by Jacob Rubin
“Fine, change the subject.”
“I didn’t know we had one to change.”
“Who gets to tell when you’re pretending?”
“I could ask you the same,” she said—a quick rejoinder—but my question had reached her. She stepped back from the door. I walked in. It was a greenroom of sorts, outfitted with a vanity mirror next to which were piled wigs and brushes. There was a cot in the corner, and a wardrobe packed with dresses.
She stood closer to me than most people would. “Look at you,” she said, smiling. “You play it sooo innocent. Fumbling around like a little boy, then you get onstage and trick everyone.” She bit her lip and batted her eyelashes. A gesture of flirtation or sardonic commentary on such a gesture?
“Why’d you come onstage?”
“Seemed like you could use the help. Besides, I wanted to see if you could dooo it.”
“Could I?”
She frowned, as though distracted, and took my hand from where it rested at my side, raising it above the waterline of shadow. “You’re bleeding.”
It was true. A mess of glass in my palm.
“A boo-boo,” she said, and with her other hand gently plucked the glass from my palm. “You have to be really caaareful.” She blew on it, and the cold rippled up my hand and arm. “If this gets infected, it could travel down the arm—”
“It’s all right, really—”
“It’s called celluuulitis.”
“Biology’s really not my—”
“Untreated it can be quite severe and spread to—”
“I think it’ll be all right. Really, I—”
“God, you must be some klutz if—”
“It’s my hand not yours!” I hadn’t meant to sound so shrill.
She seemed to scowl. She returned her hands to her hips, tapping her foot.
“I, I’m sorry,” I said. “I, I didn’t mean . . .”
The twinkling in her eye seemed to condense and sharpen, and I was sure she would either slap me or yell for help when she dropped to her knees, unbuckled my belt and unbuttoned my jeans, tugged them to my knees—underwear, too—and put her mouth around me.
I yelped. I tried to grip the wall behind me, but there was no wall to grip. The back of her head bobbed and bore, flashing in and out of the light, hidden by her hair as if under a photographer’s hood. “Yes! Yes! Sure thing! That’s the ticket!” I said it in Max’s voice because I knew I ought to say something, but all I could see was her black hair, that hood, under which she was taking photos of me. “Please stop.” I was yelping. “Stop it, please!”
At these words, her face appeared out of her hair. She looked up at me with pleading eyes, an expression of the wronged or hunted. Later I’d remember it: that vibrating moment when I grabbed her hair. Her eyes pleaded with me in that cold room. In my hands, she unraveled. We were stuck in the rooms of our bodies, but our eyes were keyholes, and as through keyholes, with that freedom, we caught each other.
When it was over, I understood I was naked. I yanked up my underwear and pants. She grinned. “I knew it,” she said, “I knew it,” and sped off, headfirst, around the corridor.
SIX
Days later Max confronted me at the Old World, a French restaurant on the edge of Lilac Park. “You tell me right now what’s going on,” he said upon my return from the bathroom. “Either a worm’s jumped into your dick or up your ass, ’cause every five minutes it’s a bathroom adventure.”
Claiming an upset stomach, I had disappeared into the bathroom minutes earlier. There I frowned in the mirror, as she had. I tried her pleading eyes. But my thin, wanting face was all that peered back. It was getting further away from me.
“Out with it.” He said this while (1) chewing with an open mouth, (2) wiping the corner of that mouth with his napkin, and (3) imbuing one of his eyebrows with a giant, bawdy curiosity.
I took a deep breath. “Lucy—”
“I knew it!”
My mouth grew heavy at its hinges.
“All. Tell. Now.”
“She—we had a-a-an encounter.”
His mouth hung open. “On my mother’s expensive grave, Giovanni, do you mean sex?” The last word hissed out of him with a sibilance that snaked up my spine, up the waitresses’ loose black aprons and around the jabbering eaters, as if a director somewhere had yelled “Action!” and all things obeyed. “Tell me a fucking tale.”
I did, wincing when certain words and certain things for which there are no words (the hurt in Lucy’s eyes, the rumbling in my head) required description. The entire time he listened visibly, and if it had been any face other than Max’s at the end of the table, my tongue would have wilted. When I stumbled or blushed, he filled in for me, planting hard terms in the holes of my speech. He yanked the story out of me and tackled it to the ground.
It was my first time kissing and telling, and I learned what every man learns the first time he tells: that the narrating of an experience like that is no repetition, no rehashing of that wet, combustive moment but that moment’s midwife, what pushes it out into the noisy world, births it, and in that way forever separates you and the unspeakable seed of what was or might’ve been. As Max pulled the wheres and whats out of me, like a detective, I waved goodbye to the impossible reality of Lucy.
“In-motherfucking-deed,” Max said when the tale had been patted down to his satisfaction. He leaned back in his chair, shaped an ostentatious O with his mouth, and breathed heavily. If there had been smoke in his lungs, rings would have drifted between us. “And so what—you’re in the bathroom tugging it, I bet? Tugging it like a fiend, eh?”
To my relief, he didn’t seem to recall my drunken confession backstage, my admission the night of our premiere that I couldn’t do her. I nodded, not wanting to say more.
“It’s tough, boy. You get that taste and you want it again. There’s a lot of talk of penis envy. Lord knows I’ve contributed to it, but there’s the opposite, too. We envy what they have. That slit. Yes, boy, yes, there’s far too little mention of absence-envy.” He continued to ruminate at a high volume. Already I regretted saying anything. It was always that way, as if the punishment for sharing were being heard.
We paid the check and walked west toward the train station just as the sun was going down, in the human silence sunsets enforce. As I learned, it was best to be aboveground for sunsets. Otherwise, you entered the subway in the day and emerged from it at night, feeling stranded. We were turning onto Eighth Ave when Max started. “My God.”
It had been painted on the side of the Eighth Avenue Church: a face, or the blueprint for one. An oval with two circles for eyes, a triangle for a nose, circle for a mouth. Underneath was written G. BERNINI. Like an animal it appeared both enlightened and permanently bewildered, the eyes and mouth the same size. I wanted Mama to come down there and peel it off the wall. But it was writing, and writing cannot be peeled.
“Any publicity is good publicity. That’s what I say,” Max tried.
I must’ve looked how I was feeling, since Max put his arm over my shoulder. “It’s the beauty of the act,” he said as we walked up Eighth Avenue. “Everyone wants to be you, because you’re being them.”
• • •
That Saturday, ten new strangers. A haberdasher who cupped his left elbow in his right hand, shyly. Giggling sisters. A cop.
Who knew the City’s jaded public hungered for an art as basic as imitation? In our first ten performances we would meet with sold-out crowds, a sea of heads who each Saturday carted a tense breed of silence into the Communiqué and left it with crackling pleasure, like teens bounding out of a dance hall. Those who wished to be imitated would soon call in advance or arrive at the ticket window days before the performance to receive their “stage number,” an option so many chose that our list of volunteers soon stretched comfortably into April. Bernard, eager to extend this s
uccess and masterful at garnering attention, would purchase a weekly ad in both the Gazette and Daily Scribe, even billboard space over the shipping docks, featuring in bold red letters THE EVERYMAN and under it, quotes from critics who’d discovered me as an object of hyperbole.
In time, Max would inject new quirks into the act. In one of our more popular twists we’d call family groups to the stage—a husband and wife, say, or mother and daughter. Stage right we would stand a wardrobe screen behind which Max would lead me and one member of the pair. So hidden, we—the towheaded child and I—would take turns saying, “But I hate peanut butter!” and that separated mother, or wife, stranded stage left, would then venture a sometimes exultant, sometimes quavering, guess as to which of those voices belonged to her intimate and which to the famous impostor, Giovanni Bernini. The entertainment, of course, lay in how often they were wrong. A mother mistook me for her son. A man knew my voice was his wife’s, at which point I would appear from behind the screen saying, “It’s me, honey!” provoking the sincerest hurrahs from the audience.
In fact, from the crowd’s reaction one would have thought I’d created a child from behind that screen. Not to speak of the volunteers themselves who, seeing me emerge, who a moment ago knew that I was their wife or daughter—these volunteers, upon recognizing their error, would hug me or even jump up and down, ecstatic, really, as if I had introduced them to their own flesh, as if inside the most familiar people (their wives and husbands) and inside themselves, too, lived a stranger they might never know, or the space for such a stranger, a prospect that thrilled them.
Afterward these volunteers would often track me down at the balcony bar. I would say to them, “Thanking me is like thanking a mirror,” which they took as an example of wit, and I suppose it was, though I didn’t intend it to be. More and more I would be deemed witty or ironical when I was trying only to defend myself, and yet I’d be lying if I claimed there wasn’t some hope, underneath all that success, that Mama was right after all, that I really was sympathetic to the bone.
“One more time for Giovanni Bernini!” Max said at the end of that second performance, and the applause crashed down.
Again my conniving manager had snuck champagne backstage. Again we guzzled it and fell into a nostalgic, dreamy dialogue, and again I wandered out in the crowd, and again, through that carwash of hands, found Lucy, this time moping on the balcony’s red steps.
“There you are,” I said, fortified by booze.
Lucy looked up lazily. “Drunk again.”
“Little sauced at the edges,” I said, like a noir detective. Drinking seemed to scramble my channels.
“You hold it well.”
“Shoulda known you’d be cold with me.”
“Yeah, you should have,” she said and like that, warmed to me. You could almost hear it happening.
“You like the show?”
“Toast of the town. Amazing, of cooourse,” she said. “But sad.”
“Sad? Why’s that?”
“Whenever something’s funny, when a joke works, it’s sad.”
Other people would have probed. They would’ve said: “Because you feel like someone’s being made fun of?” Or, “Do you like being sad?” But I hated asking questions.
“How ’bout we go.”
I wouldn’t remember the walk beyond the warmth in the night air and the big bright moon. I wouldn’t remember entering the brownstone on Chaplin Street, or the three-flight walk to her cramped apartment, or the act itself beyond the pockets of new warmth. I woke at dawn, kind of jet-lagged to be on Earth, our unhumiliated asses in the air.
“To the roof,” I said, still drunk. We climbed the stairs. A few times she slapped my behind and I shushed her, and then slapped hers, too, and dashed up the stairs. She wore my tux shirt over her panties. I, in my jacket and pants, lunged against the rusty door, and we emerged into that brief calm after dawn, when you can’t tell if the day is beginning or fading, but you know it can’t last. The bridges spanning the river looked as if they’d been built strictly for us, for our tiny lives, and I yawped because when it’s dawn-time, when you’ve tossed your virginity out the window and watched it spiral down to nothing, you yawp.
We kissed, and I watched her eyes open after the kiss, thinking it might help me. It didn’t. She shivered in my arms. It was cold. Winter coming.
“Look,” she said.
By the far ledge a squadron of pigeons, fat and thrumming, had landed. You saw pigeons all the time in the City, but they were always roosting on skyscraper ledges or dodging commuter shoes, and yet, even in this sanctuary, they seemed uneasy. Lucy rested her head against my chest, shivered.
“Here.” I slid my jacket off my arms and rested it over her shoulders.
“Look how skinny you are!” she said once I had.
I looked down at my silver-dollar nipples, the pathetic clutch of hair on my chest.
“You’re like barely here,” she said again.
“Skinny, yes. But you need to show these birds you’re naked if you want any shot with ’em. Pigeons. Dirty creatures, boy. But disciplined. You can train them—oh, shit, yes, you can. Just need to know how they talk.” She cackled. “Tough to learn. Ugly as hell, but you need to know it. Would you care to hear it, madam?” I said. “Would you care to hear the language of the birds?” I nearly cried with relief, to know that I could always be Max.
SEVEN
It snowed for days on end. One week, forty inches. The air gnawed at your skin. Frost clouded the windowpanes. Mounds of snow, shoveled to the curb, were like castle walls, so high only the balled tops of wool hats, the crowns of fedoras, floated along. Streetwalkers retreated into bundled privacies: upturned collars, hunched shoulders. Night was a brighter, quieter event. In diners people thawed rather than conversed. You’d see couples staring at each other like they’d never met before.
Max and I convened for lunch every Tuesday at New Parthenon on 105th Street, ostensibly to plan for whatever performance was upcoming but really to bathe in each other’s company. (Among the tidal surge of new experience, Max’s companionship relaxed me. Watching him roll his thumbs over each other or pull the waist of his pants up after a meal was like listening to a favorite song over and over.) After all, the heat from the scandal had finally cooled, and there was little business to discuss.
The drama began with an Artist’s Biography of Max’s creation that was soon picked up by local papers. The bio read as follows:
The exact origins of the man called Giovanni Bernini, commonly celebrated as the World’s Greatest Impressionist, are unknown and, among those who study his origins (scholars, lawyers, etc.) in great dispute. We will present only the most agreed-upon account of his earliest years since there are hundreds of versions, few of which are suitable for printing. The most common, however, has it that twenty-three years ago an infant was discovered by immigrant officials near Cape Host, sleeping in a canvas shopping bag in the hold of a flat-bottomed boat arrived from Italy.
Despite knowing the origins of the ship, the baffled officials had no way of determining where the baby himself came from as he was without identifying papers and could utter even the simplest “gagas” and “googoos” with distinctly French, German, Scandinavian, Iranian, and Chinese accents. One official, taken with the foundling, brought him home to his childless wife and raised him as his own. As the years passed, this innocent man came to learn how strange and mysterious the boy was. For one, he could imitate perfectly any sound: the mad barking of stray pit bulls, the foghorn blasts of twenty-ton steamers, the faint mewling of their neighbors’ lovemaking. Even stranger, the boy often slept standing up and could stick his hand in the fireplace without so much as a scratch. Deer sometimes lined up outside the house, and the boy would ride them through the woods. By the age of five, the child would not stop impersonating the voices of his adopted mother and father. Believing this creature cu
rsed, the man woke up early one winter morning and drove thirty miles south to the nearest train depot where he stowed the boy on a westward freight, leaving him with only a bowie knife, a box of crackers, a crate of seltzer, and a Slinky (for entertainment).
On these freights the boy received his education, and an ugly, pitiable education it was. He was attacked repeatedly by tramps, wolves, wild dogs, horses, and that sick breed of wealthy individual—there are many in this country—who loiter by the freight tracks in order to thrash the homeless with golf clubs. He nearly died of hunger twice, thirst once, and food poisoning too many times to count. He fed himself on hay, coal, straw, and (God forgive him) dog. He taught himself to read with the help of stray scraps of newspaper, road signs, and the spare book thrown at him for sport by malevolent teens. Eventually, he joined up with a makeshift traveling circus in which his most popular act was to imitate the noises of planes flying overhead.
The boy would no doubt have fallen, as they say, into the dustbin of history if famed circus organizer and humanitarian Maximilian Horatio had not, by chance, attended one of these performances at which he instantly recognized the boy’s talent. Through the layers of dirt, rags, and grim, grim odor, Horatio saw a star. Of course, it took a lot of work, a lot of sacrifice, but soon he burnished to a fine finish the raw talent inside the degraded soul. In the end, Horatio dubbed him Giovanni Bernini to honor the spirit of the Italian vessel that bore him. While Horatio has a well-known heart condition, he agreed to travel east with Mr. Bernini in order to share his exceptional talent with the world. (The Communiqué; Saturday night; ten o’clock; $6/one drink minimum.)
It didn’t take long for one Anthony Vandaline, a dogged columnist with the City Press, to grab hold of the story and, after some modest investigation, debunk it:
Like many folks around town, I’ve been impressed by “Giovanni Bernini” and his impersonation act. The kid’s talented, borderline uncanny, no doubt about it. But like a lot of folks I’m sure, I found his “Artist Bio” a little, well, outlandish. So yours truly did a little research, and it turns out the entire thing—all of it—is complete baloney. “Giovanni Bernini’s” real name? Giovanni Bernini. Found in a boat? “Educated” on the freights? Fat chance. The kid was raised in Sea View, five hours north of the City, by his librarian mom, Beatrice Bernini.
