In that last month of working for Aimee—just before she fired me, in fact—we did a mini-European tour, starting with a show in Berlin, not a concert, a show of her photographs. These were photos of photos, images appropriated and rephotographed; she had taken the idea from Richard Prince—an old friend from the old days—and added nothing to it except the fact that she, Aimee, was doing it. Still, one of the most respected galleries in Berlin was more than happy to host her “work.” All the photos were of dancers—she thought of herself first and foremost as a dancer and identified deeply with them—but I did all the research and it was Judy who had taken most of the photos, as whenever the time came to go to the studio and rephotograph the photographs there was always something else that had to be done: meet-and-greets in Tokyo, the “designing” of a new perfume, sometimes even the recording of an actual song. We rephotographed Baryshnikov and Nureyev, Pavlova, Fred Astaire, Isadora Duncan, Gregory Hines, Martha Graham, Savion Glover, Michael Jackson. I argued for Jackson. Aimee didn’t want him, he wasn’t her idea of an artist, but catching her in a harried moment I managed to convince her, while Judy lobbied for “a woman of color.” She was worried about under-representation, she often was, which meant really that she was worried about what others might perceive as an under-representation, and whenever we had these conversations I had the eerie sensation of viewing myself as really being one of these things, not a person at all but a sort of object—without which a certain mathematical series of other objects is not complete—or not even an object but a kind of conceptual veil, a moral fig-leaf, protecting such-and-such a person from such-and-such a critique, and rarely thought of except when in this role. It didn’t offend me, especially: I was interested in the experience, it was like being fictional. I thought of Jeni LeGon.
I got my chance during a car ride over the border between Luxembourg—where Aimee had gone to do a little press—and Germany. I took out my phone and googled LeGon and Aimee looked over the images distractedly—she was texting simultaneously on her own phone—while I talked as quickly as I could of LeGon as person, actress, dancer, symbol, trying to keep a hold of her wavering attention, and suddenly she nodded decisively at a picture of LeGon and Bojangles together, of LeGon standing, dancing, in a pose of kinetic joy, and Bojangles kneeling at her feet, pointing at her, and she said, “Yes, that one, I like it, yes, I like the reversal, man on his knees, woman in control.” Once I had that “yes,” I could at least start on the research for what would appear as text in the catalog, and a few days later Judy took the photo, slightly at an angle, missing parts of the frame, for Aimee had asked that they all be rephotographed this way, as if “the photographer was dancing herself.” As far as these things go, it was the most successful piece in the show. And I was glad of the chance to rediscover LeGon. Researching her, often alone, often late at night, in a series of European hotel rooms, I realized how much I had fantasized about her as a child, how fundamentally na?ve I had been about almost every aspect of her life. I’d imagined, for example, a whole narrative of friendship and respect between LeGon and the people she worked with, the dancers and the directors, or I’d wanted to believe that friendship and respect could have existed, in the same spirit of childish optimism that makes a little girl want to believe her parents are deeply in love. But Astaire never spoke to LeGon on set, in his mind she not only played a maid, she was in actuality little different from the help, and it was the same with most of the directors, they didn’t really see her and rarely hired her, not for anything except maid parts, and soon enough even these roles dried up, and not until she got to France did she begin to “feel like a person.” When I learned all of this I was in Paris myself, sitting in the sunshine, in front of the Odéon theater, trying to read the information off the sun-blanched screen of my phone, drinking a Campari, checking the time compulsively. I watched the twelve hours Aimee had allotted for Paris disappearing, minute by minute, almost faster than I could experience them, and soon the cab would come, and then an airstrip would fall away beneath me, and onwards we would go, to another twelve hours in another beautiful, unknowable city—Madrid. I thought of all the singers and dancers and trumpet players and sculptors and scribblers who had claimed to feel like people, finally, here, in Paris, no longer shadows but people in their own right, an effect that possibly required more than twelve hours to take effect, and I wondered how these people were able to tell, so precisely, the moment that they began to feel like a person. The umbrella I sat under gave no shade, the ice had melted in my drink. My own shadow was huge and knife-like under the table. It seemed to stretch halfway across the square and to point at the stately white house on the corner, which took up most of the block and outside of which a guide at that moment held up a little flag and began announcing a series of names, some known to me, some new: Thomas Paine, E. M. Cioran, Camille Desmoulins, Sylvia Beach . . . A small circle of elderly American tourists stood around, nodding, sweating. I looked back at my phone. And so it was in Paris—I tapped this sentence out with my thumb—that LeGon began to feel like a person. Which meant—I did not write this part down—that the person Tracey had imitated so perfectly all those years ago, the girl we’d watch dance with Eddie Cantor, kicking her legs, shaking her head—that was not really a person at all, that was only a shadow. Even her lovely name, which we’d both so envied, even that was unreal, in reality she was the daughter of Hector and Harriet Ligon, migrated from Georgia, descendants of sharecroppers, while the other LeGon, the one we thought we knew—that happy-go-lucky hoofer—she was a fictional being, born of a typo, whom Louella Parsons dreamed up one day when she misspelled “Ligon” in her syndicated gossip column in the LA Examiner.
Nine
The grenade went off finally on Labor Day. We were in New York, a few days away from leaving for London, with a plan to meet Lamin there, his British visa finalized. It was foully hot: the rancid sewer air could prompt a smile between two strangers in the street as they passed each other: can you believe we live here? It was like bile, and it was the scent of Mulberry Street that afternoon. I had my hand to my mouth as I walked, a prophetic gesture: by the time I reached the corner of Broome I’d been fired. It was Judy who sent the text—and the dozen like it that followed—all of which were as stuffed with personal invective as they would have been had Aimee written them herself. I was a whore and a traitor, a fucking this and a fucking that. Even Aimee’s personal outrage could be outsourced to a secondary party.
A little light-headed, woozy, I got as far as Crosby and sat down on the front step of Housing Works, on the vintage-clothes side. Every question sprouted more questions: where will I live and what will I do and where are my books and where are my clothes and what is my visa status? I wasn’t so much angry with Fern as annoyed at myself for not better predicting the timing. I should have been waiting for it: didn’t I know exactly how he was feeling? I could reconstruct his experience. Working on Lamin’s visa paperwork, buying Lamin’s air ticket, organizing Lamin’s departure and arrival, his pickups and his drop-offs, enduring the e-mails back and forth between him and Judy at every stage of this planning, devoting all time and energy to somebody else’s existence, to somebody else’s desires and needs and requirements. It’s a shadow life and after a while it gets to you. Nannies, assistants, agents, secretaries, mothers—women are used to it. Men have a lower tolerance. Fern must have sent a hundred e-mails about Lamin these past few weeks. How could he resist sending the one that would blow up my life?
My phone buzzed so frequently it seemed to have an animal life of its own. I stopped looking at it and focused instead on a very tall brother in the window of Housing Works, he had tremendous high-arched eyebrows and was holding up a series of dresses against his thick frame, stepping into a pair of roomy high heels. Spotting me, he smiled, sucked in his stomach, did a little turn and bowed. I don’t know why or how but the sight of him galvanized me. I stood up and hailed a taxi. Some questions were answered quickly. All the stuff I had in New York was in boxes on the sidewalk outside the West 10th Street apartment and the locks had already been changed. My visa status was linked to my employer: I had thirty days to leave the country. Where to stay took longer. I’d never really paid for anything in New York: I lived on Aimee, ate with Aimee, went out with Aimee, and the news my phone brought me of the price of a single night in a Manhattan hotel made me feel like Rip Van Winkle waking from his hundred-year sleep. Sitting on the front steps of West 10th, I tried to think of alternatives, friends, acquaintances, connections. All links were weak and led anyway back to Aimee. I considered an impossibility: walking in an easterly direction down this street till it met, in some sentimental dream, the west end of Sidmouth Road, where my mother would answer the door and lead me to her spare box-room, half buried in books. Where else? Where next? I had no coordinates. Unhailed cabs went by, one after the other, and fancy ladies with their little dogs. This being Manhattan, nobody paused to watch what must have looked like a staged reenactment: a weeping woman, sat on a step, under that Lazarus plaque, huddled by boxes, far from home.