That night, on my way home, a skinny man with a misaligned collar asked me how to get to Aberdeen Street. “Oh, it’s very easy,” I assured him and calmly and very clearly sent him in the opposite direction. I waved off his thanks with a big, fake smile. Then I hopped up the steps of the corner store and bought some cigarettes. I smoked one but coughed so much I threw the pack out and woke up that next morning with a torrential headache. After that, I did my best to avoid that back room.
But Bernard knew what he was doing. The Vandaline affair increased my fame. Like some urban eczema, those faces appeared more and more on the skin of the City: on the side of a delivery van, in chalk on the sidewalk, in spray paint on a fifty-foot rail bridge. People recognized me on the street, asked for my autograph, buttonholed me by the entrance to the train: How do you do it? How can I learn? Teach me. For a time the scandals hardened these public interrogations: “I knew it! Is it true?” “They say you a fraud, man,” a baggy-eyed man told me under the awning of the Hotel San Pierre. “Of course I am,” I answered.
That’s how I talked now. As I understood it, the public ached to know me and yet refused to believe they did. To understand me would disappoint them as much as not knowing me at all, a paradox that expressed itself most often through touch. Passengers on the subway, waiters at the diner were always patting my back, for instance. Yet, after this presumptuous leap, each would back off, nearly recoil, as if to reestablish the moat that ought, by all rights, to separate a talent from his devotees. What they desired, in other words, was to be confounded, but confounded warmly, a want I was happy to meet.
But all of that broke down in Lucy’s apartment.
Given the cold, we spent most days tucked into her L-shaped studio apartment, in a new proximity I found both thrilling and frightful. With Max and Mama, the more I hung around them, the more their gestures seeped into my very person, but with each hour Lucy only wrapped herself in a denser mystery, a thousand details still burying her thread: the way she puckered her lips to blow a hair fallen over her face, the angle at which she rested her head when twirling spaghetti with a fork.
It had to do with her body, soft and round and the first I’d ever known. I don’t just mean the first I’d ever laid against, shared a bed with, or made love to (a phrase Lucy despised—“We don’t make love, Giovanni, we fuck!”), no, she was the first person, in my life, to exist apart, as a whole. Perhaps I did not always allow for the fullness of people. In the case of Max, for instance, perhaps I was too busy charting the movements of his hands, too busy concocting my “Max” rebus to encounter the reality of his presence. And perhaps (I thought, watching Lucy constructing a lipstick-applying moue in the mirror) the same held for my current volunteers, each of whom I reduced in the moment I met them to a gestural acronym. Perhaps (I thought, watching Lucy, post-shower, brush her hair with strong untangling strokes) all my previous work had been a deception, as I’d felt instinctively our first night at the Communiqué.
Nearly unraveled by these notions, I sometimes acted in strange ways. One afternoon I took out her tape measure and measured the length of her thighs, the distance from pelvis to breast, knee to ankle, the length of her longest strand of hair pulled down to her chest. She lay there while I did it, without peep or complaint, shifting only to giggle when the metal tape tickled the nape of her neck. “Giovanni, where did you get so straaange?” she said, leaning up to kiss me.
Generally, though, I was terrified she would grow bored of me, would exile me from her apartment, or body, and so imitated whomever I could to keep her amused. Strangers on the subway, waiters, friends. Half the time, I was Max, the soundman Alexi, anyone. Each cackle (she had a raucous laugh — cocked her head back and shouted it loud enough to quiet most rooms) I coaxed from her soft and vulgar throat guaranteed me a few more hours of closeness.
My performances at the Communiqué seemed especially to excite her. “It’s almost creepy,” she’d say after, running her hand up the thigh of my tuxedo. Often she’d sit me down in a chair at the center of the Communiqué and hop on my lap, kiss and tangle with me, even with all those people watching. And yet, in those days I was still very polite and would often say, “Jeez, thank you,” when a waiter brought us soup or “Excuse me,” when shuffling past strangers in the subway. “Where the fuck did they make you?” she often asked.
She would not give me her real name. “It’s not the one I chose” is all she said. Her sole memory of her father, a goateed professor who left when she was three, was of him, in a silk waistcoat, holding her above the crib in a room of laughing construction workers. She produced a photo of her mother, looking like Lucy in disguise, with fake eyelashes and a fur stole. A minor stage actress in her time, she catered to men her whole life, as Lucy described it, and now lived without memories in a nursing home in Chinatown.
Lucy described her own men to me, with a detached, if vivid, interest. Among this crowded list she included Bernard casually, as if I already knew. “We went around for a bit,” she said. “He’s a good man to see when you’re feeling low because he makes you just a little looower.” Only when she was spontaneously cold, as she could be, or strangely remote, as happened, did the specter of these men, Bernard among them, haunt me. After all, I knew what they wanted. We, all of us, were like tired desert animals lining up to sip from the same oasis. Mostly, I enjoyed hearing her talk this way because there was a softened, hesitant, dreamy quality to her voice that I thought might lead me to her thread.
To Mama alone did I recount my secret repeated attempts to imitate Lucy, scribbling it to her in my letters like some deranged taxonomist. “So I’ve tried the way she walks (headfirst, rangy) in combination with the way she talks (loooong vowels), the way she talks in combination with how she tilts her head (a kind of smirking tilt). I’ve tried the way she pares her toenails, dries her hair, ties her shoes, opens envelopes, but Mama, none of it works!” It was Mama who first suggested I watch how she slept, not knowing the great frustration this would cause me. “That’s a start at least,” she wrote. “No one’s pretending while they sleep.”
In fact many nights I couldn’t sleep anyway, hearing Lucy breathe, trying to match the rhythm of it. In slumber, though, the mystery swallowed her whole, contrary to Mama’s theory. Lucy, a self-contained mound. I couldn’t stand it, and once while she lay on her side, I reached under the covers and ventured a finger inside her — dry at first, but then wet. She stirred but didn’t wake, produced a “Hmmpph” sound, as if considering a pleasant puzzle.
Yes, what I kept from Mama was how close fucking brought me to Lucy’s thread. This goes a long way in explaining why I could barely keep my hands off her, even in public, why our sex mattered so much, and how unsettling it was when she withheld it.
We’d lie in bed, the radiator baking our cheeks. I’d run my finger up her thigh and lightly kiss her neck. “No, not tonight.” I’d try again. “I’m tiiired,” she’d say or, “A gal needs her beauty sleep, Giovanni, those performances can be ex-hawww-sting,” and I’d toil over the covers, corked and jittery, while she heaved in sleep next to me.