“Always in the shadows, isn’t that convenient.”
“Are you druuuunk?”
I cleared my throat. “I’m sorry?”
“Drunk,” she said. “For the first time?”
“Fine, change the subject.”
“I didn’t know we had one to change.”
“Who gets to tell when you’re pretending?”
“I could ask you the same,” she said — a quick rejoinder — but my question had reached her. She stepped back from the door. I walked in. It was a greenroom of sorts, outfitted with a vanity mirror next to which were piled wigs and brushes. There was a cot in the corner, and a wardrobe packed with dresses.
She stood closer to me than most people would. “Look at you,” she said, smiling. “You play it sooo innocent. Fumbling around like a little boy, then you get onstage and trick everyone.” She bit her lip and batted her eyelashes. A gesture of flirtation or sardonic commentary on such a gesture?
“Why’d you come onstage?”
“Seemed like you could use the help. Besides, I wanted to see if you could dooo it.”
“Could I?”
She frowned, as though distracted, and took my hand from where it rested at my side, raising it above the waterline of shadow. “You’re bleeding.”
It was true. A mess of glass in my palm.
“A boo-boo,” she said, and with her other hand gently plucked the glass from my palm. “You have to be really caaareful.” She blew on it, and the cold rippled up my hand and arm. “If this gets infected, it could travel down the arm—”
“It’s all right, really—”
“It’s called celluuulitis.”
“Biology’s really not my—”
“Untreated it can be quite severe and spread to—”
“I think it’ll be all right. Really, I—”
“God, you must be some klutz if—”
“It’s my hand not yours!” I hadn’t meant to sound so shrill.
She seemed to scowl. She returned her hands to her hips, tapping her foot.
“I, I’m sorry,” I said. “I, I didn’t mean…”
The twinkling in her eye seemed to condense and sharpen, and I was sure she would either slap me or yell for help when she dropped to her knees, unbuckled my belt and unbuttoned my jeans, tugged them to my knees — underwear, too — and put her mouth around me.
I yelped. I tried to grip the wall behind me, but there was no wall to grip. The back of her head bobbed and bore, flashing in and out of the light, hidden by her hair as if under a photographer’s hood. “Yes! Yes! Sure thing! That’s the ticket!” I said it in Max’s voice because I knew I ought to say something, but all I could see was her black hair, that hood, under which she was taking photos of me. “Please stop.” I was yelping. “Stop it, please!”
At these words, her face appeared out of her hair. She looked up at me with pleading eyes, an expression of the wronged or hunted. Later I’d remember it: that vibrating moment when I grabbed her hair. Her eyes pleaded with me in that cold room. In my hands, she unraveled. We were stuck in the rooms of our bodies, but our eyes were keyholes, and as through keyholes, with that freedom, we caught each other.
When it was over, I understood I was naked. I yanked up my underwear and pants. She grinned. “I knew it,” she said, “I knew it,” and sped off, headfirst, around the corridor.
SIX
Days later Max confronted me at the Old World, a French restaurant on the edge of Lilac Park. “You tell me right now what’s going on,” he said upon my return from the bathroom. “Either a worm’s jumped into your dick or up your ass, ’cause every five minutes it’s a bathroom adventure.”
Claiming an upset stomach, I had disappeared into the bathroom minutes earlier. There I frowned in the mirror, as she had. I tried her pleading eyes. But my thin, wanting face was all that peered back. It was getting further away from me.
“Out with it.” He said this while (1) chewing with an open mouth, (2) wiping the corner of that mouth with his napkin, and (3) imbuing one of his eyebrows with a giant, bawdy curiosity.
I took a deep breath. “Lucy—”
“I knew it!”
My mouth grew heavy at its hinges.
“All. Tell. Now.”
“She — we had a-a-an encounter.”
His mouth hung open. “On my mother’s expensive grave, Giovanni, do you mean sex?” The last word hissed out of him with a sibilance that snaked up my spine, up the waitresses’ loose black aprons and around the jabbering eaters, as if a director somewhere had yelled “Action!” and all things obeyed. “Tell me a fucking tale.”
I did, wincing when certain words and certain things for which there are no words (the hurt in Lucy’s eyes, the rumbling in my head) required description. The entire time he listened visibly, and if it had been any face other than Max’s at the end of the table, my tongue would have wilted. When I stumbled or blushed, he filled in for me, planting hard terms in the holes of my speech. He yanked the story out of me and tackled it to the ground.
It was my first time kissing and telling, and I learned what every man learns the first time he tells: that the narrating of an experience like that is no repetition, no rehashing of that wet, combustive moment but that moment’s midwife, what pushes it out into the noisy world, births it, and in that way forever separates you and the unspeakable seed of what was or might’ve been. As Max pulled the wheres and whats out of me, like a detective, I waved goodbye to the impossible reality of Lucy.
“In-motherfucking-deed,” Max said when the tale had been patted down to his satisfaction. He leaned back in his chair, shaped an ostentatious O with his mouth, and breathed heavily. If there had been smoke in his lungs, rings would have drifted between us. “And so what — you’re in the bathroom tugging it, I bet? Tugging it like a fiend, eh?”
To my relief, he didn’t seem to recall my drunken confession backstage, my admission the night of our premiere that I couldn’t do her. I nodded, not wanting to say more.
“It’s tough, boy. You get that taste and you want it again. There’s a lot of talk of penis envy. Lord knows I’ve contributed to it, but there’s the opposite, too. We envy what they have. That slit. Yes, boy, yes, there’s far too little mention of absence-envy.” He continued to ruminate at a high volume. Already I regretted saying anything. It was always that way, as if the punishment for sharing were being heard.
We paid the check and walked west toward the train station just as the sun was going down, in the human silence sunsets enforce. As I learned, it was best to be aboveground for sunsets. Otherwise, you entered the subway in the day and emerged from it at night, feeling stranded. We were turning onto Eighth Ave when Max started. “My God.”
It had been painted on the side of the Eighth Avenue Church: a face, or the blueprint for one. An oval with two circles for eyes, a triangle for a nose, circle for a mouth. Underneath was written G. BERNINI. Like an animal it appeared both enlightened and permanently bewildered, the eyes and mouth the same size. I wanted Mama to come down there and peel it off the wall. But it was writing, and writing cannot be peeled.
“Any publicity is good publicity. That’s what I say,” Max tried.
I must’ve looked how I was feeling, since Max put his arm over my shoulder. “It’s the beauty of the act,” he said as we walked up Eighth Avenue. “Everyone wants to be you, because you’re being them.”
• • •
That Saturday, ten new strangers. A haberdasher who cupped his left elbow in his right hand, shyly. Giggling sisters. A cop.