John Irving - A Son of the Circus

The actor, who was almost famous and whose living room was ruined, came home much later—after the fire was out and the firemen had left. Danny and Martin Mills were still playing in the swimming pool.

“Let’s wait up for Mommy, so you can tell her all about the fire,” Danny had suggested.

“Where’s Mommy?” Martin had asked.

“Out,” Danny had replied. She was “out” with the actor. When Vera and the actor returned together, Martin imagined that his father was slightly pleased with the smoldering wreck he’d made of the living room. The screenplay wasn’t going too well; it was to be an opportunity for the actor to do something “timely”—it was a story about a younger man with an older woman… “something bittersweet,” the actor had suggested. Vera was hoping for the role of the older woman. But that screenplay was never made into a movie, either. Martin Mills was not sorry to leave those permanently six- and eight-year-old children on South Lorraine.

In his stark cubicle at St. Ignatius in Mazagaon, the missionary was now looking for his copy of the Pocket Catholic Catechism; he hoped that these essentials of his faith might rescue him from reliving every bedroom he’d ever slept in in California. But he couldn’t find the reassuring little paperback; he presumed he’d left it on Dr. Daruwalla’s glass-topped table—in fact, he had. Dr. Daruwalla had already put it to use. Farrokh had read up on Extreme Unction, the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick, for this fit rather neatly into the new screenplay that the doctor was dying to begin; he’d also skimmed a passage about the crucifixion—he thought that he might make some sly use of it. The doctor was feeling mischievous, and the earlier hours of the evening had seemed interminable to him because nothing mattered to him as much as beginning this suddenly important piece of writing. Had Martin Mills known that Dr. Daruwalla was about to re-create him as a character in a romantic comedy, the unfortunate missionary might have welcomed the distraction of remembering his itinerant childhood in Los Angeles.

There’d been another L.A. house, on Kings Road, and Martin had cautiously loved that one; it had a fish pond, and the producer-owner kept rare birds, which were unfortunately Danny’s responsibility while he lived and wrote there. On the very first day, Martin had observed that the house had no screens. The rare birds weren’t caged; they were chained to their perches. One evening, during a dinner party, a hawk flew inside the house—and then another hawk flew inside—and to the considerable alarm of the assembled dinner guests, the rare birds fell victims to these visiting birds of prey. While the rare birds were shrieking and dying, Danny was so drunk that he insisted on finishing his version of how he was evicted from his favorite beach-view duplex in Venice. It was a story that never failed to bring tears to Martin’s eyes, because it concerned the death of his only dog. Meanwhile, the hawks swooped and killed; and the dinner guests—at first, just the women—put their heads under the dining-room table. Danny kept telling the story.

It had not yet occurred to young Martin that the declining fortunes of his father’s screenwriting career would occasionally result in low-rent housing. Although this was a step down from freeloading in the generally well-to-do homes of directors and producers and almost-famous actors, the cheap rentals were at least free of other people’s clothes and toys; in this sense, these rentals seemed a step up to Martin Mills. But not Venice. It had also not occurred to young Martin that Danny and Vera were simply waiting for their son to be old enough to send away to school. They presumed this would spare the child the continuing embarrassment of his parents’ lives—their virtually separate existences, even within the confines of the same residence, their coping with Vera’s affairs and with Danny’s drinking. But Venice was too low-rent for Vera; she chose to spend the time in New York, while Danny was pounding the keys of a portable typewriter and dangerously driving Martin to and from Loyola Marymount. In Venice, they’d shared the ground-floor half of a shocking-pink duplex on the beach.

“It was the best place we ever lived, because it was so fucking real!” Danny explained to his cowering dinner guests. “Isn’t that right, Marty?” But young Martin was silent; he was noticing the death agonies of a mynah—the bird was succumbing to a hawk, very near where the uneaten hors d’oeuvres still occupied a coffee table in the living room.

In truth, Martin thought, Venice had seemed rather unreal to him. There were drugged hippies on South Venice Boulevard; Martin Mills was terrified of such an environment, but Danny touched and surprised him by giving him a dog for a pre-Christmas present. It was a beagle-sized mongrel from the pound—“Saved from death!” Danny said. He named it “Whiskey,” because of its color and in spite of Martin’s protests. This must have condemned the dog, to name it after booze.

Whiskey slept with Martin, and Martin was allowed to put his own things on the ocean-damp walls. When he came “home” from school, he waited until the lifeguards were off-duty before he took Whiskey walking on the beach, where for the first time he imagined he was the envy of those children who can always be found in public playgrounds—in this case, those children who stood in line to use the slide on Venice Beach. Surely they would have liked a dog of their own to walk on the sand.

For Christmas, Vera visited—albeit briefly. She refused to stay in Venice. She claimed a suite of rooms at a plain but clean hotel on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica; there she ate a Christmas breakfast with Martin—the first of many lonely meals he would remember with his mother, whose principal measure of luxury was drawn from her qualified praise of room service. Veronica Rose repeatedly said that she would be happier living on reliable room service than in a house of her own—throw the towels on the floor, leave the dishes on the bed, that kind of thing. She gave young Martin a dog collar for Christmas, which profoundly moved him because he could remember no other instance of apparent collaboration between his mother and father; in this isolated case, Danny must have communicated with Vera—at least enough for Vera to know that Danny had given the boy a dog.

But on New Year’s Eve, a roller skater (who lived in the turquoise duplex next door) fed the dog a big plate of marijuana lasagna. When Danny and Martin took Whiskey out for a walk after midnight, the stoned runt attacked a weight lifter’s Rottweiler; Whiskey was killed by the first snap and shake.

The Rottweiler’s owner was a contrite sort of muscle man wearing a tank top and a pair of gym shorts; Danny fetched a shovel, and the apologetic weight lifter dug an enormous grave in the vicinity of the children’s slide. No one was permitted to bury a dead dog on Venice Beach; some civic-minded observer called the police. Martin was awakened by two cops very early on New Year’s morning, when Danny was too hungover to assist him and there was no weight lifter available to help him dig the dead dog up. When Martin had finished stuffing Whiskey in a trash bag, one of the cops put the body in the trunk of the police car and the other cop, at the moment he handed Martin his fine, asked the boy where he went to school.

“I’m part of an accelerated educational program at Loyola Marymount,” Martin Mills explained to the cop.

Not even this distinction would prevent the landlord from evicting Danny and Martin shortly thereafter, out of fear of further trouble with the police. By the time they left, Martin Mills had changed his mind about the place. Almost every day, he’d seen the weight lifter with his murderous Rottweiler; and—either entering or leaving the turquoise duplex next door—the roller skater with a fondness for marijuana lasagna was a daily presence, too. Once again, Martin wasn’t sorry to go.