The Book of Illusions (23 page)

Meers was dubious. Why would he show his dick to the world and then not let anyone see who he was? If she were a man, she said, she’d be proud to have what he had. She’d want everyone to know that it belonged to her.

But they wouldn’t be there to look at him, Hector said. She was the star, and the less the audience thought about who he was, the hotter their performances would be. Put a mask on him, and he would have no personality, no distinguishing characteristics, nothing to interfere with the fantasies of the men who were watching them. They didn’t want to see him fuck her, he said, they wanted to imagine they were fucking her themselves. Make him anonymous, and he would be turned into an engine of male desire, the representative of every man in the audience. The stiff-boned Sir Stud, banging away at the body of the insatiable Lady Cunt. Every man, and therefore any man. But just one woman, he said, ever and always just one woman, and her name was Sylvia Meers.

Meers bought the argument. It was her first lesson in the tactics of show business, and even if she couldn’t follow everything that Hector said to her, she liked the way it sounded, she liked it that he wanted her to be the star. By the time he called her Lady Cunt, she was laughing out loud. Where had he learned to talk like that? she asked him. She’d never known a man who could make something sound so dirty and so beautiful at the same time.

Squalor has its own rewards, Hector said, purposely talking over her head. If a man decides to crawl into his tomb, who better to keep him company than a warm-blooded woman? He dies more slowly that way, and as long as his flesh is joined to her flesh, he can live off the smell of his own corruption.

Meers laughed again, unable to grasp the meaning of Hector’s words. It sounded like Bible talk to her, the stuff of preachers and roadside evangelists, but Hector’s little poem on death and degeneration was delivered so calmly, with such a kind and friendly smile on his face, that she assumed he was making a joke. Not for a moment did she understand that he had just confessed his innermost secrets to her, that she was looking at a man who four hours earlier had sat down on the bed in his hotel room and pressed a loaded gun against his brain for the second time that week. Hector was glad. When he saw the lack of comprehension in her eyes, he felt lucky to have fallen in with such a dim, lusterless tart. No matter how much time he spent with her, he knew that he would always be alone when they were together.

Meers was in her early twenties, a South Dakota farm girl who had run away from home at sixteen, landed in Chicago a year later, and started working the streets the same month that Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic. There was nothing compelling about her, nothing to set her apart from a thousand other whores in a thousand other hotel rooms at that same moment. A peroxide blonde with a round face, dull gray eyes, and the remnants of acne scars dotting her cheeks, she carried herself with a certain sluttish bravura, but there was no magic in her, no charm to keep one’s interest alive for very long. Her neck was too short for the proportions of her body, her small breasts drooped a little, and there was already a slight buildup of flab around her hips and buttocks. As she and Hector worked out the terms of their agreement (a sixty-forty split, which Hector found more than generous), he suddenly turned away, realizing that he wouldn’t be able to go through with it if he went on looking at her. What’s the matter, Herm, she asked him, ain’t you feelin’ well? I’m fine, Hector said, his eyes still fixed on a patch of crumbling plaster at the opposite end of the room. I’ve never felt better in my life. I’m so happy, I could open the window and start screaming like a madman. That’s how good I feel, baby. I’m out of my mind, out of my mind with joy.

S
ix days later, Hector and Sylvia put on their first public performance. Between that initial engagement in early June and their final show in mid-December, Alma calculated that they appeared together some forty-seven times. Most of the work took place in and around Chicago, but some bookings came in from as far away as Minneapolis, Detroit, and Cleveland. The venues ranged from nightclubs to hotel suites, from warehouses and brothels to office buildings and private homes. Their largest audience consisted of about a hundred spectators (at a fraternity party in Normal, Illinois), and the smallest had just one (repeated on ten separate occasions for the same man). The act varied according to the wishes of the clients. Sometimes Hector and Sylvia put on little plays, complete with costumes and dialogue, and at other times they did nothing more than walk in naked and screw in silence. The skits were based on the most conventional erotic daydreams, and they tended to work best in front of small-to medium-sized crowds. The most popular one was the nurse and patient routine. People seemed to like watching Sylvia take off the starched white uniform, and they never failed to applaud when she began unwrapping the gauze bandages froto medium-sized crowds. The most popularm Hector’s body. There was also the Confession Box Scandal (which ended with the priest ravishing the nun) and, more elaborately, the tale of the two libertines who meet at a masked ball in pre-revolutionary France. In almost every instance, the spectators were exclusively male. The larger gatherings were usually quite raucous (bachelor parties, birthday celebrations), while the smaller groups rarely made any noise at all. Bankers and lawyers, businessmen and politicians, athletes, stockbrokers, and representatives of the idle rich: they all watched in spellbound fascination. More often than not, at least two or three of them would open their trousers and begin to masturbate. A married couple from Fort Wayne, Indiana, who engaged the duo’s services for a private performance in their home, went so far as to undress during the act and begin making love themselves. Meers had been right, Hector discovered. There was good money to be made from daring to give people what they wanted.

He rented a small efficiency apartment on the North Side, and for every dollar he earned, he gave away seventy-five cents of it to charity. He slipped ten-and twenty-dollar bills into the collection box at Saint Anthony’s Church, sent in anonymous donations to Congregation B’nai Avraham, and dispensed untold quantities of loose change to the blind and crippled beggars he encountered on the sidewalks of his neighborhood. Forty-seven performances averaged out to just under two performances a week. That left five days free, and Hector spent most of them in seclusion, holed up in his apartment reading books. His world had split in two, Alma said, and his mind and body were no longer talking to each other. He was an exhibitionist and a hermit, a mad debauchee and a solitary monk, and if he managed to survive these contradictions in himself for as long as he did, it was only because he willed his mind to go numb. No more struggles to be good, no more pretending to believe in the virtues of self-denial. His body had taken control of him, and the less he thought about what his body was doing, the more successfully he was able to do it. Alma noted that he stopped writing in his journal during this period. The only entries were dry little jottings that recorded the times and places of his jobs with Sylvia—a page and a half in six months. She took it as a sign that he was afraid to look at himself, that he was acting like a man who had covered up all the mirrors in his house.

The only time he had any trouble was the first time, or just before the first time, when he still didn’t know if he would be up to the job. Fortunately, Sylvia booked their first performance for an audience of just one man. That made it bearable somehow—to go public in a private sort of way, with just one pair of eyes on him and not twenty or fifty or a hundred. In this case, the eyes belonged to Archibald Pierson, a seventy-year-old retired judge who lived alone in a three-story Tudor house in Highland Park. Sylvia had already been there once with Al, and as she and Hector climbed into a taxi on the appointed night and headed toward their destination in the suburbs, she warned him that they would probably have to go through the act twice, perhaps even three times. The coot was stuck on her, she said. He’d been calling for weeks now, desperate to know when she’d be coming back, and little by little she’d bargained the price up to two and a half C’s per shot, double what it had been the last time. I ain’t no slouch when it comes to talkin’ bread, she announced proudly. If we play this goon right, Hermie boy, he could become our meal ticket.

Pierson turned out to be a shy and jittery old man—thin as a shoemaker’s awl, with a full head of neatly combed white hair and enormous blue eyes. He had put on a green velvet smoking jacket for the occasion, and as he led Hector and Sylvia into the living room, he kept clearing his throat and smoothing down the front of the jacket, as if he felt uncomfortable in that foppish attire. He offered them cigarettes, offered them drinks (which they both declined), and then announced that he was planning to accompany their performance by playing a phonograph record of the String Sextet Number One in B flat by Brahms. Sylvia giggled when she heard the word
sextet
, failing to realize that it referred to the number of instruments in the piece, but the judge made no comment. Pierson then complimented Hector on his mask—which Hector had slipped over his face before entering the house—and said that he found it tantalizing, a clever touch. I think I’m going to enjoy this, he said. I salute you on your choice of partner, Sylvia. This one is infinitely more dashing than Al.

The judge liked to keep things simple. He wasn’t interested in provocative costumes, sultry dialogue, or artificially dramatic scenes. All he wanted was to look at their bodies, he said, and once the preliminary conversation was over, he instructed them to go into the kitchen and remove their clothes. While they were gone, he put on the music, turned off the lamps, and lit candles in half a dozen spots around the room. It was theater without theatrics, a raw enactment of life itself. Hector and Sylvia were supposed to walk into the room naked, then get down to business on the Persian rug. That was the extent of it. Hector would make love to Sylvia, and when the climactic moment was upon him, he would withdraw from her and ejaculate on her breasts. Everything came down to that, the judge said. The spurt was crucial, and the farther it traveled through the air, the happier it was going to make him.

After they had taken off their clothes in the kitchen, Sylvia walked up to Hector and started running her hands over his body. She kissed him on the neck, pulled back the mask and kissed him on the face, and then cupped his flaccid penis in her hand and stroked it until it became hard. Hector was glad he had thought of the mask. It made him feel less vulnerable, less ashamed of exposing himself to the old man, but still he was nervous, and he welcomed the warmth of Sylvia’s touch, appreciated that she was trying to work the butterflies out of his system. She might have been the star, but she knew that the burden of proof rested with him. Hector couldn’t fake it as she could; he couldn’t just go through the motions of simulated pleasure and pretend that he was enjoying it. He had to deliver something real at the end of the performance, and unless he went about it with genuine conviction, he wouldn’t have a chance of getting there.

They walked into the living room holding hands, two naked savages in a jungle of gilt-edged mirrors and Louis the Fifteenth escritoires. Pierson was already installed in his seat at the far end of the room: a vast leather wing chair that seemed to swallow him up, making him look even thinner and more desiccated than he was. To his right was the phonograph machine, with the Brahms sextet revolving on the turntable. To his left was a low mahogany stand, covered with lacquered boxes, jade statuettes, and other bits of costly chinoiserie. It was a room full of nouns and unmovable objects, an enclave of thoughts. Nothing could have been more incongruous in those surroundings than the erection Hector carried in with him—than the spectacle of verbs that suddenly began to unfold not ten feet from the judge’s chair.

If the old man enjoyed what he saw, he displayed no outward signs of pleasure. He stood up twice during the performance to change the record, but other than those brief, mechanical interruptions, he remained in the same position throughout, sitting on his leather throne with one leg crossed over the other and his hands in his lap. He didn’t touch himself, he didn’t unbutton his trousers, he didn’t smile, he didn’t make a sound. It was only at the end, at the moment when Hector pulled out of Sylvia and the desired eruption occurred, that a small shuddering noise seemed to catch in the judge’s throat. Almost like a sob, Hector thought—and then again, almost like nothing at all.

That was the first time, Alma said, but it was also the fifth time and the eleventh time and the eighteenth time and six other times as well. Pierson became their most devoted customer, and again and again they returned to the house in Highland Park to roll around on the rug and collect their money. Nothing made Sylvia happier than that money, Hector realized, and within a couple of months she had earned enough from the act to quit peddling her wares at the White House Hotel. Not all of it went into her own pocket, but even after she turned over fifty percent to the man she called her protector, her income was two or three times greater than it had been before. Sylvia was an uneducated hick, a semi-illiterate vulgarian who spoke in a blur of double negatives and mind-bending malapropisms, but she proved to have a decent head for business. She was the one who arranged the bookings, negotiated with the clients, and took care of all practical matters: transportation to and from jobs, costume rentals, the scaring up of new work. Hector never had to concern himself with any of these details. Sylvia would call to tell him when and where they would be appearing next, and all he had to do was wait for her to swing by in a taxi to pick him up at his apartment. Those were the unspoken rules, the boundaries of their relationship. They worked together, they fucked together, they made money together, but they never bothered to become friends, and except for the times when they had to rehearse a new skit, they saw each other only when they performed.