by Jacob Rubin
In the end, the rear admiral’s fluency in Japanese, his keeping a handwritten facsimile of the correspondence, meticulously ordered and dated in the valise under his cot, his skill in prosecuting such communiqués from the secure distance of an aircraft carrier, and his extraction of valuable intelligence from the Japanese officer (as well as the secret intervention, it was widely believed, of higher-ups in the government) saved Apache from execution. He was discharged without punishment, though many in the navy still called for his head. To his few staunch champions, however, Apache was a maverick patriot, a genius of war and other things.
“Finnegan said there were rumors,” Max told me. “That he was still doing spy work. That the theaters he owned were just a front. But this—” He snapped open the paper with a businessman’s panache.
According to the Gazette, Apache had purchased the old Tinder Box Theater, a half mile west of Aberdeen Row, the heart of bohemia. “‘The relic of the building remains in Western Downtown on Fourteenth Avenue,’” Max read, as our cabdriver nosed toward the Fourteenth Avenue exit ramp, “‘an anomaly among the warehouses and meat-packing plants that have since sprung up around it. Renovating the Tinder has remained a cause célèbre among the more quixotic and nostalgic of the city’s philanthropists, but was considered foolhardy, if not impossible, given the reestablishment of the Theater District two miles north of what is now an industrial neighborhood. The nightlife and ne’er-do-wells of Aberdeen Row are close enough, this is true, but the theater will need more than a bohemian audience to maintain its costs. And what would draw faithful theatergoers from their velvet-lined boxes in midtown to a rickety cabaret so far west?’
“Apache can do it if anyone can,” Max said, as the driver jolted to obey a stop sign and then peeled right onto a potholed street, stopping when we came to a redbrick building. “He once said to me, ‘Max, if you’re good at killing in wartime, you’ll be good at turning profit in peace.’ This guy’s got something, boy.” According to the article, Apache, outside of basic renovations, planned to make no structural changes to the building. But he was giving it a new name. It would now be known as the Communiqué.
• • •
Bookending the entrance were two copper-topped bars where men glared at us like deer. Many circular tables, chairs stacked on top of them, filled the space leading to the stage itself, between which hunched sweepers busily worked. On the stage an unoccupied ladder stood under a massive dangling light rig. It smelled like sawdust and beer.
“Is Bernard Apache here?” Maximilian addressed no one so much as the hall itself. The sweepers stopped their work to consider us. The bar hands, a few feet away, continued to peer in our direction as if incapable of speech. Max stepped forward, and I followed, both of us coming out from under the low ceiling, which, we saw now, supported a grand balcony glutted with red-cushioned seats. An illuminated box indicated a second bar above. “Is Bernard Apache here?”
Again, silence.
“Is Bernard Apach—”
“Who wants to know?”
The voice hailed from the far end of the room. Through the forest of upturned chair legs, a plume of smoke rose, like a signal in the woods, and we made our way toward it, around the sweepers. As we approached, we saw four wiry men in suits sitting around a table, playing poker, all of them vigorously chewing gum—producing a street-firecracker chaos of pops and snaps—except the oldest, a man in his early fifties maybe, who held between his middle and ring fingers a cigarette from which he extracted long, vulnerable sips. His pale blue eyes—amused, I would call them—did not stray from his hand of cards, despite this arrival of strangers, us. His tablemates, meanwhile, greeted Max and me with a uniform glower and even more hostile jawing of gum.
“Who you?” asked the man next to the cigarette smoker. This one, like the other three, wore a pinstripe suit. He had a thin, hideously tanned face, gap teeth and a lightning-shaped vein now flashing in his forehead.
“Mr. Apache, hello,” Max said to the older man, but he didn’t look up from his cards.
“Who wants to know?” the tanned one asked. He ground his gum between the words, creating out of each syllable a discrete phrase.
“But Mr. Apache, hello.” Still, Apache, if it was him, didn’t respond. He must have gone deaf, been someone else.
“Who wants to know?” the other said, rising.
“Maximilian Horatio.”
As soon as Max said his name, the older man smiled in a grand lying way, the way politicians smile when presented with a gift on television—the kind of smile that respects size over verisimilitude. The man laid down his cards, stood, and opened his arms. That was the first thing I noticed about Bernard Apache, the man who would ruin my life: He had banished all impulse from his body.
“Maximilian Horatio.” He hugged Max, patting his back twice, and then held him at arm’s length, taking him in. He was nearly Max’s height but lank with broad shoulders and moved, generally, with a lightness, a physical grace evident even in his stillness, like the pose of a magician before a trick. “Long time.”
“Too long, Mr. Apache. Too long! I trust you’ve been well?”
Apache said, “Call me Bernard.”
“All right then, Bernard,” Max said, anxious to establish levity. “How you been for godsakes?”
Apache ignored this and instead made a show of looking at me. He wore a brown suit, a black bolo tie, and cowboy boots.
“Bernard, meet Giovanni Bernini,” Maximilian said.
Apache nodded shortly and turned back to Max. “So. Why are you here?”
“Serendipity, if I ever seen it, Bernard! Here I am trying to decide where to go with this new act—I’m getting offers uptown, downtown, but, y’know how it is, none of them feel right—and that’s when I happen upon this”—he had produced the Gazette from his pocket, snapping it against the palm of his hand—“about your taking over the Tinder, and, well, it’s a match made in heaven, you ask me.”
Apache casually removed some stray tobacco from his tongue. “Is this person talented with something?”
Max paused for effect. “A master impressionist!”
“Good to see you. Stay well.”
“Wait, wait!” He chased Apache with mincing, diplomatic steps.
“I know what you’re thinking, impressionist—please, I go out on the street and find twenty just taking a shit. But this kid—”
“Take care of yourself, Max.”
“He can do anyone.” Max snapped his fingers. “Like that.”
Apache had pulled his chair back but hadn’t yet sat. “Anyone?”
“At all!” said Max. “We take volunteers from the audience. One at a time, we bring them up and—boom—Giovanni imitates them. On the spot.”
“Have him do me.”
“Then we—I’m sorry?”
“Now, please.”
“You? Why, yes, I—I mean, you’re sure?”
Apache smiled, though his eyes, throughout the smile, exhibited a hardness, a bedrock of meanness I had not yet seen. “You just asked my least favorite question.”
“Sure, sure.” Max clapped his hands. “Well, then. Without further ado, I present to you”—he retreated with small steps, like a backup dancer—“Master Impressionist Giovanni Bernini . . .”
I decided to use the moment he heard Max’s name and pull from there. The way he smiled, fakely, and laid down his cards (mine pantomimed) like an actor slowing down routine gestures for maximal effect. “Maximilian!” I hugged Max and patted him, held him at arm’s length. I raised an imagined cigarette and sucked it through the wall of my hand, all with his physical looseness. I said, “You just asked my least favorite question,” adding, “You are my least favorite question,” and when I did, a strange light finger pricked right between my shoulder blades, a calm easing down my back, and his thread emerged, yes, there it was—and pul
ling it, I saw, clearly, that this figure named Bernard was but a handsome shell, a kind of emissary or stand-in for the soul peering in through those eyes, a presence otherwise absent from the room as I was now absent from it. And I was free to look through my eyes without fear of being looked at, for my body, light and airy, was not mine at all.
A knock somewhere. Several. It was Max, I realized, patting me on the back. “Good job!” Each pat seemed to cement me, as if Max were a sculptor rounding out my shoulders.
“Very nice,” a voice said. Apache’s. He smiled fully, and looking into his eyes, I could still see it: He was not there. “Bravo.”
“You liked it? You liked it!” Max was still chewing his nails. “Of course you did!”
Bernard pulled on his cig, winced. The promised stage behind him. Perhaps the tingle hadn’t worn off yet, for I had a strange premonition. That if I were to stand on that stage, I would become not more visible but less, that I would disappear.
“I’ve got a slot open on the second at ten,” he said. “You’ll receive seven percent of admissions. Depending on how that goes, we’ll discuss further engagements.”
If there were such a thing as a jubilant heart attack, Max suffered one at that moment. “You won’t be disappointed, Bernard.”
“I suspect not,” Apache said and was sliding into his chair when a voice shot down from the balcony.
“What next, Bernard? The monkeys in top hats and the women sawed in half?”
Maximilian and I both looked up to the balcony where a woman leaned so far over the banister it seemed she might fall off. She wore a sleeveless, kelly green dress. “Hello, Maaax.”
“Lucy.” Max bowed theatrically.
“You don’t approve?” Bernard asked.
“Nope,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Do I ever?”
“Some of the time, yes, you do.”
“Maaaybe.” She gave me a look, cocking her head at an angle. In any other circumstance I would’ve melted under such female attention, but the scrapings of Bernard still covered me—or unfleshed me—so I withstood her gaze, even, I think, returned it. “Well, I’ll leave you to the boooores of business.” With that, she pushed off the banister. The green of her dress, as if worn by a ghost, floated past a bend in the balcony, and away.
On the street later, Maximilian walked ahead, talking to himself. Me, though, I had a headache. A hangover. That could happen after good ones. “He’s the first,” I heard Max say as he passed a warehouse with broken windows. “The first one who liked it.”
FOUR
I discovered it one morning while Max slept. Under the sway of some dream, I woke with a specific desire: to imitate that woman Lucy, the one on the balcony, and so tiptoed into the bathroom where I whispered, “Maaaax,” the way she had, and “Noooo,” and “Do I ever?” Several times I tried, but each pushed her further away, like a tin my own steps knocked out of reach. I tried the vowel-indulging voice, the headlong posture. But none of the usual feeling, a kind of internal warmth, came to me. “Maaax.” My tongue heavy. “Maaaax.” I sounded like a sheep.
“What?”
I turned, and there he stood in his sleeveless undershirt.
“Just warming up.”
So went the cycle the two weeks leading up to our debut: trying to imitate that woman and failing. When Maximilian showered, I tried her bugling voice. When he used the bathroom at the New Parthenon, I sat in the vinyl booth, bouncing my neck side to side like a swimmer. Wherever and whenever we walked, I tried her gait: that pushing forward, that volunteering of the face before the rest of the body. None of it right. Needless to say, such a blind spot, a limit, had never presented itself before. What’s worse, the further I got from her thread, the more individual elements, those units of her person (the tone of her voice, the angle of her head), abandoned me, stranding me with my failed attempts, like a bad mechanic scattered among car parts.
These shortcomings, needless to say, did little to reassure me in the run-up to our debut. In those two weeks I had to mimic homeless men, bus drivers, the ticket taker at the Stone-Wild Museum to reestablish that I still was, despite this recent trouble, Giovanni Bernini, Master Impressionist. This too, though, was about to change.
“Master Impressionist—it’s, well, weak,” Max mused over his pretzel. We had taken to a bench at the edge of Darling Park, two blocks south of the Stone-Wild Museum. “Master Impressionist—it’s weak, lame, flaccid. . . .”
Max had been moony since our meeting with Bernard. Hypotheticals danced through his mind day and night, hopeful (visions of packed houses, thick wads of money, hearty handshakes) when his stomach complied, doomed (nightmares of faulty lighting, poor sound, no volunteers) when it roared.
No volunteers. Before his snack that afternoon, Max had been worrying about that: “We can always plant someone. Have one of Bernard’s goons do it, just to get the ball rolling—but no, Apache wouldn’t approve. He likes independence—ah! But that’s the whole problem, boy, the flaw of the act. It isn’t, will never be, self-sufficient,” he said as we clambered down the museum’s steps. The ruminations would’ve worsened considerably, I knew, if I hadn’t steered him to the street vendor where Max promptly devoured two large hot dogs, chili fries, and a tremendous salted pretzel.
We sat under the shade of two oaks. Not ten feet away, a caricaturist with long gray hair and a knock-off earring drew the portrait of a French girl. She sat on the stool, hands in her lap, trying not to giggle while her mother stood sentry behind the artist, eyeing his paper severely.
“Master Impressionist,” Max said. “Horrible.”
I might’ve been pumping my knee, I might’ve been chewing my nail and not even known it—that’s how bad it was. Lucy so crowded my mind I forgot about my heels, myself.
Because of her, the museums had been torture. Max’s idea. “For inspiration, boy, and to show you the sights, we’ll museum-hop.” We’d been at it the past four days: the Natural Life Museum, the Shaustenhausen, the Stone-Wild.
Even had I been spared the specter of Lucy, those visits would have grated. Art, for an impressionist, is a tease. Those objects beckon, call to you, and it’s not that you can’t mimic them—you can, but even as you are, it doesn’t feel like it, the thread of the figure always withheld. As we toured the marbled halls of the Stone-Wild, I wondered if this could be the case with Lucy. Perhaps I was getting her after all but couldn’t, for whatever reason, recognize that I was. But why would that be? I tried to replicate every object we passed, to verify that I still had my chops, knowing full well that doubling the lobotomized expression of the Madonna would do nothing for me.
Max tossed the last knot of pretzel to the assembling pigeons. “We’ll need to give Bernard notice, though, if we’re changing it. For the marquee, of course.”
“Who’s that Lucy?”
“Of course it could all go to shit quickly if—Lucy?”
“The woman at the Communiqué.”
“Ah!” He draped his arm around the back of the bench. “Lucy Starlight. A real character, I’ll tell you that. Lounge singer. On the scene for years.”
“Character?”
“Let’s just say she is—how to put it?—a friend to man.”
I tried not to react visibly.
“Not that that’s a bad thing. No, sir! Some men would toss dirty words at a woman like that—scared men, boys really. There’s much saint in a slut, boy. Remember it.”
“She with Bernard?”
“Oh, I doubt it. Possible, I suppose, but—” Max stopped and looked at me. He had a queer expression on his face. “Does the genius have a crush?”
“Not in the slightest,” I said.
Since he winked, nudged my shoulder cartoonishly, and then said “O-kay,” I don’t think Max believed me, but he didn’t press the matter further.
It didn’t feel like a crush, I knew that. The world was a smooth case, Lucy a splinter jutting out of it. I’d mentioned her in the letter I wrote Mama. It was the first letter I’d ever composed, and I was shocked by the freedom of it. I could throw the words on the page and not have to stand by them.
SEPTEMBER 29
My Mama,
It was slow going at first, but it seems we’ve gotten our first bite. Your little ape, Giovanni Bernini, will be making his stage debut on October 2nd at the Communiqué (There’s a notice in the Gazette. Perhaps there’s a copy at the library?). The City is a parade of faces, Mama, and I do think I was meant to witness it. A City of threads! I’ve even met a woman I can’t imitate—I say it cavalierly, here, but it’s made me fairly nervous, as you might imagine. Only you can imagine it, I know. You’ll have to come down here and help straighten it out. Visit soon, Mama.
With love,
Giovanni
The caricaturist penned a final eyelash, completing the vision. He had tossed the thing off quickly, competently. The pink bolls in her cheeks, the fine curling eyelashes: If the girl had been born a cartoon, it would be what now appeared on his easel. Seeing the final result, the mother loosened her mouth. A grin startled her cheeks. This street man, entrusted with her daughter’s face, hadn’t attempted a crime, and she could now relax. He squinted at the drawing, plucked it from its wooden hold, and handed it to the girl. She readied herself for the unveiling, held it wide in her hands. She stared and stared at it. Her smile did not get bigger or smaller. Only children can be let down that way, invisibly, before time has taught them a measure of expectation. Rejuvenated, the mother tiptoed around the cobble and rubbed her daughter’s shoulders, confirming the experience had been a success.
