The Poser (9 page)

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 cursed, 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.

This lie, once exposed, paved the way for greater accusations. Soon “anonymous volunteers” came forward, claiming we had rehearsed the impersonations for weeks in advance, making use of complicated microphones to throw their voices. It did not help when word got out in the
Monocle
and
Daily Diary
that the act's first volunteer, a Lucy Starlight, had been sighted repeatedly smooching Bernini at the bars of the Communiqué. Vandaline himself waged a vicious print campaign against us, much, I should say, to Bernard's and Max's delight, since the spate of articles only amplified the interest in those Saturday performances by doubling the drama: my imitating the volunteers on the one hand, and the audience's scanning the stage for invisible strings, microphones, etc., on the other. None of this bothered me: not Max's fake biography, nor the public's suspicions. I liked it, in fact. I was no longer a genius but a charlatan, a role I knew how to play.

This siege on my reputation culminated in Vandaline's unexpected appearance that night at the Communiqué when early in our performance he rose near the foot of the stage, demanding that I imitate him. Max milked the moment for all it was worth (“Have
ye
no shame, sir?!”), ushering the pompous reporter center stage, where I mimicked him with no difficulty and much pleasure. The crowd applauded, and Vandaline went on to publish his lengthy mea culpa, which, to my great relief, was too glutted with self-aggrandizing caveats (“Did I push it all too far? Okay, but so did Bonaparte”) to leave any room for mention of the thread.

A week later, though, I learned from Max that Bernard had secretly arranged the whole thing, persuading Vandaline to go along with the stunt, knowing full well the spectacle it would create. “Y'know how he is,” Max said. “Mysterious as an end and as a means.”

It was true. When he wasn't attending to business in his office upstairs, Bernard kept to the back room, playing five-card stud with an unchangeable crew. There were those toughs we met the first day as well as two constant associates: Frankie Diamond and Lou Dust. According to rumor, they were uncle and nephew, strangely close in age. Others said they had nearly killed each other in a bar fight years before and, each stabbed by the other, recovered in adjacent hospital beds, after which they had been inseparable. An odd pair—Frankie tall, with largely veined hands, Lou bell-shaped. They served Bernard in ways both formal and informal, and as they counted their chips or studied a hand, sniped at each other in the style of soldiers or teammates, a banter dense with references to old slights and mutual enemies. Mostly they spoke of Fantasma Falls, out west.

Around these associates, or the bar hands, or sound guys, Bernard kept silent. This was an expression of power, I understood, one that implicitly equated talk with weakness, and when he did talk himself, his tone was either cutting or grandly deferential, as if he were making a show of lowering himself.

With me, he was the latter. Sometimes he would give important visitors a private tour, of which I seemed to be the central attraction. One week it was a bone-white dowager noting each detail with delighted shock: “Oh, and people drink here, how vibrant!” Or an important painter, a guy in a long flannel shirt compulsively rubbing his nose with the back of his hand. “Come meet our star,” Bernard would say another time, introducing me to a tall, eagle-faced man with discerning eyes. A senator, apparently.

“The imitator, got it,” the man said.

“Oh, he's a load more than that, Charlie,” Bernard said. “Give him five years, and he'll have your job.” He told me I would one day run the country. “Once you've mastered entertainment,” Bernard would say, clapping me on the back, “any field is open to you in this country.”

Always, he was trying to get me to play poker. The one time I did join, Bernard stood so quickly his chair slid against the floor. “Here's the kid keeping this whole place in business.” He waved me to a seat next to his, and as the game got under way, draped his arm over the back of my chair. Smoke clotted the room. A long-necked pianist in the corner played an angular melody. Bernard whispered in my ear how Lou never bluffed or to watch out for Clem. Hand after hand, that same feeling descended, as it had the first time I imitated him. Teeth exposed in laughter. Arms hugging the puddle of chips at the center of the table. And it took all the energy I had to peel myself out of the chair. Lou and Frankie stood, as if seeing off a dignitary, and in the parting of their suit jackets, metal briefly gleamed and then disappeared. “Come again,” Bernard said. “Anytime.”

That night, on my way home, a skinny man with a misaligned collar asked me how to get to Aberdeen Street. “Oh, it's very easy,” I assured him and calmly and very clearly sent him in the opposite direction. I waved off his thanks with a big, fake smile. Then I hopped up the steps of the corner store and bought some cigarettes. I smoked one but coughed so much I threw the pack out and woke up that next morning with a torrential headache. After that, I did my best to avoid that back room.

But Bernard knew what he was doing. The Vandaline affair increased my fame. Like some urban eczema, those faces appeared more and more on the skin of the City: on the side of a delivery van, in chalk on the sidewalk, in spray paint on a fifty-foot rail bridge. People recognized me on the street, asked for my autograph, buttonholed me by the entrance to the train:
How do you do it
?
How can I learn? Teach me
. For a time the scandals hardened these public interrogations: “I knew it! Is it true?” “They say you a fraud, man,” a baggy-eyed man told me under the awning of the Hotel San Pierre. “Of course I am,” I answered.

That's how I talked now. As I understood it, the public ached to know me and yet refused to believe they did. To understand me would disappoint them as much as not knowing me at all, a paradox that expressed itself most often through touch. Passengers on the subway, waiters at the diner were always patting my back, for instance. Yet, after this presumptuous leap, each would back off, nearly recoil, as if to reestablish the moat that ought, by all rights, to separate a talent from his devotees. What they desired, in other words, was to be confounded, but confounded
warmly
, a want I was happy to meet.

But all of that broke down in Lucy's apartment.

Given the cold, we spent most days tucked into her L-shaped studio apartment, in a new proximity I found both thrilling and frightful. With Max and Mama, the more I hung around them, the more their gestures seeped into my very person, but with each hour Lucy only wrapped herself in a denser mystery, a thousand details still burying her thread: the way she puckered her lips to blow a hair fallen over her face, the angle at which she rested her head when twirling spaghetti with a fork.

It had to do with her body, soft and round and the first I'd ever known. I don't just mean the first I'd ever laid against, shared a bed with, or made love to (a phrase Lucy despised—“We don't make love, Giovanni, we
fuck
!”), no, she was the first person, in my life, to exist apart, as a whole. Perhaps I did not always allow for the fullness of people. In the case of Max, for instance, perhaps I was too busy charting the movements of his hands, too busy concocting my “Max” rebus to encounter the reality of his presence. And perhaps (I thought, watching Lucy constructing a lipstick-applying moue in the mirror) the same held for my current volunteers, each of whom I reduced in the moment I met them to a gestural acronym. Perhaps (I thought, watching Lucy, post-shower, brush her hair with strong untangling strokes) all my previous work
had
been a deception, as I'd felt instinctively our first night at the Communiqué.

Nearly unraveled by these notions, I sometimes acted in strange ways. One afternoon I took out her tape measure and measured the length of her thighs, the distance from pelvis to breast, knee to ankle, the length of her longest strand of hair pulled down to her chest. She lay there while I did it, without peep or complaint, shifting only to giggle when the metal tape tickled the nape of her neck. “Giovanni, where did you get so straaange?” she said, leaning up to kiss me.

Generally, though, I was terrified she would grow bored of me, would exile me from her apartment, or body, and so imitated whomever I could to keep her amused. Strangers on the subway, waiters, friends. Half the time, I was Max, the soundman Alexi, anyone. Each cackle (she had a raucous laugh—cocked her head back and shouted it loud enough to quiet most rooms) I coaxed from her soft and vulgar throat guaranteed me a few more hours of closeness.

My performances at the Communiqué seemed especially to excite her. “It's almost
creepy
,” she'd say after, running her hand up the thigh of my tuxedo. Often she'd sit me down in a chair at the center of the Communiqué and hop on my lap, kiss and tangle with me, even with all those people watching. And yet, in those days I was still very polite and would often say, “Jeez, thank you,” when a waiter brought us soup or “Excuse me,” when shuffling past strangers in the subway. “Where the fuck did they make you?” she often asked.