John Irving - A Son of the Circus

“Lessened?” Farrokh repeated.

“Either the attraction went away or I overcame it,” said Martin Mills. “Finally, I won.”

“ What did you win?” Farrokh asked.

“Not freedom from desire,” the would-be priest declared. “It is more like freedom from the fear of desire. Now I know I can resist it.”

“But what about her? ” Dr. Daruwalla asked.

“Her?” said Martin Mills.

“I mean, what were her feelings for you? ” the doctor asked him. “Did she even know how you felt about her?”

“Him,” the missionary replied. “It was a he , not a she. Does that surprise you?”

“Yes, it does,” the doctor lied. What surprised him was how unsurprised he was by the Jesuit’s confession. The doctor was upset without understanding why; Farrokh felt greatly disturbed, without knowing the reason.

But the plane was taxiing, and even its lumbering movement on the runway was sufficient to panic Madhu; she’d been sitting across the aisle from Dr. Daruwalla and the missionary—now she wanted to move over and sit with the doctor. Ganesh was happily ensconced in the window seat. Awkwardly, Martin Mills changed places with Madhu; the Jesuit sat with the enraptured boy, and the child prostitute slipped into the aisle seat next to Farrokh.

“Don’t be frightened,” the doctor told her.

“I don’t want to go to the circus,” the girl said; she stared down the aisle, refusing to look out the windows. She wasn’t alone in her inexperience; half the passengers appeared to be flying for the first time. One hand reached to adjust the flow of air; then 35 other hands were reaching. Despite the repeated announcement that carry-on baggage be stowed under the seats, the passengers insisted on piling their heavy bags on what the flight attendant kept calling the hat rack, although there were few hats on board. Perhaps the fault lay with the long delay, but there were many flies on board; they were treated with a vast indifference by the otherwise excited passengers. Someone was already vomiting, and they hadn’t even taken off. At last, they took off.

The elephant boy believed he could fly. His animation appeared to be lifting the plane. The little beggar will ride a lion if they tell him to; he’ll wrestle a tiger, Dr. Daruwalla thought. How suddenly the doctor felt afraid for the cripple! Ganesh would climb to the top of the tent—the full 80 feet. Probably in compensation for his useless foot, the boy’s hands and arms were exceptionally strong. What instincts will protect him? the doctor wondered, while in his arms he felt Madhu tremble; she was moaning. In her slight bosom, the beating of her heart throbbed against Farrokh’s chest.

“If we crash, do we burn or fly apart in little pieces?” the girl asked him, her mouth against his throat.

“We won’t crash, Madhu,” he told her.

“You don’t know,” she replied. “At the circus, I could be eaten by a wild animal or I could fall. And what if they can’t train me or if they beat me?”

“Listen to me,” said Dr. Daruwalla. He was a father again. He remembered his daughters—their nightmares, their scrapes and bruises and their worst days at school. Their awful first boyfriends, who were beyond redemption. But the consequences for the crying girl in his arms were greater. “Try to look at it this way,” the doctor said. “You are escaping .” But he could say no more; he knew only what she was escaping—not what she was fleeing to. Out of the jaws of one kind of death, into the jaws of another… I hope not, was all the doctor thought.

“Something will get me,” Madhu replied. With her hot, shallow breathing against his neck, Farrokh instantly knew why Martin Mills’s admission of homosexual desire had distressed him. If Dhar’s twin was fighting against his sexual inclination, what was John D. doing?

Dr. Duncan Frasier had convinced Dr. Daruwalla that homosexuality was more a matter of biology than of conditioning. Frasier had once told Farrokh that there was a 52 percent chance that the identical twin of a gay male would also be gay. Furthermore, Farrokh’s friend and colleague Dr. Macfarlane had convinced him that homosexuality was immutable. (“If homosexuality is a learned behavior, how come it can’t be un learned?” Mac had said.)

But what upset Dr. Daruwalla was not the doctor’s sudden conviction that John D. must also be a homosexual; rather, it was all the years of John D.’s aloofness and the remoteness of his Swiss life. Neville, not Danny, must have been the twins’ father, after all! And what does it say about me that John D. wouldn’t tell me? the doctor wondered.

Instinctively (as if she were his beloved John D.), Farrokh hugged the girl. Later, he supposed that Madhu only did as she’d been taught to do; she hugged him back, but in an inappropriately wriggling fashion. It shocked him; he pulled away from her when she began to kiss his throat.

“No, please …” he began to say.

Then the missionary spoke to him. Clearly, the elephant boy’s delight with flying had delighted Martin Mills. “Look at him! I’ll bet he’d try to walk on the wing, if we told him it was safe!” the zealot said.

“Yes, I’ll bet he would,” said Dr. Daruwalla, whose gaze never left Madhu’s face. The fear and confusion of the child prostitute were a mirror of Farrokh’s feelings.

“What do you want?” the girl whispered to him.

“No, it’s not what you think… I want you to escape ,” the doctor told her. The concept meant nothing to her; she didn’t respond. She continued to stare at him; in her eyes, trust still lingered with her confusion. At the bloodred edge of her lips, the unnatural redness once more overflowed her mouth; Madhu was eating paan again. Where she’d kissed Farrokh, his throat was marked with the lurid stain, as if a vampire had bitten him. He touched the mark and his fingertips came away with the color on them. The Jesuit saw him staring at his hand.

“Did you cut yourself?” Martin Mills asked.

“No, I’m fine,” Dr. Daruwalla replied, but he wasn’t. Farrokh was admitting to himself that he knew even less about desire than the would-be priest did.

Probably sensing his confusion, Madhu once more pressed herself against the doctor’s chest. Once again, in a whisper, she asked him, “What do you want?” It horrified the doctor to realize that Madhu was asking him a sexual question.

“I want you to be a child, because you are a child,” Farrokh told the girl. “Please, won’t you try to be a child?” There was such an eagerness in Madhu’s smile that, for a moment, the doctor believed the girl had understood him. Quite like a child, she walked her fingers over his thigh; then, unlike a child, Madhu pressed her small palm firmly on Dr. Daruwalla’s penis. There’d been no groping for it; she’d known exactly where it was. Through the summer-weight material of his pants, the doctor felt the heat of Madhu’s hand.

“I’ll try what you want—anything you want,” the child prostitute told him. Instantly, Dr. Daruwalla pulled her hand away.

“Stop that!” Farrokh cried.

“I want to sit with Ganesh,” the girl told him. Farrokh let her change seats with Martin Mills.

“There’s a matter I’ve been pondering,” the missionary whispered to the doctor. “You said we had two rooms for the night. Only two?”

“I suppose we could get more …” the doctor began. His legs were shaking.

“No, no—that’s not what I’m getting at,” Martin said. “I mean, were you thinking the children would share one room, and we’d share the other?”

“Yes,” Dr. Daruwalla replied. He couldn’t stop his legs from shaking.