Black Elvis Read online

  "Marketing, you say."

  "I've got me a gig here already for next weekend."

  Black Elvis was quiet for a moment. "You been to Graceland?"

  He laughed. "Graceland! Well of course I've been to Graceland. Everyone in Memphis has been to Graceland."

  "What's it like?"

  "What's it like?" He gave a silver ring on his middle finger a half turn. "Tacky. In some ways, it feels like holy ground, but at the same time, you also feel like you're at an amusement park. The Jungle Room is pretty cool, I guess."

  "Sun Studio?"

  "They have tours, but I've never done one. If you're so interested, you ought to go."

  "You think so?"

  "Sure. Why not?"

  "You got connections there? Like who could get me a gig?"

  Robert Johnson considered this. Black Elvis realized that he'd done exactly what he'd wanted not to do, which was to put this person in a position where he had power over him. But he couldn't get it out of his head that there was something about this meeting that was more than chance. He had a feeling Robert Johnson was someone he was supposed to meet, if only he could determine why.

  "I don't think so. I mean, if you're going to do an Elvis thing, you're probably better off just about any place but Memphis. Of course, that's just my opinion."

  "I'll bet they don't have no black Elvises."

  "Are you kidding? Black, Chinese, Irish, Jewish, you name it. You think fat white men in hairpieces have the market cornered on Elvis impersonation? I know a place where they have a dwarf who sings 'Battle Hymn of the Republic' every evening at ten while two strippers give each other a bath, right on stage."

  For a moment, he imagined a big stage—an opera house—with hundreds of Elvises of all shapes and colors pushing and shoving each other to get to the front. The thought made him shiver. "Don't matter. I'm an original."

  "No doubt. If you don't mind my asking, what made you decide to start doing this?" He looked at Black Elvis with admiration. "I love your hair, incidentally. I mean, if I looked like you, Jesus. I'd be working all the time. You just have that natural, blues-man look. You could be John Lee Hooker's cousin or something."

  "I don't care much for blues music," said Black Elvis. He sniffed. "Never have."

  "Really?"

  "I like that rock and roll."

  "Well, whatever makes you happy." Robert Johnson made a move to get up.

  "No, wait," said Black Elvis, suddenly anxious. "Tell me something. Is that what you think? Have I gotten it wrong all this time? Should I be doing something else? You play good, you sing good, you know about marketing. Just tell me and I'll listen. I don't have that much time left."

  Robert Johnson stood up and adjusted his fedora. He looked slightly embarrassed. "I gotta go talk to a young woman over there," he said. "She's been staring at me ever since I got here. I'm sure you understand." He picked up a napkin and held it out. "You got a little nosebleed going there."

  Black Elvis took the napkin and held it tight against his nose.

  When he got home, Juanita was waiting for him in the living room, wearing her chef's hat and a stained serving apron, her wide body taking up half the sofa.

  "You late," she said. "Did you have a good time?"

  "Good time?" he said. He thought about this. He didn't really go to the blues jam for a good time. He went because it gave him a purpose, a place to be, and because by now it just seemed that if he didn't go, all hell might break loose. The sun might not come up in the morning. "I sang you a song," he said.

  "That right? What you sing? One of them Elvis songs?"

  "'Amazing Grace.'"

  "Well, that's nice. You've got blood on your shirt, you know."

  "Mmmm hmmmm." He pulled up a chair and sat opposite her. He had not turned on any lights, and her figure was shadowy and evanescent, like a glimpse of a fish below the surface of a fast stream. "You supposed to be dead, now."

  "Supposed to be."

  "Bad ticker, huh?"

  "Just stopped on me."

  "Hurt?"

  "Shit yes. For a second it felt like someone hit me in the chest with a sledgehammer. Now, tell me the truth, how come you singing songs for me? You know I don't care for you much at all. I'd have thought the feeling was mutual."

  "Let me turn on a light."

  "Don't do that. I like it better in the dark. Come on, now, what's with the song?"

  Black Elvis closed his eyes for a moment. "There was a man there, a Chinese man. He took my spot."

  "And so you go all churchy? You just nothing but a hypocrite. Just a big old faker."

  "I don't believe in you," said Black Elvis. "And I'm turning on the light."

  "I don't believe in you, either," said Juanita. "Go ahead."

  He cut on the light and she was gone, as he'd suspected she would be. From the street below, he heard shouting and laughter. He went over to the window and pulled back the curtains just far enough to see.

  The two boys he'd seen earlier were out in the middle of the street. One had a spray can of paint and was walking slowly back and forth, while the other, the bigger one, watched and occasionally shouted encouragement. At first, he couldn't tell what the image was, but then the lines began to come together and he realized that it was him the boy was painting, Black Elvis, spray-painted twenty feet high and glowing against the asphalt. He watched in amazement as the details took shape, his pompadour, the serious eyes, sideburns, pouting lips.

  "Believe in me," he said. "Stupid woman."

  Know Your Saints

  Back in May, about the time that Larry's fiancée, Gwen, was coming clean to him about the professor she had been sleeping with—apparently there was no book group or yoga class—his aunt Julia's boyfriend, Frank Packard, had run his Alfa Romeo right off the side of the autostrada. Frank, whom Larry had never met, was now in a coma. "I'm just sort of waiting to see," Julia told him over the phone, her three-thousand-mile-distant voice as clear as if it were next door. "But in the meantime, there's lots of room here. You're totally invited." That night at Loch Raven Liquors, as Larry shelved case after case of Italian wines, the names began to stir music inside him. Abruzzi, Montepulciano, Veneto, Valpolicella. When he got back to his apartment—empty now, of all of Gwen's soft things—he got online and bought a ticket, charging it to his already overburdened Citicard. Pot smoke and the sound of bad guitar strumming drifted up from the apartment downstairs; in the street, a man was shouting at his wife. "I tole you," he said. "I tole you."

  Julia was an occasional actress, in her forties, his mother's youngest sister, and the oddball of the family, particularly in her choice of men. She had once brought a guy to Thanksgiving whose entire face was covered in Maori tattoos, even the eyelids. She'd been married, briefly, but no one had ever met the man, and she never spoke of it. Frank Packard was a different kind of choice.

  "He has Alzheimer's," she told Larry his first night at the apartment, which was on the fourth floor of a sixteenth-century palazzo, with a view of the Boboli Gardens off the tiny back terrace. Frank, who'd had a successful dental practice in Buffalo, New York, had some years ago moved to Italy with the intention of writing mystery novels. But he'd started to suspect that there was something going wrong with him. "It's not too bad, yet," Julia said. "He's, like, sixty, seventy percent. I guess. I mean, I didn't know him before, so I can't be sure. Our deal is that I take care of him, help him spend his money and enjoy himself and, you know, not get lost. Then, later, he leaves it all to me."

  "You have this in writing?" asked Larry, who was still jet-lagged.

  "I guess that would have been smart," she admitted.

  He asked if she was working and found out that she was spending her days in front of the Uffizi spray-painted gold and posed as an Egyptian sarcophagus, although it was becoming increasingly clear that she'd have to go home soon. Also, Packard's ex-wife was in town. "Buzzard," she said. "Just circling, you know?"

  Larry spent his first few day
s drinking way too much, staring cynically at tourists, and copping poses with cigarettes that he hoped would be noticed by attractive women, but weren't. He imagined Gwen locked in a summer-long coital embrace with her new lover, taking breaks only long enough for him to explain the finer points of Marxist philosophy. Larry needed something to occupy his time, some sort of a project—otherwise his head was going to blow up. The town was full of art history graduate students giving private tours.

  "Performance art!" Julia cried delightedly when he ran the idea by her. "I can help you find customers. I meet people all the time. I'll look for the dumbest faces and the nicest shoes. People with money always have good shoes."

  "Let's not call it art," he said. "Let's call it theft."

  He doubted he'd be able to pull off the deception for long, if at all. Perhaps it would lead to a fistfight. Secretly, though, he hoped he might meet a girl, someone to take his mind off his broken heart.

  To his surprise, he turned out to be a reasonably good guide. No one seemed to know that "Massachusetts State" was not a real school (he had in fact gone to Hopkins, studied English, and played bass, badly, in a retro-punk band, The Meretricious Popes). Even for the clients willing to pay for tours—he charged a hundred euros for five hours—visiting the museums and churches was still mostly a duty to be fulfilled, a required purgatory to pass through on the way to afternoon gelato. They were not suspicious. There was a Japanese family of four who nodded a great deal and had him take their photo in front of Pizza Ponte Vecchio, then took his; there were Carol and Cliff from Ohio who were mostly interested in counting angels ("Look, Cliff, look how many there are in that one!").

  He told the Japanese family that the pictures underneath various altarpieces at the Accademia were called the pudenda, and even got them to repeat it. He explained to a woman from Van Nuys that the Medicis had been crypto-Jews. He told Carol and Cliff that since Saint Peter was always depicted holding a key, he was the patron saint of locksmiths (Cliff was a locksmith). Some of the information he gave out was accurate—he'd eavesdropped on a few real guides, studied a guide to Florence he picked up at a tabacchi, and had done his best to remember information from the Survey of Western Art class he'd taken sophomore year—but he also made a point of saying things that were simply outrageous (though the locksmith comment, to his surprise, had turned out to be true). He told the Frankenthaler family from Bayonne that Michelangelo had done a series of pornographic woodcuts at the request of the Pope, and that these were kept in a special vault at the Vatican, too valuable to be destroyed, too embarrassing to be acknowledged. Before 1500, he explained, all depictions of Jesus showed the holy genitalia—loincloths were painted over later, mostly by Titian.

  They met in front of the information office at the train station, as arranged. Bob Seitz was gray haired, in his midfifties, of average height, with overly tanned skin and a nose that appeared to have been broken at some point—it took a distinct turn to the left. He wore the kind of "travel" clothes you find in SkyMall catalogs—khaki cargo pants, a white, short-sleeved shirt, and a vest with an absurd number of pockets in it. He was allergic to something, and behind his round glasses both his eyes were rimmed red.

  It was a particularly hot Tuesday morning in July, and Larry's hangover was bad. He'd stayed out late drinking Scotch and listening to an Italian band called Hard Again do covers of Muddy Waters songs. Bob Seitz shook Larry's hand enthusiastically, his grip powerful, the backs of his hands, Larry noticed, practically cobwebbed with hair. "Pleased to meet you," he said, and he really did seem it. "I'm looking forward to this."

  They walked together to Santa Maria Novella. "Masaccio basically scared the hell out of everyone with this painting," Larry said, when they were in front of the Trinity. "They thought it might be black magic. Look how the figure of Jesus comes out at you."

  "Who are those people praying?"

  "Rich people who paid for the painting. If you paid for a painting, you got to be in it. Even a crucifixion. Noblemen and clergy show up—in Renaissance outfits—at the Annunciation, the flight into Egypt, you name it."

  "Like getting your photo taken in Washington with a cardboard cutout of the president?"

  "Exactly. That skeleton at the bottom is a memento mori—a reminder about death."

  "I spent two hours in that Uffizi yesterday," said Bob. "You know who I saw there? Jeff Goldblum. Honest. He was with some young blonde. Very cute. But she looked, I don't know, maybe sixteen. Tell me about Saint Francis. What's the deal with him? What did he do? He's like Dr. Dolittle, right? Talks to the animals?"

  Francis was Larry's favorite. "Classic case of dementia. The guy had a fight with his father, who was a merchant, his father disowned him, so he went off to live in the woods, where he basically had a psychotic break, or found God—you choose. Came back covered with mud and preaching, which in those days was a reasonable career path. Pretty soon he had followers, and the next thing you know, he's on key chains and coffee mugs. One of his big miracles was that he saw demons flying over a city, then sent one of his monk buddies to chase them away. He didn't even go himself. Personally, I think the demons were swifts. They're all over the place at sunset around here, catching bugs, darting around."

  Bob had wandered up to the altar area and was looking at the wooden crucifix that hung there.

  "The cross is probably by Giotto," said Larry, who thought he hadn't said Giotto enough yet today. He liked the way it felt in his mouth, like chewing gum. People always nodded reverentially when he said Giotto. "Notice the bones at the bottom? The medieval understanding about the crucifixion was that it happened conveniently right over the spot where Adam's bones were buried. Jesus's blood trickles straight down to them and boom—Resurrection."

  "That Jeff Goldblum, he's even taller than you think."

  "Is that right?" said Larry.

  "After here, I go to Venice," said Bob. "This was a trip my wife always wanted to take." He made his way to a bench along one wall of the nave and sat down suddenly.

  "Are you okay?" Larry asked. Bob sniffed, took a handkerchief out of his pocket, and blew his nose loudly.

  Larry figured the best thing to do was to keep going. "Here's how to know your saints. Peter holds keys—those are to heaven. John the Baptist is always shown in a hair shirt. Francis is usually on his knees looking surprised as he's getting zapped from above by holy rays."

  "Holy rays?"

  "Then there's Stephen, who looks a little like he's joined the Mickey Mouse Club, with these round ears over his head, which are actually supposed to be rocks. Lorenzo—that's my guy—holds the grill they barbecued him on. Agatha had her breasts cut off, and you'll often see her holding them on a plate. Like little custards or something."

  Bob looked at him.

  "Oh, it's a celebration of pain and suffering." Larry checked his watch. "OK, there's the museo next door, which has some pretty good frescoes, although they're weathered, and then we go to San Marco and look at the Fra Angelicos."

  Bob stood and put away his handkerchief. "One more question," he said. "On this whole Resurrection business." He paused, blinking, then continued. "The guy died, then came back to life, as I understand it."

  "That's the idea," said Larry.

  "Then what?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean, where is he? If he came back to life, shouldn't he be here?"

  "Well, he went up to heaven."

  "Alive?"

  "Right."

  "So, heaven is full of dead people, souls and all, and one living person?" Bob dug into a pocket of his vest and produced a small vial of pills, shook one out, and swallowed it with water from a bottle that emerged from a different pocket. "I'm not trying to be difficult. Honestly. Is it easier to care about these things, these saints and Last Judgments and whatnot, if you believe in them? Or do you just look at the pictures like it's a Superman comic?"

  Larry saw that an actual guide—a young Italian man he'd run into before and who he w
as pretty sure was suspicious of him—had come into the church along with a middle-aged American couple. "Superman comic. The Roman Empire never went away, you know. It just transformed into Christianity, then continued to eat everything in its path. The cult of Minerva becomes the cult of the Madonna. Instead of lots of different gods to pray to, you substitute saints. People couldn't read, so the authorities gave them pictures to look at instead. The world hasn't changed so much. Back home, the cult of Seinfeld gives way to the cult of Friends , but it's all still the empire of American big business putting up the shrines."

  "What do you plan to do with this degree when you get it?"

  "I don't know," Larry said, thoughtfully. "Teach, maybe."

  Bob poked a finger behind his glasses and rubbed his eye. "I'm in insurance. Claims investigation. Or I was. I'm retired now."

  "You know Double Indemnity? I love that movie."

  "Barbara Stanwyck," said Bob, revealing some teeth. "My wife was named Barbara."

  Larry started toward the door. "Do you find many cases of fraud, then?" The real guide, a guy a year or two older than him, with Italian clothes—a dark silk shirt, expensive-looking trousers—was pointing at the cross and saying something about Brunelleschi. Their eyes met briefly, and they nodded at one another.

  "Oh, sure. People stage or cause auto accidents, for instance, then sue for bodily injury. In Brooklyn, we get a lot of that."

  "What do you do to them?"

  But Bob didn't answer. His gaze had drifted back to the crucifix. Larry found a Life Saver and popped it in his mouth.

  At the Museo, Larry identified various Old Testament stories for Bob in the frescoes, making up ones he didn't know. He should have been having fun—Julia had negotiated a fee of 150 euros from Bob—but he wasn't. He just wanted this to end.