At one point Lucy herself went, and Mama leaned across the table. “It’s in her head — the tilt of her head, Giovanni. I’m sure of it.”
• • •
That Saturday night Giovanni Bernini, the World’s Greatest Impressionist, devoured ten downy strangers before a packed house at the Communiqué. All show I could feel her: through the mist of smoke, the shrieks of laughter. Like a soft breeze or ray of light, sometimes harkening from the hinterland of back tables, sometimes from the wings of the balcony, I could sense that abiding presence, the bottomlessness of a mother, and many, both in print and out, would stretch the furthest reaches of superlative to describe the power of that night’s performance. The most transporting, they said. A work of art.
Before the performance I had arranged to meet Mama and Lucy by the balcony bar and there they stood, as planned. There she stood, like some prophetess: Mama, in her old dress, the one she wore to Derringer’s office, with the belted waist and giant bow. “Mama—” I was saying, when Lucy pounced, peppering my cheeks with kisses. “My freeeak.” It was as if she wanted to tattoo me with her kisses, so that any onlooker, in order to see me — and there were many idling by the bar trying to do just that — would have to penetrate the very public veil of her affection. I managed to hold her at arm’s distance. “Max says the car’s downstairs,” I said. “We ought to go.”
Soon Mama, Max, Lucy, and I were crammed into the hired car, motoring to Marguerite Harris’s town house, ten blocks away. Lucy sat between Mama and me, the whole time petting my thigh, this with Mama sitting right next to her, transforming the streets out the window, with her very gaze, into a kind of poster for longing.
Max swiveled around noisily in his seat. “Proud of your man over there?”
Mama smiled absently.
“Proud as a peacooock,” Lucy said, inching her hand up my thigh. I smiled, removed it.
The driver stopped at Mandel Street in front of Marguerite Harris’s four-story town house bookended by pear trees in full bloom. Figures could be seen milling on the roof like the building’s hair, their voices echoing down to us, glib and jocular. That throb and chatter emanated, too, from the building, a sound that stings any passerby with a prick of loneliness and any invitee with dread.
Max, at the head of our group, employed the heart-shaped (not the heart traded on Valentine’s Day, but an actual organ-shaped device) brass knocker to the impressive door. Lucy, in the shadows, pecked at me. “Not right now,” I whispered, and smiled, which she took as countermand to all I asked. Max knocked again. “Hello!” he greeted the loud impassive house. “You’d think there’d be a buzzer,” he muttered, and just as he was arching his head to call up to one of the figures on the roof, the door swung open, and there stood before us a seventy-year-old man in a chiffon wedding dress.
“So difficult to hear this bloody knocker,” he said. “Why the Whore doesn’t install a proper buzzer, I’ll never know.”
Marguerite Harris, it should be said, was known among her friends as the Virgin Whore because even at the age of fifty-five (or thereabouts, no one knew her exact age) she had not yet parted with her virginity. Her lack of desire for sex did not originate in any deep-seated belief, religious or philosophical. Aesthetically and from the absolute depths of her, she found the act uninteresting, failing to be “fresh,” the sole criterion for her attention. Years before, she had hosted an infamous orgy to see what “this sex thing was all about.” As rumor had it, Marguerite invited to her town house some friendly, hirsute professionals along with famous artists, renting, for the experimental purposes of the evening, a haul of trapeze equipment from the Big Tent Circus as well as several live farm animals. A wardrobe was wheeled in filled with such diverse costumes as nuns’ habits, adult diapers, judge’s robes, lederhosen, overalls, and several fake long gray beards (fitted for both the male and female face); having covered her chaise longue and ivory bookcases with plastic tarps, and catered the event with genitalia-shaped cuisine from all over the world, Marguerite then sat with her secretary on adjacent wooden chairs as the seventy or so guests delved into busy, crowded intercourse. By most accounts, the heiress lasted twenty minutes, the whole time yawning and sighing, and soon repaired to the downstairs study in order to appreciate an eighteenth-century washbasin.
There passed between us a silence to confirm our greeter had been wearing a bridal gown. Max motioned for Mama to pass and then followed her through the open door. Lucy pulled me aside. “Let’s find a bathroom and fuck.”
“Lucy, I don’t think it’s—”
She grabbed my arm.
With alacrity, with a smirking sense of conspiracy, she separated us from Mama and Max. Down a hallway lined with caterers; through a sitting room where a string quartet played, the musicians — we saw as we passed through — wearing wolf masks; up the staircase, along which a series of black-and-white photographs showed in a flip-book sequence a black woman pushing out the corona of her newborn, who, at the top of the stairs, proved to be Caucasian; past a pear-shaped man in a silk waistcoat bounding after an escaped gerbil; past a woman with a hat made of plastic fruit kissing a woman with the same succulent hat. Around another hall Lucy led me to an unoccupied bathroom where we — as she ordered — fucked.
After, she sabotaged the reconstruction of my tux. “Kiss me,” she said. “Kiiiiss me.”
“I need to find my mother.”
“Giovanni loooves his mama.”
“But she’s leaving tomorrow,” I said, making my way to the door.
It didn’t take me long to find Mama and Max, standing in conversation with Bernard below the famous portrait of Marguerite’s grandfather, the oilman D. W. T. Harris, the one on posters and the covers of hardback books: Harris in top hat and tie, about to scowl. His eyes are gray and humorless, his face as delicate as a horse jockey’s. In the painting he has perfected the imperious glare of one who’s amassed huge sums of money precisely to commission such portraits and have them hang over the living.
As I soon gathered, the three had been discussing Mama’s recent trial, a conversation not particularly welcome, it seemed, given Mama’s shaking head and galled eyes. They were so exercised, in fact, neither she nor Bernard seemed to notice my entrance, my presence acknowledged only by Max, who inhaled deeply while enlarging his eyes as if to express some ongoing, delicate situation. After some listening, I understood that they were discussing the letter Unheim’s lawyer, Le Fleuer, had produced, the one supposedly sent from Sandra to ask after Unheim.
“I’m merely asking if you can be sure the letter was falsified,” Bernard said. He looked oddly playful as if debating for sport the ending of a forgettable movie.
“Are you kidding?”
“Not at all,” he said, sipping from his tumbler of whiskey.
“Her whole life Sandra railed against him, she couldn’t stand him,” Mama said.
“But isn’t it possible that she sent this one letter?” Bernard asked. “That she had one single moment of doubt? You must concede that’s possible, no?”
“Really, you have some nerve, you know that. I worked with the woman my whole life. You think you know her better than me?”
“No, not at all. I’m merely saying, it’s possible the woman had moments of doubt, of kind feeling for her nephew. That’s all.” The more upset Mama became (setting her hand on her hip, shaking her head), the more lighthearted Bernard seemed (smiling like a baffled innocent failing to understand why others have taken offense). That same smile was rising on my lips, too, an expression thwarted only by the concerted effort of several facial muscles. Well, you have been pitying yourself quite a bit, Mama, I almost blurted out. After all, I was busy doing only what you’ve wanted me to. It was happening again: Bernard’s attitude finding me.