The Poser (12 page)

Mama watched him leave. “Be careful with that man.”

“That man,” said Max, “is singlehandedly responsible for every good fucking hallelujah that's happened to us.” Seeing Mama unassuaged, he added, “Not the warmest soul in the world, I agree, but harmless, truly.”

“Truly,” I said, mainly because I knew I should talk and wanted to keep it short. As if dredged up by Bernard, a slew of ghastly thoughts were rising to mind.
(Oh, were you really so, so wronged? Just behave, please. Just be grateful and smile, please. You're here strictly as my guest, understand? I could have you banned. Behave accordingly. Jesse Unheim had a point—you're always meddling in people's business.)
I breathed deep.

“Might we escape to the roof?” Max suggested. “I hear the hors d'oeuvres are a revelation.”

 • • • 

In the mild evening air, the roof's garden terrace reeked of tulips and honeysuckle. At that four-story height, the City took on the inviting quiet of a village, and I felt like myself again. Illuminated windows were but yellow patches in the quilt of redbrick. I kept making quick trips to the bar for champagne. Mama, too.

Next to it Marguerite Harris, our host, was holding forth to a group of wary men in suits. I introduced Mama.

“Thanks so much for having us,” Mama said.

“Thanks so much for having
him
,” Marguerite said, vigorously kissing Mama on both cheeks. “Meet my darlings,” she said of the suited men. They were, she explained, homeless, or had been before her intervention. Their cardboard pleas for food or money, scratched with messages like
TIRED & HUNG
RY
or
SIK NEED MONY
, she had begun to sell at auction.

“You're an artist then?” Mama asked one of them.

The man shrugged and pointed to Marguerite. “I make signs. She sells it like it's art.”

“So
edible
,” said Marguerite.

“What kind of signs?” I asked.

“Aren't that many types: Go, Stop, Food. Mine was Food.”

“Do you find this place strange?” I asked.

“No stranger than anywhere else. I hate places.”

“Cut them up with a cookie cutter and
eat
them,” said Marguerite.

“You're right,” I said. “Places are terrible.”

“I'm never right,” he corrected me.

Marguerite placed a hand over her heart. “My darlings.”

A grave caterer kept appearing with a platter of champagne flutes. Another trailed him to collect the drained glasses. As soon as the first departed, the second appeared, followed again by the first, in an efficient and unending mechanism of inebriation. As if on a ride, Mama and I accepted and returned these flutes and soon found ourselves quite drunk in a corner of the roof. “I hate places,” I said, “I'm never right.” I had been imitating the homeless man we'd talked to, relishing that flat baritone.

“Shh!” Mama giggled. “You're screaming!”

I was having trouble not swaying. “None are the right place,” I continued. “You're my only place, Mama.”

“My Giovanni.”

“I'll miss my Mama!” I said, imitating something, I'm not sure what. The words like hot soup in my mouth.

“You have your Lucy,” she said. “That's good.”

“But I still can't do her!” I stomped my foot. Heedling—that's who.

“It's the head, I'm telling you.” She said, “The tilt of her head.”

“Oh,
c'mon
. Like I haven't tried it.”

“Let's see.”

I shucked off my shoulders. I took a deep breath. “Giovaaaanni,” I said, “you're so
creeeeepy
.” I was going around in a circle by the roof's ledge in that gait of hers, a kind of sped-up lumbering. “Are you
kidding
me?” I said. “Our show was
teeeerrible
.” I was tilting my head too much. “Geoff keeps
fucking
up.”

“Almost,” Mama said. “Walk a little slower.”

I slowed down, sped up. I threw my head back. I cackled. I ranged around the roof, lying on my side, hands folded under my head, breathing that slow, deep-sleep breath.

“No, no,” Mama said. “Stand up.”

Marguerite and the man in the wedding dress had gathered near us like spectators drawn to a foreign ritual.

“Try the head again,” Mama said.

I heard my neck crack. “But it iiiiiiiisn't right, Mama,” I said. “Giovaaaaanni.”

“Tilt it more.”

I was groaning.

“No, no, no,” Mama said. “The head!”

But I was grunting and moaning. “Oh, Giovanni, oh, oh, yeah!” I was grinding the air with my pelvis. “Oh, Giovanni, oh!”

I could hear Marguerite cackling.

“Giovaaaaanni, you're gonna, you're gonna . . .”

Mama blanched. But I couldn't stop.

“. . . you're gonna maaaaake me
cum
!”

There was silence. The man in the wedding dress spoke first. “Bravo, really. Quite something.” “How little one needs to understand in order to adore!” Marguerite added. Then I turned and saw Lucy. A tear hung in her eye. I tried to say her name but could only say: “Giovaaaanni!”

I had never seen her cry before, her eyes like blurred pits. “Lucy—” Now that I landed on her name, I could only say it. “Lucy!” But she ran away, and after a frozen moment I chased after her. As I wheeled on to the head of the stairs, a herd of those homeless men was coming up it, thick as the crowds in midtown. “Excuse me,” I said. “Please!” I tried to push through, but there were too many men, so many. A familiar voice came crying out behind me: “You must understand. He's just sympathetic, sympathetic to the bone. . . .”

What I remember of that tour are the phone booths: on street corners, in hotel lobbies and gas stations, those phone booths, which across the country have graffiti keyed into their doors and smell like human palms. The country lay before us like a nude in an oil painting, and I didn't once sneak a peek, burying myself in those booths as into a vertical tomb.

Soon after Marguerite's party word had trickled from Lucy to Bernard, from Bernard to Max, from Max to me, that Lucy had quit the tour. “She doesn't want to see him” is the message I received. It seemed absurd that so many people could
fit
between us. I did all the things: sent flowers and cards, waited outside her apartment, called and called again. I couldn't know if I was doing it correctly, if I was picking the right cards, sending the right flowers, saying the right things.

Mama rang to comfort me. I saw her to the train the day after Marguerite's party in a state of mute despair. “She'll call you,” she said on the phone a few days later. “Tomorrow you'll hear from her, I guarantee it, Giovanni, or the day after. And if you don't, well—what you did on the roof—she has to know that's who
you are
.”

I said, “Yes.”

The tour was clammy hands competing to shake mine. The vegetable smell of certain stages. Everywhere we went I saw her silhouette: patterns of shade on a suburban lawn, the stars above the desert.

We held a press conference in the lobby of the Bellwether Hotel in Lake City, the crown of the Midwest where we were scheduled for four sold-out nights at the Northern Juke. We sat before a conference table topped with a floral arrangement of microphones. The cameras whirred and cranked. The journalists hovered over their chairs instead of sitting in them.

“How'd you learn to do it?”

“Same way I learned to walk.”

“How's that?”

“Who knows?”

Chuckles.

“What do you think about when you're doing it?”

“A choice combination of everything and nothing.”

Guffaws.

“What do you think accounts for the popularity of your act?”

“I don't know. But I've never trusted popularity and don't plan to now, just because I'm enjoying some.”

Applause.

The quotation marks swaddled me. It was all something I
could
say, something I
could
mean, but the reporters jotted it down as news. One fingered a stray lock, another smirked to himself. I could see them right then hatching their phrases, cherry-picking their quotes to concoct the mystique of Giovanni the Celebrity for their readers, men and women who would happen upon these pieces while waiting for their toaster to spit out their bread or while buckling along on the elevated train, readers who would wonder about this Bernini and so buy a ticket for the tour date nearest them, readers who might, at first, hover by the back of the amphitheater before edging forward to volunteer themselves, readers who would enter the spotlight with circumspection and leave it with merriment—the merriment of having been
verified
—and all of us, in that way, collaborating in a lie.

Touch. This is what Max prescribed. “
Distract
yourself, boy. Goddamnit, that's what life is—food, money, sex.
Sex and money
, Giovanni!” He escorted the faux-coy to the beaded leather booths where we always somehow were.

The sheer pulchritude—I couldn't stomach it. Those buxom brunettes, those doe-eyed blondes, all armed with rehearsed insights and sweet rebukes for the traveling entertainer. “You're like a sculptor,” said a redhead with a waist as wide as my hand. “And we're all your marble.” “I'm all right,” I said, “I'm okay, thank you,” and disappeared to claw at Lucy through the phone.

Once—once!—I caught her at the end of the line. I stood in a telephone booth in the lobby of a hotel out west, decorated in melons and pinks. It rang for a long time. Finally I heard,
“Heeello?”

“Lucy?!”

There was a pause.

“I didn't meeean to pick up. I'm going.”

“Please.”

“Whaaaat?”

“Oh, please, oh, please.” I said, “I love you.”

There was the phone-crackle.

“Ugh, I know,” she said and hung up.

 • • • 

Those two words—
I know
—buoyed me the last days of the tour. As did that sound she'd made:
ugh
, that grunt of disgust, so nakedly expressed it could only be meant for family. Those two words and that
ugh
—preserved in my brain exactly as Lucy had said them (through the crackling of the line, in a tone of exhausted, motherly forbearance)—steadied my quivering gut, and I returned to the Communiqué that first Sunday I was back.

I caught the last two songs of her set. To watch her sway in that spotlight before a crowd of men in the afternoon dark was to know the blackness of desire. I downed two shots at the bar, waiting until she exited through the wing before opening the side door. I stumbled backstage as through thick undergrowth, tripping, retracing my steps, getting lost again, until I arrived at a small metal table, a replacement for the glass one I'd tripped over months before. Pawing the wall, I located the handle of the door and, with a pause and a wild beating heart, swung it open.

By the glow of the vanity mirror Bernard Apache sat, smoking a cigarette, his brown trousers around his ankles, his moon-white legs spread. A head of long black hair bobbed furiously between his thighs. “Oh,” he said, seeing me.

Lucy did not try to right her appearance or dissemble—a futile task anyway, but a kind of expected courtesy—beyond shooting up and rubbing her mouth with the back of her hand, straightening her tousled dress and saying, “Giovanni, oh my G-
ah
-d, Giovanni!” She squeezed and unsqueezed her fists, nervously.

I squeezed mine, too.

“Giovaaanni!” She hopped up and down. “What are you doooing here?”

“Meeee?! What am I doing heeeere?” Like that, I had it! Yes! Her thread. The eyes had been right all along (hurt, wronged, accused, accusing), but I was missing the hands and tantrum feet. This was Lucy. When I would thrust her from behind and she would look back with those horrified, happy eyes, it was to reward me, to announce that she had, for a moment, been
caught
.
Caught
is what she wanted to be.

“Stooop it,” I said to her. “Just—just leave me alooone.”

Now that I had it, I could pull away, each strand joining the whole—the tilt of her head, the wild vowels. “Giovaaanni,
please,
” I said, squeezing and unsqueezing my fists. The plastic-covered clothes on the rack, the rusty pipes, Apache, who had pulled up his pants but did not move from the chair, lighting a cigarette; Lucy who headed for the door—all of it seemed to be shaking.

“Giovaaaaanni! Nooo!”

 • • • 

A wailing infant on the crosstown bus, a homeless man saying, “Howdy do,” an irate black preacher surrounded by bruisers in fezzes notifying Second Avenue that God would be returning in a few days and wouldn't be pleased. “You will be saved or you will be damned!” I yelled back at him. “A decision is required, it is
required
!” until one of those fezzed meatheads shoved me to the curb. “You the lieutenant of the devil,” he said. “Be gone, white man.”

My ending up at the Ambassador Hotel must have required various darting actions—packing a bag, hailing a cab, surviving the rich, handsome life of the lobby (the perfume shop manned by women who seemed always to pull down the ends of their blouses in a state of vigilant self-maintenance; the ring of armchairs by the window where men with pinky rings and silk cravats spoke in hushed voices)—though I remember only shutting the heavy door to room 3015, entering that sealed chamber ensconced in crimson drapes. It was what I'd come for, that hotel-room silence, thick and expensive (yes, in this fevered state I began to celebrate money and its uses for the first time; it was a means of separating yourself from the noises of the street by thirty stories, to hide away in some tower by the park; I thought of it, physically, as padding that you could stick between yourself and the world).

And yet, after only an hour or so, the silence proved far worse than any street noise. Like outer space, it coaxed a body to explode. I coughed up what voices I knew, but each stung my throat. Pacing, squeezing my neck, I noticed a radio on the nightstand. I flipped it on, undamming the voices. A newscast. A radio play about pilgrims. I mumbled along, like a parishioner. With some relief, I let it play through the night. That way, if I woke up at three a.m., there would be something in the air.

After three days, I tried parting the curtains and stepping out onto the balcony, but that general waft of noise, the honks of trucks and taxis, even at this distance, attached itself to me, and I shut both the curtains and balcony door.

Still, I believed I could conduct my life from that room—or would have believed it, if not for bad dreams, so solid they seemed to inhabit the room. In one, the hotel room was transported to the stage at the Communiqué, where an infinity of faces peered down at me, holding clipboards or winding large watches. Among the faces were all my old classmates in Sea View, Mr. Heedling, Bernard, Marguerite Harris, Mama, and Lucy. There was that man in the wedding dress from Marguerite's party repeating, “Quite good, bravo, really.” Later I barged into the greenroom to find Lucy between the knees of a skeleton. Driven by this dream, I one night launched myself out of bed, dropped to my knees on the carpet, and worked my head up and down. “Giovaaanni! No!” I said again, whimpering, an ad for cigarettes playing in the background.

Soon I set up the hotel desk chair, so I could grip its arms as I bobbed my head. After a few beats, I would turn, as if sensing someone behind me. Then I would wipe my mouth with the back of my hand, shift my weight to my left leg, and come to a standing position. “Giovaaaaanni! No!” I would say, stomping my feet. I alternated stomping my right and left feet more quickly, balling and unballing my fists while bringing myself to tears—tears that ended abruptly the moment I started over, kneeling again, and placing my hands on the arms of the chair.

I repeated the act, turning off the radio in order to concentrate fully. With each iteration, I began to place more weight on the arms of the chair, a tweak that helped give more
spring
to the moment when I turned around, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, and put the weight on my left knee. I had started around three a.m., working straight till eleven a.m., when the crashes and ascents of inspiration flatlined into a kind of airless certainty. My mouth felt wind-bitten from the all the rubs I'd given it with the back of my hand. Peering down at that chair, I understood, in a moment of hopelessness, that no matter how many inches I moved it, no matter how I threw my voice or accelerated my stomping, this chair would not be a person.

I turned on the radio again, my head splitting. And yet just as quickly shut it off. Before I knew it, I was hunting for socks.

I would find him in the office upstairs. “C'mooon, you, we're going to the greeeeenroom!” I'd say, leading him by the hand. Like Lucy herself, I wouldn't care who saw us. And I could picture him laughing as I led him backstage, being
game
. Perhaps he had already done such things before. Perhaps he was, in his inscrutable way, all but encouraging it.

As soon as I stepped into the hallway, though, I ducked back into the room. This time I sat on the chair, sliding my pants down my legs until they pooled about my ankles. I worked my way into that lightly perturbed expression. I sat there for some time, letting it “soak,” as Mama used to say. It needed something. I pulled my pants up, and with purposeful strides, entered the life in the elevator and lobby, passing the doormen in broad, brass-buttoned overcoats. With those same strides, all but holding my breath, I made my way to the corner store where I purchased a pack of Blue Arrow cigarettes.

Returning to the safety of my room, I lit a cigarette with matches the cashier had given me. This made it better, except Bernard never used matches, and the falsity of striking one opened a fissure in the act. So I pulled up my jeans and ventured outside again, purchasing a silver-plated lighter at a tobacconist on Amity Street, maintaining what calm I could as I waited, along with two chatty tourists, for the gold-trim elevator doors to part. Then I hustled back to my room where I sat back on the chair and slid my pants down, this time trying the lighter.

It was better, yes. But with this difficulty cleared up, my attention soon scurried to my ankles. Bernard, of course, had been wearing his customary suit, the fabric of which must have felt quite different from my bunched-up jeans. At first I tried to simulate the feeling of his suit by wrapping my legs in a bedsheet. Then I considered my shirt, which was, of course, all wrong. And my bare feet, which were not wearing his cowboy boots. It was like trying to plug holes in a sinking ship, only to have another appear.

The next morning, very early, I went downtown to Bernard's tailor, from whom Max had first rented and later bought our tuxes. (Of course, I could have enlisted the concierge in accomplishing these various tasks, but the idea of explaining any of it to him, even in Max's voice, brought back a terrible sense of panic.) Whenever on the walk my nerves crackled, I smoked a cig.

Marco, a perpetually drunk Greek in suspenders, kept repeating what I said to him. “Same as Mr. Apache?”

“Same, yes,” I said.

“Same exact as Apache?” he said.

“Yes, exactly the same.”

With a bewildered shake of the head, as if my request represented the latest instance of a larger, dispiriting trend, he reached wanly for his tape measure. “Next Friday,” he said after taking my measurements.

That was nearly two weeks.