The Poser

by Jacob Rubin

  This lie, once exposed, paved the way for greater accusations. Soon “anonymous volunteers” came forward, claiming we had rehearsed the impersonations for weeks in advance, making use of complicated microphones to throw their voices. It did not help when word got out in the Monocle and Daily Diary that the act’s first volunteer, a Lucy Starlight, had been sighted repeatedly smooching Bernini at the bars of the Communiqué. Vandaline himself waged a vicious print campaign against us, much, I should say, to Bernard’s and Max’s delight, since the spate of articles only amplified the interest in those Saturday performances by doubling the drama: my imitating the volunteers on the one hand, and the audience’s scanning the stage for invisible strings, microphones, etc., on the other. None of this bothered me: not Max’s fake biography, nor the public’s suspicions. I liked it, in fact. I was no longer a genius but a charlatan, a role I knew how to play.

  This siege on my reputation culminated in Vandaline’s unexpected appearance that night at the Communiqué when early in our performance he rose near the foot of the stage, demanding that I imitate him. Max milked the moment for all it was worth (“Have ye no shame, sir?!”), ushering the pompous reporter center stage, where I mimicked him with no difficulty and much pleasure. The crowd applauded, and Vandaline went on to publish his lengthy mea culpa, which, to my great relief, was too glutted with self-aggrandizing caveats (“Did I push it all too far? Okay, but so did Bonaparte”) to leave any room for mention of the thread.

  A week later, though, I learned from Max that Bernard had secretly arranged the whole thing, persuading Vandaline to go along with the stunt, knowing full well the spectacle it would create. “Y’know how he is,” Max said. “Mysterious as an end and as a means.”

  It was true. When he wasn’t attending to business in his office upstairs, Bernard kept to the back room, playing five-card stud with an unchangeable crew. There were those toughs we met the first day as well as two constant associates: Frankie Diamond and Lou Dust. According to rumor, they were uncle and nephew, strangely close in age. Others said they had nearly killed each other in a bar fight years before and, each stabbed by the other, recovered in adjacent hospital beds, after which they had been inseparable. An odd pair—Frankie tall, with largely veined hands, Lou bell-shaped. They served Bernard in ways both formal and informal, and as they counted their chips or studied a hand, sniped at each other in the style of soldiers or teammates, a banter dense with references to old slights and mutual enemies. Mostly they spoke of Fantasma Falls, out west.

  Around these associates, or the bar hands, or sound guys, Bernard kept silent. This was an expression of power, I understood, one that implicitly equated talk with weakness, and when he did talk himself, his tone was either cutting or grandly deferential, as if he were making a show of lowering himself.

  With me, he was the latter. Sometimes he would give important visitors a private tour, of which I seemed to be the central attraction. One week it was a bone-white dowager noting each detail with delighted shock: “Oh, and people drink here, how vibrant!” Or an important painter, a guy in a long flannel shirt compulsively rubbing his nose with the back of his hand. “Come meet our star,” Bernard would say another time, introducing me to a tall, eagle-faced man with discerning eyes. A senator, apparently.

  “The imitator, got it,” the man said.

  “Oh, he’s a load more than that, Charlie,” Bernard said. “Give him five years, and he’ll have your job.” He told me I would one day run the country. “Once you’ve mastered entertainment,” Bernard would say, clapping me on the back, “any field is open to you in this country.”

  Always, he was trying to get me to play poker. The one time I did join, Bernard stood so quickly his chair slid against the floor. “Here’s the kid keeping this whole place in business.” He waved me to a seat next to his, and as the game got under way, draped his arm over the back of my chair. Smoke clotted the room. A long-necked pianist in the corner played an angular melody. Bernard whispered in my ear how Lou never bluffed or to watch out for Clem. Hand after hand, that same feeling descended, as it had the first time I imitated him. Teeth exposed in laughter. Arms hugging the puddle of chips at the center of the table. And it took all the energy I had to peel myself out of the chair. Lou and Frankie stood, as if seeing off a dignitary, and in the parting of their suit jackets, metal briefly gleamed and then disappeared. “Come again,” Bernard said. “Anytime.”

  That night, on my way home, a skinny man with a misaligned collar asked me how to get to Aberdeen Street. “Oh, it’s very easy,” I assured him and calmly and very clearly sent him in the opposite direction. I waved off his thanks with a big, fake smile. Then I hopped up the steps of the corner store and bought some cigarettes. I smoked one but coughed so much I threw the pack out and woke up that next morning with a torrential headache. After that, I did my best to avoid that back room.

  But Bernard knew what he was doing. The Vandaline affair increased my fame. Like some urban eczema, those faces appeared more and more on the skin of the City: on the side of a delivery van, in chalk on the sidewalk, in spray paint on a fifty-foot rail bridge. People recognized me on the street, asked for my autograph, buttonholed me by the entrance to the train: How do you do it? How can I learn? Teach me. For a time the scandals hardened these public interrogations: “I knew it! Is it true?” “They say you a fraud, man,” a baggy-eyed man told me under the awning of the Hotel San Pierre. “Of course I am,” I answered.

  That’s how I talked now. As I understood it, the public ached to know me and yet refused to believe they did. To understand me would disappoint them as much as not knowing me at all, a paradox that expressed itself most often through touch. Passengers on the subway, waiters at the diner were always patting my back, for instance. Yet, after this presumptuous leap, each would back off, nearly recoil, as if to reestablish the moat that ought, by all rights, to separate a talent from his devotees. What they desired, in other words, was to be confounded, but confounded warmly, a want I was happy to meet.

  But all of that broke down in Lucy’s apartment.

  Given the cold, we spent most days tucked into her L-shaped studio apartment, in a new proximity I found both thrilling and frightful. With Max and Mama, the more I hung around them, the more their gestures seeped into my very person, but with each hour Lucy only wrapped herself in a denser mystery, a thousand details still burying her thread: the way she puckered her lips to blow a hair fallen over her face, the angle at which she rested her head when twirling spaghetti with a fork.

  It had to do with her body, soft and round and the first I’d ever known. I don’t just mean the first I’d ever laid against, shared a bed with, or made love to (a phrase Lucy despised—“We don’t make love, Giovanni, we fuck!”), no, she was the first person, in my life, to exist apart, as a whole. Perhaps I did not always allow for the fullness of people. In the case of Max, for instance, perhaps I was too busy charting the movements of his hands, too busy concocting my “Max” rebus to encounter the reality of his presence. And perhaps (I thought, watching Lucy constructing a lipstick-applying moue in the mirror) the same held for my current volunteers, each of whom I reduced in the moment I met them to a gestural acronym. Perhaps (I thought, watching Lucy, post-shower, brush her hair with strong untangling strokes) all my previous work had been a deception, as I’d felt instinctively our first night at the Communiqué.

  Nearly unraveled by these notions, I sometimes acted in strange ways. One afternoon I took out her tape measure and measured the length of her thighs, the distance from pelvis to breast, knee to ankle, the length of her longest strand of hair pulled down to her chest. She lay there while I did it, without peep or complaint, shifting only to giggle when the metal tape tickled the nape of her neck. “Giovanni, where did you get so straaange?” she said, leaning up to kiss me.

  Generally, though, I was terrified she would grow bored of me, would exile me from her apartment, or body,
and so imitated whomever I could to keep her amused. Strangers on the subway, waiters, friends. Half the time, I was Max, the soundman Alexi, anyone. Each cackle (she had a raucous laugh—cocked her head back and shouted it loud enough to quiet most rooms) I coaxed from her soft and vulgar throat guaranteed me a few more hours of closeness.

  My performances at the Communiqué seemed especially to excite her. “It’s almost creepy,” she’d say after, running her hand up the thigh of my tuxedo. Often she’d sit me down in a chair at the center of the Communiqué and hop on my lap, kiss and tangle with me, even with all those people watching. And yet, in those days I was still very polite and would often say, “Jeez, thank you,” when a waiter brought us soup or “Excuse me,” when shuffling past strangers in the subway. “Where the fuck did they make you?” she often asked.

  She would not give me her real name. “It’s not the one I chose” is all she said. Her sole memory of her father, a goateed professor who left when she was three, was of him, in a silk waistcoat, holding her above the crib in a room of laughing construction workers. She produced a photo of her mother, looking like Lucy in disguise, with fake eyelashes and a fur stole. A minor stage actress in her time, she catered to men her whole life, as Lucy described it, and now lived without memories in a nursing home in Chinatown.

  Lucy described her own men to me, with a detached, if vivid, interest. Among this crowded list she included Bernard casually, as if I already knew. “We went around for a bit,” she said. “He’s a good man to see when you’re feeling low because he makes you just a little looower.” Only when she was spontaneously cold, as she could be, or strangely remote, as happened, did the specter of these men, Bernard among them, haunt me. After all, I knew what they wanted. We, all of us, were like tired desert animals lining up to sip from the same oasis. Mostly, I enjoyed hearing her talk this way because there was a softened, hesitant, dreamy quality to her voice that I thought might lead me to her thread.

  To Mama alone did I recount my secret repeated attempts to imitate Lucy, scribbling it to her in my letters like some deranged taxonomist. “So I’ve tried the way she walks (headfirst, rangy) in combination with the way she talks (loooong vowels), the way she talks in combination with how she tilts her head (a kind of smirking tilt). I’ve tried the way she pares her toenails, dries her hair, ties her shoes, opens envelopes, but Mama, none of it works!” It was Mama who first suggested I watch how she slept, not knowing the great frustration this would cause me. “That’s a start at least,” she wrote. “No one’s pretending while they sleep.”

  In fact many nights I couldn’t sleep anyway, hearing Lucy breathe, trying to match the rhythm of it. In slumber, though, the mystery swallowed her whole, contrary to Mama’s theory. Lucy, a self-contained mound. I couldn’t stand it, and once while she lay on her side, I reached under the covers and ventured a finger inside her—dry at first, but then wet. She stirred but didn’t wake, produced a “Hmmpph” sound, as if considering a pleasant puzzle.

  Yes, what I kept from Mama was how close fucking brought me to Lucy’s thread. This goes a long way in explaining why I could barely keep my hands off her, even in public, why our sex mattered so much, and how unsettling it was when she withheld it.

  We’d lie in bed, the radiator baking our cheeks. I’d run my finger up her thigh and lightly kiss her neck. “No, not tonight.” I’d try again. “I’m tiiired,” she’d say or, “A gal needs her beauty sleep, Giovanni, those performances can be ex-hawww-sting,” and I’d toil over the covers, corked and jittery, while she heaved in sleep next to me.

  But this one time I needed her: that moist buried star inside her, I needed it. When we made love (“fucked!” corrected Lucy), her eyes, her smell—she began to unravel. I saw her shape emerge, as if out of a deep mist. Her thread almost—almost—appeared. I nuzzled her neck.

  “C’moooon,” she said.

  “You can’t do this.” Tears were piercing my eyes.

  “Do what?”

  “You can’t give it to me sometimes, then keep it away!”

  “What? My pussy?”

  “Yes,” I said, though it wasn’t what I meant.

  “Okaay.” The smirk was nearly audible. “Come and get it.”

  Afterward, she’d kiss my chest and go to the bathroom, and I’d lie in bed, waiting to hear the water start. Once it had, I’d tiptoe to the mirror and attempt that shocked, hunted look, but it wasn’t, was never right, and as soon as the shower had cut off, I’d retreat, heart pounding, to bed. Before that, though, for a delving moment, I’d lie there, considering the windows walled in frost. A stranger might be looking up at them right then, I’d think, wondering who was up there. And it made me nearly tearful, yes strangely joyful to think, I am.

  • • •

  Lucy performed Sunday afternoons at the Communiqué with an effete piano player named Geoff who snapped his head at the striking of certain high notes. Lucy herself sang huskily into the microphone and swayed in place like a mechanical doll. No banter, no seductive preambles introduced their songs. Geoff injected what life he could into each piece, but Lucy seemed bothered up there.

  “That was shiiiit,” she’d say afterward, Geoff trailing contritely behind her. Each Sunday I wreathed compliments around her neck, and each Sunday she shrugged them off.

  “It was great,” I’d insist. “Best yet.”

  “Lie-er!”

  It was true. All of Lucy’s ballsiness abandoned her onstage. Through most songs, she seemed hesitant to leave the microphone stand. The few times she did venture to the hemline of the stage or kicked out her leg or shimmied to her knees, it was always with a curbed physicality, an awkward smile, like that of someone apologizing for a misstep.

  Yet I looked forward to these sets as they were a rare opportunity to watch her without being seen, and often in the dark, I would sway and tap my foot as Lucy did in that tollbooth of light. But it didn’t help. Her voice was too husky, her hips too bridled.

  “I do wish she were better,” a voice said one afternoon. I turned, and there was Bernard, raising a cigarette to his mouth.

  “She’s improving.”

  “You’re too kind,” he said. “Or think you ought to be. The stage always calls her bluff.”

  Years later a man at a party out west would tell me that he once snorted a drug so good he refused then and there to ever do it again. That’s how I felt with Bernard. I could feel it happening again.

  “I assume Lucy told you about me and her,” he said.

  “She did.”

  “That doesn’t bother you, I hope.”

  “It doesn’t.”

  “Her goal is to undress the world. That’s what draws her to people like us, who can’t be undressed so easily.”

  Together we watched the object of our talk, in her sleeveless green dress, swaying indecisively.

  I said, “And the girl likes a good dicking, too.”

  He said nothing, smoked. Like that, I hated myself.

  Their song ended. Lucy and Geoff struck up a new, stilted number.

  “I was surprised how much trouble you had doing her,” he said. “Onstage, I mean.” With that, he patted me on the shoulder and walked away.

  EIGHT

  From the beginning we had planned on Mama’s coming to the City—first in the fall, then Christmas, then late January—but bad luck kept delaying her visit. Days before she was to take the train in October, Sandra DeMille, her beloved coworker at the library, suffered a stroke while shelving a textbook on naval history, cracked her skull on the fall from the ladder, and fell into a coma. The resident brain doctor at LaClaire County Hospital implored Mama to contact a member of Ms. DeMille’s family, as the human voice, he said, reading or simply chatting, represented the patient’s last tie to the living world. Since Sandra had no family to speak of (her husband had died of a cardiac thrombosis years before), Mama canceled her tri
p and spent the next five weeks running shifts, along with Mimi Washington and Doris Huitt, sitting by tube-fed Sandra in the hospital, reciting passages from Journey to the North Pole and Everest, At Last!, tales of exploration always having been her favorite.

  The week before Christmas, with Mama planning her second trip—having recovered from the initial devastation of Sandra’s fall and having arranged for Wendy Delacroix to take her afternoon shift by the patient’s bedside—Sandra died. “Our time here is very short,” Mama wrote in her letters. “I must see you.” Because there was no one else, it fell on Mama’s shoulders to organize the funeral and oversee the devolution of Sandra’s considerable estate (her deceased husband the scion of one of Sea View’s oldest shipping families) in the absence of a written will.

  Herman Mayfield, local lawyer, aided in the stickier legalities. As it had been established town gossip for years that Mayfield adored, and perhaps in his timorous way, loved Sandra, no one questioned his motives in the matter, and it was with the unspoken, but essential, blessing of all of Sea View that Mama and Mayfield donated the lion’s share of Sandra’s estate to the small, cherished library where Sandra had devoted so much of her time, both personal and professional. The remainder was bequeathed to the county’s public school system in keeping with the beliefs and philanthropic history of the DeMille family. There appeared a sweet obituary in the Sea View News, which Mama clipped and mailed to me. “There was too much ice on the road for many people to come,” Mama wrote of the funeral. “But there was a memorial at the library where all kinds of folks came to pay their respects. Mr. Halberstam and others gave very eloquent speeches. Who knew? You can live next to a person all your life and not know the feelings inside them.”