The picture had premiered earlier that night at the Broken Temple, a theater on Last Hour Boulevard built to seem a half-century old. Monument Pictures had secured the attendance of its best actors and actresses as well as other capering types: elegant figures, mainly, whom I didn’t recognize but who carried themselves with the brisk, supple air of the broadly known. They chatted and reached across the soft-cushioned rows to shake a hand or blow a kiss; some saluted far-off acquaintances or performed some snappy task in their handbags before turning, at the cue of the dimming lights, to take their seats, hiking up their pant legs or sliding their hands cleanly under the seat of their dresses. The theater went dark. A lively silence. I sat, alert as a rabbit, in the opera box with Bernard, Max, Frankie, Lou, and Ms. Julie Dark, the hired woman from the Jade House and my companion for the evening.
Since my first trip with Bernard, I had returned to the Jade House several times, beginning to understand it more. Ms. Dark, I saw, was an exquisitely attuned performer. She could read in the way a man smoked his cigarette a desire to be punched playfully on the arm or petted on the shoulder. In a moment she could switch from carnivorous desire to motherly concern, and even, at times, performed a sort of under-self, in which costume she would, in the longueurs of the late evening, divulge heartrending details about her brother Dennis and his long struggle with leukemia. Not very much of it was convincing, but it didn’t have to be. It was the very exaggeration that was of value, like old Greek theater, with its swooning and its masks.
On future occasions I would be provided with different women from the Jade House. Yet each one, whether a broad-shouldered blonde or shy-eyed black girl, went by the name Julie Dark and each, it seemed, had consulted the same well-kept file or card catalogue or whatever organizing system the house used to keep track of notable moments from our previous outings. In this way, each new girl (who said, “So good to see you again,” when stepping into the town car or appearing at my door) helped contribute to the illusion of a history, referring with ease to the time the paparazzi chased us outside Town Hall or that oyster night at the Tangiers.
Some of these pretenders, of course, demonstrated more skill than others, and yet I came to enjoy the poorer ones in the way one relishes even amateurish renditions of a familiar song, each, in the vagaries of their difference, pointing to some ur-melody one could never actually hear. Except one girl, a chatty type with bags under her eyes, at the crucial divot in the night when she was to lay her head on my chest and relay the latest episode in the long sufferings of her dear brother Dennis, so mangled the story (making him a younger brother and sentencing him to lung cancer instead of leukemia) I immediately, in a strange, high-pitched voice, called for the car to pick her up and, after she left, paced madly around the bed, feeling as I had that first day of shooting. This feverish state of mind might have lasted for several hours if I hadn’t swallowed two more of those green pills, a hefty supply of which Lou had given me.
To myself (I never discussed them with others) I referred to these panicked spells as bursting moments and was quite worried, in fact, that I would suffer one the night of the screening. I took a pill before leaving, but when the movie started up in the held silence of that theater, my heart was going hard. There he stood, me, twenty feet tall, peering through the blinds of an office window onto the traffic on Fifty-seventh Ave. A man could be heard shouting from the street, the blinds tinkling under my fingers. Onscreen I raise the cigarette to my mouth as if posing a question. So, deliciously, is presented the life of this character: a man who studies the hieroglyph of traffic from a tenement window. Harry Knott, posing as a private dick hired on the main by desperate men days into their second ulcer. But when a customer comes in, a nervous hat-fiddling man, asking for “a new fabulous raincoat,” a code word, we learn the government needs Harry, for Harry is a spy.
We had filmed it on the lot. Rather than a busy avenue, the window looked out on a pile of orange utility cables. But the camera turned that moment into a succulent image, such was the camera’s genius. And as the movie went on, I watched myself in a kind of rapture. I watched myself kiss a woman in that way that involves a dip. I shot a man dead at the airport. I could not wait to describe to Mama the dream and statue they had made of her son.
As the red curtains closed, however, my mood seemed to stiffen. I waved too much and smiled weakly to the applauding people below. In the trip from the sidewalk to the waiting car, I walked with a hitched gait, and once inside the Desert had difficulty finding my footing in the sand. I linked my elbow with Julie Dark’s, hoping that would help. Attentive as ever, she laid her soft fingers on my arm as we strode into the party, but this made it worse, and I just as quickly released the grip.
Soon I led us to a group of chatting actors, whose company was my favorite. The women held their heads at a soft-focus angle, the men made everything crisp and light. With actors each gesture rose to the level of event. The way they snapped an arm forward and back in order to check the time. The fruitful nodding. I stood around them in my customary silence.
Through the years, I’d tried different strategies, of course. I’d put my faith in politeness first, and later in wit, but silence, I learned, was better still and got you so far, especially in Fantasma Falls, where the point of someone was to not know them. People would descend upon me as tourists would a famous statue, and like a statue, I was charged only with the task of being still. By then, I lived under a haze of rumor: That I acted this way only after the movie came out. That I was “staying in character.” That Bernard was imitating me. We were fucking. Uncle and nephew. Crooks. What bits reached me I didn’t bother to dispel, and soon, to my delight, words like mysterious and laconic came to surround my name in the papers, like newsprint bodyguards.
And yet, when the feeling blasted me, as it did that night at the Desert, this armor of rumor, of reputation, did little, and it was best to have Bernard nearby, so that I could draw him live. So while an actor nattered on about the joys of the ninth hole at Trembling Hills, I looked discreetly for Bernard, finding him at last by the five-piece band where he danced in a kind of fever, digging his toe in the sand, twisting his hips, marking this effort with an ugly frown. When I looked up again sometime later, he was standing on his tiptoes to whisper to the band’s singer, a statuesque blonde with dark, diving eyebrows. As he seemed to gnaw on her ear, she nodded with slow-dawning comprehension and then shrieked, shoving Bernard to the sand, where he waved his legs and arms in playful arcs, giggling.