“How were you?” said Eloise incredulously. She was sitting on the jump seat, her feet resting on the duffel bag. She stared at him, then said, “You were wonderful.”

They were so embarrassed over everything they started to tease him. Jack, they said. Jack, I’m lonely. Where’s my monkey?

“She doesn’t have a monkey. She has a cat.”

Darling Jack, lovely Jack, come here, I’ll stick my hand up you.

Even Jack was laughing. It was horrible and hilarious.

Eloise said in her fancy voice, “What I would like to know is who the fuck is Jack.”

“Good name for a ventriloquist,” offered Jack.

“Better name for a dummy,” said Fiona: the nice one.

At Heathrow he opened the stolen case. He’d been so certain he would see Willie Shavers looking up at him he couldn’t made sense of it: Captain Sims, the woeful cat; how on earth did he get there? Lottie was meticulous, she said it made a difference, the figures minded where they rested, but it had been careless Jack who’d last packed them up, after a performance in Brighton.

What was the emotion he felt? Less than loss and more than longing. He stared at the slack-jawed cat awhile then shut the case and left it in the airport men’s room. Let the bomb squad explode it. Let it linger in lost property forever.

All the way across the ocean he dreamt of Willie Shavers, the little clicking of his mechanisms, his square shoulders, his thick wig. His slumber beneath Lottie’s bed. Jack should have known that one of them would have to stay behind.

Thereafter, and for years, whenever he was in public—telling a story at a party, delivering a lecture to undergraduates, holding forth in a meeting—he would feel Willie Shavers, not upon him but in him: sliding glass eyes and deadpan disbelief, quirking eyebrows and carved wooden palate, even the dimple that Willie had and Jack didn’t. Even that he could feel upon his cheek. And somewhere behind him, between the small of his back and the nape of his neck (though his body had no other nape and no other small), the ghost hand of Lottie flexed, otherwise uninvolved. She operated no important part of him, nothing at the level of soul or sympathy. Just the bit that allowed him to believe that people might want to hear what he had to say. The part that let him ask strangers for their love, and not care if they said yes.

Mistress Mickle All at Sea