Cat's Pajamas (7 page)

“But the new Mina—the Mina duplicate—what did she make of all this?” I asked.

“She didn't like to talk about it. Whenever I broached the subject, she offered the same reply, ‘My life is my art,' she said. ‘My life is my art.'”

While Bruno and the new Mina pursued the eros circuit, their shadow halves—the doppelgänger Bruno and the damaged Mina—journeyed to the south of France, moving into a farmhouse outside of Nîmes. No member of this odd quartet took much joy in the arrangement, but neither did anyone despair. Never before in human history, Bruno speculated, had irreversible brain injury been so cleverly accommodated.

“But cleverness, of course, mere cleverness—it's an ambiguous virtue, no?” Bruno said to me. “After pursuing Dr. Croom's ingenious scheme a mere fourteen months, I felt an overwhelming urge to abandon it.”

“Because it was clever?”

“Because it was clever and not beautiful. Everything I knew, everything I held dear, had become false, myself most especially.
The Book of Bruno
had lost its poetry, and instead there was only correct punctuation, and proper spelling, and subjects that agreed with their verbs.”

Bruno Pearl, the falsest thing of all, the man with the glass eyes, wooden teeth, crepe hair, and putty nose. He could enact his passion for Mina, but he could not experience it. He could enter her body, but not inhabit it. The flawless creature in his arms, this hothouse orchid, this unblemished replica who wore his wife's former face and spoke in her previous voice—nowhere in her flesh did he sense the ten million subtle impressions that had accrued, year by year, decade by decade, to their collective ecstasy.

“The skin is wise,” he told me. “Our tissues retain echoes of every kiss and caress, each embrace and climax. Blood is not deceived. Do you understand?”

“No,” I said. “Yes,” I added. “I'm not sure. Yes. Quite so. I understand, Mr. Pearl.”

I did.

Shortly after a particularly stunning concert in Luxembourg Gardens, Bruno and the duplicate Mina drove down to Nîmes, so that the four of them might openly discuss their predicament.

The artists gathered in the farmhouse kitchen, the primal Mina resting in her wheelchair.

“Tell me who you are,” the primal Bruno asked the counterfeit.

“Who am I?” the forged Bruno said.

“Yes.”

“I ponder that question every day.”

“Are you I?” the primal Bruno asked.

“Yes,” the forged Bruno replied. “In theory, yes—I am you.”

“I was not created to be myself,” the facsimile Mina noted.

“True,” the primal Bruno said.

“I was created to be someone else,” the facsimile Mina said.

“Yes,” the primal Bruno said.

“If I am in fact you,” the forged Bruno asked, “why do I endure a meaningless and uneventful life while the world lays garlands at your feet?”

“I need to be myself,” the facsimile Mina said.

“I hate you, Bruno,” the forged Bruno said.

The primal Mina took up a red crayon and scrawled a tortured note,
SET THEM FREE
, she instructed her husband.

“The right and proper course was obvious,” Bruno told me. “My twin and I would trade places.”

“Of course,” I said, nodding.

“I told my doppelgänger and the duplicate Mina that if they wished to continue the tour, I would respect and support their decision. But I would never do Sphinx Recumbent or any other act in public again.”

Bruno was not surprised when, an hour before their scheduled departure from Nîmes, the replicas came to him and said that they intended to pursue their careers. What
else
were they supposed to do? Performance intercourse was in their bones.

For nearly five years, the duplicates thrived on the circuit, giving pleasure to spectators and winning plaudits from critics. But then the unexpected occurred, mysterious to everyone except Mina and Bruno and their doubles—and perhaps Dr. Croom comprehended the disaster as well. The ersatz copulators lost their art. Their talent, their touch, their
raison d'être
—all of it disintegrated, and soon they suffered a precipitous and inevitable decline. Months before the automobile accident, audiences and aestheticians alike had consigned these former gods to history.

“Naturally one is tempted to theorize that the Citroën crash was not an accident,” Bruno said.

“The despair of the fallen idol,” I said.

“Or, if an accident, then an accident visited upon two individuals who no longer wished to live.”

“I guess we'll never know,” I said.

“But if they deliberately ran their car into that concrete wall, I suspect that the reason was not their waning reputation. You see, lovely Susan, they didn't know who they were.”

A fat, sallow, October moon shone into my apartment. It was nearly ten o'clock. Bruno gently dislodged Leni from his lap, then rose from my wing chair and requested that I lead him home. Naturally I agreed. He shuffled into the kitchen, reassembled his wallet, and slid it into his back pocket.

Gathering up Bruno's clothes, still damp, I dumped them into a plastic garbage bag. I told him he was welcome to keep Craig's dungarees, everything else too. I gave him Anson's boiled wool coat as well, then escorted him to the door.

“How do you feel?” I asked.

“Warm,” he said, slinging the plastic bag over his shoulder. Leni pushed against Bruno's left leg, wrapped herself around his calf. “Restored.”

Retrieving my motorcycle jacket from the peg, I realized that I still felt protective toward my charge: more protective, even, then when I'd first pulled him from the Hudson. As we ventured through the city, I insisted on stopping before each red traffic light, even if no car was in sight. Noticing an unattended German shepherd on the sidewalk ahead, I led us judiciously across the street. Finally, after a half-hour of timid northward progress, we reached 105 Willow Avenue.

Removing his keys from Craig's dungarees, Bruno proceeded to enact a common ritual of modern urban life—a phenomenon fully documented in the Kaleidoscope video called
Safe City Living.
Guided by my fingertips, he ascended the stoop, opened the lock on the iron gate, unlatched the main door, climbed one flight of stairs, and, finally, let himself into his apartment.

“Darling, I want you to meet someone,” Bruno said, crossing the living room.

Mina Pearl sat in a pool of moonlight. She wore nothing save a wristwatch and a jade pendant. Her bare, pale skin gleamed like polished marble. A fanback wicker chair held her twisted body as a bamboo cage might enclose a Chinese cricket.

“This is Susan Fiore,” Bruno continued. “As unlikely as it sounds, I fell off the ferry tonight, and she rescued me. I lost my glasses.”

Mina worked her face into the semblance of a smile. She issued a noise that seemed to amalgamate the screech of an owl with the bleating of a ewe.

“I'm pleased to meet you, Mrs. Pearl,” I said.

“Tomorrow I'm going to sign up for swimming lessons,” Bruno averred.

As I came toward Mina, she raised her tremulous right hand. I clasped it firmly. Her flesh was warmer than I'd expected, suppler, more robust.

She used this same hand to gesture emphatically toward Bruno—a private signal, I concluded. He opened a desk drawer, removing a sheet of cardboard and a felt-tip marker. He brought the implements to his wife.
THANK YOU
, Mina wrote. She held the message before me.

“You're welcome,” I replied.

Mina flipped the cardboard over,
PAN AND SYRINX,
she wrote.

For the second time that evening, Bruno shed all his clothes. Cautiously, reverently, he lifted his naked wife from the wicker chair. She jerked and twitched like a marionette operated by a tipsy puppeteer. As her limbs writhed around one another, I thought of Laocoön succumbing to the serpents. A series of thick, burbling, salivary sounds spilled from her lips.

Against all odds, Mina and Bruno connected. It took them well over an hour, but eventually they brought Pan and Syrinx to a credible conclusion. Next came a two-hour recital of Flowering Judas, followed by an equally protracted version of Sphinx Recumbent.

The lovers, sated, sank into the couch. My applause lasted three minutes. I said my good-byes, and before I was out the door I understood that no matter how long I lived or how far I traveled, I would never again see anything so beautiful as Bruno and Mina Pearl coupling in their grimy little Willow Avenue apartment, the pigeons gathering atop the window grating, the traffic stirring in the street below, the sun rising over Hoboken.

I
SIT IN THE
comfort of my easy chair, the cat on my lap, the world at my command. With my right index finger I press the button, and seconds later the hydrogen bomb explodes.

The videocassette in question is
Trinity and Beyond,
a documentary by Peter Kuran comprising two hours of restored footage shot in full color by the U.S. Air Force's 1352nd Motion Picture Squadron, “The Atomic Cinematographers.” I am watching the detonation of February 28, 1954: Castle Bravo, fifteen megatons, in its day the largest atmospheric thermonuclear test ever conducted on planet Earth.

Red as the sun, the implacable dome of gas and debris expands outward from ground zero, suggesting at first an apocalyptic plum pudding, then an immense Santiago pilgrim's hat. The blast front flattens concrete buildings, tears palm trees out by the roots, and draws a tidal wave from the Pacific. Now the filmmakers give us a half-dozen shots of the inevitable mushroom cloud. I gaze into the roiling crimson mass, reading the entrails of human ingenuity.

“You're free of cancer” and “You're the lover I've been looking for my whole life” are surely two of the most uplifting sentences a person will ever hear, and it so happened that both declarations came my way during the same week. An optimist at heart, I took each affirmation at face value, so naturally I was distressed when the speakers in question began backpedaling.

No sooner had Dr. Joshua Pryce told me that the latest lab report indicated no malignant cells in my body, not one, than he hastened to add, “Of course, this doesn't mean you're rid of it forever.”

“You think it will come back?” I asked.

“Hard to say.”

“Could you hazard a guess?”

Dr. Pryce drew a silk handkerchief from his bleached lab coat and removed his bifocals. “Let me emphasize the positive.” In a fit of absentmindedness, the oncologist repocketed his glasses. “For the moment you're definitely cured. But cancer has a will of its own.”

In the case of the man who called me his ideal lover—Stuart Randolph, the semi-retired NYU film historian with whom I've shared a bohemian loft overlooking Washington Square for the past eighteen years—I logically expected that his subsequent remarks would concern the institution of marriage. But instead Stuart followed his declaration by arguing that there were two kinds of commitment in the world: the contrived commitment entailed in the matrimonial contract, and the genuine commitment that flowed from the sort of “perfect rapport and flawless communication” that characterized our relationship.

“If we enjoyed perfect rapport and flawless communication, we wouldn't be having this discussion,” I said. “I want to get married, Stu.”

“Really?” He frowned as if confronting a particularly egregious instance of postmodern film criticism. Stuart's an auteurist, not a deconstructionist.

“Really.”

“You truly want to become my fourth wife?”

“As much as I want you to become my fifth husband.”

“Why, dear?” he said. “Do you think we're living in sin? Senior citizens can't live in sin.”

“Imitation of Life
is a lousy movie, but I like it anyway,” I said. “Marriage is a bourgeois convention, but I like it anyway.”

“Should the cancer ever return, dearest Angela, you'll be glad you've got a committed lover by your side, as opposed to some sap who happens technically to be your husband.”

Stuart was not normally capable of bringing romance and reason into such perfect alignment, but he'd just done so, and I had to admire his achievement.

“I cannot argue with your logic,” I told him. And I couldn't. All during my treatments, Stuart had been an absolute prince, driving me to the hospital a hundred times, holding my head as I threw up, praising the doctors when they did their jobs properly, yelling at them when they got haughty. “Checkmate.”

“Love and marriage,” he said. “They go together like a horse and aluminum siding.”

Have no fear, reader. This is not a story about what I endured at the hands of Western medicine once its avatars learned I'd developed leukemia. It's not about radiation treatments, chemotherapy, violent nausea, suicidal depression, paralyzing fear, or nurses poking dozens of holes in my body. My subject, rather, is the last performance ever given by an old colleague of mine, the biggest box-office star of all time, John Wayne—a performance that was never committed to celluloid but that leaves his Oscar-winning Rooster Cogburn gagging in the dust.

It would be inaccurate to say that Duke and I hated each other. Yes, I detested the man—detested everything he stood for—but my loathing was incompletely requited, for at some perverse level Duke clearly relished my companionship. Our irreconcilable philosophies first emerged when we appeared together in the 1953 survival melodrama,
Island in the Sky,
and ever since then our political clashes, too uncivilized to be called conversations or even debates, provided Duke with a caliber of stimulation he could obtain from no other liberal of his acquaintance. Throughout his career he routinely convinced the front office to offer me a marginal role in whatever John Wayne vehicle was on the drawing board, thereby guaranteeing that the two of us would briefly share the same soundstage or location set, and he could spend his lunch hours and coffee breaks reveling in the pleasurable rush he got from our battles over what had gone wrong with America.