Max had been moony since our meeting with Bernard. Hypotheticals danced through his mind day and night, hopeful (visions of packed houses, thick wads of money, hearty handshakes) when his stomach complied, doomed (nightmares of faulty lighting, poor sound, no volunteers) when it roared.
No volunteers. Before his snack that afternoon, Max had been worrying about that: “We can always plant someone. Have one of Bernard’s goons do it, just to get the ball rolling — but no, Apache wouldn’t approve. He likes independence — ah! But that’s the whole problem, boy, the flaw of the act. It isn’t, will never be, self-sufficient,” he said as we clambered down the museum’s steps. The ruminations would’ve worsened considerably, I knew, if I hadn’t steered him to the street vendor where Max promptly devoured two large hot dogs, chili fries, and a tremendous salted pretzel.
We sat under the shade of two oaks. Not ten feet away, a caricaturist with long gray hair and a knock-off earring drew the portrait of a French girl. She sat on the stool, hands in her lap, trying not to giggle while her mother stood sentry behind the artist, eyeing his paper severely.
“Master Impressionist,” Max said. “Horrible.”
I might’ve been pumping my knee, I might’ve been chewing my nail and not even known it — that’s how bad it was. Lucy so crowded my mind I forgot about my heels, myself.
Because of her, the museums had been torture. Max’s idea. “For inspiration, boy, and to show you the sights, we’ll museum-hop.” We’d been at it the past four days: the Natural Life Museum, the Shaustenhausen, the Stone-Wild.
Even had I been spared the specter of Lucy, those visits would have grated. Art, for an impressionist, is a tease. Those objects beckon, call to you, and it’s not that you can’t mimic them — you can, but even as you are, it doesn’t feel like it, the thread of the figure always withheld. As we toured the marbled halls of the Stone-Wild, I wondered if this could be the case with Lucy. Perhaps I was getting her after all but couldn’t, for whatever reason, recognize that I was. But why would that be? I tried to replicate every object we passed, to verify that I still had my chops, knowing full well that doubling the lobotomized expression of the Madonna would do nothing for me.
Max tossed the last knot of pretzel to the assembling pigeons. “We’ll need to give Bernard notice, though, if we’re changing it. For the marquee, of course.”
“Who’s that Lucy?”
“Of course it could all go to shit quickly if — Lucy?”
“The woman at the Communiqué.”
“Ah!” He draped his arm around the back of the bench. “Lucy Starlight. A real character, I’ll tell you that. Lounge singer. On the scene for years.”
“Character?”
“Let’s just say she is — how to put it? — a friend to man.”
I tried not to react visibly.
“Not that that’s a bad thing. No, sir! Some men would toss dirty words at a woman like that — scared men, boys really. There’s much saint in a slut, boy. Remember it.”
“She with Bernard?”
“Oh, I doubt it. Possible, I suppose, but—” Max stopped and looked at me. He had a queer expression on his face. “Does the genius have a crush?”
“Not in the slightest,” I said.
Since he winked, nudged my shoulder cartoonishly, and then said “O-kay,” I don’t think Max believed me, but he didn’t press the matter further.
It didn’t feel like a crush, I knew that. The world was a smooth case, Lucy a splinter jutting out of it. I’d mentioned her in the letter I wrote Mama. It was the first letter I’d ever composed, and I was shocked by the freedom of it. I could throw the words on the page and not have to stand by them.
SEPTEMBER 29
My Mama,
It was slow going at first, but it seems we’ve gotten our first bite. Your little ape, Giovanni Bernini, will be making his stage debut on October 2nd at the Communiqué (There’s a notice in the Gazette. Perhaps there’s a copy at the library?). The City is a parade of faces, Mama, and I do think I was meant to witness it. A City of threads! I’ve even met a woman I can’t imitate — I say it cavalierly, here, but it’s made me fairly nervous, as you might imagine. Only you can imagine it, I know. You’ll have to come down here and help straighten it out. Visit soon, Mama.
With love,
Giovanni
The caricaturist penned a final eyelash, completing the vision. He had tossed the thing off quickly, competently. The pink bolls in her cheeks, the fine curling eyelashes: If the girl had been born a cartoon, it would be what now appeared on his easel. Seeing the final result, the mother loosened her mouth. A grin startled her cheeks. This street man, entrusted with her daughter’s face, hadn’t attempted a crime, and she could now relax. He squinted at the drawing, plucked it from its wooden hold, and handed it to the girl. She readied herself for the unveiling, held it wide in her hands. She stared and stared at it. Her smile did not get bigger or smaller. Only children can be let down that way, invisibly, before time has taught them a measure of expectation. Rejuvenated, the mother tiptoed around the cobble and rubbed her daughter’s shoulders, confirming the experience had been a success.
“World’s Greatest!” Maximilian exclaimed out of nowhere. “Giovanni Bernini, the World’s Greatest Impressionist!”
FIVE
From the network of rafters above to the stage below, the comedian’s shadow stretched like a jinni out of its bottle. “Y’know, my wife and I. We’ve been married for ten years — I think it’s ten, right, Doris?” The comedian in his rumpled velvet suit turned to the wing where Max and I stood. “Doris, is it ten or twelve? Doris! Oh, Jesus. Asking how long you’ve been married — that’s like diggin’ up a grave and askin’ the corpse how long he’s been buried.” The crowd groaned, a notice of pain somewhere between plea-for-help and war cry.
Pacing in the shadowed wings, Max and I could judge the audience’s size only by these spurts of noise. Glasses clinked. Chairs scraped against the floor. Voices rose—“Be funny!” “Get off!”—like sea-thrown bodies, surfacing for a moment before sinking again into the black depths.
“Don Q., more like Don eewww,” Max said, pacing. All day he had been anxious. That afternoon when one of the microphones kept emitting feedback, Max, in a huff, referred to one of the stagehands as a “pig’s heart.”
“My wife, she’s quite a doll.” Don Q. scratched the side of his head. “I mean, literally, she’s a doll. I bought her at the toy shop on Sixty-third Street and I tell ya, I got no complaints.”
His shadow extended its arm like a dancer at the end of a routine.
“My wife — when we get home, we’re in bed, and she says to me, ‘C’mon, baby. It’s been so long since we made love.’” His shadow, the second comedian, gave the line a real what-the-hell-can-I-do oomph, and the most absurd picture came to me: of the lanky shadow in bed next to a bewildered woman tugging the sheets up to her neck. “‘C’mon, let’s make it a special night, honey,’ she’s saying to me. ‘When we were young, we did it all the time. C’mon, make love to me,’ she says. So I tell her, ‘Baby, I already did. You didn’t notice?’”
He was an excellent comedian, the shadow. He made the circumstances so unamusing that one had to laugh.
“You find this trash funny?” Max asked.