The Poser (16 page)

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.

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.

“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 PATRIO
T ONSCREEN AND OFF
, a glossy-magazine profile on the extent to which my character's political views mirrored my own;
R
ETIRED MILKMAN CLAIM
S TO EYE REAL BERNIN
I AT LOCAL BOWLING A
LLEY
, 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 H
ARRY KNOTT
, a teenybopper questionnaire in which I listed my favorite type of ice cream and the politicians I most admired;
THE PRODU
CER 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!”

As these appearances galloped along, the newspapers, to my shock, reported them as fact. I didn't know which I preferred more: giving the speeches or reading about them a day later in my bungalow at the Chateau Ravine. In truth, it was hard to divide the two, for the event seemed to happen only when it had been written about, or rather, it was only then that it was confirmed to have
happened—its
having happened
, its being preserved in the gel of that tense, made it delectable, like hearing of a stranger you happened to be.

On those mornings when I expected a newspaper article, I'd open the door to find the
West News
rolled on the black doormat. Feigning a light curiosity, I'd page through before turning to the Politics section. There I would happen upon the headline, reading the article in a gulp before cutting it out and adding it to the scrapbook.

ACTOR
BERNINI
ENDORSES
SENATOR
STENGEL

Former senator Rory Stengel addressed a mixed and boisterous crowd of seven hundred supporters today on the steps of the Old Municipal Tower, marking his third such appearance in Fantasma Falls this month as he, along with his opponents, make their final preparations for the statewide presidential primary on the 21st. While Mr. Stengel has failed to gain a foothold in Fantasma Falls, let alone nationally, his candidacy was bolstered today by the appearance and public support of actor Giovanni Bernini, famous for his role as spy Harry Knott in the films
Everyman
and
No Man's Land
.

Political endorsements from entertainers are nothing new, of course, in this heated primary season. What distinguished this appearance from others was Mr. Bernini's decision to appear as the character Harry Knott, the fictitious spy the actor plays onscreen. Mr. Bernini took to the podium this afternoon in a suit identical to the one worn by Harry Knott, delivering a twenty-minute address praising Mr. Stengel's right-wing positions in a manner indistinguishable from that of the character.

These eccentricities did not appear to faze the energized crowd, however. When this reporter canvassed them after the addresses, many confirmed they had attended solely to see the movie actor. “I'd vote for him if I could,” said Carl DeWee, a high school senior. “Have you seen his movies? Now he's taking it into real life.” Said Timothy Michaels, a retired engineer, “He hunts pinkos in the pictures, and he'll do it right here, too.”

Opponents may well seize upon this appearance as evidence of the former senator's reactionary positions. Given the robust turnout at today's rally, however, it seems a trade the candidate is willing to make. “Mr. Bernini is going to continue to stump with us,” a spokesman from the campaign confirmed. “We're delighted to have him.”

I campaigned with Rory Stengel for six months, rarely interacting with him backstage and then hugging him or gripping his hand and hoisting it with mine once on it. In this proximity, I learned the strategies. The sanctity of eye contact, for instance. How eruptive a grin can be. Above all, the key was to have said things so many times that when you were delivering the line, whether solemnly or casually, whether to a cigar-chewing reporter or tongue-tied voter, you weren't ever thinking about the words, but about some essential, misdirected thing—the way you touched a man's shoulder, for instance, or seemed to smile unthinkingly to yourself—in the way a magician talks always but never about the palmed ace or hidden thrumming dove.

By the time Stengel was defeated in the election, I had stolen what I could from him. Little time passed, perhaps a month, before my appearances recommenced at political rallies and in convention halls up and down the state, at which events I delivered speeches deviating little from the message I preached with Stengel, the primacy of patriotism, mainly, and the specter of communism. “I am a patriot in the stories I tell and in the life I live,” I must have said a thousand times, becoming the master of certain phrases and mottoes, whose syllables I'd run up and down, like melodies. We traveled in a motorcade from event to event, winding our way as far north as Red Rock Shoals.

By that time there had developed a cult of admirers, zealots who attended rallies in my suit and bolo tie and cowboy boots, waving placards and vicious signs. These men seemed to grow in number with each new appearance, and security men often mistook Bernard for one of their lot, checking his passage or giving him a skeptical once-over. “Committed, huh?” a burly organizer once asked him. Bernard answered, “Why, sir, I'm committed to any cause that will awaken this country to the real.” After making it past this guard, I expected Bernard to wink, but he looked solemn, if anything, strutting ahead with the bellicose energy of a football player taking the field. During the rallies, I would sometimes spot him in the crowd itself, waving a sign or joining a chant as if electrified, genuinely, by the policies I described. “Meet the most natural politician this country's ever produced,” he said when showing me off.

In truth, the content of my speeches mattered little to me. No, what mattered was the
performance
, of which these addresses were but a small part (and the meaning of them hardly relevant at all). How I walked onstage, waving to the peopled bleachers, the style in which I descended stairs—these mattered as much as my rhetoric or tone of voice, and to test these gestures I began to use the mirror every morning.

Previously I had used it sparingly: to verify, say, a look I'd caught on the traffic-scanning face of a jaywalker. I think I saw it as a cheat. But after we announced that I was running for governor, I began to rely on the mirror, to practice in front of it in the morning, usually after reading an article about me, in order to solidify certain details. How I looked flipping the page on the dais, for instance, or sighing.

As I soon discovered, however, the bedroom mirror wasn't big enough. I made the request to Frankie and Lou, and it was taken care of: a larger, multipaneled mirror replaced the length of the wall opposite my bed, so I could examine the full sweep of a gesture. Even this was insufficient, though, and, upon my request, was expanded again. Wrapping around the bed, a semicircular mirror came to be installed, but this, too, disappointed me—seemed to emphasize the lack of mirror elsewhere—and I eventually told Frankie and Lou that I wanted the entire room mirrored, three hundred sixty degrees, and the ceilings, too.