“You’ve got some nerve making light of such a matter,” Mama said.
“Oh, I would never! No! Never!” He reached across and held her shoulder with his left hand. “Just debating the merits of the case, which don’t seem entirely clear to me, that’s all.” Then he turned to me as if signaling for help in ushering out a pesky caller. And only then did I realize that I had never once in all our correspondence mentioned to Mama the near-drugged sensation my imitations of Bernard induced. “Quite a spirited woman,” said Bernard. “Absolutely delightful.”
Mama shook her head.
“I know you must curse this Unheim for keeping you away from Giovanni. But I can assure you, not to worry! He’s in good hands now.” The now seemed to be added intentionally. “If you’ll excuse me.” With a semi-ironic bow, Bernard turned and made his way to the den. Some sort of atonal music was playing there.
Mama watched him leave. “Be careful with that man.”
“That man,” said Max, “is singlehandedly responsible for every good fucking hallelujah that’s happened to us.” Seeing Mama unassuaged, he added, “Not the warmest soul in the world, I agree, but harmless, truly.”
“Truly,” I said, mainly because I knew I should talk and wanted to keep it short. As if dredged up by Bernard, a slew of ghastly thoughts were rising to mind. (Oh, were you really so, so wronged? Just behave, please. Just be grateful and smile, please. You’re here strictly as my guest, understand? I could have you banned. Behave accordingly. Jesse Unheim had a point — you’re always meddling in people’s business.) I breathed deep.
“Might we escape to the roof?” Max suggested. “I hear the hors d’oeuvres are a revelation.”
• • •
In the mild evening air, the roof’s garden terrace reeked of tulips and honeysuckle. At that four-story height, the City took on the inviting quiet of a village, and I felt like myself again. Illuminated windows were but yellow patches in the quilt of redbrick. I kept making quick trips to the bar for champagne. Mama, too.
Next to it Marguerite Harris, our host, was holding forth to a group of wary men in suits. I introduced Mama.
“Thanks so much for having us,” Mama said.
“Thanks so much for having him,” Marguerite said, vigorously kissing Mama on both cheeks. “Meet my darlings,” she said of the suited men. They were, she explained, homeless, or had been before her intervention. Their cardboard pleas for food or money, scratched with messages like TIRED & HUNGRY or SIK NEED MONY, she had begun to sell at auction.
“You’re an artist then?” Mama asked one of them.
The man shrugged and pointed to Marguerite. “I make signs. She sells it like it’s art.”
“So edible,” said Marguerite.
“What kind of signs?” I asked.
“Aren’t that many types: Go, Stop, Food. Mine was Food.”
“Do you find this place strange?” I asked.
“No stranger than anywhere else. I hate places.”
“Cut them up with a cookie cutter and eat them,” said Marguerite.
“You’re right,” I said. “Places are terrible.”
“I’m never right,” he corrected me.
Marguerite placed a hand over her heart. “My darlings.”
A grave caterer kept appearing with a platter of champagne flutes. Another trailed him to collect the drained glasses. As soon as the first departed, the second appeared, followed again by the first, in an efficient and unending mechanism of inebriation. As if on a ride, Mama and I accepted and returned these flutes and soon found ourselves quite drunk in a corner of the roof. “I hate places,” I said, “I’m never right.” I had been imitating the homeless man we’d talked to, relishing that flat baritone.
“Shh!” Mama giggled. “You’re screaming!”
I was having trouble not swaying. “None are the right place,” I continued. “You’re my only place, Mama.”
“My Giovanni.”
“I’ll miss my Mama!” I said, imitating something, I’m not sure what. The words like hot soup in my mouth.
“You have your Lucy,” she said. “That’s good.”
“But I still can’t do her!” I stomped my foot. Heedling — that’s who.
“It’s the head, I’m telling you.” She said, “The tilt of her head.”
“Oh, c’mon. Like I haven’t tried it.”
“Let’s see.”
I shucked off my shoulders. I took a deep breath. “Giovaaaanni,” I said, “you’re so creeeeepy.” I was going around in a circle by the roof’s ledge in that gait of hers, a kind of sped-up lumbering. “Are you kidding me?” I said. “Our show was teeeerrible.” I was tilting my head too much. “Geoff keeps fucking up.”
“Almost,” Mama said. “Walk a little slower.”
I slowed down, sped up. I threw my head back. I cackled. I ranged around the roof, lying on my side, hands folded under my head, breathing that slow, deep-sleep breath.
“No, no,” Mama said. “Stand up.”
Marguerite and the man in the wedding dress had gathered near us like spectators drawn to a foreign ritual.
“Try the head again,” Mama said.
I heard my neck crack. “But it iiiiiiiisn’t right, Mama,” I said. “Giovaaaaanni.”
“Tilt it more.”
I was groaning.
“No, no, no,” Mama said. “The head!”
But I was grunting and moaning. “Oh, Giovanni, oh, oh, yeah!” I was grinding the air with my pelvis. “Oh, Giovanni, oh!”
I could hear Marguerite cackling.
“Giovaaaaanni, you’re gonna, you’re gonna…”
Mama blanched. But I couldn’t stop.
“… you’re gonna maaaaake me cum!”
There was silence. The man in the wedding dress spoke first. “Bravo, really. Quite something.” “How little one needs to understand in order to adore!” Marguerite added. Then I turned and saw Lucy. A tear hung in her eye. I tried to say her name but could only say: “Giovaaaanni!”
I had never seen her cry before, her eyes like blurred pits. “Lucy—” Now that I landed on her name, I could only say it. “Lucy!” But she ran away, and after a frozen moment I chased after her. As I wheeled on to the head of the stairs, a herd of those homeless men was coming up it, thick as the crowds in midtown. “Excuse me,” I said. “Please!” I tried to push through, but there were too many men, so many. A familiar voice came crying out behind me: “You must understand. He’s just sympathetic, sympathetic to the bone….”
NINE
What I remember of that tour are the phone booths: on street corners, in hotel lobbies and gas stations, those phone booths, which across the country have graffiti keyed into their doors and smell like human palms. The country lay before us like a nude in an oil painting, and I didn’t once sneak a peek, burying myself in those booths as into a vertical tomb.
Soon after Marguerite’s party word had trickled from Lucy to Bernard, from Bernard to Max, from Max to me, that Lucy had quit the tour. “She doesn’t want to see him” is the message I received. It seemed absurd that so many people could fit between us. I did all the things: sent flowers and cards, waited outside her apartment, called and called again. I couldn’t know if I was doing it correctly, if I was picking the right cards, sending the right flowers, saying the right things.