The Poser (11 page)

“I had dreams about him. He—”

“Why didn't you come? Just a couple days you could've come. You know how
lonely
I was?”

“Mama, I—”

She slapped my thigh with zest. “I know, I know. You have your precious Lucy here.” She wagged her finger. “And we'll get to the bottom of
that
.”

I knew she would calm down once we had her settled in her room, which in no time we had. She took it all in—the brocaded wallpaper, the plastic flowers, the heavy maroon comforter—with the same head-swirling attention she gave the busy city streets walking to Leaning Tower, the Italian restaurant where Max awaited us. All the while, she stayed close, laying her head on my shoulder, frisking me with those eyes.

Dinner was a play of two voices: Mama's and Max's, the latter reporting all the perks of city-wide success Giovanni had been too modest to include in his letters—how, for instance, a TV star and a famous lawyer had recently volunteered—the former exclaiming, “Oh my!” and “Of course!” and rubbing my back. Talk plowed over the expected fields of conversation: revenue (increasing by the week), the upcoming tour, the cities we'd visit, the generous patronage of Marguerite Harris, who, as it turned out, was hosting a major fête at her town house that following Saturday, Mama's last night in town.

Over the course of dinner Mama drank three martinis, performing the usual program of memories (my unappreciated genius growing up in Sea View, my old performances for her). Then she started in on me. “I'm angry with you,” she said. “I was all alone up there. Have you
forgotten
your mama already?” It went on for a while, with Max smiling queasily and Mama wagging her finger at all the sins in the air.

She drank so much, I had to help her into the cab and guide her by the elbow through the hotel lobby, up the old whirring elevator, and, after a brief burlesque of keys, into the room. I helped her onto the tightly made bed. She motioned with her hand for me to lean in, and when I did, kissed me on the lips. “Ah, here we are, still in life.”

“Yes, Mama.”

“We're gonna find this Lucy's thread . . .”

“Yes, Mama.”

“I guarantee it!”

“Rest, Mama.”

“I tell you, you know . . . your father used . . . when he was . . .”

“Mama?”

But she was snoring.

 • • • 

“Oh, Giovanni, let me.”

Lucy and I sat on one side of the table, Mama the other, the three of us at a tea shop downtown. On the train ride there, two kids with baseball mitts had tugged on my sleeve with an autograph request. I obliged, signing their mitts with my standard, “
You're
the star.” Mama had watched it all, looking offended by joy.

“Isn't he just delightful?”

“Mama, please.”

“He's a strange one,” Lucy said. “That's for sure.”

“Strange. Is that a good thing to be these days?”

“Of c-ore-se,” Lucy said in an ironic voice.

“‘Of course,'” Mama said. “I liked the way you said that.” I felt something under the table: Mama kicking me. “And you're going on tour together. Exciting.”

“Yeah, well, I was the tax. They wanted Giovanni, they had to pay for me.”

“Oh, I don't believe that.”

“Believe it,” Lucy said.

“No, it's,” I said, “it's not true.” A sore spot. When I first came back from that meeting with Marguerite—tipsy after some mandatory drinks with Max—and delivered the news to Lucy, she refused to go. We argued.
I'm not your sidekick
is one of the things she said. I had to beg, make a whole jokey campaign of wanting her.

“What do you sing?” Mama asked her.

“Oh, I don't know if it really fits into a type.”

“How would
you
describe it?”

“I don't knoooow.”

“If forced, how would you?”

“If forced?”
Lucy made a pained expression. I felt Mama again under the table. “Lounge songs, I guess.”

“What about?”

“Giovanni! I didn't know I'd be interrogaaated!” Lucy laughed. “What are they about? I don't know.” She asked me, “What are they about, Giovaaaanni?”

“Well, Mama, they're . . . really, they're excellent. . . .”

Over the course of our brief sit-down, we each had two teas. Many times I'd imagined Mama and Lucy meeting, and every time they talked their way into each other's hearts, and we realized we were family. Only now that we were seated together in a kind of stunned trio did I realize how stupid that was. As Mama and Lucy tiptoed verbally on a heightened, high-wire form of small talk (discussing, eventually, Jesse Unheim as well as the scene at the Communiqué), the afternoon recalled more and more that first, nauseating dinner with Max when there was no room, really, for me to be anyone. Yes, between Mama and Lucy, I shuttled in tone between two Giovannis—the bold, strange lover and that thread-hunting boy—and not knowing what to say or how to say it, kept ordering new hot teas and downing them too quickly, kept going to the bathroom to escape, feeling like I might at any moment shout out something wrong.

At one point Lucy herself went, and Mama leaned across the table. “It's in her head—the tilt of her head, Giovanni. I'm sure of it.”

 • • • 

That Saturday night Giovanni Bernini, the World's Greatest Impressionist, devoured ten downy strangers before a packed house at the Communiqué. All show I could feel her: through the mist of smoke, the shrieks of laughter. Like a soft breeze or ray of light, sometimes harkening from the hinterland of back tables, sometimes from the wings of the balcony, I could sense that abiding presence, the bottomlessness of a mother, and many, both in print and out, would stretch the furthest reaches of superlative to describe the power of that night's performance. The most transporting, they said. A work of art.

Before the performance I had arranged to meet Mama and Lucy by the balcony bar and there they stood, as planned. There
she
stood, like some prophetess: Mama, in her old dress, the one she wore to Derringer's office, with the belted waist and giant bow. “Mama—” I was saying, when Lucy pounced, peppering my cheeks with kisses. “My
freeeak
.” It was as if she wanted to tattoo me with her kisses, so that any onlooker, in order to see me—and there were many idling by the bar trying to do just that—would have to penetrate the very public veil of her affection. I managed to hold her at arm's distance. “Max says the car's downstairs,” I said. “We ought to go.”

Soon Mama, Max, Lucy, and I were crammed into the hired car, motoring to Marguerite Harris's town house, ten blocks away. Lucy sat between Mama and me, the whole time petting my thigh, this with Mama sitting right next to her, transforming the streets out the window, with her very gaze, into a kind of poster for longing.

Max swiveled around noisily in his seat. “Proud of your man over there?”

Mama smiled absently.

“Proud as a
peacooock
,” Lucy said, inching her hand up my thigh. I smiled, removed it.

The driver stopped at Mandel Street in front of Marguerite Harris's four-story town house bookended by pear trees in full bloom. Figures could be seen milling on the roof like the building's hair, their voices echoing down to us, glib and jocular. That throb and chatter emanated, too, from the building, a sound that stings any passerby with a prick of loneliness and any invitee with dread.

Max, at the head of our group, employed the heart-shaped (not the heart traded on Valentine's Day, but an actual organ-shaped device) brass knocker to the impressive door. Lucy, in the shadows, pecked at me. “Not right now,” I whispered, and smiled, which she took as countermand to all I asked. Max knocked again. “Hello!” he greeted the loud impassive house. “You'd think there'd be a buzzer,” he muttered, and just as he was arching his head to call up to one of the figures on the roof, the door swung open, and there stood before us a seventy-year-old man in a chiffon wedding dress.

“So difficult to hear this bloody knocker,” he said. “Why the Whore doesn't install a proper buzzer, I'll never know.”

Marguerite Harris, it should be said, was known among her friends as the Virgin Whore because even at the age of fifty-five (or thereabouts, no one knew her exact age) she had not yet parted with her virginity. Her lack of desire for sex did not originate in any deep-seated belief, religious or philosophical. Aesthetically and from the absolute depths of her, she found the act uninteresting, failing to be “fresh,” the sole criterion for her attention. Years before, she had hosted an infamous orgy to see what “this sex thing was all about.” As rumor had it, Marguerite invited to her town house some friendly, hirsute professionals along with famous artists, renting, for the experimental purposes of the evening, a haul of trapeze equipment from the Big Tent Circus as well as several live farm animals. A wardrobe was wheeled in filled with such diverse costumes as nuns' habits, adult diapers, judge's robes, lederhosen, overalls, and several fake long gray beards (fitted for both the male and female face); having covered her chaise longue and ivory bookcases with plastic tarps, and catered the event with genitalia-shaped cuisine from all over the world, Marguerite then sat with her secretary on adjacent wooden chairs as the seventy or so guests delved into busy, crowded intercourse. By most accounts, the heiress lasted twenty minutes, the whole time yawning and sighing, and soon repaired to the downstairs study in order to appreciate an eighteenth-century washbasin.

There passed between us a silence to confirm our greeter had been wearing a bridal gown. Max motioned for Mama to pass and then followed her through the open door. Lucy pulled me aside. “Let's find a bathroom and
fuck.
”

“Lucy, I don't think it's—”

She grabbed my arm.

With alacrity, with a smirking sense of conspiracy, she separated us from Mama and Max. Down a hallway lined with caterers; through a sitting room where a string quartet played, the musicians—we saw as we passed through—wearing wolf masks; up the staircase, along which a series of black-and-white photographs showed in a flip-book sequence a black woman pushing out the corona of her newborn, who, at the top of the stairs, proved to be Caucasian; past a pear-shaped man in a silk waistcoat bounding after an escaped gerbil; past a woman with a hat made of plastic fruit kissing a woman with the same succulent hat. Around another hall Lucy led me to an unoccupied bathroom where we—as she ordered—fucked.

After, she sabotaged the reconstruction of my tux. “Kiss me,” she said. “Kiiiiss me.”

“I need to find my mother.”

“Giovanni loooves his mama.”

“But she's leaving tomorrow,” I said, making my way to the door.

It didn't take me long to find Mama and Max, standing in conversation with Bernard below the famous portrait of Marguerite's grandfather, the oilman D. W. T. Harris, the one on posters and the covers of hardback books: Harris in top hat and tie, about to scowl. His eyes are gray and humorless, his face as delicate as a horse jockey's. In the painting he has perfected the imperious glare of one who's amassed huge sums of money precisely to commission such portraits and have them hang over the living.

As I soon gathered, the three had been discussing Mama's recent trial, a conversation not particularly welcome, it seemed, given Mama's shaking head and galled eyes. They were so exercised, in fact, neither she nor Bernard seemed to notice my entrance, my presence acknowledged only by Max, who inhaled deeply while enlarging his eyes as if to express some ongoing, delicate situation. After some listening, I understood that they were discussing the letter Unheim's lawyer, Le Fleuer, had produced, the one supposedly sent from Sandra to ask after Unheim.

“I'm merely asking if you can be sure the letter was falsified,” Bernard said. He looked oddly playful as if debating for sport the ending of a forgettable movie.

“Are you kidding?”

“Not at all,” he said, sipping from his tumbler of whiskey.

“Her whole life Sandra railed against him, she couldn't stand him,” Mama said.

“But isn't it possible that she sent this one letter?” Bernard asked. “That she had one single moment of doubt? You must concede that's possible, no?”

“Really, you have some nerve, you know that. I worked with the woman my whole life. You think you know her better than me?”

“No, not at all. I'm merely saying, it's possible the woman had moments of doubt, of kind feeling for her nephew. That's all.” The more upset Mama became (setting her hand on her hip, shaking her head), the more lighthearted Bernard seemed (smiling like a baffled innocent failing to understand why others have taken offense). That same smile was rising on my lips, too, an expression thwarted only by the concerted effort of several facial muscles.
Well, you have been pitying yourself quite a bit, Mama
, I almost blurted out.
After all, I was busy doing only what
you've
wanted me to.
It was happening again: Bernard's attitude finding me.

“You've got some nerve making light of such a matter,” Mama said.

“Oh, I would never! No! Never!” He reached across and held her shoulder with his left hand. “Just debating the merits of the case, which don't seem entirely clear to me, that's all.” Then he turned to me as if signaling for help in ushering out a pesky caller. And only then did I realize that I had never once in all our correspondence mentioned to Mama the near-drugged sensation my imitations of Bernard induced. “Quite a spirited woman,” said Bernard. “Absolutely delightful.”

Mama shook her head.

“I know you must curse this Unheim for keeping you away from Giovanni. But I can assure you, not to worry! He's in good hands now.” The
now
seemed to be added intentionally. “If you'll excuse me.” With a semi-ironic bow, Bernard turned and made his way to the den. Some sort of atonal music was playing there.