve dreamed, she says.
He kisses her shoulder, her throat, the house where that voice—that voice!—lives. Voice like he’s never heard, water over cobblestones, silver scales. His parents are deaf, his house a silent film. This will make it easier, later, for him to fall into the medium as it’s born. But now it separates him like curtains from his lovely songbird wife. For her, life is the birthing of sound. Life is music. Life is rounded and bright syllables, strung with beads of paint, the warmth of animals. The brilliance. She turns away from her husband, this Pierrot that after her is doomed to play the would-be lover, the sad clown laughing soundlessly, flickering in the shadows. Laugh, clown, laugh, she says, and turns away.
She is meant for the European tour, for the grand life. She started out well enough, those parades through the heart of small towns, ticker tape and Main Street crowded with families, applauding, whistling, and boys on fathers’ shoulders, mother and her flowered hat beaming with pride.
But now: the languages they never spoke, the silence for her, after he spends the night opening up a crowd and sending them howling homeward. Nothing left for her. Nothing left for Creighton. Don’t be an actor, he tells his boy, laugh lines glued in place with spirit gum and paint. His legacy for them just skins of dust, and later, canisters, newsreels and microfilm spools. His legacy for them the silence of the grave.
So out she goes one day. She goes with grace, with with joie de vivre, leaves the spectacle behind for the gathering eyes and shocked O mouths. The sign she ends with is not lost in the vibrations of other gestures, not lost within the vibration of other minds. Her heart opens silver beneath the membrane of the night. Her heart blooms once, and closes its fingers tight and shut. A pantomime rooted in reality, the grisly death performed by the prima ballerina. It is a masterful death, and it will stain the husband and the son forever.
His story grows larger after she leaves it, and yet there are whispers that his story never really went on at all. That the whole of his art can be found, sourced, in the portrait of a woman on his night stand, an etching of hues pink and brown. That the whole of his sound is a plea as he staggers along highways and dirt roads, lost beneath the yellowed membrane, lost in the silence of his gestures, of his wheezing. That the whole of his music is a song made of static, and now, a voice lovely and lost and taut and frayed. A voice crescendoing, crashing up through the static, singing, Where are you, love? Where are you with your white strong face? You are sleeping, dreaming your life, while they eat your laughter and wash it down with tears.
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Remixer’s process: I took out all the juicy bits and turned it into a sort of family drama about Lon Chaney Sr. The original story just kept making me think of Cheney, sort of stuck in this rut and playing the same sad clown over and over again. I couldn’t get that image out of my mind so I turned “The Clown Show” into that. (Well, from the perspective of his first wife, who killed herself.)
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Amber Sparks’s work has recently appeared in Wigleaf, New York Tyrant, Barrelhouse Online, Annalemma, and Lamination Colony, among other places. She is a contributor at the literary blogs Big Other and Vouched, and is also the fiction editor at Emprise Review. You can find her in Washington, DC with her husband and cats in real life, and here (www.ambernoellesparks.com) in fake internet life.