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By Root 2394 0

do any scene that called for a dialogue between two characters, though we gravitated toward comic scenes, and our tragic scenes for some reason had a way of becoming comic when we performed them. I was Horatio to his absurdly obese Hamlet, I was Cassius to his Brutus, I was Iago to his Othello, Antonio to his Shylock, and I wore a blond wig, lipstick, and a dress to play the Juliet to his Romeo (authentic Shakespearean women are performed in drag anyway), the Cordelia to his Lear, and I was the Lady to his Macbeth, riding triumphantly on the shoulders of my husband as I chastise him for his weakness of heart and exhort him to murder, and now I realize, Gwen, that I’ve gotten ahead of myself and completely neglected to tell you about my nose.

XXXVII

Ah, my nose! My anthropomorphosis was not complete yet. Let’s talk about noses, Gwen. Look at a chimpanzee’s nose. No human being who isn’t grotesquely deformed has a nose like that. It’s barely there at all. The chimp’s face caves inward in the middle like a wad of punched-in dough. The gentle glacis of his lower face into his wide upper lip from his nose holes, these two ugly apertures are flanged with a couple of slight ridges between the eyes, and that is all a chimp has to call his nose. I felt that I could not even begin to convincingly pass for human with an abhorrence like that smack in the middle of my otherwise not entirely unhandsome face. No, that thing had to go. Or rather, it had to become: to become a real man’s nose.

I do not remember at what point I had begun to obsess so much over my nose, but it was before I was accidentally removed to New York, and before I was living with Leon and performing Shakespeare in the subways. But I do know that this was when my vanity finally drove me to rhinoplasty. I was so self-conscious of my nose’s ugliness that I swear I couldn’t go five minutes without thinking about it. I scrutinized my face in every reflective surface I happened to pass, imagining what it would look like with a decently attractive human nose. Noses are strange things, Gwen. There is something innately humorous about them. Noses are silly. While the eyes are the tragedians of the face, the nose is its comedian. The eyes are the windows to the soul: human beings are disturbed and enchanted by their eyes—and amused by their noses.

Anyway, I wanted one. I had to have a nose. I’d made my decision, but there were difficulties. Chief among them: I was illegal. I was off the grid. I had no Social Security number, paid no taxes, had no papers of any kind to prove my existence, outside of some documents moldering in a filing cabinet somewhere in the Lincoln Park Zoo—but they were of course no help to me, not for what I wanted. The Shakespeare Underground was beginning to pull in a decent (but far from exorbitant) amount of cash by this time, due almost certainly to the addition of Bruno to the company, to the freak-show element he added to the act, and so also was the case with Leon’s magic shows. In truth, Leon had never been scrabbling in so much business in a very long time as he was with me. He came to depend on me—he needed me. Like organ grinder and monkey, we were entertainment symbiotes, lowbrow wedded to high. Months passed quietly. Leon and I passed these months in performing Shakespeare in the subway stations, rehearsing our acts in Leon’s squalid apartment on City Island, and occasionally performing our magic shows. Leon made me a present of my beautiful nickel-plated kazoo, and I learned to play it. As I’ve said, I have it still. Sometime I will show you my kazoo, Gwen. Leon would cook spaghetti for us, or instant macaroni and cheese, and we would eat watching old movies on TV—watching Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Cary Grant. We spent many nights at Artie’s, drinking for free at Audrey’s tolerant behest. We became great friends.

Between Shakespeare, magic, and the bar beneath the rubber shark in the back of Artie’s Shrimp Shanty, the months passed, and our finances increased at a modest rate. But I was still a fugitive, and I was still in