Mama rang to comfort me. I saw her to the train the day after Marguerite’s party in a state of mute despair. “She’ll call you,” she said on the phone a few days later. “Tomorrow you’ll hear from her, I guarantee it, Giovanni, or the day after. And if you don’t, well — what you did on the roof — she has to know that’s who you are.”
I said, “Yes.”
The tour was clammy hands competing to shake mine. The vegetable smell of certain stages. Everywhere we went I saw her silhouette: patterns of shade on a suburban lawn, the stars above the desert.
We held a press conference in the lobby of the Bellwether Hotel in Lake City, the crown of the Midwest where we were scheduled for four sold-out nights at the Northern Juke. We sat before a conference table topped with a floral arrangement of microphones. The cameras whirred and cranked. The journalists hovered over their chairs instead of sitting in them.
“How’d you learn to do it?”
“Same way I learned to walk.”
“How’s that?”
“Who knows?”
Chuckles.
“What do you think about when you’re doing it?”
“A choice combination of everything and nothing.”
Guffaws.
“What do you think accounts for the popularity of your act?”
“I don’t know. But I’ve never trusted popularity and don’t plan to now, just because I’m enjoying some.”
Applause.
The quotation marks swaddled me. It was all something I could say, something I could mean, but the reporters jotted it down as news. One fingered a stray lock, another smirked to himself. I could see them right then hatching their phrases, cherry-picking their quotes to concoct the mystique of Giovanni the Celebrity for their readers, men and women who would happen upon these pieces while waiting for their toaster to spit out their bread or while buckling along on the elevated train, readers who would wonder about this Bernini and so buy a ticket for the tour date nearest them, readers who might, at first, hover by the back of the amphitheater before edging forward to volunteer themselves, readers who would enter the spotlight with circumspection and leave it with merriment — the merriment of having been verified—and all of us, in that way, collaborating in a lie.
Touch. This is what Max prescribed. “Distract yourself, boy. Goddamnit, that’s what life is — food, money, sex. Sex and money, Giovanni!” He escorted the faux-coy to the beaded leather booths where we always somehow were.
The sheer pulchritude — I couldn’t stomach it. Those buxom brunettes, those doe-eyed blondes, all armed with rehearsed insights and sweet rebukes for the traveling entertainer. “You’re like a sculptor,” said a redhead with a waist as wide as my hand. “And we’re all your marble.” “I’m all right,” I said, “I’m okay, thank you,” and disappeared to claw at Lucy through the phone.
Once — once! — I caught her at the end of the line. I stood in a telephone booth in the lobby of a hotel out west, decorated in melons and pinks. It rang for a long time. Finally I heard, “Heeello?”
“Lucy?!”
There was a pause.
“I didn’t meeean to pick up. I’m going.”
“Please.”
“Whaaaat?”
“Oh, please, oh, please.” I said, “I love you.”
There was the phone-crackle.
“Ugh, I know,” she said and hung up.
• • •
Those two words—I know—buoyed me the last days of the tour. As did that sound she’d made: ugh, that grunt of disgust, so nakedly expressed it could only be meant for family. Those two words and that ugh—preserved in my brain exactly as Lucy had said them (through the crackling of the line, in a tone of exhausted, motherly forbearance) — steadied my quivering gut, and I returned to the Communiqué that first Sunday I was back.
I caught the last two songs of her set. To watch her sway in that spotlight before a crowd of men in the afternoon dark was to know the blackness of desire. I downed two shots at the bar, waiting until she exited through the wing before opening the side door. I stumbled backstage as through thick undergrowth, tripping, retracing my steps, getting lost again, until I arrived at a small metal table, a replacement for the glass one I’d tripped over months before. Pawing the wall, I located the handle of the door and, with a pause and a wild beating heart, swung it open.
By the glow of the vanity mirror Bernard Apache sat, smoking a cigarette, his brown trousers around his ankles, his moon-white legs spread. A head of long black hair bobbed furiously between his thighs. “Oh,” he said, seeing me.
Lucy did not try to right her appearance or dissemble — a futile task anyway, but a kind of expected courtesy — beyond shooting up and rubbing her mouth with the back of her hand, straightening her tousled dress and saying, “Giovanni, oh my G-ah-d, Giovanni!” She squeezed and unsqueezed her fists, nervously.
I squeezed mine, too.
“Giovaaanni!” She hopped up and down. “What are you doooing here?”
“Meeee?! What am I doing heeeere?” Like that, I had it! Yes! Her thread. The eyes had been right all along (hurt, wronged, accused, accusing), but I was missing the hands and tantrum feet. This was Lucy. When I would thrust her from behind and she would look back with those horrified, happy eyes, it was to reward me, to announce that she had, for a moment, been caught. Caught is what she wanted to be.
“Stooop it,” I said to her. “Just — just leave me alooone.”
Now that I had it, I could pull away, each strand joining the whole — the tilt of her head, the wild vowels. “Giovaaanni, please,” I said, squeezing and unsqueezing my fists. The plastic-covered clothes on the rack, the rusty pipes, Apache, who had pulled up his pants but did not move from the chair, lighting a cigarette; Lucy who headed for the door — all of it seemed to be shaking.
“Giovaaaaanni! Nooo!”
• • •
A wailing infant on the crosstown bus, a homeless man saying, “Howdy do,” an irate black preacher surrounded by bruisers in fezzes notifying Second Avenue that God would be returning in a few days and wouldn’t be pleased. “You will be saved or you will be damned!” I yelled back at him. “A decision is required, it is required!” until one of those fezzed meatheads shoved me to the curb. “You the lieutenant of the devil,” he said. “Be gone, white man.”
My ending up at the Ambassador Hotel must have required various darting actions — packing a bag, hailing a cab, surviving the rich, handsome life of the lobby (the perfume shop manned by women who seemed always to pull down the ends of their blouses in a state of vigilant self-maintenance; the ring of armchairs by the window where men with pinky rings and silk cravats spoke in hushed voices) — though I remember only shutting the heavy door to room 3015, entering that sealed chamber ensconced in crimson drapes. It was what I’d come for, that hotel-room silence, thick and expensive (yes, in this fevered state I began to celebrate money and its uses for the first time; it was a means of separating yourself from the noises of the street by thirty stories, to hide away in some tower by the park; I thought of it, physically, as padding that you could stick between yourself and the world).
And yet, after only an hour or so, the silence proved far worse than any street noise. Like outer space, it coaxed a body to explode. I coughed up what voices I knew, but each stung my throat. Pacing, squeezing my neck, I noticed a radio on the nightstand. I flipped it on, undamming the voices. A newscast. A radio play about pilgrims. I mumbled along, like a parishioner. With some relief, I let it play through the night. That way, if I woke up at three a.m., there would be something in the air.