My husband of fourteen long and briefly joyous years suddenly left me last month for a male circus hooker. He spends his time between the arms of his lover and more menial tasks, such as cleaning out the lion cage and refilling the clown’s squirting water flower. And while part of me admires him for it, the situation has hardly done much for my self-esteem.
It all started when I awoke one morning without my husband beside me, and found on the dressing table a flyer bearing a trumpeting elephant, a red-and-yellow tent, and a mustachioed man using one finger to hoist weights. Scrawled in the bottom corner of the thin sheet was the familiar phrase, ‘Off to join the circus’. He had taken none of his possessions save the suit he was wearing and a pair of misordered, grossly oversized shoes.
I’m not up to date with the modern terminology. I’ve heard of the phrase gay-for-pay, and a life in the circus brings scant monetary reward. It’s not for me to say whether my husband’s new relationship represents true love or mere sleight of hand, but understandably after what’s happened, I’m a bit of a cynic.
A divorce settlement is ongoing, but shouldn’t prove too much bother. As an itinerant traveller who lives in and out of the back of a circus truck, my husband has little use these days for our four-door vehicle or old family home. I’ve already started to forget what a shared breakfast looks like, or the sound of a quiet moment without distant laughing and a strange honking from some far-off place.
Some day I’ll tramp that well-worn grass and push past the waddling seals and cotton candy, and I’ll confront that old man of mine, even if I have to tear him out of the arms of his newfound lover. I’ll ask him why he left me, if we weren’t once happy, why he felt that he couldn’t talk to me, if the circus of reality is the same he once conjured in his dreams. We quarrelled often before his departure, and he might tell me to go swing. And I’ll probably end up joining the circus and taking up the trapeze, because I’ve always fancied myself as kind of limber.
