ELEVEN
“It’ll be like a movie without cameras,” Bernard said, handing me the speech in the hushed backseat of the town car. Before long we arrived at the fairground where a makeshift stage, festooned with orange bunting, stood before the defunct Ferris wheel. There was an air of frenetic activity behind the stage, a mill of anonymous people excitedly performing tasks.
When the presidential candidate and former senator Rory Stengel finally entered the backstage area, applause traveled swiftly through the crowd. It was a pleasure to watch him smile and greet people and shake his head with warmth and enthusiasm, a head taller than everyone. When he came to me, he held my shoulder and frowned terribly, as if chagrined by gratitude. I don’t remember exactly what he said. Something like, “So glad, really, an honor, we’re gonna thank you for the yes we’re glad.” This was my first time meeting a politician, and it surpassed by far the company of actors. A politician, I learned that afternoon, cannot part with a gesture until he’s blown it up to maximum size. As Senator Stengel thanked me, his face shining with makeup, I began to understand the event. It didn’t matter what my speech said, it mattered only what gestures I made.
The speech itself, as I said, had been written, so, when the time came, all I had to do was stand at the podium and declaim it. Already the crowd thought of me as a kind of hero because of the supposed political undertones of Everyman and No Man’s Land, the second film starring Harry Knott, even more popular than the first. By then I had lived in Fantasma Falls for five years.
I maintained through that time a comprehensive scrapbook larded with articles, profiles, photographs, and puff pieces about Harry Knott. The headlines, in their factuality, pleased me to flip through: THE TOTAL ACTOR, an article about my unflinching commitment, both on film and in life, to the role of Harry Knott; A PATRIOT ONSCREEN AND OFF, a glossy-magazine profile on the extent to which my character’s political views mirrored my own; RETIRED MILKMAN CLAIMS TO EYE REAL BERNINI AT LOCAL BOWLING ALLEY, a small item (among many others like it: one week, it was a garbage man spotting me weeping outside Fantasma Falls Hospital; another, a bus driver claiming I, wearing a hula skirt and blue eye shadow, boarded the M30 at midnight and handed him $200 with stern instructions to drive due east), in which a man named Gary Evershed claimed to spot me “violently cursing a gutter ball” at lane four of the Happy Hall bowling alley; WHO IS SHE NOW? with capsule images of the Julie Darks as they sauntered down the red carpet or emerged from a limousine, along with epithets purporting to describe each woman (Melanie, a young actress; Tabitha, a nurse and hobby painter); TEN QUESTIONS WITH HARRY KNOTT, a teenybopper questionnaire in which I listed my favorite type of ice cream and the politicians I most admired; THE PRODUCER INSPIRED ENOUGH TO JOIN, a rare profile of Bernard and his choice to imitate the character Harry Knott, moved, as he was, by the character’s patriotic actions on film.
That many of these articles were imprecise or wholly fabricated only enhanced their meaning. If anything, I began to see the scrapbook as an act of preservation, aided precisely by these layers of invention. The lies in them helped protect Harry Knott, in the way Knott concealed my imitation of Bernard, in the way my being Bernard, in turn, helped conserve somewhere, however deep or buried, Giovanni himself, surviving in the scrapbook’s photographs, if nowhere else.
He no longer existed in letters, it’s true. Since the incident at the Desert, I had not written to Mama. For a time she regularly sent her own, claiming to be ill. First her lungs, then an infection in her toe lately replaced by a heart palpitation or arrhythmia that “will be the end of me,” she swore. “If you want to leave it like this, fine. But I’m close to the end. A body knows these things.” I’d called once and knew immediately, from her voice, that she was in fine health, and stopped writing again.
A few days after the episode in the Desert, Bernard had sat me down for a talk at the Chateau Ravine bar. She was trying to sabotage me, he said. However much Mama claimed that she was helping me, that was the exact degree to which she was seeking to destroy me.
Sanctioned by repetition, the theory grew more persuasive. For what, really, had been Mama’s plan in coming to the City all those years before? (There was a delicacy, a succulence to these speculations, insulated from fear by Bernard’s remove.) Why, after all, had she encouraged me to imitate Lucy on Marguerite’s roof, knowing that Lucy was herself at the party and might very well come up at any moment? And even if the resulting row had not been Mama’s strict intention, why, all along, through letters and in person, had she encouraged the pursuit of Lucy’s thread? How could such a search have ended well? And why, really, had she surprised me at the Desert? Was that scene she’d caused with Nathan and Bernard truly an accident? Why had she gone if not to stir up trouble? To throw my career in jeopardy and lure me back home? After all, what had she been doing all my life if not making me dependent on her and her alone? Why had she trained me to seek threads? If not to yoke me to her and separate us, on an island of two, from every other living soul?
This logic, however, could be easily derailed. Late at night, in the blue-black of four a.m., with Julie Dark fast asleep in bed (one of the worst parts of any evening in her company, for each woman slept differently, some on their back, mouth gapingly open, others on their stomach, creaking like an unclosed door in light wind), I would begin to see Mama anew, as a framed savior. Perhaps she was right, I would think, starting to pace. Perhaps this whole Harry Knott stunt represented a crime against my instincts. Hadn’t Bernard betrayed me with Lucy? Why should I trust him? Perhaps he, from the beginning, had so relentlessly campaigned against Mama because he knew she represented the sole threat to his authority. And so I would go back and forth, these doubts spiraling into my chest, where my heart beat more quickly, my legs, too, speeding up until in my quickened motions the mirror reflected an alien silhouette, a man to my terror, that looked not at all like Harry Knott. The need to call Mama would bolt through me, but then, always, the man in the wedding dress would come to my ear saying, “Quite something, really,” and I would need to swallow two green pills to steady myself again.
An hour later, I would lie in bed. Julie would stir or lightly moan, and the bursting moment, now past, would seem the best proof of Bernard’s case. After all, if thinking about Mama caused such tumult, imagine what writing her would do?
And in those moments when I ached to call or write her (moments that grew both less frequent and more extreme), I consulted the scrapbook, which, I knew even then, existed only for her. Each curly-eared article, each tape-mummified photograph awaited her fingers. And one day, we would collect in the Sea View living room, where she would dim the lights, and I would present the completed book, and with each page she would giggle and shake her head, relishing this immaculate trick I had pulled on the world.
And what an addition this political speech would make! That day at the fairgrounds, I read each sentence. When I reached the period, the audience applauded. “The Communist threat is still present and will remain present without the vigilance some deem excessive.” Applause. “It takes a spy to know one.” Applause. Now and then I would look up from the paper to see the concerned, pink-faced men in straw hats holding papers rolled into batons. The women fanned themselves with the same papers, shaking their heads at an indignity I had named. I kept waiting for someone to yell, “Cut!”