Stone Junction

‘Heavens,’ Jean Bluer howled at his first attempt, ‘you’d be arrested in a moment as a transvestite, and any self-respecting drag queen would assist the police. The nylons are baggy. If your upper lip were any thinner you could slice salami. The purse was out of style seven years ago, and you are holding it like a dead baby. Your breasts have ridden up around your collarbones because you have not imagined their weight, thus are holding your shoulders too far back. Also, your feet are too far apart and your center of balance seems to be around your knees rather than between your hips. This is bad, Daniel. This makes me ill.’

After school, Daniel, who lived in a rooming house down the block, was free to do as he pleased, as long as he observed how people looked, walked, talked, and thought. Daniel kept notes, and while he practiced the morning’s lesson in Tao Do Chaung, Jean critiqued them aloud.

‘“Waved.” Which hand? Was this coat buttoned, open, or partially buttoned. You note a blue-striped dress shirt. What sort of collar and cuffs? “European laugh?” “Southern accent?” Meaningless descriptions. The laughter of the French and Italians is completely different. There are well over a hundred southern accents. Precision, Daniel. Detail. Nuance. One perfect gesture or inflection will carry even a hasty physical disguise.’

When Jean Bluer was satisfied with Daniel’s progress, he introduced the second stage, the dance. He started Daniel at the center: muscle, bone, integument – what was connected to what and how it worked. From that center, Jean explained, posture, movement, and gesture naturally expanded.

‘Physique is the deposited history of our forebearers, and thus a component of character. Any voluntary movement is, naturally, a gesture of consciousness – certainly our main interest – but always pay initial attention to the arrangement of muscle, bone, and skin, for they determine the actual form of the movement.’

Daniel learned ten basic walks, each emphasizing a different center of gravity, and therefore a different balance. He worked barefoot to sense the precise distribution of weight and strain. They spent the lunch hour on the street, observing the way people moved their bodies, endless variations on a few skeletal themes. Jean emphasized hands – the position of the fingers, angle of the palms, the speed and force of movement, continually reminding Daniel to look for each person’s pattern of motion, not just isolated moves. And at the end of eighty strenuous days, Jean, pleased with Daniel’s abilities, announced they would move to the third stage of disguise, the poem.

Daniel started with breathing exercises, first establishing a ‘regular’ breath as a median from which to explore different rhythms. ‘Accent, pitch, inflection’ – Jean dismissed them with a wave – ‘they can only be added after you have the basic cadence. Listen to how people breathe when they talk, and the rest falls into place.’ As usual, his advice was amazingly helpful.

From breath cadence, Daniel moved into sound, the vibrating air of vowels and consonants, the bare phonetic minimums and the corresponding placement of teeth and tongue, the subtle variations in pitch and duration. Daniel practiced from Jean’s vast catalogue of tapes as Jean listened for flaws in Daniel’s imitations.

‘Not “you-all”; it’s “yawl.” Roll the jaw – it’s a broad elision… More drag on the gutturals and more hum in the nasals – you’re in New Mexico territory, pahdnah. Pay attention to that tongue! Northern, more forward; southern, let it loll back a little. And diction, Daniel, diction! You’re supposed to be an Irish hod-carrier, not a British barrister.’

Daniel’s favorite of these admonitions was ‘More mumble, please, more mumble.’

When they entered the last stage of disguise, Jean gave a short speech about what he was after. ‘So far we have been involved in the duplication of appearance, movement, and speech. Duplication requires craft. Now we enter art, for the fourth stage requires not merely a physical extension of identity, but its assumption. Real imagination, where you become what you create. And this needs to be stressed: Those identities are already within you. We think of identity as being singular, unique. But it is only the expression of one possibility. Think of identity as a braid of many identities through which the force of life flows – like an electrical wire composed of many smaller, intertwined wires coated with a rubber insulation that keeps them intact, coherent. You are both the Ancient Mariner and the wedding guest, the bride and the groom, minister and derelict. Every person dead, alive, or to be born is within you. Tap that storehouse of selves, draw upon your own body of metaphor.’

The exercises for the fourth stage of disguise, the person, were challenging to the point of absorption. At seven each morning Jean gave him a problem to solve. Daniel had till noon to find a solution, which he performed for Jean. If Jean approved, he sent Daniel out on the streets to present it under real circumstances. The problems were people.

The first was easy. ‘Daniel, become a thirty-seven-year-old union electrician, born in Chicago, with a wife and two children. You fell from some scaffolding two years ago and shattered your left shoulder, living on disability insurance ever since. You’re on your way back from seeing the doctor and have stopped for a drink in an unfamiliar bar. I’ll be taking the part of the bartender.’

The problems soon became more difficult. ‘You are a twenty-year-old female journalism student at Columbia University. You were born in Lubbock, Texas, lived there till you were fourteen, then moved to Newark. Your father is a mid-level executive with Standard Oil, and your mother is a closet alcoholic. You have been increasingly depressed the past few months and have sought help from the university counseling center. I will be a psychologist.

‘You are a thirty-year-old male Puerto Rican cocaine dealer. You’ve been in prison once for three years for assault on a peace officer. You have a scar on your right cheek. I will be a new buyer, whom you suspect may be a narc. You want to be careful, but you could also use a new customer.’

Although Jean always sent Daniel to the street with each solution, it was nearly four months before the sharp, continual criticism gradually gave way to praise. The day Daniel passed through a welfare interview as a fifty-year- old female Colombian immigrant with four children and little English, Jean told him, ‘As you know, you are my first student under my agreement with Volta, and I’m either a much better teacher than I ever hoped, or you are a natural talent. I can find very few flaws lately, and they are flaws only experience, not instruction, can correct. You are good enough to leave any time you choose. I will notify Volta.’

‘Thank you,’ Daniel acknowledged the praise, ‘but I won’t leave until I can fool you as you initially fooled me.’

‘Ah, but Daniel, that was much easier on my part, since you’d never seen me before or suspected I would be in disguise. Do remember that I can spot a disguise very quickly, especially when I’m looking for one. Your chances of getting past me are extremely poor.’

‘With all respect, I believe I can do it.’

‘Very well, if you insist. At the end of Tao Do Chaung each morning, I will tell you where I plan to eat lunch and the route I’ll take to get there. Assume the disguise of your choice and engage me along the way. If you can fool