Maybe the Moon

glance.
    “Hey,” said Tread. “I’m clean.”
    “Just not at the house,” said Neil. “That’s all I ask.”
    “Jeez,” muttered Tread.
    “Hey.” Neil’s expression was pleasant yet pained. “Do I look like Marilyn Quayle?”
    “Totally!” Julie emitted a froggy laugh, then reached over the seat and slapped Neil’s shoulder. “Especially when you do that little pursing thing with your mouth.”
    “What little pursing thing?”
    “You know.” Julie squinched her mouth up, prompting Tread and another clown to follow suit, to the enormous merriment of everyone but Neil.
    “Guys,” he said, drawing the word out in a sort of Valley whine. “Not in front of the new person.”
    Julie hooted, then lunged into a real get-down Janis Joplin coughing jag. Emmett Kelly regarded her in doleful silence, then thumped her on the back a few times, to no avail. Neil gazed back at me and winked. “It’s not too late to back out.”
    “Hey,” I told him. “No problem here.”

    The obstetrician’s house was a low-slung fieldstone affair with a pristine gravel drive, crisp lawns, and a blood-red front door that seemed higher than the house itself. The caterers were erecting a tent on the lawn when we arrived. Neil received his orders from the obstetrician’s wife—a nervous anorexic with one of those carefully windswept lopsided hairdos so popular in Bel Air—then parked the van, as instructed, in a space next to the tennis court.
    On my feet again, I stretched and took several deep breaths. My left foot had gone to sleep during the trip, so I stamped it a fewtimes in the gravel, like an old vaudeville horse doing arithmetic. Neil caught this action and grinned at me. “You OK?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Whatcha wanna blow?”
    “Pardon me?”
    His lip flickered. “Balloons or bubbles?”
    “None of the above?”
    He chuckled, then dug into the back of the van and handed me a bottle of bubbles. “Give it a try. It works well with the little kids.”
    I asked him how little they were.
    “Five or so. It’s a fifth-birthday party.”
    “Check.”
    “We’ll sing ‘Happy Birthday,’ bring out the cake.”
    I smiled at him. “Want me to jump out of it?”
    He took that as nervous humor, I guess, because he smiled back and said, “Don’t worry. You’ll do great.”
    Anyone else who’d reassured me about this mickey-mouse gig would have caught some shit, but Neil was different. As the day wore on, I saw how much he loved his work and how much he wanted me to love it as well. He was terrific with the kids, never condescending, dealing with their minicrises like someone who remembered how it felt. Here’s the image that remains with me: Neil at his keyboard, onyx eyes aglimmer, serenading the birthday girl with an up-tempo rendition of “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby.” When I jumped in unannounced for the second verse, he was surprised I could sing so well, but he winked at me and welcomed me into the song. It was a satisfying moment.
    The other guys had their functions too. Tread did magic tricks and made balloon animals, Emmett Kelly and his buddy were tumblers, and Julie shlepped around with her magic wand, telling knock-knock jokes that were incredibly lame, even for a fairy princess talking to preschoolers. I didn’t fare much better with my roving bubble-blower routine, but most of the kids, bless their voyeuristic little hearts, leapt at the chance to study a grownup shorter than themselves.
    We were finished by five o’clock, packed up like gypsies heading for the road. I’d already begun to think of the job in those terms, for purposes of sanity, if nothing else. It was easier somehow to tell myself that this wasn’t Bel Air 1991 but Romania a century earlier (minus the pogroms), and we were all actors in a wandering troupe, plying our trade at a village fair. There was grass beneath our feet, after all, and simple music of our own making, and a blue dome of sky above our heads. So what if the villagers were all the same age and the local noblewoman had a ridiculous hairdo? Fantasy is the art of not being picky.
    We dropped off the others at the parking lot, and Neil drove me home according to plan. As we climbed into the canyon, he apologized for the obstetrician’s wife, who, among other things, had called me “cute as pie” to my face in the same simpering tone she used with her five-year-old.
    I told him I was used to it.
    “Yeah, but still…”
    “Did she commend you on