Max laid me on the low couch opposite them.
“Victim Two in Perfume of Shangri-La?” a man with horn-rimmed glasses asked.
“No, no, he’s the, uh, bookkeeper in Diamonds One,” answered a stooped man with flaking skin.
“The kid’s sick!” a third said.
In no time, the word sick carried across the room.
There was a pop. A musket. The neigh of a horse. A light cast the men in bloodred. Out of instinct I searched for Bernard, who had established himself behind Nathan’s desk. He’d crossed his arms and kicked up his foot, resting it against the window in the posture of a fierce, appraising woman at a cocktail party.
“What’s going on here, Bernie?” Nathan asked, not taking his eyes off me.
The door opened and in shuffled Frankie and Lou.
“He fainted.” Bernard took his time. “Not an actor, it seems.”
“A movie star who doesn’t act is the kind of riddle a man in my position can’t much afford to contemplate,” Nathan said. He wiped his mouth with a napkin imprecisely before embarking upon another bite of the lamb.
Again a lurid red blanketed the studio boss and the men, and Bernard, too. I understood. The wall behind me was no wall at all, but the back of a movie screen. We were somehow behind it. A voice shrieked, “Mince ’em — to the bone!”
“The boy belongs on a stage,” Max said, pacing along the far wall. “As the man who discovered him, I think I’m entitled to some views on the subject.”
“Do us a favor, Max,” Bernard said. “If you find your mouth is beginning to open, close it, please.”
“Break ’em!” the screen shouted. “To bones!”
Suddenly, my mind was full of Lucy’s apartment, its warmth in the winter, when the radiator clanged by the soft land of her bed. The couch of Sea View, too, where Mama might have been sitting that very instant, and how greatly I wished to sit on her lap, in the light of the lamp.
“A movie star’s the dictionary definition of a man,” Nathan said. “This looks like a dog to me. I took a risk on this kid.”
“Mince ’em!”
“He doesn’t have to act,” Bernard said and, with the usual ecstasy of self-control, sauntered over to the side table. There he poured a glass of water and slowly fished something out of his pocket. The men watched Bernard as he decanted the carafe and set it on the bar. He approached me with an extended hand. In his palm lay a green pill.
For the record, I did picture pushing his hand away. I pictured fleeing down the stairs, through the set, out past the lot café where the long-necked women in floppy hats were having their ginger ales; I pictured running past the gate of the studio, past the boulevard to the howl of the interstate, where I would hail a car that would carry me east, back to the City, perhaps, to the Communiqué, where I would step onstage, where I would pick out the first available volunteer, whoever it was, or even venture farther north, to Sea View, and knock on Mama’s door, but in what suit would I knock? I wondered as I swallowed the pill and was led, by Bernard, to a nearby closet, where I changed back into my outfit, that is, one identical to his, at which point the thought of escape seemed so ridiculous I couldn’t believe I’d considered it at all.
Upon my reentering the room, the men’s expressions shifted subtly but decisively, like figures in a famous painting captured, as indelibly, moments after breaking their pose. Some cocked their heads. Others straightened their backs. I lit a cig, bathed in the blue of the screen.
Bernard said, “I present you Harry Knott, international spy.”
“Now why didn’t we think of that earlier?” asked Nathan with a smile, his plate finished.
• • •
Mama and I resumed our correspondence some weeks before the completion of filming. That day I had been running late, heading out of my bungalow at the Chateau Ravine, a hotel set in a small hill veiled by Jurassic vegetation. I jogged briefly to the town car in which Bernard, Frankie, and Lou waited for me. Yet Bernard was never one to jog, and that harried pace seemed to stick to me, like a bad thought, once I’d slipped into the backseat. As we drove along, Frankie told a joke about a black man, and Lou laughed very hard, and I had a strange premonition that these men were ferrying me to some abandoned lot, though I only smiled at the billboards.
That night I wrote to Mama. To my shock, I was able to construct myself on the page.
SEPTEMBER 10
I’m sorry not to have written, Mama. I’m sure you know the story from Max — the movie we’re making and all of it. I had a very bad day the first time but otherwise I’m doing well. It is of the utmost importance that I achieve my own person, and this seems to be the way. I grew tired of the Communiqué, of all those volunteers tugging at my sleeve and having to be the man they expected of me. I know you don’t care for Bernard, but he is the most unrequiring person I’ve ever met. If anyone was born for the silent life, it is your son, who has much rock inside him. The world, if it likes, can beat against the rock and make the sound of itself. Please feel free to write. But I think it’s best if, for now, you don’t visit. Everything I do is for you, Mama.
She wrote back.
SEPTEMBER 16
My Giovanni,
All of it makes me sick, and yes, Max has been giving me sly little updates on all that you’re doing. I’ve been thinking about this Bernard business. I was thinking of when you were a child: Do you remember the day you learned about the guards who stood outside the royal palace all day and never moved once? Remember, they showed you in school? You loved these palace men who barely ever blinked, even with thousands of visitors passing right in front of their eyes, and you decided one day that you were going to be one of these guards. Do you remember, Giovanni? “I was born to be a guard,” you told me. And you stood still for a long time. You were looking out into the distance just as if the queen were behind you! You did it late into the night, but in the morning I woke up and heard the news report going full blast on the radio. It had come on, and you were mimicking it. I said, “I thought you were born to be a guard?” and you said, “I was wrong.” Well, it’s true — you are not a guard. Remember, there is so much more for you to be in life. I will keep my distance, for now, I’ll agree to that, but you must, must write me back.
M
I did, keeping these exchanges secret from Bernard, who would have disapproved, I knew. Yet, he shouldn’t have, for these letters, if anything, helped sustain my imitation of him, providing a release, an imaginary realm in which I could once again sound like Giovanni. The two (writing like Giovanni, living like Bernard) aided each other, in fact, as a periscope allows a submarine to dart along, unseen, unharmed. And through this correspondence, all my new adventures, the characters I met, were soon layered with a second, deferred pleasure: that of imagining how I would describe them in my letters to Mama.
So it was the night of the premiere.
Years before a two-hundred-yard desert was built on the Monument lot to satisfy the director Arnold Tolstoy, a by-all-accounts impossible man who considered the set a necessity for the filming of The Raj, the three-hour epic that was to make his name. As Tolstoy had just made a killing for Monument Pictures with The Impossible Tower, the studio heads happily met his request. Over a period of months, the trucks passed day and night, hauling in two-ton bags of sand marked by the hues (Persian khaki, oasis yellow) Tolstoy felt necessary to achieve what he called a “heightened verisimilitude” of the Arabian expanse. Union carpenters spent months shaping dunes of pleasing composition and plausible distance. An elaborate lighting system was installed to simulate the passage of the desert sun, and its absence, which meant the stringing up of a vast black tarp wired with a new kind of scattered electrical light. In the last weeks, hundreds of scarabs were set loose in the sand. When The Raj bombed, ending Tolstoy’s career, many wondered what would become of the lot. But Monument Pictures honored scale above all, whether in catastrophe or triumph, and elected to maintain the Desert as an all-purpose venue for parties and premieres. It was there they held the event for Everyman.