Out of the corner of my eye, with Julie at my side, I monitored his raucous passage through the party. Bernard pushed past a bushy-haired waiter, spilling a platter of ruby cocktails. Later he participated in a shouting conversation with a circle of very tall men. At one point he vanished from sight altogether only to appear later on a rafter high above the party, where he crouched like a gargoyle before the fake orange sun.
I’d seen such things before. Once when he was drunk at the Communiqué, he had climbed onto the bar to do a limb-tossing jig, the intended irony of which was difficult to gauge. As it was the time he shushed everyone in the Communiqué’s back room to sing a winding, impassioned ballad about sailors who survived the open sea only to perish after visiting the “midnight house” of a lightly mustachioed prostitute named Frangelina. As I remembered it, no one quite knew how to react to these emotive displays, and the few who attempted to muss Bernard’s hair or clap him on the back were met with vicious muttered insults.
He seemed to be moving toward us. “Have to go to the restroom,” I said to Julie.
“Go to the restroom, darling.”
As Bernard moved through the party, I did what I could to push in the opposite direction, hoping, really, to sneak out the back exit, though I soon found myself approaching Nathan Sharp, dressed in his customary premiere-night ensemble. Top hat, tuxedo, white gloves. Seeing me, he raised his arms in triumph. I bent down to receive his hug.
“I got that little feeling in my chest. And it’s not angina.” He gave me a coquettish look. “It’s that sequel feeling.”
“There you are!” I turned, and there stood an actress who looked exactly like Mama. The aged version I’d seen in the City. Her drooping cheeks. Hair fully gray. Max stood next to her. The woman smiled in an absent, anxious way.
“Mama.”
Her smile filled the Desert, and it was as if all the separating years vanished, like that! In the middle of the Desert, I shrank to the size of a nine-year-old, drowned in an oversize suit and too-big cowboy boots, peering up at my Mama. How many times had I been poked or headlocked or scowled at by some petty parent before Mama arrived, saving everything! And it was as if all the Desert — the peering, braceleted women, the men cocking their heads to airdrop hors d’oeuvres into their mouths — shimmered and then vanished altogether, mere emanations of our play inside the Sea View living room.
“Well?” I said. “What did you think?”
She did not hesitate. “My favorite part was the panhandler. The way you shook the tin — that was my Giovanni, that had the old joy in it.”
“Dollar, sir. Dollar, please.” I couldn’t resist, shambling in the sand with that hunched back, my hand raised above my head. I passed Mama, who was already giving me her Look. “Charity helps all, goddamnit!” But as I circled her, planning one more go-around, there appeared before me, somehow, the man in the wedding dress, from Marguerite Harris’s party. “Quite something, really,” he said before disappearing, an apparition of memory soon replaced by my room at the Ambassador, that den where I had shivered and sweated. The bursting feeling. And I stood up very straight and looked at Max, with Bernard’s appraising eye. “Did you arrange this?”
“Well, I did, yes. Call me naïve, but I was hoping you’d listen to her and forget all this moviebiz masquerade bullshit.”
“I thought we agreed that you wouldn’t come,” I said to Mama, trying to hold my tone.
“Oh, I know, Giovanni, but I just couldn’t resist. The idea of seeing it in Sea View and coming out of the theater all alone — no, I couldn’t stand it. I had to surprise you.”
“And what a delightful surprise it is,” a voice said.
I turned, and there stood Bernard. His hair and face, since his time in the rafters, had somehow become wet. The bolo tie hung around his neck like a towel. “If we knew you were coming, Ms. Bernini, we certainly could’ve gotten you better seats.” He made a vague tsk-tsk gesture in Max’s direction and then reached for Mama’s hand, which she snatched away.
“But of course, but of course, please, I insist!” Bernard extended his arm toward me with the unctuousness of a maître d’.
“Look at him!” Mama had a fist on her hip and a finger in the air, accusingly. “For a day, fine. For the screen, yes, but not to stay, Giovanni.”
“But it seems to be working out?” Bernard said. “It seems everything’s been going sort of perfectly well since he left home, no?”
“I would never have let you go with Max…” she said, ignoring Bernard, who began doing a strange, sort of absentminded pirouette and who, hearing this latest riposte, began to repeat “let you?!” with mock disbelief, with bent knees, and a hand cupped above his waist as if nursing a stab wound. “Thank god, she let you,” he kept saying until Mama, with whitely pursed lips, stepped through the sand and swatted him with her handbag.
She lit into him, striking him about the head, shoulders, and neck, a look of unholy concentration in her eyes. Bernard, in response to this assault, protected his head with his hands and hopped around in circles, like a tickled chimp, the two of them kindling onlookers’ attention until a ring of people had formed, Nathan among them, and Julie, too, who, finding me there amid this chaos, constructed a look of disgust, and then, seeing my own expression, downshifted to concern.
Nathan by then was standing behind Mama, attempting to peer over her shoulder. As he did, however, Mama was winding back to strike Bernard again and whacked the mogul on the nose, sending him recoiling. He back-stepped to the rim of a dune and, before any warning could be given, tumbled down it with a shriek.
“Look at him! Is that who you want to be?” Mama said, waving her arm at Bernard. A lock of her gray hair had come unhinged.
The onlookers gawked at me as they had so many times in Sea View. Nathan’s pale, de-hatted forehead was peeking out from the rim of the dune.
“My Giovanni,” she said. “You’re sympathetic to the—”
“I’m not.” It came out of me. Harry Knott’s voice. The whoosh of traffic out my tenement window. “And don’t say that I am.” I added, “I’ve never been and never will.” My heart beat in my throat, and I turned away.
Bernard by then was stepping into the dune to help Mr. Sharp, the short man brushing sand from his tuxedo pants and yelling in Mama’s direction. His shouts called to assembly several turban-wearing enforcer types who gathered close, ushering Mama out, I gathered from her protestations. Each time she called my name, the sound got farther away. Then she was gone.
Ten minutes later, Max returned. They had her thrown out, he said. She’s standing outside the lot, he said. “We had an agreement,” I said in the right voice. Julie stroked between my shoulder blades.
It was simple enough not to return Mama’s calls over the next couple of days. All this entailed was not picking up the phone. Three days later word came that she had flown back to Sea View. But that night, after the energy of the scene had died, and the sun was turned off, and the fist of stars appeared over the Desert with the big auxiliary fan blowing in a hot and idle wind, I snuck out the back door to the part of the lot where they kept the old sets. There was the frontier town, its row of saloons. Past it stood the cardboard façade of a castle, reachable by a metal drawbridge spanning a drained moat. I jumped up and down on the drawbridge, listening to the tested metallic sound it made. I swallowed a green pill. One that I liked to do was pick a cigarette out of the pack. Bernard did it with two taps. After lighting one, I put it out and tried another. Maybe I tried half a pack because a lot of barely smoked cigarettes were strewn about the drawbridge by the time I was pacing, the gun in my hand. I hadn’t used it, not once, but it helped now and then to take it out and feel its weight. I threw it up in the air and caught it with both of my hands, laughed. Already I was feeling better.