Mr. Vertigo (22 page)

P
ART THE
T
HIRD
I’m floating down to the ground with my arms spread, descending as slowly as someone in a dream. Just as I’m about to touch the stage, I stop. Gravity has ceased to count, and there I am, hovering six inches off the ground with no prop to support me. The theater darkens, and a second later I’m enclosed in the beam of a single spotlight. I look down, I look up, I look down again. I wiggle my toes. I turn my left foot this way and that. I turn my right foot this way and that. It’s really happened. It’s really true that I’m standing on air. A drum-roll
breaks the silence: loud, insistent, nerve-shattering. It seems to announce terrible risks, an assault on the impossible. I shut my eyes, extend my arms to their fullest, and take a deep breath. This is the exact midpoint of the performance, the moment of moments. With the spotlight still fixed on me, I begin to rise into the air, slowly and inexorably taking myself upward, climbing to a height of seven feet in one smooth heaven-bound soar. I pause at the top, count three long beats in my head, and then open my eyes. Everything turns to magic after that. With the music playing at full throttle, I go through an eight-minute routine of aerial acrobatics, darting in and out of the spotlight as I turn twists and somersaults and full gainers. One contortion flows into another, each stunt is more beautiful than the last. There is no sense of danger anymore. Everything has been turned into pleasure, euphoria, the ecstasy of seeing the laws of nature crumble before your eyes.

P
ART THE FOURTH
After the final somersault, I glide back to my position at the center of the stage, seven feet off the ground. The music stops. A triple spotlight is thrown on me: one red, one white, one blue. The music starts up again: a stirring of cellos and French horns, loveliness beyond measure. The orchestra is playing “America the Beautiful,” the most cherished, most familiar song of all. When the fourth bar begins, I start to move forward, walking on the air above the heads of the musicians and out into the audience. I keep on walking as the music plays, traveling to the very back of the theater, eyes set before me as necks crane and people stand up from their seats. I reach the wall, turn, and begin to head back, walking in the same slow and stately manner as before. By the time I reach the stage again, the audience is one with me. I have touched them with my grace, let them share in the mystery of my godlike powers. I turn in
midair, pause briefly once again, and then float down to the ground as the last notes of the song are played. I spread my arms and smile. And then I bow—just once—and the curtain comes down.

It wasn’t too shabby. A trifle bloated at the end, perhaps, but the master wanted “America the Beautiful” come hell or high water, and I couldn’t talk him out of it. The Opening pantomime sketch came straight from yours truly, and the master felt so keen about those pratfalls that he got a little carried away. A clown suit would make them even funnier, he said, but I told him no, it was just the opposite. If people expect a joke, you have to work a lot harder to make them laugh. You can’t go whole hog from the start; you have to sneak up and goose them. It took me half a day of arguing to win that point, but on other matters I wasn’t nearly so persuasive. The bit I worried about most was the end—the part where I had to leave the stage and go off on an aerial tour of the audience. I knew it was a good idea, but I still didn’t have total confidence in my loft abilities. If I didn’t maintain a height of eight and a half or nine feet, all sorts of problems could arise. People could jump up and swat at my legs, and even a weak, glancing blow would be enough to knock me off course. And what if someone actually grabbed hold of my ankle and wrestled me to the ground? A riot would break Out in the theater, I’d wind up getting myself killed. This felt like a definite danger to me, but the master pooh-poohed my nervousness. “You can do it,” he said. “You got to twelve feet in Florida last winter, and I can’t even remember the last time you dipped under ten. Alabama maybe, but you had a cold that day and your heart wasn’t in it. You’ve gotten better, Walt. Little by little, you’ve shown improvement in every area. It’s going to take some concentration, but nine feet isn’t a stretch anymore. It’s just another
day at the office, a walk around the block and then home. No sweat. One time and you’ll be over it. Believe me, son, it’s going to go like gangbusters.”

The hardest trick was the ladder jump, and I must have spent as much time on that one as all the others put together. Most of the act was a recombination of turns I already felt comfortable with. The invisible props, the skyward rushes, the midair acrobatics—all those things were old hat to me by then. But the ladder jump was new, and the entire program hinged on my being able to pull it off. It might not sound like a big deal compared to those dramatic flourishes—just three inches off the ground for one tick of the clock—but the difficulty was in the transition, the lightning-fast two-step required to get me from one state to another. From flopping and careening madly about the stage, I had to go straight into liftoff, and it had to be done in one seamless movement, which meant tripping forward, grabbing the rung, and going up at the same time. Six months earlier, I never would have attempted such a thing, but I had made progress on reducing the length of my prelevitation trances. From six or seven seconds at the beginning of my career, I had brought them down to less than one, a nearly simultaneous fusion of thought and deed. But the fact remained that I still lifted off from a standing position. I had always done it that way; it was one of the fundamental tenets of my art, and just to conceive of such a radical change meant rethinking the whole process from top to bottom. But I did it. I did it, by gum, and of all the feats I accomplished as a levitator, this is the one I’m proudest of. Master Yehudi dubbed it the Scattershot Fling, and that’s roughly what it felt like: a sensation of being in more than one place at the same time. Falling forward, I’d plant my feet on the ground for a fraction of a second, and then blink. The blink was crucial. It
brought back the memory of the trance, and even the smallest vestige of that fibrillating blankness was enough to produce the necessary shift in me. I’d blink and raise my arm, latching my hand onto the unseen rung, and then I’d start going up. It wouldn’t have been possible to sustain such a convoluted stunt for very long. Three quarters of a second was the limit, but that was all I needed, and once I perfected the move, it became the turning point of the show, the axis on which everything else revolved.

Three days before we left Cape Cod, the Pierce Arrow was delivered to our door by a man in a white suit. The driver had brought the thing all the way from Wichita, and when he stepped out and pumped the master’s hand, grinning and gushing his hearty hellos, I assumed I was looking at the infamous Orville Cox, My first thought was to kick the four-flusher in the shins, but before I could deliver my scout’s welcome, Master Yehudi saved me by addressing him as Mr. Bigelow. It didn’t take long to figure out that he was another one of Mrs. Witherspoon’s lunkhead admirers. He was a youngish guy of about twenty-four with a round face and a gee-whiz booster’s laugh, and every other word that came from his mouth was “Marion.” She must have done a hell of a snow job to conscript him into running such a long-distance errand for her, but he seemed pleased with himself and oh-so-proud to have done it. It made me want to puke. By the time the master suggested going into the house for a cool drink, I had already turned my back on him and was clomping up the wooden stairs.

I headed straight for the kitchen; Mrs. Hawthorne was in there washing the dishes from lunch, her small bony figure perched on a stool beside the sink. “Hi, Mrs. H.,” I said, still churning inside, feeling as if the devil himself were doing handsprings in my head. “What’s for dinner tonight?”

“Flounder, mashed potatoes, and pickled beets,” she said, answering in her curt New England twang.

“Yum. I can’t wait to sink my chompers into them beets. Make me a double portion, okay?”

That got a little smile from her, “No problem, Master Buck,” she said, swiveling around on the stool to look at me. I took three or four steps in her direction, then went in for the kill.

“Good as your cooking is, ma’am,” I said, “I’ll bet you ain’t never rustled up a dish half so tasty as this one.”

And then, before she could say another word, I flashed her a big smile, spread my arms, and lifted myself off the ground. I went up slowly, taking myself as high as I could without bumping my head against the ceiling. Once I’d reached the top, I hung there looking down at Mrs. Hawthorne, and the shock and consternation that spread across her face were everything I’d hoped for. A choked howl died in her throat; her eyes rolled back into her head; and then she toppled off the stool, fainting onto the floor with a tiny thud.

As it happened, Bigelow and the master were just entering the house at that point, and the thud brought them running into the kitchen. Master Yehudi got there first, bursting through the door in the middle of my descent, but when Bigelow arrived a couple of seconds later, my feet were already touching the ground.

“What’s this!” the master said, sizing up the situation in a single glance. He pushed me aside and bent down over Mrs. Hawthorne’s comatose body. “What the hell is this!”

“Just a little accident,” I said.

“Accident my foot,” he said, sounding angrier than I’d heard him in months, perhaps years. I suddenly regretted the whole stupid prank. “Go to your room, you idiot, and don’t come out until I tell you. We have company now, and I’ll deal with you later.”

I never did get to eat those beets, nor any other of Mrs. Hawthorne’s dishes for that matter. Once she recovered from her swoon, she promptly picked herself up and marched out the door, vowing never to set foot in our house again. I wasn’t around to witness her departure, but that’s what the master told me the next morning. At first I thought he was pulling my leg, but when she didn’t show up by the middle of the day, I realized I’d scared the poor woman half to death. That’s exactly what I’d wanted to do, but now that I’d done it, it didn’t seem so funny to me anymore. She never even returned to collect her wages, and though we stayed on for another seventy-two hours ourselves, that was the last we ever saw of her.

Not only did the meals deteriorate, but I suffered a final indignity when Master Yehudi made me clean the house on the morning we packed up and left. I hated to be punished like that—sent off to bed without any supper, consigned to KP duty and household chores—but fume and bitch as I did about it, he was well within his rights. It didn’t matter that I was the hottest child star since David loaded up his slingshot and let ‘er rip. I had stepped out of line, and before my head swelled to the size of a medicine ball, the master had no choice but to crack down and let me have it.

As for Bigelow, the cause of my temperamental outburst, there isn’t much to be said. He hung around for only a few hours, and by late afternoon a taxi came to fetch him—presumably to drive him to the nearest railroad station, where he would begin his long trip back to Kansas. I watched him leave from my second-floor window, despising him for his moronic cheerfulness and the fact that he was a buddy of Orville Cox, the man Mrs. Witherspoon had chosen over me and the master. To make matters worse, Master Yehudi was on his best behavior, and it addled my spleen to see how politely he treated that twit of a bank clerk.
Not only did he shake his hand, but he entrusted him with delivering his wedding present to the bride-to-be. Just as the cab door was about to close, he placed a large, beautifully wrapped package into the scoundrel’s hands. I had no idea what was hidden in the box. The master hadn’t told me, and though I fully intended to ask him about it at the first opportunity, so many hours passed before he released me from my prison, I clean forgot to when the moment arrived. As it turned out, seven years went by before I discovered what the gift was.

From Cape Cod we went to Worcester, half a day’s drive to the west. It felt good to be traveling in the Pierce Arrow again, ensconced in our leather seats as of yore, and once we headed inland, whatever conflicts we’d been having were left behind like so many discarded candy wrappers, blowing out into the dune grass and the surf. Still, I didn’t want to take anything for granted, and just to make sure there was no bad blood between us, I apologized to the master again. “I done wrong,” I said, “and I’m sorry,” and just like that the whole business was as stale as yesterday’s news.

We holed up in the Cherry Valley Hotel, a dingy hooker’s nest two doors down from the Luxor Theatre. That’s where I’d been slotted for my first performance, and we rehearsed in that music hall every morning and afternoon for the next four days. The Luxor was a far cry from the grand entertainment palace I’d been hoping for, but it had a stage and curtains and a setup for lights, and the master assured me that the theaters would get better once we hit some of the larger stops on the tour. Worcester was a good quiet place to begin, he said, to familiarize myself with the feel of the stage. I caught on fast, learning my marks and cues without much trouble, but even so there were all sorts of kinks and glitches to be worked on: perfecting the spotlight sequences, coordinating the music with the stunts, choreographing
the finale to avoid the balcony that jutted out over half the seats in the orchestra. The master was consumed by a thousand and one details. He tested the curtains with the curtain man, he adjusted the lights with the lighting man, he talked endlessly about music with the musicians. At no small expense, he hired seven of them to join us for the last two days of rehearsals, and he kept scribbling changes and corrections onto their scores until the last minute, desperate to get everything just right. I got a kick out of working with those guys myself. They were a bunch of hacks and has-beens, old-timers who’d started out before I was born, and when you added it up, they must have spent twenty thousand nights in variety theaters and played for a hundred thousand different acts. Those geezers had seen everything, and yet the first time I came out and did my stuff for them, all hell broke loose. The drummer passed out, the bassoonist dropped his bassoon, the trombonist sputtered and went sour. It felt like a good sign to me. If I could impress those hard-boiled cynics, just think what I’d do when I got in front of a regular audience.