Tales of the City 08 - Mary Ann in Autumn

soft gray light as acrobats practiced on the trapeze. Shawna sat in the top row of the bleachers, as far away from the action as possible, since she hated the thought of embarrassing Otto in his element.
    Otto was actually his real name, though he’d lengthened it to Ottokar for his professional handle. The original Ottokar had been emperor of Bohemia—something Otto had learned from a Tintin comic book. He was a lanky, lion-maned man who rode a beat-up bicycle, when he wasn’t riding a unicycle, and carried coffee-stained paperbacks in his knapsack. The night they met (the night Iron & Wine came to the Café du Nord) they’d talked mostly about the music, learning next to nothing about each other. Shawna liked that—not because she was in any way ashamed of her work but because Otto had come to their hookup with none of the usual expectations. He’d never even heard of Grrrl on the Loose, much less followed a blog, so her raffish online persona had never worked its cheap tricks on him. This guy wanted the girl—not the Grrrl—and that made all the difference to Shawna. Bettie Page, poor thing, should have been so lucky.
    When Otto told her he was a clown—came out to her, in effect, with a mortified grimace as if he’d just confessed something horrendous—her heart had gone out to him. She’d tried to show him she was totally cool about it, that she understood his art form beyond the kitschy creepiness of Ronald McDonald and Bozo the Clown. She’d told him about her passion for Fellini and how her gay uncle Michael (who wasn’t technically her uncle) had introduced her to Cirque du Soleil when she was seven years old.
    But all the while she’d been fixated on something else: a report she’d once written for her blog about a local group whose fetish was fucking in clown costumes. She had witnessed this phenomenon herself one rainy night on Minna Street, though it had struck her as more of a stunt than an actual fetish. (“Call me old-fashioned,” she would later write, “but when I feel something red and round and hard, I don’t want it to be a nose.”) She had left the party early, apologizing to the host, having learned nothing beyond the obvious reality that lube and greasepaint were not each other’s friends.
    Of course those people had just pretended to be clowns. Otto was the real deal; he approached his craft with a dignity that bordered on the sacramental, especially when he made his rounds at schools and nursing homes. She respected him for his charity work and admired his expertise with unicycles and bowling pins, and generally found him to be sweet and a great deal of fun in the sack, but she never started taking him seriously—much less gazed into his heart— until she met Sammy.
    Sammy was a life-size monkey puppet who rode on Ottokar’s arm. In the routine Sammy would poke teasingly at Ottokar until the clown became angry and smacked the monkey in the face, knocking him to the ground. Aghast at what he had done, Ottokar would scoop Sammy into his arms, where, like a simian pietà, Sammy would hang as limp as the rag that he was. Ottokar’s frantic efforts at reviving Sammy would eventually succeed (to the audible relief of the audience) only to be undone when the clown stumbled and fell, crushing the monkey under his weight. For a long time all the audience could see was Ottokar’s inert form. Then, limb by skinny limb, Sammy would appear again, pulling himself from beneath the body of his friend.
    What was it about this bit that had endeared Otto to her? Had it simply shown he was a nice guy, a compassionate person, or was it something to do with his irony, his weary grasp of life’s betrayals? Whatever it was, her defenses had fallen on the spot. Her previous lover, a Brooklyn lighting designer named Lucy Juarez, had worn Shawna down with her melodrama and free-range jealousy. Lucy had been the ultimate buzz-kill, in fact, the final nail in the coffin of Shawna’s two-year New York experiment. She had moved East to sell a book (or a “blook,” as Lucy had once snidely called it, since almost all of it had come from the blog) and partly to show her doting single dad that it was time for them to pursue separate lives. But her dad had long ago hit the road in his RV, and Brooklyn, for all its pioneer charm, was starting to wear a little thin. When she packed her bags and headed back to San Francisco, she felt no shame about it whatsoever, only a determination to simplify