A Son of the Circus

“Lunch here, tomorrow,” the actor replied.

“Lunch!” the screenwriter said with disappointment.

“So you’ve made a start,” the policeman said.

“Yes, I think so. It’s something, anyway—I’m not sure what,” Dhar remarked.

“So she responded?” Farrokh asked. He felt frustrated, for he wanted to hear the dialogue between them—word for word.

“Look at his lip!” Nancy told the doctor. “Of course she responded!”

“Did you ask her to draw you a picture?” Farrokh wanted to know.

“That part was scary—at least it got a little strange,” Dhar said evasively. “But I think she’s going to show me something.”

“At lunch?” Dr. Daruwalla asked. John D. shrugged; he was clearly exasperated with all the questions.

“Let him talk, Farrokh. Stop putting words in his mouth,” Julia told him.

“But he’s not talking!” the doctor cried.

“She said she wanted me to submit

to her,” Dhar told the deputy commissioner.

“She wants to tie him up!” Farrokh shouted.

“She said she meant more than that,” Dhar replied.

“What’s ‘more than that’?” Dr. Daruwalla asked.

The waiter brought the ice and John D. held a piece to his lip.

“Put the ice in your mouth and suck on it,” the doctor told him, but John D. kept applying the ice in his own way.

“She bit me inside and out,” was all he said.

“Did you get to the part about her sex-change operation?” the screenwriter asked.

“She thought that part was funny,” John D. told them. “She laughed.”

By now the indentations on the outside of Dhar’s lower lip were easier to see, even in the candlelight in the Ladies’ Garden; the teeth marks had left such deep bruises, the discolored lip was turning from a pale purple to a dark magenta, as if Mrs. Dogar’s teeth had left a stain.

To her husband’s surprise, Nancy helped herself to a second glass of champagne; Detective Patel had been mildly shocked that his wife had accepted the first glass. Now Nancy raised her glass, as if she were toasting everyone in the Ladies’ Garden.

“Happy New Year,” she said, but to no one in particular.

“Auld Lang Syne”

Finally, they served the midnight supper. Nancy picked at her food, which her husband eventually ate. John D. couldn’t eat anything spicy because of his lip; he didn’t tell them about the erection Mrs. Dogar had given him, or how—or about how she’d said he was as big as an elephant. Dhar decided he’d tell Detective Patel later, when they were alone. When the policeman excused himself from the table, John D. followed him to the men’s room and told him there.

“I didn’t like the way she looked when she left here.” That was all the detective would say.

Back at their table, Dr. Daruwalla told them that he had a plan to “introduce” the top half of the pen; Mr. Sethna was involved—it sounded complicated. John D. repeated that he hoped Rahul was going to make him a drawing.

“That would do it, wouldn’t it?” Nancy asked her husband.

“That would help,” the deputy commissioner said. He had a bad feeling. He once again excused himself from the table, this time to call Crime Branch Headquarters. He ordered a surveillance officer to watch the Dogars’ house all night; if Mrs. Dogar left the house, he wanted the officer to follow her—and he wanted to be told if she left the house, whatever the hour.