Stone Junction (29 page)

‘Anywhere you choose.’

She cocked her head slightly, a gesture that would have seemed coy if not for the strength in her voice, ‘And please, Mr Pearse, don’t mistake
me
.’

‘I won’t,’ Daniel assured her, thinking,
I dreamed; now maybe I can
make love to the same woman twice
.

They ate at a small Greek restaurant, then, having dismissed Phillips earlier, took a taxi to her Upper East Side apartment. He didn’t wait for her to turn on the lights. Taken with the sudden dizziness of desire, he put his arms around her.

‘Daniel,’ she warned, breaking away. ‘Don’t. You’ll be disappointed, I’m afraid.’

‘More likely, that would be
your
complaint, not mine.’

‘I doubt that sincerely,’ she said, flipping on the lights.

Daniel, whose attention had been riveted on her, was startled to see her apartment was more like a small warehouse, most of it devoted to makeup tables and racks of clothes. He looked at her, the intimation of betrayal like a weight in his lungs. But before he could even imagine what it was he hoped she could explain, Imera swept off her wig and hung it on a nearby rack. She was bald.

And when she spoke, it seemed her voice had dropped thirty-nine octaves. ‘Daniel, allow me to introduce myself properly. I’m Jean Bluer, Master of Disguise.’ Jean Bluer smiled hugely at his little joke.

‘I’m going to kick your ass,’ Daniel promised, taking off his coat.

‘I seriously doubt that will occur. Besides being a master of disguise, I am also a master of Tao Do Chaung, the almost extinct art of Ninja foot fighting, and I
will
defend myself.’

‘I think you’re the master of bad jokes and bullshit.’ Daniel lunged.

Jean Bluer spun sideways, whipping his right foot around into Daniel’s thigh with an excruciatingly precise force. Daniel went down screaming.

Jean Bluer looked at him as he writhed in pain. ‘Daniel,’ he said, vaguely disappointed, ‘you must develop a larger appreciation for the essential humor of identity.’

Since Jean Bluer was never entirely himself, any description was provisional. His eyes most often were blue, but through the adroit use of contact lenses and the application of special drops he prepared himself, they might be twenty shades of hazel, brown, or grey. His hair color, length, and style were a function of whatever wig he chose for the day, just as his nose and ears depended on putty and makeup for their shape. He altered his body with girdles, lifts, padding, postural changes, and the warehouse of costumes, many of which he’d sewn or otherwise assembled himself. When Smiling Jack had called Volta’s attention to Jean Bluer, Jack had claimed that given enough preparation time, Jean could pass for
any
adult from twenty-nine different cultures – and Jack was notoriously frugal with exaggeration.

Daniel received his daily lessons in the warehouse where Jean dwelt among his manifold identities. Jean was a passionate and exacting teacher. Study began at seven in the morning and lasted till nine in the evening. At Daniel’s insistence, instruction in Tao Do Chaung was added, beginning at 5 a.m. After the smoky rancidity of the gambling life, Daniel embraced the physical exertion of Tao Do Chaung’s dervishlike exercises.

Daniel had revered – even loved – Wild Bill. Mott Stoker he’d admired for the exuberance of his excesses. He’d hated and adored Aunt Charmaine’s glacial grace and piercing mind. He’d respected Bad Bobby’s skill, style, and raptor’s eye. He was enthralled by Jean Bluer. The warehouse, like Jean’s psyche, was a hall of mirrors, and while Jean, like his student, examined each image for its elemental accuracy, teacher and student were both compelled to look into themselves for who they might possibly become.

Jean Bluer distinguished four stages of disguise: the photograph; the dance; the poem; and the person. The photograph, as the label implied, centered on visual accuracy. Under Jean’s severe tutelage, Daniel learned how to use skin tints, crepe beards, putty, sponges, false eyelashes, contact lenses, paint-on tooth enamels; a variety of wens, warts, and beauty marks; and molded latex masks which, worn overnight, pulled his features to their designs.

Initially they worked from a file of photographs. When Daniel finished his makeup, Jean Bluer inspected the face, offering a barrage of criticisms and suggestions.

‘The seal between the nose putty and lip line is faulty – use a bit more glue, and mix a touch of Max Factor Number Nine in with it.

‘The beard is inept, much too sparse below the jaw. The powder on the cheekbones is excessively dark, thus exaggerating the hollow; in sunlight you’d look like a zombie. And
smear
the lip gloss; it’s blinding. Small amounts, smoothly applied – that’s the proper application. Small and smooth. Suggestion, not statement. The harmonious integration of details.’

After a month working from photos, they moved to the street for an hour every morning. Jean Bluer would pick out a model for Daniel to reconstruct back at the warehouse. Jean commented as Daniel, squinting into the semicircular mirror on the makeup table, reproduced the face from memory. As Daniel soon discovered, each face Jean chose as a model presented different problems.

‘
No!
Never! The eyes are too far apart. You couldn’t fool a blind man,’ Jean Bluer would admonish, picking up the eyeliner. ‘Like
this
, you see – a bolder line, and a little more arch to the brows. The eyelashes, now, curl them
away
from each other. Notice how it widens the placement of the eyes, thus broadening the forehead, harmonizing the illusion.’

Or another day: ‘Acchhh! The scar is terrible.
Atrocious
. Like scars little kids paint on their faces playing pirate. Utterly one-dimensional.’ (One-dimensionality was, for Jean Bluer, the only unforgivable fault.) ‘Wipe it off before its stupidity paralyzes us both. Now try this: a whitish-grey liner, a hint of silver, a faint streak of blue for the highlights. Then, the little bottle next to the Max Factor Flexible Collodion that you’ve used to hold wigs and seal putty – no, next to it, yes, the little bottle that says
Non
-flexible Collodion. Now, paint over the scar. See? It shrinks the skin and draws it inward. Notice how the lower lid of your eye is just
slightly
pulled down? Yes, yes – excellent. You did especially well on the coloration. That
is
a scar. Merely looking at it one can feel the pain of the original wound, the pain of healing.’

When Daniel was proficient with makeup, Jean introduced him to costume. From Amish hats to zebra-striped panties, Daniel learned materials, cuts, padding, and the conventions governing them. Women’s clothing in particular confounded him.

‘Heavens,’ Jean Bluer howled at his first attempt, ‘you’d be arrested in a moment as a transvestite, and any self-respecting drag queen would
assist
the police. The nylons are baggy. If your upper lip were any thinner you could slice salami. The purse was out of style seven years ago, and you are holding it like a dead baby. Your breasts have ridden up around your collarbones because you have not imagined their weight, thus are holding your shoulders too far back. Also, your feet are too far apart and your center of balance seems to be around your knees rather than between your hips. This is bad, Daniel. This makes me ill.’

After school, Daniel, who lived in a rooming house down the block, was free to do as he pleased, as long as he observed how people looked, walked, talked, and thought. Daniel kept notes, and while he practiced the morning’s lesson in Tao Do Chaung, Jean critiqued them aloud.

‘“Waved.” Which hand? Was this coat buttoned, open, or partially buttoned. You note a blue-striped dress shirt. What sort of collar and cuffs? “
European
laugh?” “
Southern
accent?” Meaningless descriptions. The laughter of the French and Italians is completely different. There are well over a hundred southern accents. Precision, Daniel. Detail. Nuance. One perfect gesture or inflection will carry even a hasty physical disguise.’

When Jean Bluer was satisfied with Daniel’s progress, he introduced the second stage, the dance. He started Daniel at the center: muscle, bone, integument – what was connected to what and how it worked. From that center, Jean explained, posture, movement, and gesture naturally expanded.

‘Physique is the deposited history of our forebearers, and thus a component of character. Any voluntary movement is, naturally, a gesture of consciousness – certainly our main interest – but always pay initial attention to the arrangement of muscle, bone, and skin, for they determine the actual form of the movement.’

Daniel learned ten basic walks, each emphasizing a different center of gravity, and therefore a different balance. He worked barefoot to sense the precise distribution of weight and strain. They spent the lunch hour on the street, observing the way people moved their bodies, endless variations on a few skeletal themes. Jean emphasized hands – the position of the fingers, angle of the palms, the speed and force of movement, continually reminding Daniel to look for each person’s
pattern
of motion, not just isolated moves. And at the end of eighty strenuous days, Jean, pleased with Daniel’s abilities, announced they would move to the third stage of disguise, the poem.

Daniel started with breathing exercises, first establishing a ‘regular’ breath as a median from which to explore different rhythms. ‘Accent, pitch, inflection’ – Jean dismissed them with a wave – ‘they can only be added
after
you have the basic cadence. Listen to how people breathe when they talk, and the rest falls into place.’ As usual, his advice was amazingly helpful.

From breath cadence, Daniel moved into sound, the vibrating air of vowels and consonants, the bare phonetic minimums and the corresponding placement of teeth and tongue, the subtle variations in pitch and duration. Daniel practiced from Jean’s vast catalogue of tapes as Jean listened for flaws in Daniel’s imitations.

‘Not “you-all”; it’s “yawl.”
Roll
the jaw – it’s a broad elision… More drag on the gutturals and more hum in the nasals – you’re in New Mexico territory, pahdnah. Pay attention to that tongue! Northern, more forward; southern, let it loll back a little. And diction, Daniel,
diction!
You’re supposed to be an Irish hod-carrier, not a British barrister.’

Daniel’s favorite of these admonitions was ‘More mumble, please, more mumble.’

When they entered the last stage of disguise, Jean gave a short speech about what he was after. ‘So far we have been involved in the duplication of appearance, movement, and speech. Duplication requires craft. Now we enter art, for the fourth stage requires not merely a physical extension of identity, but its assumption.
Real
imagination, where you become what you create. And this needs to be stressed: Those identities are
already
within you. We think of identity as being singular, unique. But it is only the expression of one possibility. Think of identity as a braid of many identities through which the force of life flows – like an electrical wire composed of many smaller, intertwined wires coated with a rubber insulation that keeps them intact, coherent. You are both the Ancient Mariner and the wedding guest, the bride and the groom, minister and derelict. Every person dead, alive, or to be born is within you. Tap that storehouse of selves, draw upon your own body of metaphor.’

The exercises for the fourth stage of disguise, the person, were challenging to the point of absorption. At seven each morning Jean gave him a problem to solve. Daniel had till noon to find a solution, which he performed for Jean. If Jean approved, he sent Daniel out on the streets to present it under real circumstances. The problems were people.

The first was easy. ‘Daniel, become a thirty-seven-year-old union electrician, born in Chicago, with a wife and two children. You fell from some scaffolding two years ago and shattered your left shoulder, living on disability insurance ever since. You’re on your way back from seeing the doctor and have stopped for a drink in an unfamiliar bar. I’ll be taking the part of the bartender.’

The problems soon became more difficult. ‘You are a twenty-year-old female journalism student at Columbia University. You were born in Lubbock, Texas, lived there till you were fourteen, then moved to Newark. Your father is a mid-level executive with Standard Oil, and your mother is a closet alcoholic. You have been increasingly depressed the past few months and have sought help from the university counseling center. I will be a psychologist.

‘You are a thirty-year-old male Puerto Rican cocaine dealer. You’ve been in prison once for three years for assault on a peace officer. You have a scar on your right cheek. I will be a new buyer, whom you suspect may be a narc. You want to be careful, but you could also use a new customer.’

Although Jean always sent Daniel to the street with each solution, it was nearly four months before the sharp, continual criticism gradually gave way to praise. The day Daniel passed through a welfare interview as a fifty-year-old female Colombian immigrant with four children and little English, Jean told him, ‘As you know, you are my first student under my agreement with Volta, and I’m either a much better teacher than I ever hoped, or you are a natural talent. I can find very few flaws lately, and they are flaws only experience, not instruction, can correct. You are good enough to leave any time you choose. I will notify Volta.’

‘Thank you,’ Daniel acknowledged the praise, ‘but I won’t leave until I can fool you as you initially fooled me.’

‘Ah, but Daniel, that was much easier on my part, since you’d never seen me before or suspected I would be in disguise. Do remember that I can spot a disguise very quickly, especially when I’m looking for one. Your chances of getting past me are extremely poor.’

‘With all respect, I believe I can do it.’

‘Very well, if you insist. At the end of Tao Do Chaung each morning, I will tell you where I plan to eat lunch and the route I’ll take to get there. Assume the disguise of your choice and engage me along the way. If you can fool me for thirty seconds, consider yourself successful.’