“Okay.” Before he could offer it, I helped myself to the chair across from him.
As if following my lead, Bernard sat behind the desk. “You come to spook me?” He smiled again in that grand fake way.
“Something like that.” Already I was learning so much: The way his eyes changed when he inhaled smoke. How he paused before the last two words of a line, to squeeze the moment. The rain outside was soft and low.
“For the record,” he said, “she told me you two had split.”
“Guess it’s fine then.”
He seemed to consider this. “You knew she and I had some times. What’s one more?” He exhaled smoke through his nose. “I think the word for that is showbiz.”
I said nothing. This alone felt like a revelation — that I was under no obligation to speak.
“She was upset,” he said. “Apparently you put on quite a show at Marguerite’s.”
“Keep talking. You’ll find something that sticks.”
“Look, you’re young. You like Lucy. Guys tend to. Hell, sometimes she even likes them back. Believe me, this gig ain’t your last stop, but it’s hers.”
“All that up to you?” My body felt so pliable, so light — it could tense up or fly away, freed as it was from housing me.
“What can I say?” He made a show of repressing a grin. “The girl likes — how’d you put it? A good dicking?” He did that thing where he revealed the hardness of his eyes without shedding his grin. After a moment, he stood up. My lap began to lift with his, but I tensed, remained seated. “We have some things in common, y’know.”
“I think that’s why I’m here.”
“Is it? I’ve got an inkling you don’t entirely know why you are. Scotch?”
“Sure.” I should have said, “Fuck off,” or nothing at all.
“You ever think about who our customers are?”
Perhaps it was because he was at the sideboard, out of view. I tried the cigarette.
“Y’know, I think about it a lot. Of course, if I’m gonna keep a shop like this in operation, I need to consider who comes in the door, don’t I?”
“Sure you do.”
“Well, a customer’s someone who buys a ticket to the show, right? We could start there. Grown up around window displays and advertisements and radio programs, our man couldn’t help but be born with the dream of becoming one — a customer, I mean. Ask a kid, he’ll say he wants to be a doctor or engineer, some new kind of electric fag who’ll shock the world. And, hell, he may do it, but he’ll also all his life, first and foremost, be a customer just the same way he’ll be a citizen.” He was pacing, out of view. “So let’s say our customer, he meets a nice brunette right out of a glossy mag, and when the time comes, he gets down on one knee because, well, that’s what tradition says to do, no? And he buys into tradition. After all, he’s a customer, hell, that’s the first thing he buys. And he and this little bride, they get a nice apartment on the east side or a split-level out in Woodberry Heights, and they go out to restaurants and drive home with not a helluva lot to say. And he looks out his window at the windows of other customers and wonders what kind of furniture they have and what they look like when they’re vacuuming, doesn’t he? Maybe he gets bored. Maybe he’s sick of watching his pukish little kids do long division, and he decides — well, fuck it, he decides to take out that office girl, the one with the fat ass. The customer’s having an adventure now, isn’t he? And on any given Tuesday night, after chewing on his girl’s cunt for a half hour, he likes to sit on her fire escape and smoke a cig just like that guy in that thing, the handsome one he saw back when he was a customer at the movies. But he’s getting older, isn’t he? Our customer’s getting gray hair! Sundays he sits with the paper and has a good ole time getting as indignant as he can. That’s the service the paper provides — indignity all the way home. Yes, he sprays his opinions at it. He’s got opinions that are his alone, the customer does; they’re precious to him, near holy. Tears come to his eyes when they sing the national anthem at ball games and when he holds his opinions in his mind.” Bernard came into view, grinding out the cigarette in the desk’s ashtray. “But, alas, he’ll forget his opinions. He’ll have trouble remembering what the big ones were and why they mattered. Luckily, he socked away some dough. A gravesite, a funeral — these are his last purchases, his last acts as a customer. And they all gather around it — his customer buddies, his customer wife and kids, the girlfriend, whose ass isn’t fat anymore — and these mourners cry, because they buy that the customer lived a life, don’t they? They weep around our customer’s grave.” He scratched his chin and then waved his hand almost effetely, as if to dismiss all that he had previously said as nonsense. “But what I wonder, as the owner of this outfit, is before he kicks the bucket, why does the customer come to our show?”
I did what I could to make my answer sound flat and rote, like a kid who’s heard the same lecture too many times. “Because it makes him feel like less of a customer.”
His smile vanished. “I know how it is. You were born, cursed, with that urge. To peek behind the curtain. No, the stage can’t hold you for long.” He added, “I was pleased to see you finally got it right, by the way.”
“What’s that?”
“Your impression of Lucy backstage. It was finally whole.” His smile erupted again. And it was then I realized. The way he acted when he saw me in his office — I was sure he was taken aback, ambushed, but it wasn’t that at all. He had been excited.
“I don’t know how much longer I need to be here,” I said, even as I was feeling all the more bolted to my chair and the second chair of my knees and arms. I was back in it. Such a subtle thing, such an infinite difference. The lift of the chin, the tap of a finger. A centimeter between happening and tumbling, between having and being had.
“What is it you want?” I asked. But I already knew, it had already started. He was going to make me a spy.
BERNARD
TEN
Once inside the bedroom Bernard with bearlike swipes chased her from the dresser to the mantel to the four-poster bed, at the edge of which the broad-shouldered woman squealed in delight, the belt of her fur-trimmed negligee still somehow staying tied. Earlier she’d performed a perfect B-girl curtsy, turning on white slippers when offering her hand, even doing that thing where she stuck her index finger in her dimple and screwed it in. I understood. It didn’t matter how well she pretended, what mattered is that she would never stop.
On all fours on top of the bed she made eyes at me in the armchair as Bernard kissed her neck.
“Am I gonna know your friend, too?” she asked.
“Shut up.” He began to insult her body. Each time she emitted gasps as round as quarter notes. It went on like that. Not like he was playing an instrument so much as moving his hands over one of those pianos that play themselves. Buttoning up his shirt, he nodded to me. “You want this?”
“Please,” she pleaded as I rose. “Help.”
Sauntering toward the bed, I produced a high, whimpering laugh. Around the sheets hung the stench of bad fruit. “Please.” Her shoulders were warm and pressed, her hair like steel wool. I pulled it. “Shut up,” I told her.
Laughter arose from the beaten armchair the moment it was over. The woman slapped me loosely on the back, her hands slick and warm. “Where’d you find this one, Bernie?”