Two Sad Clowns

Even Punch and Judy were in love once. They knew the exact clockwise adjustment required to fit their preposterous profiles together for a kiss, her nose to the left of his nose, his chin to the left of her chin. Before the slapstick and the swazzle, the crocodile and the constable, before above all the baby: they’d known how to be sweet to each other.

These people, too, Jack and Sadie. They’d met at a long-ago winter parade in Boston. Sadie had been walking home from a show at the Rat, drunk and heartbroken over nothing: twenty-one years old, the clamor of the smoky club still around her, a trailing cloud she imagined was visible. Her friends had terrible boyfriends, one after another, but she never did. When she felt particularly maudlin, she blamed it on her father’s death when she was nine, though most of the time she thought that was neither here nor there. She liked to imagine him, the man who might love her. A performer of some kind, an actor or musician, somebody she could admire in the company of strangers. He’d have an accent and a death wish and depths of kindness. She wanted love so badly the longing felt like organ failure, but it was the longing itself that had rendered her unlovable, the way the starving are eventually unable to digest food. At the same time she believed she deserved love—not as much as anyone, but more. Only she would know what to do with it.

She was thinking of this, love and fantasy, as she came down Dartmouth toward Boylston and saw at the end of the block a claque of towering, angling, parading puppets, avalanche-faced, two stories high and neither male nor female. Their arms were operated by lumber, their mouths by levers. Some human fools followed behind with tambourines. Nobody whose mother ever truly loved them has ever taken pleasure in playing the tambourine.

By the time she got to Copley Square, the puppets had vanished. How was that possible? No, there was one, stretched out on the pavement alongside the public library. The parade had lost its spine, become a mob, but the downed puppet was away from that, one of its ears pressed to the ground and the other listening to God. Ordinarily she wasn’t drawn to puppets. This one reminded her of a corpse at a wake. It demanded respect. Nobody loved it, either.