“Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you, Giovanni Bernini!” Max shouted, and the hall filled with applause. “Giovanni Bernini!” It was a misunderstanding. I was going to be caught, I was sure. They would pelt me with ashtrays and glasses when they realized I’d tricked them, that I hadn’t really done it. “The World’s Greatest Impressionist!”
With protesting hands and a modest smile, I accepted the applause, though my heart was pounding. I stole a glance at Lucy, who, confined to her spotlight, leered at me like an angry sibling. Her look indicated that we shared a secret, but whether that secret was my failure or success I couldn’t know.
Max said, “A round of applause for Lucy Starlight,” and Lucy batted her eyes and curtsied with that theatrical irony, though something about the act, you could tell, had rattled or satisfied her. Before that first wave of clapping subsided, she had already disappeared down the stairs, through the maze of tables — ignoring hands offered to congratulate her — her green dress eaten up by the dark. I nearly sprinted after her, began to, actually, and then remembered I was onstage and, wind-up toy that I was, wound down.
“Giovanni Bernini, the World’s Greatest Impressionist!” Max declared, the vindication like wine in his voice. At this there was no applause, just the quiet of anticipation. He was right. Everyone wanted a nibble of magic, the duet of spotlights.
“Who would like to be next?” he asked now. “Who next will be impersonated by the incomparable, the inexplicable, the indefatigable Giovanni Bernini?” Immediately, fifty hands went up.
• • •
“You demented genius!” said a jubilant Maximilian after we’d exited through the wing to a shadowed nook backstage. “This is just the fetus of the whole thing, boy — just the goddamn slimy-headed fetus!” He hugged me. “I know you sensed it, my boy. I know you did ’cause I did!”
A hundred hands must’ve cluttered the dark that night, but we had time only for ten. All of their threads, thank God, curled out of their person. I gave a tug, and that was that. A paunchy lawyer. Two transparent teens.
Our last volunteer that night was a schoolteacher. She liked to nod four times after saying something true. Max asked her: “You teach which grades?” And she said, “Second and first graders. That’s right,” and nodded four times. After the imitation, I’d returned to my default position, staring at my feet when she all but tackled me. She pecked me on the cheek and then rushed back to her spot beside Max, eyeing me like a bashful fawn. The crowd ooohed with delight, and, without thinking about it, I scampered over to her, pecked her on the cheek, and hurried back to my mark — the spotlight running with me — batting my eyelashes. The crowd ate it up. I bowed, they hurrahed more. Giovanni the Thief bowing! I was delighted, it’s true, and yet I could not shake the feeling that I was tricking these people, or they were tricking me, that together we were collaborating in some vital deception.
Despite these strange notions, I said, “Mmm-course” to Max, because I had been confined to that spotlight all night, and it was such an odd, pleasing feeling to be hugged.
“Just the beginning!” he said, walking to the corner where he crouched down, and from behind a wooden scenery of pink clouds, dragged what appeared to be a bucket. It contained, I saw as it came closer, two bottles of champagne. He removed one. “I got these in case tonight went as swimmy as it did,” he said and then turned to face the wall as if for the privacy of a urination. There was a pop and he tilted his head and the bell of the bottle rose into view over his considerable hair-scape. He turned, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Ah!” he added viciously, then handed me the bottle.
Not wanting to disappoint him, I poured too much down my throat, bent over, and managed to swallow before hacking hard. Max slapped my back. “That’s it, boy. Drink.”
Before long we were on the second bottle. I was telling Max things. My predicament with Lucy, for one. “You can just imagine how I felt with her coming to the stage.” I was making severe shapes with my hands. Only later did I realize I was imitating him.
“You were her.” He stood with one foot against the wall, a sleepy smile on his face.
“No, my great friend, not in the slightest!” Like that, I began a drunken excursus on the thread. It was the first time I’d discussed the concept with anybody but Mama, and the words, existing aloud, sounded both miraculous and thin.
“You got it, man,” Max said, the two of us carrying on interlocking monologues. “That shining star in the belly. It’s not something you get if you’re lucky or you try real hard, you know that? You’re born with that seed inside you — you either are or you ain’t—and if you’ve got it and the world waters that seed, then you become fame-us.” He pronounced the word like a spell, and a shiver went through me. “I’m gonna find Apache,” he said, pushing himself off the wall. “See what kind of green he’s got.”
We pawed our way around dark corridors to a side door and parted there, agreeing to meet backstage later. Given the fifty or so ounces of champagne sloshing around our guts, it’s unsurprising, perhaps, that ours was a dramatic goodbye, rife with sustained hugs and hardy pats of the back. We were like two diplomats hamming it up before an international press corps.
When I rejoined the world of the hall, big band swing was blaring out of the house speakers. The balcony bar was alive with heady, flushed people, all eager to establish an intimacy. They patted my shoulders; one pinched my cheek. I was like a lucky stone that had to be rubbed, and yet it was as if the spotlight still separated me, so that no matter how much they jostled and mussed me, I could not be touched. When they offered me a drink, I said, “Oh, thank you, but I can have no more.” When they inquired about the act — how long I’d been at it — I said, “All my life.” Nothing I said was impolite, which made them all the more curious, I think, to see the buried genius inside me emerge and yawp. I was drunk, that was clear, and at times grabbed the banister and leaned over it to peer down at the carnival of heads below. I tripped around for some time before making my way back to the stage door. With some work, I opened it, the heavy thing closing behind me with a shotgun’s report. “Max!” I tried. My hand thinned to a sliver of white.
I hugged the wall, followed it, drifting deeper into the interior of the stage. I stopped only when the glass shattered. A ringing pain in my knee and hand. “Fuck!” I screamed. Yellow light unpeeled the shadow on the far wall. A toppled glass table sat before me.
In the opened door appeared a silhouette. “Who’s there?”
“Who’s there, too?” I asked.
“Giovaaanni?”
“Oh, God.” It was her.
“What are you doooing here?”
“I could ask you the same.” I stood. “There are a number of things we ought to discuss posthaste. Like, what the hell you trying to do to me, huh? That’s first off.” Whose voice was this?
“God, you’re weird.” She was backlit, shadowed in the doorway. All the clues and tics, the theater I depended on — those weaknesses in her face were hidden from me.