As if he were some seasonal pollen that gets stuck up my nose and reminds me what time it is, every year at the beginning of spring it all flashes back and I’m right there again in that sticky Australian heat, longing for something that will never be. Like a sad fantasy that makes me want to cry and come, all at the same time. I remember his face hovering over mine, whispering “my Ava, beautiful Ava.” I remember the play, the never-ending game, the laughter, the sense of possibility, the sense of something precious slipping through my fingers. I remember…

I almost put him on my vision board. He was a fringe famous bouffon clown who’d had a hit show at Edinburgh Fringe, where I planned to take my show next, and I wanted to put his five-star reviews on the vision board I was making before leaving for Australia. I decided it was too weird to put some random on my vision board, who knew what I’d attract.

In February of 2018, I took my one-woman show The Pleasure Project to Adelaide Fringe, “the second largest arts festival in the world” according to its Wikipedia page. The Pleasure Project tells the story of five aliens living on earth in human female form who, in light of impending nuclear war, believe the clitoris has the power to save humanity. I wrote it in the beginning of the first Trump presidency and premiered at Hollywood Fringe in 2017. I raised $14,000 on Kickstarter to sponsor the world tour, then quickly realized this amount would only pay for Adelaide. I’d have to figure out something else for Edinburgh in August. I’d been living rent-free at my aunt’s house in Tujunga for the past year, and what I raised was all the money I had to my name.

“Where ya headed?” asked a ruddy Australian on the sixteen hour flight from LAX to Melbourne.

“Adelaide!” I said brightly, rooting around in my backpack.

“Adelaide’s a shithole,” he said. “Why you goin there?”

“I’m doing the fringe,” I practically sang, handing him a postcard with a photo of the back of me wearing a skintight beige bodysuit, bent away from camera during a rehearsal of the show, so my entire virtually naked ass filled the frame. THE PLEASURE PROJECT in fuchsia printed over my crack. The guy who’d taken the photo was a friend from the theatre with whom I’d had disappointing sex once, disappointing because his penis was so long and sword-like, my insides hurt the next day, and because I got chlamydia.

“Oh yeah, the bogans are gonna love this one,” slurred the Aussie, licking his cracked lips. I made a mental note to look it up later.

Bogan (noun) (derogatory, informal) an uncouth or unsophisticated person regarded as being of low social status.

I’d made friends with an Australian dancer at Hollywood Fringe who was from Adelaide and whose parents still lived there. She set it up so my producer and I could stay with them at a reasonable rate for the run of the festival. Our first night in town, our hosts fried up a batch of egg rolls from scratch and, as the champagne flowed, I started bagging on America’s new president. My friend’s father said something that made me recalibrate where I was going with my rant. I turned to him.

“Wait. Do you like Trump?” I asked.

“Oh, we love him,” he said, without irony.

With reddened faces and champagne-loosened tongues, we started going at it as his wife and my producer attempted to shrink under the table.

The next morning, averting our tired eyes as we passed one another in the hallway, my friend’s dad and I agreed to disagree, and never mentioned politics again.  

As I sat at the kitchen table eating a heaping bowl of muesli and nursing a brutal champagne headache, my friend’s mother dropped the daily paper, The Advertiser, down in front of me. She pointed to the front page, and there he was smirking up at me, the fringe famous bouffon clown I’d almost put on my vision board.

“He’s fantastic,” she said, tapping the spot where the reviewer had put four stars. I stared into the dark well of his red-rimmed eyes.

“I couldn’t get into his show in Edinburgh, there was a line every night,” said my producer as she sat down next to me, a bowl of steaming black coffee in her hands.

“Let’s go tonight,” I said.

 

We walked past a tent the size of one you might take camping. The sign in front read Naked Girls Reading. This was Gluttony, one of two outdoor venues built in Rymill Park for the festival, the other being the Garden of Unearthly Delights. These were where the most popular shows of the fringe performed, the big circus spectacles and famous comedians—noise spill from every tent competing in a relentless cacophony of music, laughter, and disembodied voices. My show on the other hand, I would be performing in the band room of a dive bar called The Cranker, up the road and away from the action.

Finally we arrived at his red and white striped tent and outside there was a life-sized cardboard cutout of his character’s bulging blue body with a hole where the face should be. I stood behind it and shoved my face in the hole, sticking out my tongue. My producer snapped a pic.

We stepped inside the air-conditioned tent, a large fan set up to keep the air circulating. We took a seat in the center of the audience and waited. And suddenly he was there, as though he’d been there all along. Actually he had been there all along—these tents had no backstage. He materialized from behind a screen one long skinny leg at a time wearing a cobalt bodysuit with bulging protrusions around his midsection making him look like a tick fat from feasting off the blood of the innocent. Who was this sexy weirdo who pranced around the stage like a voluptuous ballerina? I felt drawn to his talent, his physical dexterity and dark humor, his seeking mind, the intensity of his eyes as they found me in the crowd. And then, when he stripped off his sweat-soaked costume and straightened his posture, magically transformed into a tall slender man with thinning brown hair sticking up sweatily from his head, I was stunned by his handsomeness. His show was about finding nonmonogamy after sabotaging a series of relationships. It was meant to be a story of redemption, showing us the reformed bad boy, and yet the mischievous look in his eye and the pleasure he took in reliving his debauchery made me wonder if he wasn’t still that bad. Oh no, I thought, I’m going to fall in love with this clown.

 

I spent the next week and a half exploring Adelaide, opening my show, and hustling for an audience. I felt I was in training, running in the parklands every morning to Taylor Swift’s “22”, working out at the exercise stations, walking around town with my three foot tall blond afro wig balanced on my head handing out flyers to curious passersby.

Despite a couple good interviews in festival magazines and a five-star review in The Advertiser, I had trouble filling the fifty folding chairs, and every night I shouted over drunk bogans playing pool and yelling in the next room.

I had the sense that there was a secret world of fringe artist life I wasn’t privy to, and after the initial thrill of performing my show in Australia had worn off, I started to feel lonely. As I walked around town putting my five stars on the posters I’d hired a distribution company to plaster around town, I was haunted by his eyes staring out at me from his posters, which were ubiquitous. The tagline under his character’s name read, “Come with Me.” I decided that I would.

 

Sunday

I knew what I was doing when I reached out on Facebook asking him to coffee, under the pretense of being a fringe newbie wanting to pick the brain of a seasoned performer fifteen years my senior. Perhaps I even convinced myself all I wanted was career advice, but I changed tables twice waiting for him. Finally he appeared out of nowhere wearing a homburg and a tailored suit and carrying a cane. He looked like a character from an Oscar Wilde play.

“Are you eating? I’m eating,” he said, picking up a menu. I’d already had my usual bowl of muesli, yogurt and fruit at the house. My friend’s mother liked to watch me eat, announcing to the air, “Ava likes a big brekkie.” But I felt self-conscious about making him eat alone so I ordered the cheapest thing on the menu—marmite on toast—then spent the entire time wishing I had ordered something more substantial as I watched him devour a heaping plate of portobello mushroom, kale, sweet potato and eggs.

I was disappointed to find we had little chemistry, and remembered the warning about meeting your heroes. I found myself trying to impress him, trying to sound smart and funny. At some point I managed to make him laugh and felt irrationally proud of myself. He picked up his phone.

“I need to be better about checking in with my wife,” he said as he sent a text. “It’s hard to be the person left behind at home. I’m not sure if you have experience with that.” He looked at me, a question in his eyes, but he didn’t ask so I didn’t answer. His wife wasn’t exactly “left behind at home,” she was in another country, on tour with the circus.

“Why did you come to Adelaide?” He asked. I laughed. Because I’d been obsessed with Australia ever since watching Priscilla Queen of the Desert as a child?

“Honestly, I don’t remember.” He gave me a look that told me this wasn’t a sufficient answer. I cleared my throat. “I’m planning to take my show to Edinburgh, so I’m using this as kind of a dress rehearsal.”

“Pretty expensive dress rehearsal,” he said. He suggested I apply for the Canadian fringe circuit.

“There’s a lottery, but if you get in you can actually make some money.” I nodded, took notes. The idea of making money working the fringe circuit had never occurred to me. I was just trying to get noticed. I realized that career performers viewed this as a job.

He said he’d connect me with the clowns he knew in LA, where there was a bit of a hot scene developing. I thanked him for his time and said I’d take care of breakfast. He seemed surprised when I hugged him goodbye.

“Oh!” he said, giving me an awkward pat.

I watched him amble up the street swinging his cane, thinking what a strange meeting that was, and that I’d probably never see him again.

He texted me late that night to ask how my show went, then again, later, to ask if I was going to the Artists’ Bar at Fringe Club. I was asleep already, having gone to bed early. I’d only been to Fringe Club once, for an afternoon mix n mingle hosted by the festival.

When I discovered his texts in the morning, I felt a fluttering in my belly. A sense I’d missed out on something, but what I didn’t know. That afternoon, after taking a hot yoga class that was free for fringe artists, I texted to find out what was happening that night. He said he was on his way back from wine tasting with some artists from Gluttony. They were going to a bar. I could meet him there if I wanted.

“Just gotta change out of these sweaty clothes,” I said.

“Those aren’t your going out clothes?” he asked.

“Depends on the night.” I beamed, showing my producer. She raised her eyebrows and shot me a look. Careful.

 

Monday

That night, he told me about the time he cheated on his girlfriend and had sex with someone else in their bed and this woman left behind a ring on the windowsill and, when his girlfriend found it, he lied and said it was a present for her.

“That’s how I got the nickname, grubby bunny.” He grinned, his crooked bottom teeth catching the light. I was thrilled by the intimate turn the conversation had taken. The tip of his nose was red from a day spent wine tasting in the sun, and he seemed more relaxed. We’d separated ourselves from the other artists and were sitting alone at the bar of a place called The Stag. 

We talked about the rules of his relationship: yes condoms, no oral sex, no spending the night. It felt like he was showing me the menu: this is what I can offer you. I was so fixated on the possibility of sex with him that the red flags eluded me: his show was about how much he enjoyed lying, his wife liked to change the rules of their arrangement at her will, his nickname was grubby bunny.

“Now show me yours,” he said. And it was my turn to share something embarrassing, shameful, revealing. I grinned. I knew exactly the story to trump his. I wanted him to know he’d met his match. I could be bad too.

I told him about the unavailable bartender I used to sex attack at my local dive bar in Silverlake until he gave in to my advances one fateful Halloween night, when I dropped my phone in the toilet and sucked the toilet water out of it before sucking the bartender’s dick in the bathroom.

When I got to the part about plucking my phone out of the toilet and putting it to my lips, his mouth dropped open.

“You look shocked,” I laughed, feeling nervous. What was wrong with me that I insisted on shocking men on first dates? Was this a date? My propensity for oversharing had blown up in my face before. Like the time I couldn’t stop talking about another man’s pussy eating abilities over breakfast with a guy I liked who couldn’t stay hard when we’d had sex the night before. That guy laughed at my jokes, then stopped answering my texts.

What I didn’t tell the clown was the look the bartender gave me after he came on the dirty bathroom floor, like I was the villain in his story.

“You make me a bad person,” he’d said. “Now I’m gonna have to lie to the woman I love for the rest of my life.” What I didn’t say was how ashamed I felt. How I didn’t want to be someone who ruined people’s relationships. The next morning, I’d handwritten a letter of apology and shoved it through the mail slot at the bar, then regretted doing that and went back to retrieve it only to find it was gone. I’d gone to an emergency therapy consultation and used up the free twenty minutes emptying the therapist’s tissue box.

“I’ve seen myself as an agent of change for men in unhappy relationships,” I sniffled. “I don’t know why I keep casting myself in this role.”

“Well, that’s a very mature question you’re asking,” the therapist said.

I didn’t tell the clown any of this because I wanted him to think I was cool. I watched him raise an eyebrow, take a sip of his drink. Had my toilet-water-dick-sucking story turned him off? Maybe I’d been wrong about him. Maybe he couldn’t handle me after all. I felt disappointed entertaining this possibility. There was something different about him. I knew from the moment he slithered onstage in that bulbous blue bodysuit that he was the one I’d been looking for.

A slow smile crept across his face and I realized he liked my story. He liked that I was capable of such depravity. He was not afraid of me. I let out the breath I’d been holding.

“From now on, I will call you… Potty Mouth,” he said.

 

He took my hand as we walked through the Garden of Unearthly Delights. I felt overstimulated, like I had been dropped into the most romantic scene of a movie without any of the preamble. Just yesterday I’d walked through this place alone, suckered into playing one of those carnival games designed to make it look like you could win a giant stuffed animal if you threw a ring just so, but you never would, not in a million years.

“For you, five tries,” said the carnie. I handed over my twenty bucks. That was twenty bucks I’d never get back. What a Pollyanna, I thought, convinced I could beat the house even with the odds stacked against me.

And now, everything was different. We stood under the death drop rollercoaster.

“Wanna try?” I asked. He peered up at the precarious machinery.

“Let’s do it on the last night. That way, if we die, at least we’d have finished our shows.”

“Makes sense,” I said, elated by the idea of seeing each other again after tonight. Thrilled to be with a real artist who didn’t care about dying so much as missing a performance.

We stopped under a giant oak tree and he turned to face me, smiling, then leaned in and kissed me. Our mouths fit together like they were always meant to. The current of the kiss ran from my lips down to my toes.

“You’re a good kisser!” He said as we broke apart, his Midwestern twang coming out more as he relaxed around me.

“I like kissing you too,” I said. We kissed again.

“Get a room!” yelled an amiable drunk passing with friends.

“We will!” I shouted back. I remember thinking, this is the most romantic night of my life.

At the corner store, I lingered by the magazines while he bought the condoms.

“That ritual always reminds me of high school,” I confessed in the Uber back to his.

“It doesn’t feel like that for me anymore.” He smiled sadly as he texted his wife, letting her know what he was about to do.

“All good?” I asked. He took my hand.

Back at the apartment he shared with a famous magician, he went to take a shower. I could hear him in the bathroom clipping his nails. At first I wondered why he was clipping his toenails now, then realized it was his fingernails in preparation for fingering me. I found this quite endearing. The room was like a boy’s college dorm with clothes scattered on the floor and red sheets bunched in the middle of the bed. I marveled at how grown men, away from their wives and left to their own devices, often reverted to this first moment of independence when they no longer had their mothers to do their laundry and make their beds. I opened his closet and gasped. There hung his deflated blue costume, dangling limply from the hanger, drained of all its magic without him inside. It felt like an invasion of his privacy to look at his character’s naked body. I reached out and touched the fabric. Then I took a photo and texted it to my producer.

“Guess where I am,” with a clown face emoji.

He returned from the shower having put all his clothes back on over his wet body. I laughed at him.

“You put your clothes back on!”

“Well, I didn’t want to be presumptuous,” he mumbled, clearly nervous.

He kissed me and I could taste toothpaste. I found it sweet that he cleaned up for me, but I liked the taste of his mouth better before. He reiterated that we weren’t allowed to do oral sex.

“Because of STDs. But I love oral sex,” he said, licking his lips.

That first time was pretty standard getting to know you stuff, trying all the various ways your bodies can fit together. We did lots of positions and I didn’t come.

“Can I do anything for you?” he asked after. I shook my head. At 4am, he walked me to the curb.

 

Tuesday

“It’s my wife’s birthday today,” he said when I ran into him at Glamonster v. The World. I’d come to the show with my producer and venue promoter, but distanced myself from them, strategically positioning myself next to the clown as we filed into the front row. It felt impossible to pay attention to Gingzilla, the seven foot tall bearded ginger drag queen, even despite her fabulousness, because his leg was pressed against mine.

After the show, I felt magnetized to him even as he attempted to slither away from me.

“She said she’ll never speak to me again if I hang out with you on her birthday.” I felt relieved that this was the reason for his slipperiness, and weirdly excited that his wife might view me as a threat, as if this were confirmation that what I was feeling was real. Even she could sense it, 7,000 miles away.

 

Thursday

I was lying in bed in the middle of the afternoon feeling like I might be getting sick when I saw on the Adelaide Fringe Facebook page an announcement that they were “seeking a brave soul” to take on the clown at tonight’s Lipsync Battle in place of Big Queefy, who had injured themself. My cursor hovered over the response box. Then I held my breath and typed out a message.

“I’ll do it!”

I hit send and sat back, imagining the scene... He finishes his lipsync and sits off to the side of the stage, expecting Big Queefy. He yawns, checks his watch. Then, as I emerge from the audience, wearing the final number from my show—long blond wig, red cocktail dress, fuchsia pumps and matching gloves—his bored expression transforms to one of shocked amazement. I wink at him and turn out to the audience as the opening chords of “Last Dance” begin to play. I have the crowd in the palm of my hand and, when the beat drops, everyone claps along with my choreography. I catch his eye as I turn away from the audience and shimmy out of the red dress. Then, in the final crescendo of the song, as Donna Summer hits the high note, I turn back to the audience, pulling off my wig and flipping my hair in one elegant motion, transformed into Eve in the Garden of Eden, wearing a sequined leaf bra and a sparkly pink merkin. An audible gasp from the crowd. I see him watching me with loving admiration. As I strut across the stage, presenting myself to the audience in all my blooming glory, he gets to his feet, starting the standing ovation…

I was pulled out of my fantasy noticing a response on Facebook.

“Someone else snagged it. Could you do tomorrow night?”

Deflated, I told them I couldn’t, not wanting to make plans in case there was a chance of seeing him again. I popped a prednisone and tried to rally for my show.

As my producer and I lugged my giant suitcase along the sidewalk to the bus that would take us into town where we then had to walk five blocks to The Cranker, I started to feel nauseous. It was 104 degrees in the middle of a heat wave, and I hadn’t eaten all day.

We arrived at the dive bar to find the AC was broken. There were eight people on the books for the show, and I wasn’t sure I’d make it through. Feeling like I might throw up or pass out, I started negotiating with my producer about what scenes we could cut and still have the show make sense.

“We can’t cut anything,” she said. “Because the people from Soho Theatre and Gilded Balloon are coming tonight.”

 

Friday

“It was awful. Just a bunch of drunk people screaming,” he texted the next day. Apparently he’d lost the Lipsync Battle. His opponent was just playing for laughs, while he was trying to do something beautiful.

“What song did you do?” I asked.

“I Put a Spell on You. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins,” he said. How apropos, I thought.

“I volunteered to battle you,” I told him.

“Really?”

“They were looking for volunteers on Facebook. I said I’d do it but it was too late.”

“Huh,” he responded.

I’d emailed the scout from Soho Theatre thanking her for coming to see the show and received a response saying she enjoyed it but didn’t feel it was quite ready for them, but to be sure to keep them in mind for any future work. The guy from Gilded Balloon said he would talk to his team about offering me a slot at Edinburgh in the fall, but ultimately the decision wasn’t up to him.

 

Saturday

It was four days after his wife’s birthday when he texted to say he wanted to go antique shopping, but was having trouble getting out of bed.

“I can come help you out with that,” I said.

“That sounds nice. Let me check in with my wife.”

She wasn’t answering her phone.

“Her phone died,” he said. Likely story.

He said he was going to try to get clearance for the rest of the festival so he didn’t have to ask for permission every time he wanted to see me. I felt elated at the prospect of having a whole uninterrupted week together. I tried not to think about what would happen after that week. Like in a dream, I dealt only with what was in front of me. No past or future, only now.

Three hours after we started texting, I had permission to come over. I told him I felt strung along but, horny and frustrated, I went to him.

When I arrived, he was eating rice from a pot on the stove. I made fun of his “bachelor rice” and he defensively informed me that it was actually very good Spanish rice he’d made for himself with vegetables in it.

In his room, we undressed. It was the middle of a hundred degree Australian summer day and we were sweating through our clothes. He got on top of me, and we maintained eye contact. I noticed a gnarly green booger in his nose. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to break the tension between us, make him feel embarrassed and risk a retreat. I wasn’t repulsed as I thought I might’ve been. If anything, the vulnerability of the booger moved me. After a while it was gone and I wondered fleetingly where it had gone to.

“Oh Ava,” he said as he entered me. He would repeat these words over and over.

“My Ava, beautiful Ava, darling.” It wasn’t cheesy. It was the hottest, most erotic thing I’d ever heard. I had always found the expression making love to be lame and embarrassing, but now I understood what it meant. This was making love. And it occurred to me that here I was falling in love. With a married clown. And I was totally screwed.

Afterwards we lay there, letting the sheets soak up our sweat. He asked again what time my show was.

“If I get everything ready beforehand and run over there, I could see your show on Sunday,” he said. Thrilled by the prospect that he would see my work, not only as a lover but as an artist I admired so much.

 

Sunday

I prepared with special attention, putting on my makeup and doing my tongue twisters in the lobby of the rundown hotel connected to the dive bar that served as my backstage. I knew I would give this performance my everything, that on some level I would be performing just for him.

I entered the audience through the back, scanning the room as I went. With forty people, the house was almost full. I didn’t see him, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t there. I imagined him lurking in the shadows and felt infused with newfound energy at the possibility that he might be out there. Despite the still broken AC, it was a great show.

My producer confirmed with me afterwards that he hadn’t shown up.

“You stood up my show!” I texted him.

“Fucking horrible day,” he responded. “My wife told me she’s not going to speak to me for a week.”

He didn’t apologize for not coming to see my show. I felt he had usurped my right to be angry by bringing up something that was more important than my feelings—his marriage. But again, that excited feeling. What was happening between us wasn’t only affecting me, but also her.

“Oh no, I’m so sorry to hear that,” I wrote back. Lying.

 

Monday

I had a night off and was heading home in an Uber after seeing the incredible Betty Grumble, a sex clown from Sidney who opened her show by singing “Loving You” out of her vagina. I spotted him in his homburg walking down the path leading to the Artists’ Bar, and told the driver to pull over.

“This isn’t your stop.”

“I know. Can you please just pull over?”

“You still have to pay for the whole ride,” he said, annoyed.

“That’s fine,” I yelled as I jumped out of the car and ran silently along the path leading to Fringe Club. I grabbed his waist. He didn’t react. He was distracted, staring at his phone.

“I’m checking to see if my wife’s posted any new photos on Facebook,” he said. Finally, he looked at me.

“What are you doing here?”

“Going to the Artists’ Bar,” I lied. We continued there together. It was closed so we headed back into town. Everywhere we went, we ran into artists he knew from the festival circuit. He introduced me, told them about my show.

“Oh, I think I’ve heard of that one,” said an androgynous Brit with a parrot on her shoulder.

He mentioned that he’d gone to a costume party the night before and had a wild time. I noted that this was the same night he stood up my show because he was too broken up about his wife. Again, I felt left out not knowing about the secret underbelly of the fringe.

“I’m starving,” he said, so we looked for a restaurant, but everything was closed. We ended up in a large, bright cafeteria where we ordered overpriced plates of pasta. He insisted on paying, so I bought the wine. Sparking Shiraz, a South Australian specialty. The mood was melancholy, but it was nice to be with him. We gazed across the table at one another, basking in the impossibility of it all.

“Why are you still single?” He asked then. “You seem cool, but I don’t know you that well.” I hated this assumption that I must be single because something was wrong with me, that it couldn’t be a choice. And how could he say he didn’t know me that well when we were so obviously soul mates? Like for him this was some low stakes sex comedy, while for me it was Titanic.

“I haven’t met anyone worth not being single for,” I said, hoping he could read between the lines. I stared into his eyes, and I could have said “I love you” right then, sitting across from this person I met a week ago in this fluorescent room in the middle of the night in a tiny town across the world from where I lived. We held hands over the table and tasted each other’s pasta.

 

“Put on some music,” he said, back at his place, handing me the iPad. As he took a shower, I looked through Pandora and felt a pang to see that the range of his musical taste echoed my own. To match my mood, I put on Chet Baker and we made love to “My Funny Valentine”, a song from his show, while staring into each other’s eyes, repeating one another’s names over and over.

And I did something then that I’d never done with anyone, not with either of my two boyfriends or with any of the other twenty nine men I’d had sex with. As I reached orgasm, I didn’t break eye contact. And when I came, staring into his eyes, I cried.

It was 4am and we were still naked when his wife called on FaceTime.

“She must have seen that I was on Facebook,” he said. He’d been showing me pictures of his family, his father who was missing teeth, his mother who had died young. He recounted this tragedy with little affect, as if it didn’t mean much, when clearly it had been the making of him. I mused that his persona of the sophisticated artist was a fabrication, not only had he designed his clown character, but also this version of his “real” self sitting in front of me.

“I don’t want to answer like this,” he said, pointing to his flaccid penis. “Want me to call you an Uber?”

“I got it.” I was already getting dressed, heading for the door.

“I’ll walk you out,” he said.

“You don’t have to.”

He kissed me on the sidewalk. I got into the Uber, wondering what my driver must think of this younger woman with a pink streak in her hair getting picked up at 4am outside a middle-aged man’s apartment.

 

Tuesday

I awoke to a string of texts letting me know that all was good with his wife. They’d had a good talk and decided to close things off for the rest of the week.

“You and I will now move into friend mode,” he said. “I actually think I could be quite a cool friend.” His tone was flippant, like he didn’t really care one way or another. Like he assumed I wouldn’t care either. As if I hadn’t crygasmed. I felt destroyed by this news, and wanted him to know it hurt me while not seeming too desperate.

“It makes me a bit sad,” I downplayed. “I’m not used to feeling expendable. But I saw it coming a mile away. I’m glad we can still be friends.” I turned off my phone and cried myself back to sleep.

When I woke again a few hours later, I decided there was more to say.

“The truth is I fell for you more than I intended and this has all been a bit of an emotional rollercoaster for me. You asked why I’m still single and it’s because I’m looking for a deep connection with somebody, something I actually felt with you. The cruel irony is that I would feel this for someone who is married.” He ignored the gushing of my open heart and apologized that things had gotten “awkward” between us. He said he hated having to be one way and then another, that it was usually straightforward with his wife and he didn’t understand why this time was different.

“You are a good, playful, intelligent woman. And you deserve the best.”

He said maybe we should speak in person, but understood if I didn’t want to.

 

Wednesday

In a daze, I wandered through town in search of food or him—maybe both, maybe one more than the other. I walked down the alley to the café where we’d first met and sat at our table and ten minutes later a server came to tell me they were closed. I stood up, continued on. And there he was, sitting outside the restaurant next door, drinking a beer and eating a burger, working on his laptop. I froze, then kept walking. He lifted his head and waved. I waved back, rolled my eyes, and walked over.

“Get out of my life!” I yelled, shaking his table. His full pint glass of beer tipped over and spilled everywhere. A nearby group turned to look. I blushed and apologized, righting his glass.

“Oh my god. I didn’t mean to do that. I’m so sorry. I’ll buy you another beer.” I flagged down the waitress and asked her to get him another.

“That was not a cool move,” I said.

“Very Elaine from Seinfeld,” he said, laughing and dabbing at his pants.

I told him I was looking for food but everywhere was no longer serving. I had tried our place next door.

“Same. You would have run into me there if not here. Join me.”

“I don’t want to invade your lunch.”

“I’d love to have lunch with you,” he said.

I went to find the server again and ordered myself a burger. I sat down across from him, taking the rest of his spilled beer for myself.

Friend mode turned out to be nice. I found myself more relaxed around him, more myself without the burden of trying to appear fuckable.

“Have you read Just Kids?” he asked. I winced, a fresh cut to the heart. What I’d always wanted from a partner was someone with whom I could talk about books like this.

“We’ll be like Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe,” he said. “We’ll run into each other throughout our lives. Lovers, then friends.” I took a deep breath. The prospect both thrilled and terrified me. Did I want a lifetime of running into this clown?

He told me he was going to come see my show on Sunday, my final performance.

“Are you nervous?” he asked.

“A little,” I said.

“Good. It’s good to be a little nervous.”

 

That night at the Artists’ Bar he tried to behave himself, and I tried to break him. I grabbed at his crotch and he begged me to stop. The more he resisted, the more determined I became to win. I could feel through his pants that he was hard, and there was some wetness too.

“I’m going to have to throw away these underwear,” he joked.

I put my nose to his face and inhaled. My desire felt primal, pheromonal, a feline driven wild by catnip. I stood on my tip toes, trying to kiss him. He raised his chin, so his mouth was just out of reach.

“It’s not fair, you’re so tall,” he yelped.

 We closed down the bar and walked beneath our giant oak tree, the one where we’d had our first kiss. I told him we could do what we wanted, this was a dream. He grabbed my ass.

“Why can you do that, but you can’t kiss me?” I whined.

“Because when I check in with my wife tonight, she will ask if we kissed. And if I lie, she will know.” He was looking for a loophole, so I looked too.

“What if I suck your dick under this tree?” Certainly she wouldn’t ask about that, as oral sex was supposedly off the table entirely. He begged me to tell him to leave. I wouldn’t. I would never be the one to walk away. We strolled some more, delaying the inevitable. Then his wife called. He sighed and turned away from me, leaving me alone on the sidewalk.

 

Thursday

I found an article online about the biological reason that women are attracted to the smell of certain men. If someone smells good to you, it indicates their genetics are dissimilar enough to yours that you’ll have healthy offspring. I sent him the article and asked if he wanted to go to the botanic garden.

“I’ll behave myself. We can go as friends.”

“I can’t today. How about another day?” … “That article is fascinating.”

 

That night at the Artists’ Bar we joked about our sexual frustration, stabbing the ice in our weak drinks. When the bar closed, he told me he’d reach out later. I wondered why. Back at the house, I got undressed and fell asleep. My phone buzzed me awake. I read his text.

“Are you asleep?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is this a dream?”

“What do you want?”

“A magic trick.”

“What are we doing here?”

“Not sure how to answer that. Are you unsure”

“I’m unsure why you texted me”

“I miss being with you”

“Me too. I want you”

“Me 2”

“So what can we do about that”

“I am here”

“And…?”

“Do you want to be here”

“Yes”

“I am waiting for you. If it’s not too late”

“I’m coming”

I got out of bed, dressed in sweats, and went to him. It was 5am when I arrived at his place. I was exhausted after so many late nights, running on pure adrenaline and lust. After we made love, I lay on his bed, hoping that since we’d broken the rule that we weren’t supposed to have sex anymore, that we could break this one last rule, that I could spend the night.

He traced the tattoo on my ribs with his finger. I will be light. A vision I’d had during an ayahuasca ceremony of what will happen when I die.

“I want to be light too,” he said, and kissed me. The sun was already coming up.

I asked why we were allowed to have sex now, knowing we weren’t but curious how he was justifying it to himself. He said he’d figured out a loophole. Because of the time difference, he usually checked in with his wife when he was going to sleep around 4am and she was just waking up and starting her day. Therefore, any questions she asked about me she would ask at their 4am check in. He could say we hadn’t had sex without lying, then have sex with me after their check in.

So, you’re cheating again, I thought and didn’t say. I didn’t say it because I didn’t want him to stop. I called an Uber and returned to my bed at 7am.

 

Friday

I woke up to rain and, feeling horny and nostalgic, texted him.

“Have you seen Call Me By Your Name?”

“No. I have to wait to see it”

“Why”

“Another rule of love. Ha ha”

“It reminds me of you.” Of us.

             

Saturday

We walked through the Bicentennial Conservatory at the Adelaide Botanic Garden, a geometric faux greenhouse meant to simulate the rainforest. I had loved the sticky humidity when I’d come here by myself just a week earlier. I’d fantasized about us making out in the hot mist. Now we were here talking about his wife.

“I’ve never seen her like this before,” he said. “She’s so jealous.”

“Why don’t you go to couples therapy?” I suggested. He shook his head.

“That’s what you do when it’s over.”

“No, it’s what you do when you want to work on your relationship,” I said. “Relationships are hard.”

“But so worth it!” He shrieked, and I felt annoyed by the implication that I was saying they weren’t worth it.

“Doesn’t she know all we do is talk about her?” He looked embarrassed.

“Oh god. Sorry.” We watched a blue bird take off from a large palm leaf and fly up into the glassed dome of the ceiling.   

“Have you been to the actual rainforest?” he asked. I shook my head, again feeling like our time together was a cheap knockoff of a real experience he’d had with his wife. This manmade facsimile suddenly seemed less spectacular than I’d remembered it.

           

Later, we sat in the audience of a painfully bad circus performance, marveling that this was the kind of mediocre shit Adelaidean audiences loved. He turned to the Australian woman sitting next to us in the booth.

“What do you like about this?” he asked.

“Oh, we love all of it. Every last bit of it,” she spat, sipping a weak paloma.

“Every. Last. Bit of it.” We barked at each other all night, laughing hysterically. Airing out our bitterness that our own shows couldn’t pull a tenth of this audience, concluding that ours were simply too sophisticated for these philistines to appreciate.

At Fringe Club, the DJ played 90’s hip hop and we stopped trying to be good. I began twerking on him ferociously, grinding my ass into his crotch, while he stood against the fence and playfully called for help. A crowd formed around us, by turns cheering me on and performatively trying to help him escape. Some people put offerings at our feet: a pint of beer, a rubber chicken. These were our people, fringe theatre people. They understood the game and everyone was eager to join in the spontaneous bit. The song changed and we danced for real, him spinning me around and dipping me. Then it changed again and he pulled me in close and we stared into each other’s eyes as we swayed.

“I like this,” he said. It started raining. We kept dancing, closing down the Artists’ Bar.

Back at his place, as he headed for the bathroom, I reached for his hand.

“I’ve had a show,” he said.

“Me too,” I said.

“Do you want to take a shower?” I nodded, but we never made it there. Wet and salty from a night of performing and dancing in the rain, we made love for the last time.

“I’ll miss this,” I said.

“You’ll go back to LA and get swept up in your life,” he said. I knew that wasn’t true, that it would take me months (years) to recover from this experience, from the loss of something I didn’t know I’d been missing. He didn’t say he’d miss me too, but as he buried his face in my neck, I could have sworn I heard him say I love you.

 

Sunday

I was packing up my costumes and preparing for my last performance when I received a series of long texts. He’d spoken to his wife, had mentioned that he was planning to see my show. She’d freaked out, asked when he’d spoken to me. He admitted he ran into me at a café and invited me to join him for lunch. She considered the fact that he hadn’t told her about this a devastating betrayal.

“So I am in the doghouse and I must face that I am a shitty husband who has not shown respect to his wife. Considering all the events I can’t go tonight.” I asked how seeing my show was a betrayal of his marriage. He said he had to prioritize his wife’s feelings. I said if we were friends he should be allowed to see my show. He said his marriage was on the line. I asked why he could have sex with me but he couldn’t see my show.

“I’m sorry. I’m very scared of losing my wife. I don’t think I could take that.”

“I honestly never thought you’d come anyway. You should really stop making promises you can’t keep.”

“Yes, you’re right. Thank you.”

 

The show that night was everything I’d ever wanted it to be.

My five aliens couldn’t believe that women were sitting on all this power, the power of their clitorises, and that somehow the culture had convinced us that the most sacred, beautiful, amazing part of ourselves was dirty, wrong, shameful. The show at its core was about realizing the potential that lies within each of us, and that there was nothing more powerful on this earth than a turned on woman.

Every folding chair was taken for my final performance, and I could feel the audience feeling all the things I wanted them to feel—awe, pleasure, catharsis. I was overcome with love for my creation, this show that had brought me to Australia, the thing I’d come here to do and almost forgotten about in the whirlwind of my obsessive affair. The irony did not escape me that here I had created a show about female sexual empowerment and, while performing it, had allowed myself to be completely derailed by a married clown.         

And still, as I took my final bow, I imagined him amongst them, starting the standing ovation, beaming proudly at me as if to say, “That’s my girl.”

 

I put on a flowy blue dress and a pair of kitten heels and showed up at the Artists’ Bar hoping he would be there, that we might have one last night together. My heels got stuck in the plastic honeycomb covering the ground, so I took them off. The festival directors were onstage, announcing the winners of the fringe awards. My show had not been nominated. A consolation prize: neither had his.

He finally showed up looking like the textbook definition of a sad clown, in post-show sweats, soggy eyeliner making dramatic lines through white face makeup.

“You look great,” he said, surprised.

“It’s the last night,” I murmured, feeling stupid for having gotten dressed up, incapable of accepting that it was over. I could see he was already gone, mentally on the plane home to his wife, his real life, getting ready to face the consequences of his actions.

“What are you doing now?” I asked.

“I’m going to go pack, then fly home and see if my marriage can withstand a coffee.” I winced. A coffee?

I resisted asking if he wanted help packing. I didn’t want him to leave, but I didn’t know how to make him stay.

“I’m sorry things got awkward between us,” he said again. This choice of words infuriated me every time he said it. The experience for me hadn’t been awkward so much as earth shattering.

I wanted to tell him that I loved him, that even after everything he’d put me through I still wanted him, that if he ever left his wife I would be waiting, ready to take his shit for eternity.

“Well, I made my bed and now I have to lie in it,” I said instead, channeling the cool girl he thought I was. He gave me a pitiful smile and turned to leave and, just to keep him standing there a moment longer, I cried out.

“I don’t regret it!” He turned back.

“Can I hug you?”

As I watched his balding head disappear into the crowd of artists celebrating the end of fringe, I realized that it was me who had broken the rules of this manmade world. That fringe existed on a parallel but unrelated timeline to the real world, never the twain shall meet. I understood that and yet…

 

Over the following days, weeks and months, I acted out all the clichés of the sad romantic comedy I decided I was living in. On the eighteen hour flight back to Los Angeles, I hovered under the scratchy airplane blanket watching Titanic and crying silently.

I’ll never let go Jack. I’ll never let go.

After landing in LA and sleeping for ten hours in the glorified closet at my aunt’s house, I decided I wasn’t yet ready to face the music and instead drove fourteen hours to visit my friend Falk in Bend, Oregon. On the inevitable drive back to LA, I stopped at my parents’ house in Bolinas and, feeling sorry for myself while walking alone on the beach, I sent him a Facebook message.

“I miss being with you.” And thus began the next chapter of our affair, which continued via text for the following three months, during which I masturbated often to “My Funny Valentine”, letting the tears pool in my ears as I came. I spent dutiful hours pouring over his wife’s Facebook albums, looking for clues that he loved me, that he was just pretending to be happy with her as they fed each other sushi and climbed Machu Picchu. After exhausting my friends with the tale, I started budget therapy so I’d have someone to pay to listen to me talk about the married clown.

One day lying on my back in the Silverlake meadow, I had a sudden moment of clarity and told him I didn’t want to be his side piece anymore. Followed by a moment of confusion when we started sexting again, and I came while doing my taxes. I met all the people he told me to meet in LA, and by meeting them, felt closer to him. I performed The Pleasure Project at a theatre run by one of his middle-aged contemporaries. I took a workshop with the director of his show. Like Waldo, I saw him everywhere, in every man in a hat walking down the street.

Then, one Friday afternoon in July, as I sat at a bar in Venice Beach enjoying happy hour with my ex, Will, I opened Facebook and saw that his wife had just posted a photo. There they were at a donut shop outside LAX. Two Collins deep and egged on by Will, I texted him.

“OMG so weird! I thought I just saw you.” Then, waiting for a reply and starting to regret the drunken impulse, I sent a follow up.

“You weren’t really going to come to LA without telling me, were you?” I put away my phone, left the bar and walked across the street to Salt & Straw, where Will and I shared an ice cream. I checked my phone again, a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. And in that moment, I knew.

I never heard from him again. I found a photo on Instagram of him with a group of aging magicians at the Magic Castle. I stared into the dark well of his eyes and wondered as I often did what he was doing at that exact moment. Was he thinking of me? If I concentrated hard enough, could I communicate with him across space and time?

 

--

 

Four years later, I’m standing in the backyard of my friend JV’s house in LA, about to watch a clown show.

A lot has happened in four years. I took The Pleasure Project to San Francisco and New York. The promoter from Adelaide offered me a slot at Gilded Balloon in Edinburgh, but it was at midnight in one of their newer venues, and I didn’t have it in me to try to raise $25,000 (what by all accounts it would cost) only to get lost in the shuffle and potentially have nothing to show for it but more debt. I needed to pay off my credit card and move out of my aunt’s house. By the end of 2019, I was working two jobs and starring in a play in Venice about a very pregnant woman walking through London planning to throw herself off London Bridge in the wake of a devastating climate event. When we closed in January 2020, I was exhausted, emotionally, physically, mentally.

One night, a guy I knew from the clown scene came into the bar where I worked with some friends, a clown named Shawn among them. We started dating. When covid hit, we locked down together, moved in, got a puppy. We were nonmonogamous, and Shawn fell in love with another clown named Rebecah. I decided I didn’t want to be with someone who was having stronger feelings for someone else than they’d ever had for me. We broke up on Christmas 2021 and eight days later I met Stevie at a winter solstice fire at a friend’s house. 

In January, Stevie and I went to a psychedelic drug party in JV’s backyard and, as we sat gazing into each other’s eyes, he put his hand on my belly.

“Maybe we’re going to have a baby,” he said.

“Yes,” I said, and five months later we got pregnant by accident.

 

But just one month after that party, Stevie and I are here in the same backyard, getting ready to watch a show that Shawn and Rebecah are both in, when I see him. Sitting in the back of the audience in a folding chair. Alone. Watching.

I run to tell Shawn. The clown loomed large for us, not only because of my infatuation, but also because in the clown world he’s kind of famous.

“That’s him?” Shawn can’t believe that this balding, solemn man sitting in the back of the audience could possibly be the clown who occupied so much space in our relationship.

And what a perfect moment for him to show up. I feel great. I’m surrounded by friends, I’m in love with someone who loves me back, radiating happiness and good health. Sometimes, when you’re in the flow of life, the universe delivers in such a perfect way, you couldn’t have written it better yourself.

During the show, I sit in front on the lawn and help wrangle the toddler of one of the performers. I pretend not to know him. I assume he’ll do the same. But, after the show, as we all hang around in the backyard schmoozing, I hear my name. I turn and there he stands.

“Ava, I owe you an apology,” he says, stepping forward, his dark eyes shining. “That day we were talking about going to the antique store, my wife was just so threatened. I’ve never seen her like that before. I got scared.” I can’t believe he’s taking us right back there, to that scorching Australian summer day when he’d strung me along for hours, the tension building to such a fever pitch that when we finally saw each other, we fell into bed in the bright afternoon, sweaty already as we hungrily peeled off wet layers, pushing our clothes to the floor.

“It’s okay,” I say now.

“You look good,” he says.

“I’m happy.”

He smiles.

“Is that your child?”

“No, she belongs to the community.” His desire for what I have is palpable. I feel the tables turning, and now he’s the one standing outside looking in at the cozy scene of my life.

“Maybe we can be friends,” he says.

“Maybe,” I say, noncommittal. I can’t imagine how that would work. He was always a fantasy, a mirage, hardly a real person I might meet for coffee.

As I leave the party with Stevie, making plans to go out with friends, I see the clown watching us. Smiling sadly as he turns and walks down the street alone, towards a rentable scooter to take him home, wherever that might be.

“Where’s home?” I asked when he was leaving Adelaide.

“Home is with my wife,” he’d said then, but now it occurs to me that he has no home, he is ungrounded, rudderless. And I feel sorry for him.

As I watch him walk away, I’m reminded of how I’d looked for him all over the streets of Adelaide, how he appeared to me everywhere, the tall man in the homburg hat. My Waldo. I wonder what my life would have been like if I hadn’t met the clown. Would I have gone to Edinburgh, made another show, performed at Soho Theatre? Would I have even met Shawn, or Stevie? Would I have had my daughter? Could it be that what felt like a painful detour from my path led me exactly where I was meant to go?

Now I’m the wife, the one with the furrowed brow and the greying hairs. How quickly the ghost of Christmas future catches up with us. Now I’m the one left at home when Stevie goes to Santa Barbara for school one weekend a month; he’s becoming a therapist. Now I’m the one left to wonder who he’s flirting with when I’m not there. Like the clown, Stevie too falls in love easily. It happened when we met. He was with someone else. Again, I cast myself as the agent of change for a man in an unhappy relationship. But with him, I broke my pattern. This time, I was the one who was chosen.