The Poser (18 page)

“So I got into show business—the only business. Every business these days is show business. And it's easy and it's boring and it made me want to do a William Tell with about every last shit that walked into the Communiqué. But then I saw you.” He set his hands on his hips. “Now I hope you appreciate what we've all helped to do. What Frankie, Lou, and Nathan have helped me do. I don't mean that you're a movie star. No. Right now, I'm not talking to Giovanni Bernini, the actor, I'm talking to the spy Harry Knott, a man who has stepped out of the screen into the world. And even better, even better, yes! You're
them
”—he flung his arm in the direction of the blinds—“at any moment you could be any voter in the world, and they know it. Don't you see how rare this is? You're both their movie hero and them
at the same time
.” He smiled. “What is it you think we're up to, Giovanni? Why stop at governor? Hell, you're gonna run this country, for, tell me, please, who in the hell can defeat a
make-believe president
?”

He ground out his cigarette, a favorite maneuver of his when approaching the coup de grâce. “About Lucy and me?” He laughed to himself. “Hell, I was hoping you'd hear about it. Really, what interest could I possibly have in a piece of ass like that? No, I was thinking of
you
, Giovanni. I got hard thinking of
you
: how you of all people thought you could have a girlfriend. Really, you think you're gonna find some sweet little piece and sit by a lake and exchange rings? No, the family you've been allotted is the audience, the public, voters, customers—whatever the fuck you wanna call them. They alone preserve you, you understand that? Because
you're
imaginary
. Get it?”

“Sounds good.”

I stood and emptied the ashtray into the kitchen trash. When ballplayers say of a home run, “I knew as soon as it left the bat”—so I felt after this remark. Bernard tried some things, even patted me on the back. “Anyway, we'll talk more about it,” he said as he left. “Absolutely,” I answered, with a grin. If his goal had been to make this sound bad, he had failed, for what could be better than becoming fictional?

That night, or one soon after, I wrote a letter to Mama explaining that she was not to visit. Calls followed. Letters. Most I tore up without reading. I knew what they would say. In fact, I almost mailed her a parody of my own, a note riddled with
oh, my boy
s, and
I was only trying to help you
s. That gray prison in Dun Harbor. All those years I'd passed it on my way to the train station, and my father, my namesake, had been there.

At Nathan Sharp's mansion, in that alcove with paintings of flamingos, Max said, “Goddamnit! He's using you, don't you see? He's gonna have you get into office and
use
you.”

That was one moment I wished I could have seen on camera (or viewed in the mirror or, for that matter, read about in the paper) because I knew I took the right amount of time. “And what use do
you
have?” I asked. And Max was such an unwitting actor—he huffed, shook a fist, even turned one last time to shake his fist
again
before tramping down the hall, and away, it turned out. Later that night, I did it again in front of the mirror.

 • • • 

From the wings we could hear the herd of reporters: jittery-kneed, pens-at-the-ready, like the old crowds at the Communiqué.

Bernard and Lou waited backstage with me, as did Michael Martet, the owner of the theater. When we first met, Martet had subjected me to his gratitude, squeezing my hand at this rhythm: down, up, down (held), then a pat on the back, down, up, down (held), pat on the back. “This sure means a lot, Mr. Bernini,” he said six times. Martet was a head shorter than I was, his face forgettable except for a colorful and bulbous nose. Like a Christmas ornament on a thin stem, plum-shaped and plum-colored, it lent to his restless person an availability of spirit. The nose was meant to be shared. “This sure means a lot” accounted for ninety percent of what he said to me, and I was pleased when he left me in order to pace by Lou. For a long time I remembered his nose. Because of what happened, I remembered and wondered if there had been signs in it.

I was worried the feeling would come. I worried about this often. When I had greeted my opponent with a mean vigorous shake, for instance, equidistant from our podiums before the moderator, a silhouette from waist to head like a target at a shooting range. Or at the VA hospital when shredded, hopeful men thanked me as I came around and at the Jade House, where I knew how everything looked because I had practiced in the mirror taking off my belt and cumming. When admirers outside the rally in Redwood Park swaddled my back or when they reached over several rows of people unself-conscious to grab my hand, I thought then, surely, the bursting feeling would come, and at the condemned house, too, where the photographers broke their bulbs over me and the men without jobs smiling. At a fund-raiser in the hills, when it happened, I pretended it was something I ate. The pills by then didn't always help. A butler led me to the upstairs bathroom, where my expression in the mirror looked only slightly puzzled. Relieved, I lay in the cold hard tub, the murmur of party guests below. It was this way. Some expressions felt like shotgun blasts to the nose but weren't really so bad when you took them to the mirror. Tearing up her letters, for instance. Or waking from a dream of rattling grates and dumb heads bobbing through slatted shadows. “An inspiration to the conservative majority, if still a mystery to many . . .” the newscaster said in his professional voice. The television made Bernard's grinning face the same blue it made all the hotel suite, lively at the time with balloons and jubilant people whose names I didn't know applauding.

Now we stood at the backstage of the abandoned Jupiter Theater. Bernard had selected it as the site of my first address as governor-elect. A symbol of decay, soon to be resurrected, was the idea. The cobwebs in the rafters were thick. Light bored through the warped paneling. This was not the place I wanted to be: in that musty backstage speared through by light, and yet I could think of no better place. I riffled through all the places I'd been, and none was the right place. More and more this was the feeling. I was not dreading the press conference. If I could dread certain places, like that neglected theater, it would spur me to find the better place, if only as a kind of negative search.

When Bernard and Senator Stengel took the stage, a hubbub broke out in the theater. The two sat at a microphone-laden table. The photographers' bulbs flashed. Stengel was beginning his introductory remarks when Mr. Martet tapped me on the shoulder with news of a phone call.

The short walk to the office, Martet expressed his surprise that the man on the other line could track down the number. On his metal desk sat the heavy receiver.

“I've been trying to reach you all day.”

I said nothing.

“It's Ken,” the voice said. “Ken Kessman. Your mother's neighbor.”

“Go on.”

“The police . . . Giovanni, there's been a . . . he tried to rob her . . .”

I said nothing.

“Giovanni—Jesse Unheim—he—”

When I walked onto the stage, the reporters shouted. Their flashbulbs cut me like glass. “You're not supposed to come out yet,” Bernard said, looking over his shoulder at me.

“My mother was shot,” I told him. “She's dead.”

Bernard looked like he might speak when I punched the back of his head. I yanked his hair until his chair toppled over, I shoved his face into the stage, punching it again when the stage broke under us, and we landed in cold dirt. I punched him until my hands were bleeding, and then I reached into my jacket for the gun. Against his forehead I put the nose and cocked the hammer. It clicked. I pulled it again. “A toy,” Bernard said, when I was scooped up by the armpits. Lou was holding me, suspended over the crater in the stage, flailing like a swimmer stolen out of the water, while the reporters made the cameras perpendicular to their faces. A sound was coming from inside the hole in the stage: Bernard, on the ground, his teeth pink with blood, like some half-fleshed skeleton. “A toy,” he said.

I woke to two men in white scrubs standing over my cot. “Ready, Mr. Bernini?” the stocky one said.

My body heeded the routine. Without my consent, it followed the men out of the room. They would lead it down the bright hall and stairs to the cafeteria, illuminated, like all of the building, by a floor-to-ceiling window. There it would swallow the pills the men gave it, and be gathered by these pills into a body. When it called to its arm, that arm moved! It could stretch and yawn! But the afternoon would age, and over the body would come a wan and wintry feeling. Fractures would open in its fingers and around its ankles, fissures so small it never failed to surprise the body when these cracks spread to its knees and neck. Soon its legs would shear off at the knee, and the body did its last bad running-up to its room, to its bed, where it could, in privacy, fall apart.

When the pills worked, however, this body—I—could stand to perceive this place. After breakfast, a square-jawed man in white scrubs rounded us up and led us outside to the front lawn, clean and aromatic, where we were organized into rows and exhorted to follow energetic movements he made, doing jumping jacks when he did and squats and jogging in place. It was like he was a volunteer and the twenty of us men and women were slow-footed, self-conscious impersonators. We did push-ups and sit-ups and I did not weep or die, as I feared, and soon we were taken to a side entrance of the building, the men and women separated into different locker rooms.

In the men's room we were each allotted a locker inside of which hung a towel and swimsuit. After changing, we padded across the blue tile to a pool, lined on one side by a bank of Jacuzzis, for what the blond man called Water Therapy. Water Therapy was this: Ten times we walked across the pool, which was long and clean and without a deep end, and then soaked in the Jacuzzis for a half hour. Afterward we were led back to our rooms to shower and change back into our blue scrubs. The same two men came to my door at lunchtime and escorted me again to the mess hall, where I ate untoasted bread, a grapefruit, and some peanuts.

But before dinner there were “Free Hours.”

The first day, during this unstructured period, I kept to my room, a taupe square with a cot, bathroom, and closet. In the closet stood a dresser. One drawer held a collection of white ankle socks, the other a pile of neatly folded blue scrubs, identical to the ones I currently wore. On the floor of the closet were three pairs of white sneakers. The medicine cabinet in the bathroom kept an unlabeled tube of toothpaste and a toothbrush. The wall behind the bed was no wall at all, I discovered, but a floor-to-ceiling window covered by a taupe-colored blind that, when raised, faced a sparkling lawn where figures in blue scrubs squatted on stone benches or stumbled, woozily, as though recently struck on the head.

The next day during these Free Hours I explored the house. There was a screening room, commissary, greenhouse, library, and bowling alley, even a squeaky-clean racquetball court. All of this exploration unnerved me, however, and I soon returned to my room, where I tossed in bed, humming to ward off the silence. I did nothing that next day (feeling like I might collapse again), but the following one, during Free Hours, I wandered the grounds. The house, I saw from the lawn, resembled a venerable prep school except for those odd architectural choices: the floor-to-ceiling windows, for example; the marble colonnades on the north and south sides of the building. The property was vast, encompassing two lawns, an apple orchard, small pond, and rose garden, all (I discovered after some cautious exploring through thickets and pine) enclosed by a high white fence.

That night I learned the story of the place. A man at a nearby table went on and on, and I eavesdropped zealously. As far as I could tell, he referred to everyone, himself included, as George. My back to him, I chewed on a napkin, blocking the escape of his faux-British accent (at night, as the pills wore off, the old urges surged back). Given the oscillations of his tone, I could not tell if he was addressing a lover, child, or himself. “Yes, he had a real
millionaire's name
. Sandy Lewis, I think. An eccentric philanthropist—watch your sleeve now, come on. Well one day he had an epiphany, you see.
Walls
cause all the world's misery. So what does Lewis do? He hires contractors, squadrons of them—with their wrecking balls and hard hats—orders the men to raze every wall on his property and replace them with windows, pillars, colonnades. Just about
anything
that isn't a wall. Will you stop it, really?! Sit still now, c'mon. Well, then Mr. Lewis extends an invitation to all the homeless in the area to come in and live here. He gives each of them a studio and a bicycle. An artist colony for the mad. Except three years later our millionaire expires. Buried under the stand of birch trees on the north lawn. They say he had syphilis. Later they changed it all, of course. Now it's for us
nuts
. Why, of course, yes, George, they do just
spectacular
business.” He switched to a stage whisper. “That George there, you don't recognize him? He was an archbishop, for heaven's sake. Yes, oh, and that George there was a baseball star, he was, why, of course.” I was petrified he would point to me next and say, “This George there was that actor-politician type, wasn't he then?” but he didn't, thank God. And I got up soon after that, all but running to my room.

It's true, no one seemed to recognize me. The beard, I suppose, helped ensure my anonymity. And yet, even if it hadn't, I might not have been disturbed. Among the patients reigned, I soon discovered, a kind of wary discretion, disrupted only rarely by a scene: a shiny-headed man raising his plate in the middle of the cafeteria and then smashing it into pieces on the smooth floor; a woman weeping naked in the middle of the lawn. These transgressors disappeared for a few days, a week sometimes, and then rejoined the buffet line with the same shuffling obedience, the same covetous reaching for breakfast buns.

When I first arrived at No More Walls (if that was its real name), I feared I would make such a scene myself. That I would begin to howl. That when the pills ebbed in their effect, I would steal George's voice. Yet with each passing day, this fear diminished. The medication helped in this, yet so did the routine, whose sheer repetition was its own kind of medicine. I hoped to live like some ball left on the beach, pushed in and out by the ocean—yes, I wanted to be pushed around by the routine. But that day, instead of walking me down to the mess hall my escorts ascended the stairs. “To the doctor,” they explained.

 • • • 

The previous day the routine had also been severed. I was told I had a visitor and was led down a gravel path to a picnic table where Max waited.

Maybe I hadn't looked at him in years, for he had aged tremendously, it seemed, magically, as if some painting of Max had for years been interposed between us, the living man tumbling out behind it only then. Why did people always age this way? Purple-black bags hung under his eyes. He had lost weight, and his face dripped with skin.

Of the days after the incident at the Jupiter Theater I remembered little. My name hollered down a prison hall, the acoustics like a drained pool's. A country through my porthole. I said, “You'll have to be the talker.” I was thankful for his thumbs knocking the table, as I was for the breeze raking through the trees and the birds squeaking above us, all saviors against silence. The bursting feeling had returned the previous night. It began with the dream of Jesse Unheim, and then the silence, the first furniture of every room.

Max attempted a grin. His eyes creased with the effort. “A reputable place, Giovanni. The head psychiatrist, a Doctor Orchfee—Orgall—Ori
ganief—
a
genius.
Experimental
, they say, but top-notch. I've been in touch with the accountant. He's managing your funds until you're, um, in a greater position to—well, you understand.” Normally my manager made a religion of looking a person in the eye—it was the eager salesman inside him—but he didn't then, squinting, instead, in the direction of the house. “It's part of the agreement. Legally, I mean. That you spend a little time here. Bernard's dropped all charges, but the judge insisted. Apparently, they're having a new special election, given the circumstances. You are relieved of all duties as governor-elect, thank the Lord Jesus Holy Christ Almighty. I've alerted the authorities here that he's not allowed to visit or call. Not that I think he will, boy. He knows it's done. Whatever it was in the first place, it's done.” He snickered. “He thinks life's a game, boy. That people don't have blood in their veins . . .” When Max spoke next, his voice sounded like embers in a fireplace. “I've been in touch with your mother's neighbor in Sea View. He said he'd look after the house and make sure it stays as your mother had it until you're well enough to go there yourself.” He said, “I don't know if you want to hear it, but there's word of Jesse Unheim, too.”

“Go.”

“Owed money to people, apparently. Bookies. The mob. Intended to rob your mother and accidentally shot her. Life in prison, they're saying.” He sighed. “The police found him weeping on the floor.”

The pills glued me into a person on a bench. Otherwise the wind would have blown through my cracks.

“This will be my last visit, probably. They encouraged us not to come until you're well. It has a
very
good reputation, Giovanni.”

“I trust you, Max.”

He yawned urgently, or so it seemed. It took me a moment to understand he was crying. “You know what I thought when I first met you,” he said, “when we went to my rented room and you sat there on my chair, stiff as a board? I thought, how I would
love
to be this little brat. How he must see people and things! How he must read the world! I saw you onstage and
knew it
. To be Giovanni! Even when you were a mess, a downright mess after Lucy, I thought, how he must
be feeling it, the boy who's so sensitive to the world. How
sweet
it must feel, how
deep
! When you were Bernard, too, I felt it. As cold and mean as you were, I thought, this little rascal, he's
experiencing life from the inside
. Me, all the rest of us, what are we in comparison? Even right now, boy, this very moment, looking at you across this picnic table, pale and sick, I can't help but—but
envy
you, you've followed feeling to its very end. Oh, it's terrible, I know. Like the audience, I wanted to feel it
through you
!”

He laid his head on his arm, his arm on the table. He stayed that way for some time, making choked noises and then shot up, like one woken abruptly from a nap. “Really, this Orchelli—he's supposed to be excellent.” He repeated that he would write before disappearing past the hedges. For a good half hour I sat there, listening to the birds.

I thought of that visit as they led me up the stairs. The doctor. I was hoping to put it off indefinitely. The previous evening I had heard a very different account of the man while eavesdropping on George. “A very tricky character,” he'd said. “Very tricky. Well, no, calm yourself there, please. I think it's fair to use the word
trickster
, yes. Always sending people to the basement.”

I was brought to a dark corridor with two benches and a black wall. The nurse knocked on the wall twice until a bar of light appeared at its bottom, a bar that grew in height until the entire wall was transparent, revealing behind it an airy, well-appointed study. I trembled, sure some hideous magic was occurring, the kind where walls vanish and cruel sorcerers are met, but then I realized a curtain was being unrolled from the other side—that the wall was no wall really, but another window. A door had been hewed into it, which the head nurse opened, ushering me forward.

At the front of the room stood two armchairs set at a distance too great to be intimate but too close to be unintentional. There was a crowded bookshelf, a set of diplomas on the wall, and a big desk whose only decoration seemed to be a framed hundred-dollar bill. On the other side of that desk was a floor-to-ceiling window affording a view of the south lawn and, farther away, the blue mountains. The door closed behind me.

“Hello again,” a voice said. A man stood in the corner of the room, I saw only then, ratcheting the curtain back down.

“Did Unheim send you? He did, didn't he?!” If it hadn't been for the pills, I would have screamed.

The man was tall, of athletic build, dressed in jeans and a plaid workman's shirt rolled to just above the elbows revealing hirsute and well-muscled arms. He wore his tar-black hair parted down the middle in a European style of an older time and possessed a tremendous Roman nose that skewered his otherwise boyish features like some private joke, or burden, of his ancestry. His front two teeth he kept exposed, perched on his bottom lip in such a fashion as to make him look vulnerable, if not downright imbecilic, yet his eyes were tender and retreated, brown as a bear. He soaked me with them and smiled as a wounded person smiles: that is, with an intensity of expression that is equal to the intensity of its hiding.

“We met once before, but you were severely agitated, and do not, I don't think, remember it. My name is Doctor Josef Orphels,” he said. The manner in which he walked toward me—it spoke of a man so confident in the mechanisms of his body that I immediately resented and feared him, backpedaling into one of those burgundy chairs. I was saying a number of things, each word a small bullet against the silence, the silence, which can be shot and shot and lurches on. None of it seemed to perturb or surprise Doctor Josef Orphels. A preternatural calm—the calm of a murderer, I thought—hung about his person. He eased into the other chair.

“Who is Jesse Unheim?” he asked me.

I said nothing.

A few minutes later: “Giovanni, who is Jesse Unheim?”