Paul Theroux - Picture Palace

Carney grew impatient and interrupted Millsaps’s arrogant fawning. He didn’t shout. He sucked the cigar out of his mouth and said sharply. “Cut the crap, Milly, and start the fucking show.”

“Music, maestro!” said Millsaps, and another crack of his whip brought clowns tumbling into the ring. Among them was Mr. Biker, dressed in a Lord Fauntleroy suit; Mr. Biker — the solemn little person from Boarders , who had been so nice to me — with his face grotesquely painted; Mr. Biker — whom I had also done on Mrs. Fritts’s sofa with the big tomcat on his lap — now riding a child’s tricycle, now leapfrogging the other clowns, his tiny legs working like mad and tipping him from side to side when he ran. One would not know from his work that this fool was a man.

This wasn’t what the men wanted. Led by Carney, they booed the clowns; they booed poor Orrie who expertly juggled five oranges — booed so loudly Orrie panicked and dropped them; they booed Digit, they booed Turko the weightlifter, and they howled so furiously at a dog act the little mutts scattered yapping out of the ring.

All the while I was doing pictures: Carney, the pig, the drunks in tuxedos, the catcalling. And it dawned on me that the whole purpose of the dinner, like the purpose of patronage, was a meal ticket to mock, to sit in judgment upon people whom money had made into clowns. They craved a chance to boo, and I saw Papa laughing with the rest of them. I didn’t mind doing his picture anymore, because this was the truth. Each picture made me ever more solitary: photography was something that rid me of images by disposing of the visible world, a lonely occupation that made me lonelier.

It was about fifteen minutes after these acts came on, with the band crashing and the men booing, that the others started. There were trumpets and drum-rolls. I saw them enter; I verified them in my viewfinder, then I looked at Monk, who was working a spotlight at them. Monk was nibbling his lip and though I was not in his way he was saying, “Shift, shift.”

I couldn’t believe my eyes, but I believed my camera. First, Harvey and Hornette, galloping in on a white horse; then the Flying Faffners, Kenny and Doris, prancing back and forth on the high wire; then a girl named Glory, whom Millsaps introduced, as he had the others, by screaming her name and cracking his whip. The circus ring was in motion and up above, Glory was swinging on a trapeze over the heads of the men at the tables.

The men had gone silent. They craned their necks at Glory. No boos for this; the only sounds were the horses’ hooves, the band playing “The Loveliest Time of the Year” in a muted quickstep, and the squeak of the trapeze ropes; and the reason was the costumes, for they had no costumes.

They were stark bare-ass naked, Harvey and Hornette wobbling on their horses, the Faffners upstairs on their wire — their bums shining in Monk’s spotlight — and Glory, a stripped doll on her trapeze swooping with her legs open. The nakedness alone didn’t shock me; it was their movement — they were endangered white figures and looked unprotected in their skin. Glory flung herself backward, started to fall and caught her ankles on the bar, hung briefly like a side of meat and then came at Carney reaching and so fast her breasts were yanked and I could hear the wind rushing against her navel.

There were tumblers. They came in a small jalopy and piled out, twelve of them, boys and girls, with springy bodies, doing cartwheels and handstands — such a splash of energy it was hard to tell they were naked except by the tufts of hair between their legs. They tumbled in pairs, linked in a brisk double image, repeating around the ring, miraculously missing the horses’ hooves.

Harvey and Hornette drew level on their horses and Harvey vaulted behind Hornette to a corn-holing posture. The watching men found their voices and rooted loudly. At first all the mounted brother and sister did was canter. As they rode into Monk’s green light I noticed their flesh and the horse’s, the way their straddling legs clutched the blanket-folds of his muscles and looked so frail and damp. The cries increased, and the band’s braying; Hornette stood up and raised her arms, and her breasts jogged as Harvey held her flanks. He got to his feet and around they went, one behind the other, naked on the slippery horse.

Glory had swung to a rope. There was a red stripe on her buttocks where the trapeze bar had cut her. She slipped one foot in a stirrup loop and upside down scissored her legs open — and pulled a length of magician’s scarves, knotted end to end, out of her mousehole. She arched her back, and as Monk painted her in light she slipped the other foot in and spun herself to a blur.

The young tumblers made themselves into a pyramid. They pitched forward somersaulting and rolling in the sawdust in brief copulatory gymnastics, the girls on all fours throwing their hair from side to side as the boys rushed them from behind making little slaps as they met the squealing girls.

Body on body, naked, pairing — double exposure: two of everything. And how strange it was when they walked on their hands and showed their beaks and cracks as wrinkled fluidy faces in collars of hair between their kicking legs. But I was frightened by the roar of the men and their table-thumping; by the sight of the circus performers stripped naked, and the grunts that reached me in my cubicle; by the heat. What disturbed me most was seeing people I knew so changed — not just Papa hollering, but Harvey and Hornette belly to belly on the tramping horse.

Nakedness speaks in a way no voice can, saying fear and woe and age. But it wasn’t naked anymore, nor a show of muscle and damp hair. It was a thin bruised suit, pale enough for me to photograph the stitchings of veins, and luminous in the cigar smoke and dust and paint. Their defenseless skin! Flesh has a tremble that clothes hide: everything they did looked dangerous.

Typically, the nude is shown in repose or making love. But this was against all tradition — Hornette swiveling by her teeth, the tumblers becoming bizarre people with fuzzy shrunken heads, Hornette rejoining Harvey on the horse. It was unimaginable human motion, animated by a crowd of cheering men. I would not have believed it without my camera.

What Harvey and Hornette were doing at a gallop, the Faffners did on their high wire, without a net. I could barely keep my camera steady when I saw them get down on one knee and face each other, mimic a caress eighty feet in the air, denting the wire where their knees pressed it. They remained suspended, swaying slightly, in a risky balance. Their lips touched and their shoulders met: I expected them to be jerked to the ground and to end up in a broken pudding of arms and legs. This danger made its eroticism vividly blacker.

But they stayed on the wire and continued to simulate the sexual duet. The symmetry anchored them. The pair of them were saved by the electric field of their two bodies: the man and woman joined making them a perfect magnet, incapable of coming loose. She chased him; she sat on his face; she hung by her knees, hinged upside down on the wire and, crouching, he gratified her with his finger, while she rocked back and forth in the air, her arms outspread, like spiders at play.

Hornette was doing a headstand on Harvey’s own head, repeating his seated posture in a mirror image. The tumblers had gone off. They were replaced by a lion act, six growlers on red stools making mauling motions with their paws at the naked girl with the whip and chair. I could not bring myself to photograph them licking her, and I looked away when she pulled their tails. But I had six tries at them lunging through her legs and rubbing and lifting her as they passed sleekly under the arch of her thighs.