The Master Butcher's Singing Club

TWO. The Balancing Expert

IN A SMALL TOWN on the headwaters of the Mississippi River and in a room rented solely for the purpose of making love, a man and woman, unclothed and in bed, paused in apprehension. For several months before this hour, they had been comfortably well acquainted, even friends. They had met doing town theater in Argus, North Dakota. Inevitably, they both became curious whether there was more and they set off together. Could they make a living with a traveling act? Were they in love? The man reached out and the woman, Delphine Watzka, raised her penciled eyebrows as though to judge. His hand swerved. “You have,” he said, “very strong stomach muscles.” He swept her torso lightly with his knuckles, then the tips of his fingers. With a thump, Delphine turned over onto her back, threw the covers off, and pounded herself on the stomach. “My arms are strong, my legs are strong. My stomach’s tough. Why not? I am not ashamed I grew up on a goddamn farm. I’m strong all over. Not that I know what to do with it…”

“I have an idea,” said the man.

She thought for a moment that the man, whose name was Cyprian Lazarre, and who was of a tremendous tensile strength, would put his idea into immediate action. She hoped that his purpose would overcome lack of nerve. That did not exactly happen. Enthusiasm for the plan in his brain gripped him, but instead of leaping passionately upon Delphine, he knelt, upright, on the sagging mattress and regarded her thoughtfully. Welts of soldered skin fanned across his shoulders. He was thirty-two years old, and his body was flint hard, perfectly muscled because of his gymnastic practice. She thought that he looked just like one of those statues dug out of the wrecked ancient city of Troy, even to the damage of war and time.

Along with a cousin and a buddy, Cyprian had enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps, survived his training and perhaps the most dangerous part of the war, exposure to Spanish flu, to find himself plunging ahead in the fourth wave at Belleau Wood, where he was burned in the wheat. During that last year of the Great War, chlorine gas blinded him, the split barrel of a machine gun nearly took his hand off, dysentery unmanned him, his sense of humor failed, and he very much regretted his zeal. He came home before it even occurred to him that, as an Ojibwe, he was not yet a U.S. citizen. During his slow recuperation, he couldn’t vote.

With a slight bounce, he went from his knees to standing and then hopped off the bed. There was a chair in the tiny room. Eyes flashing with performance fire, he gripped the bowed back, twisted the balls of his feet for purchase on the wooden boards, and then kicked up into a handstand. The chair wobbled just a bit, then steadied. “Bravo!” he breathed to himself. With his back to her, head down, sculptured buttocks and pointed toes, he was an ideal picture of manliness. Delphine was glad she couldn’t see around to the front of him. She was also hoping that no one outside in the street opposite this rooming house happened to glance up into the curtainless second-floor window, when she heard a scream from outside. Cyprian ignored it.

“This will be the finale,” he said, “I’ll be ten feet in the air, and you’ll be holding me up here with your stomach muscles!”

Another scream outside was followed by a shudder of voices in the street below.

“Oh, will I?”

Delphine’s voice was muffled by the neck of her blouse. One of Delphine’s talents was to dress very quickly. She had learned it changing costumes in the repertory theater, where they’d all played two or three roles at once. She was dressed, even to her stockings and shoes, and the covers were pulled up on the bed before Cyprian even grasped what was happening in the street below. He was, in fact, still talking and planning as he practiced the handstand, when she slipped out the door and hurried down the stairs. She stopped at the very bottom, cooled her thoughts. With a composed air she stepped out the door and went straight up to the landlady, who was already purple.

“Mrs. Watzka!”

“I know,” Delphine sighed, her face a mask of resigned calm. “Back in the war, you know, he was gassed.” She tapped her temple as the landlady’s mouth made an O. Delphine then walked straight into the cluster of people on the street. “Please! Please! Don’t you have any respect for a man who fought the Hun?” She dispersed people with sharp waves and claps, the way she used to scare her chickens. The people staring upward suddenly were staring downward, pretending to examine their purchases. One of the ladies, cheeks delicately wrinkled, her eyes very round and her mouth a little beak of flesh, bent close to Delphine’s ear. “You had really best persuade him to rest, dear! He is in a state of male indiscretion!”

That Delphine did not turn to look up at the window proved her both quick thinking and self-disciplined, although she did decide to hurry back into the room. “Oh dear,” she said in the tone of a resigned wife, “and to think, standing on his hands is the only way he can maintain his readiness. And we’ve managed to have two darling children!”

Turning away she spoke to the crowd sweetly, as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred at all, as though she hadn’t just thrown them into a state of startled conjecture. “Don’t forget, the show is at five o’clock this evening! Second stage at the fairgrounds!”

From the quality of the silence behind her, she knew it would be packed.

THAT NIGHT, Cyprian spun plates on the top of poles balanced two on each arm, one on each shoulder, one on his forehead, and one between his teeth. He set up a long line of poles and plates that he twirled as he ran back and forth, while Delphine took bets from the crowd on how long he could keep the plates going. That was where they made most of their money. He stacked things on his head, whatever the audience came up with — crates of chickens, more dishes. He declined the washing machine. While the stack mounted up, he jigged. He rode a bicycle over wires strung across the fairgrounds. For the finale, as the night was windless, he climbed the flagpole and balanced, did a handstand gripping the ball on top. The sight of him — tiny, perfect, a human pin against the wild black Minnesota sky — made Delphine start with a thrill of sympathy. At that moment, she forgave him for his lack of sexual heat, and decided that his desperate need for her was enough.

A STOCKY POLISH girl from off a scrap of farm is not supposed to attract men so easily, but Delphine was compelling. Her mind was very quick — too quick, maybe. Things came out of her mouth that often surprised her, but then, she’d had to deal with a lot of unpredictable drunks in her life and this had sharpened her reflexes. She had small, even, very white teeth, a clever dimple on one side of her mouth. Extremely light brown eyes, honey gold in direct sunlight, narrow and bold in a tan face. Her nose was strong, straight, but her ears were rakishly lopsided. She often wore her hair in what she imagined was the style of a Spanish contessa — one spit curl midforehead, two before either off-center ear, the rest in an elaborate bun. If she stared sharply into a man’s eyes, he was immediately filled with unrest, looked away, could not help looking back. Just because she was magnetic, though, it did not make life easy.

At the age of three or four months, she had lost her mother. Her extreme affection for her dipsomaniacal father was unappreciated, even misplaced, and yet she was helpless before the onslaught of his self-pity. They would have lost even their tiny wedge of land and homestead many years ago, but for the fact that the farmer to whom her father leased his land refused to buy it outright and sewed that up in a contract. Therefore, they had a tiny income month to month, which went to hooch unless she swiped it. To escape a miserable home life, Delphine had sewed bright outfits, practiced the fabulous speeches of tragic heroines, and thrown herself into local dramatic productions. She’d met Cyprian when he was honing his act with the congenial town troupe. She left North Dakota with him, headed back into the hills and trees of Minnesota, where the towns were closer together and less dependent on the brutally strapped farmers. He’d said that there would be excitement, and that commenced with the all-revealing handstand before the window. He also said there would be money, which she hadn’t seen much of yet. Delphine had joined the show because she hoped she’d become infatuated with Cyprian, who was the only other person in the show and was, although this became quite incidental, handsome.

Cyprian called himself a balancing expert. Delphine soon found that balancing was really the only thing he could do. Literally, the only thing he could do — he couldn’t wash his own socks, hold a regular job, sew a seam back together, roll a cigarette, sing, or even drink. He couldn’t sit still long enough to read an entire newspaper article. He couldn’t hold much of a conversation, tell a story beyond the lines of a joke. He seemed too lazy even to pick a fight. He couldn’t play long card games like cribbage or pinochle. Even if they ever stayed in one place long enough, he probably couldn’t grow a plant! She did begin to love him, though, for three reasons: first, he claimed he was crazy about her, secondly, although they had still not made love with decisive lust, he was very sweet and affectionate, and lastly, his feelings were easily hurt. Delphine could never bear to hurt a man’s feelings because she was so attached to her own father. In spite of his destructive idiocy when in his cups, she harbored an undying fondness for Roy Watzka that became, unfortunately, a kind of paradigm.

For instance, she expected nothing much of Cyprian, except that he not fall off the chair. For his part, after only one week, Cyprian grew attached to belonging to Delphine. He curled in the cheap rooming house beds, under covers that Delphine had requested be relaundered, as she was picky about bugs. While he nursed his sore muscles, Delphine busied herself with their survival. She mended what they’d torn during their act, planned how long to stay in each town and which to hit next, counted money, if there was any, wrote letters and advertisements to newspapers, decided what they’d eat.

The morning after the flagpole balance, she proclaimed that they had the wherewithal to eat sausage with their eggs and oatmeal. It was necessary, anyway, to fortify themselves for the long practice session they had decided to hold in a cow pasture. They ate slowly, luxuriously, from thick scarred plates. The café owner knew them now and brought extra sugar and a leftover pancake. Cyprian drew a diagram. A stick man standing on his hands on a chair, a random-looking but really very carefully balanced stack of chairs, the bottom chair on the stomach of a woman whose stick arms and legs were supports, whose balloon face smiled out off the scrap of a playbill.

“This will make our fortune,” said Cyprian, solemn.

Delphine looked at the tower of chairs, the line that represented her gut beneath, and forked up another sausage.

NO COWS WERE IN the pasture and the patties on the ground were dry circles. She flung them off like plates and did some stretches, a couple dozen toe touches. Flexed. Hard to begin with, her stomach muscles would soon be phenomenal. Cyprian showed her how to develop them using a series of scientific exercises. Now, as he had to fall hundreds of times before he perfected an act, Delphine calmly yawned as the weight left her stomach. An instant later he crashed beside her. She didn’t move until all of the chairs had fallen away, battering him. He set the chairs up so that if she just held her position beneath she could not be harmed. Time after time, as he fell and fell, memorizing each piece of the balancing trick in his body, she felt the edifice collapse and strike the earth around her. She stayed still. A few times a chair leg came close enough so that her hair was disarranged a bit, but beyond that she was never touched.

THE DAY WAS SPECTACULAR, and Delphine was dressed in a long elegant red skirt that swirled as she walked before the crowd. She did four cartwheels, and ended up sitting on a low, broad table. Cross-legged, she closed her eyes, folded her hands, and meditated to draw out the suspense. Just as the audience began to shift, impatient, she flipped over and became a human table. Cyprian then approached, holding a large wooden tray set up with tea things. On his head and his shoulders he carried an arrangement of six chairs, which he shrugged off, one by one. He sat upon the last chair, put the tray on Delphine’s torso, nodded pleasantly to her. He drew a fork, a knife, a napkin, a herring from his sleeve, and then proceeded to lay out the plate and eat the herring, which he cut into tiny bites and chewed rapidly. When he was finished, he dabbed his mouth, stretched, appeared ready to relax with a smoke and a good book.

At that point, he frowned, he did not look comfortable. He sat in each chair, frowning harder, until he came to the last chair. “Do you mind?” he politely asked Delphine. “I suppose not,” she answered. He then cleared off the tea things and set the first chair on the tea tray on her stomach. Now they needed a helpful member of the audience to pass the chairs up. One by one, leg upon wooden seat, Cyprian balanced the chairs. Climbed higher, higher. Finally, he had the sixth chair balanced and he sat down on it and took a cigarette from his pocket.

That was always when he noticed that he had forgotten his matches on the table, or rather, upon Delphine. (Someone in the audience always hollered the information, proud to make such a discovery.) Someone always offered to throw the matches up, but Cyprian politely declined any help, for already he had taken from his shirt collar a little collapsible fishing rod and unreeled the line. The end was fitted with a bobber, an ostentatious hook, and a sinker that was really a magnet and easily attracted the fixed matchbox.

Once Cyprian had possession of the matches, he slowly and luxuriously lighted his cigarette. Then with many flourishes he pulled out abook, and pretended to regale the assembled crowd with its contents — more or less off-color jokes, which he laughed at, too, and even kicked up his heels, so that the chairs swayed alarmingly and drew gratifying whoops of anxiety from the crowd. Cyprian did not fall, of course. Once he finished his book, he tossed it. Did a handstand, on the topmost chair. Everyone applauded until, most amazingly — and here is where Delphine wished for an accomplice to produce a drum roll — he came down the chairs, headfirst, dismantling his tower by piling each chair onto his feet, hooking one to the next, until he stood on his hands under the chairs, on Delphine’s stomach.

Let us not forget that all of this time she was beneath, wrists locked, neck in a vise, gut clenched, legs solidly planted underneath the feminine red skirt!

Balancing on her torso, with the chairs on his feet, Cyprian craned his neck until his lips met hers. His kiss was falsely passionate, which got a roar from the crowd and had already started a slow burn of resentment in Delphine. The chairs were still balanced above them. They looked into each other’s eyes, and that to Delphine was at first intriguing. But what do you really see in the eyes of a man doing a handstand with six chairs balanced on his feet? You see that he is worried he will drop the chairs.

THEY HOOKED UP with a vaudeville group and traveling circus from Illinois in the town of Shotwell, by the North Dakota border. “This is more my kind of place,” said Delphine to Cyprian, comforted by the horizon all around them. At the end of every street the sky loomed. There had been too many trees surrounding the towns before. The open sky was homey. As well, they met carousing friends. Cyprian knew a few of these people from fairs and other shows, and the first evening, he brought her along with him to the local saloon. The place was a low, dank sty. They sat in a booth in the corner, packed in with three other couples, and were immediately served hard liquor. Up until then, Delphine had never witnessed Cyprian drinking, though at times she detected a whiff on his breath. Presented with a shot glass and a beer, he tried to slug the first back, and choked. Delphine said nothing, just nursed her beer and quietly tipped the shot onto the floor. She was almost ashamed of her fierce contempt for alcohol.

After the first round, two of the other couples got up and danced. That left Delphine and Cyprian, and another two. The men were involved in some deep topic, though, and since Delphine and the other girl were at their men’s left elbows they could not really make an impact on the conversation or start talking to each other. Delphine pretended to watch the other dancers for a while. Bored, she went to visit the powder room, which was anything but a place to powder your nose, then she stepped outside to marvel at the sunset. The sky was roiling, the edges of the clouds were a startling green, and the light behind them an appalling threatful yellow. A man who passed by in the road said that it looked like a goddamn storm.

“What’s it to you?” said Delphine, smiling just because she always smiled at a man, and because she was happy to see a sky that reminded her of home.

“I’m a farmer, that’s what.”

“Well you should come and see our show,” said Delphine. “You should bring your whole family.”

“Does anybody take their clothes off in it?”

“Sure!” said Delphine. “We all do!”

“Oh mama,” said the man.

When Delphine stepped back into the saloon, the other girl was smoking grumpily in the booth and the men were gone.

“Where are they?” said Delphine.

“How the hell should I know?” said the girl. Her lips moved nervously, drinking and smoking, like two limp ropes. Painted with a glossy purple red, those lips gave Delphine a shiver up her back. The girl was ugly, Delphine decided, and that made her mean. Plus, she’d ordered two more drinks and Delphine thought at first she’d ordered one for her. But the girl drank both, one after the other, right in front of her.

“What’s wrong with you?” Delphine asked.

“How the hell should I know?” said the girl.

Delphine left the saloon and walked back out into the road, where the sky was changing as fast as Delphine herself used to when she was an actress. Not for the first time since she’d left her father, she felt lonely and out of sorts. Perhaps all that space was making her homesick. Maybe it was the beer, but the absence of Cyprian was certainly part of it as well. He was very attentive to her moods, and when she felt blue, she told him. He usually came up with some way to cheer her. For instance, the last time she’d entered one of these slumps he’d picked her pocket, for she always kept some money in an easily unbuttoned side vent of her jacket, and he’d bought her a spray of red hothouse roses. That was a thing she’d never had before, roses. She had dried them and kept the petals in a handkerchief just to remember. Then there was another time he’d bought her a little jar of peanut butter to eat with a spoon. That was a treat. He’d bought her an ice cream on a stick, and he’d also done little things for her that did not require money. He’d picked up pretty stones by the lake, and once a tiny black arrowhead that he said an old-time Ojibwe probably used to shoot a bird. She had tied it on a tiny cord, and still wore it around her neck. Now, Delphine decided that he probably had gone somewhere to buy her a gift. It cheered her to find two dollars missing from the stash.

They were staying in a tent this time. She went back to the camp cot, rolled herself in her blanket, and woke before morning because the storm had indeed come and blown through the tent’s unwaxed canvas walls and gotten her soaking wet. Luckily, the stuff in the middle was hardly damp, and she was able to string up a line between two trees in order to dry it all. Cyprian had not slept in the tent. Irritation pinched the back of her neck. But when he showed up he was so dear, so sweet to her, so fawning and anxious for her affection and, indeed, he had brought her the gift of a daisy cleverly carved of pure chocolate, that her annoyance collapsed. She smiled into his face and he held her to his chest, which was hard as a piece of armor.

“I love you,” she said. It was not the first time she had said it, but there was in her a great tearful lump of emotion that the words unblocked. Tears stung and she reared back, energized.

“Where the hell were you!”

“Nowhere,” he said.

He did not say this to her smoothly or in a manipulating way, but painfully, as though he really had been nowhere. Smoothing her hair back from her face, he kissed her forehead, right below the middle parting. Her hair was braided to either side. She looked, and felt, like a child. Cyprian’s voice was so astonishingly sad that she forgot her need to know and molded to him in a melt of sympathy. His arms tightened, to the point that she had to take tiny little breaths. That was all right. They were sitting underneath a tree. Delphine was always to remember that. Without her knowing what had happened, they were close, so close, and she could sense every fiber of his doubtless love for her singing through his skin and in his thoughts. She felt entirely safe. She did not want to move. He fell asleep, beneath the tree, but his arm stayed tightly flexed. Delphine was content to watch the world wake up around them, the earth brighten, the fields beyond fields of green wheat thrash to life underneath a powerful mirror.

THEY MADE IT ALL the way to Gorefield, Manitoba, before she found out what the nowhere was and why it pained him to have told her about it. This time, at a fancy hotel, they stayed in the bridal suite. The furniture was elaborate, all spindles and spools, and the upholstery looked like tapestries right out of a museum. The rugs were deep and probably Persian, but what did Delphine know. She had splurged on this room because she was curious, once and for all, whether they could fall in love. In a way, they did. Not at first. He kept his eyes shut while they were rolling around, and seemed to be in a state of deep concentration. Though it all felt mechanical, she did not want to disturb him. She was alert, a little bored. His hands sprang off her breasts or he tweaked her nipples in a way that was unthinking, even painful. She wanted to bat him on the head, and was about to give up, when, with a happy groan, he climaxed, or at least pretended to.

Immediately, he eyed her for approval like a dog.

She patted his head. After a while, she turned him to face her. That was when they looked into each other’s eyes and there commenced a mysterious bonding — something that Delphine had never felt before with anybody else on earth. They left time, left space, and just existed in the calm power of their eyes. They did not let go. Delphine felt loving energy rise in her and without any effort Cyprian went hard. She rolled on top of him and then they started moving again. The deeper they stared into each other’s eyes the more each wanted to make use of the other body, the more they loved. The whole thing went on and on until they were exhausted. Still, every time they looked into each other’s eyes, they started again to move, found themselves doing another thing, finding out something new. It was a strange experience, one they didn’t talk about afterward, or, unfortunately, manage to repeat.

TWO DAYS LATER, Delphine went down to the river on a walk. Cyprian had skipped out on her after their performance and had not told her where he was bound. That left her alone to amuse herself, and because she was good at that she didn’t sulk or mope but went to the town’s one point of interest. Delphine sat down on a low bench by the river and watched the river move on by. It was heading north, rapidly, she could hear the current lapping shore, dragging little sticks into it, moving dirt and leaves and fish along.

The night was peaceful, and a few steady lights shone just across on the other shore, enough to see a few feet ahead. Annoyed to hear voices, footsteps, Delphine slipped into the tall brush just beside the bench. She wanted her bench back, and not to have to talk to anybody. Soon, two men walked into the clearing. Once they got to the bench they shut up and then one sat down and the other knelt before him. Delphine was hidden slightly behind the bench off to one side. Although she was immediately intrigued, she couldn’t see what was taking place. Later, when she put it all together in her mind, she realized it was probably good she hadn’t seen it all at once. It would have been too much of a shock. She hadn’t known that men could get together like that.

“Oh my dear fucking God,” groaned the man on the bench. He put a period stop between each word and moaned the last one. His hands flopped out and his legs sprawled. The man on his knees was utterly silent. There was some movement. The man who spoke was wearing a suit, Delphine saw, because now he turned and held the backrest of the bench as he bent over. The kneeling man then stood behind him, white shirt glowing. There was something about that white blaze of shirt. Delphine peered into the smudge of air. The shirt was suddenly gone, the men were half naked, one was moving across the other with a fluid eagerness.

The men kept changing and dissolving. They rolled over each other like fish. Sometimes they were frantic with a small animal’s alacrity, then they slowed into a tenderer pulse. There was no way, now, that Delphine could leave her hiding place, not that she really wanted to. She could not see exactly how the sex was taking place, but she was curious. She put the mechanics together and nodded when she made each discovery. Suddenly she understood that Cyprian was the man who had thrown off the blaze of shirt, and then she did one of those things she often did that surprised her. She walked out of the bushes and cheerfully said hello.

Panicked, the men rolled away from each other. Her numb shock made her wicked. She sat down on the bench, began to talk.

“I was just out looking for you, honey,” she said.

“Delphine, I don’t know what—”

“Christ almighty,” said the other man, scrambling for his clothes.

Delphine crossed her legs, lighted a cigarette, and blew the smoke out gently. As she continued to speak, to elicit polite answers and draw up neutral topics of conversation, a dreamlike hilarity took hold of her. She made a small joke and when the two men laughed reality skewed. No questions made sense, her mind was operating on too many levels. Layers of dark curiosity. Still, she did not acknowledge what she’d interrupted but, wielding an amused power, continued to make irresistible small talk. The three bantered back and forth as they walked away from the side of the river. The men shook hands and went their separate ways. Side by side and gravely thoughtful, Delphine and Cyprian walked back to their own room.

I wonder what will happen once we’re inside, thought Delphine. She had the willful naïveté to imagine that now that this was out in the open she and Cyprian could at last be true lovers. She also had the wit to know this was simpleminded. Nothing at all happened once they got back into the room. It all seemed too exhausting to contemplate. They stripped down to their underwear, got under the covers, and held hands like two mourners, alert and lost, unable to speak.

IN THE NIGHT, deep in the dark, Delphine’s brain flickered on and her thoughts woke her. She let the roil of feelings wash over her and then shook Cyprian until he groaned. She meant to say something cutting about his betrayal, to ask didn’t he remember how they’d looked into each other’s eyes? She meant to ask him why the hell he never told her he was that way, to shout in his face or just wail miserably. But in the second before her voice left her lips, other words formed.

“How do you balance?”

Her voice was calm, curious, and once she asked the question she found that she really wanted to know the answer. Cyprian was also wide awake. He’d never really slept. He put his palms over his face and breathed through his fingers.

It was not an easy question to answer. When he balanced, his whole body was a thought. He’d never put the balancing into words before, but perhaps because of the dark, and because she knew about him now, and because her voice wasn’t angry, he spoke, tentatively at first.

“Some people think of it as a point, but it isn’t a point. There is no balancing point.”

She lighted a cigarette and blew the smoke into a white cloud over them. “So?”

Cyprian was as clumsy with words as he was agile in other ways. Attempting to describe what happened when he balanced caused an almost physical hurt. Still, he reached far in his thoughts and made a desperate effort.

“Say you have a dream.” He spoke earnestly. “In that dream you know that you are dreaming. If you become too aware of knowing you are dreaming, you wake up. But if you are just enough aware, you can influence your dream.”

“So that’s balancing?”

“Pretty much.”

He breathed out, relieved and empty. She thought for a while.

“And what is it,” she asked, at last, “when you fall?”

Cyprian caught his breath back, almost despaired, but again — because, in spite of who he was, he loved Delphine — he dug for an answer. It took so long that Delphine almost fell asleep, but his mind was working furiously, shedding blue sparks.

“When you fall,” he said, startling her awake, “you must forget that you exist. Strike the ground as a shadow strikes the ground. Weightless.”

“I think I’ll leave you,” said Delphine.

“Please don’t leave me,” said Cyprian.

And so they lay balanced on that great wide bed.