The Poser

by Jacob Rubin

  Amelia Stern

  PS I’m sorry about your mother.

  I read the note ten, twenty, thirty times. As I held it, my room took on a doomed and blanched quality, and a great panic fell on my head.

  The next day I showed the letter to Doctor Orphels. I could barely sit still. “It’s the voice,” I said, “the voice inside of her.”

  “You sound almost religious,” he said.

  “I want it for myself.”

  “Want what?”

  “That voice! That can’t be spoken.”

  “But you have your own, Giovanni.”

  “I don’t think so, no.”

  “But look at what she said about your letter. She seems to think you did.” He said, “You won’t tell me what you wrote?”

  “Honestly, I was in such a state. It was after our session, when I told you about her note to me, and you told me that I ought to explain myself. Those words had never sounded stranger: Explain yourself—I took a long walk at night and all of a sudden I remembered things. That’s when I ran back to my room and wrote her.” I said, “Why do I suspect you’ve arranged this all?”

  “Tell me about the envy, Giovanni.”

  “When I was imitating you,” I said. “What I envied was the telling—your telling your story. Not just telling it but that it was complete, that it made sense. You explained yourself.”

  “Write yours then.”

  “What?”

  “Your story, Giovanni. Write it to her.”

  • • •

  Without the benefit of frenzy, the second letter took longer. My fist wouldn’t release the right words, but I took solace in knowing when a phrase was right and when it wasn’t. Soon I found myself writing, “Sympathetic to the bone,” and “Mama’s eyes could do things no one else’s could.” She wrote me back a few days later. Then I told her of the doctor’s suggestion. I didn’t think I could do it, I wrote, unless she, too, provided me with her own letters. The next day there was a note under my door: “Whatever the doctor thinks.”

  • • •

  Since then I’ve received hundreds of notes from Amelia. Each morning they appear under my door like the most important newspaper in the world.

  Here’s one:

  Men always take it upon themselves to pity me, but don’t for a minute fucking do it, no. My father’s a rich man, Giovanni, the publisher of newspapers. I had maids, a big fat yellow lab, the advantages. Anything for Amelia, that’s Dad’s philosophy. Here’s an image: He used to spread the Sunday issue out on the floor of my bedroom, and the two of us would roll around on it like mutts.

  Her eye is as good as Mama’s. Her notes like clues in a treasure hunt. A crack in a tile, a certain chef’s frown:

  Look at the bark on the first tree in the fourth row of the apple orchard. There’s a kind of gray patch on it I really like. The color of an elephant.

  Or,

  I love the doctor’s teeth. The way he just leaves them out. Does it make him more or less trustworthy?

  Sometimes she describes old photographs. Like one of a candidate for state assembly:

  He had thinning hair. You know how that looks—like a man failing to keep a secret. I climbed up a fucking tree to get it. To get the spots where the scalp showed, pale as a halibut under his wheat-tipped combover.

  Or photographs she snapped with the empty camera:

  I took a photo today I wish, I wish, I wish I had a copy of. Of a nurse (young, female) and a patient (the one with the gray goatee?) sitting on one of the benches on the south lawn, right at sunset. Both of them with their hands in their laps, hands not clasped, just floating in their laps, both with their shoulders sort of slumped, both with their heads tilted toward the sunset. The same exact pose. You know the way a dog tilts its head up at his owner—that’s how the two of them looked at the sun.

  Her notes are a physical presence for me, a human company, and without their touch I couldn’t have produced this account.

  Doctor Orphels saw to it that I was provided with a typewriter. Every night I left a fragment of my life under Amelia’s door, until, writing longer and harder, I would leave a whole sheaf of papers by her door every couple of weeks, describing the spring boardwalk in Sea View, for instance, or the pigeons outside the Stone-Wild Museum. Then I became more serious and asked for the pages I had given her back so I could revise what I had written, add what was missing, and deliver it when complete. She agreed, leaving the pages by my door, and I have been earnestly working since.

  Throughout we’ve maintained our promised distance. Given Amelia’s schedule, this hasn’t been as difficult as it might sound. I’ve stayed on B Schedule and, in that way, experience the circuit of No More Walls an hour after she does: I see her residue in the kitchen, in the front lawn during exercise class. A few times I’ve glimpsed her blond ponytail in the commissary or the rose garden and my heart gasped, like seeing a figure from the other side, like seeing Mama, and I turned away, terrified. At first I ached to see her, but I know this is best, the two of us, close neighbors, pen pals.

  Or so it had been until recently. At that point I had reached the moment in my story when I started following Amelia, and I asked if we could take a walk together to help me better describe it. The faithfulness of our accounts had taken on a religious seriousness for both of us. Later that day I received a note from her saying, “East Portico 3pm tomorrow.”

  • • •

  I showed up a half hour early, forgetting how bad being early can be. The night before I had memorized certain remarks in sign language that now crackled in my fingers like static electricity. I tried to run my hands through my hair, pass them over my face, but all they wanted was to talk, to talk to Amelia, yet when I looked up and saw her fidgeting before me, one hand on her hip, they fell dead at my side. The dimple in her cheek looked like a play of light.

  I said, “Are you early, too?”

  She smiled, snapped a photo of me, and motioned with her hand, as if to say, Are we gonna walk or what?

  I nodded. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. After you,” but she had already stepped ahead of me and didn’t see.

  We walked as if chaperoned, maintaining a sort of legal distance, and in that way passed through the bee-haunted orchard and the garden. Amelia stayed a pace ahead of me, starting with the second row of apple trees in the orchard, doing what she always did, even with me trailing her, which I took as a handsome sign. From my week of following her, I knew what would come next: a walk to the garden, where she would snap the blue hydrangea bush four times, lean in, and smell its top flowers twice, circle it once more, and then continue down the embankment to the pond, where she would crouch next to the weeping willow.

  All of this she did without once looking back, and I felt like Eurydice in the tale of Orpheus, one of the best and most pitiable from Heedling’s class. Watching her head to the embankment, wrapped so firmly in her repetitions, I thought of that myth all over again, and thought I understood it, too. It was that Orpheus loved Eurydice too much to look at her. He had to walk ahead or behind her. But to look at her directly, to see her head-on, the love would become a thing too real to exist. Amelia crouched under the weeping willow, anchored to that patch of earth she trusted. I sat next to her so we could face the same direction and not each other.

  We sat for some time. A cloud of gnats hovered over the pond. I kept fearing she might disappear, or had already.

  I turned. You just let me know—please let me know—if you ever want to leave.

  When she smiled, it was like the world carving joy into her face. I had never seen a person smile like that. You can speak!

  A little.

  She punched my shoulder. You didn’t tell me you were practicing.

  My last secret.

  I doubt that. I doubt that highly, Mr. Bernini. I’d pin you for a secret machine. A secret machine, she repeated for em
phasis and dropped her jaw. Then she frowned. A breeze passed and she lifted the camera to her eyes, snapping a photo. You getting all this?

  What?

  She waved her hand over her face. This. I feel like I’m posing for a portrait. With that, she leaned back, resting her head on her fist. Just as quickly, she snapped back to her previous position. The scrubs made the sound of raked leaves.

  I’m getting it. I dared to flash a smile. But by then she was frowning again. Is it a bad feeling? If it’s bad, we can stop. Right now we can stop.

  I don’t know. She shrugged. A new one. I don’t like new things usually, but this isn’t so bad. She checked over her shoulder. Twice. You really ought to do something about that beard. I don’t understand a man’s attraction to a beard. It’s something yet to be explained to me in any satisfactory way.

  Hiding.

  She said nothing.

  I mimicked the strokes of a razor along the sides of my face. I can shave it.

  It’s okay, I don’t care, really. Just making conversation.

  She was sitting cross-legged, tearing out the grass. Each blade made a belching sound. I tapped her on the shoulder again. I’m worried we’ll run out of things to say.

  Then we’ll say nothing. She smiled brusquely and then turned again to the grass. A moment later she looked up. And are you hiding now? With your hands? Is that what this is?

  My expression, I realized, was greatly exaggerated: my brow ruffled, lips pursed. No, it’s better than that. Everything I’m saying is true, but it feels like, like something I could say, a what if. The quotation marks—it’s like we’re inside them.

  Ah, Max’s famous quotation marks. She smiled wanly and tugged again at the grass.

  I tapped her. You okay?

  She pursed her lips in such a way that the lower lip hung out more than the upper, nodded, and returned to the grass.

  I hope I didn’t say anything bad. If I did, please tell me.

  But she was facing the ground.

  I tapped her. I hope I didn’t say anything bad. If I did, please tell me.

  She signaled again, and this time I understood. I cried. I covered my face and bawled. I hadn’t planned to, but there I was, weeping. It had been a fantasy of mine for years: to cry in front of someone I might love, and the moment, finally come, was like most moments. What I mean is, I wanted to be done with it, hide, and it hit me then how lonely a man I was. The loneliness—all of my life it had been my spine, and I didn’t know if I could live without it.

  She smiled again, discreetly this time, as if many people were watching.

  To the bone, I repeated, and she reached across and rubbed my knee.

  We sat in silence. I said, I like speaking this way. It’s like writing letters in the air.

  Not for me, unfortunately. Just chatting.

  But you have a voice, don’t you?

  She shook her head. Nope. A second later, though, she took my hand and placed it around her throat. I didn’t feel it at first. Then it came: a low hum, like the whoosh of a furnace. Then she executed a smile I won’t soon forget: a smile as vulnerable as it was unshy, a smile I would’ve killed for in my old days and might have stolen even then if I hadn’t been so happy—and frightened—to be the lucky fool for whom it was meant.

  She released my hand. She angrily ripped the grass out of the ground, lost in her own thought, and then stood up, wiping the bottom of her scrubs. All in all it took about twenty minutes for her to make it back to the east portico. I was wracking my brain for a proper goodbye when she leapt up and kissed me. The whole thing was very quick and bashful, and felt like language. Like a specific meaning that could only be communicated one way: lips together.

  That’s all you get till you’re done, she said.

  Done?

  With your story, and with that she opened the door and entered the sunny house.

  • • •

  I’ve stayed on at No More Walls for two years. It hasn’t been a thousand days, but one day lived a thousand times. I see the doctor, eat with the patients, and in every free moment, chip away at this account. That I survived all those years without this typewriter seems a miracle. Yes, the practice of writing, as I’ve learned, is the best moat there is, or rather, outdoes the apparatus of a moat, a mechanism very literal and clunky compared with the magic of a story. Words, I’ve come to see, not so much recount experience as replace it, and as I reread this account of the famed impressionist, it is as if he never happened at all or that he is happening only now, here, where he can live as Giovanni the Words.

  Doctor Orphels and I have had our moments. Several months ago he accused me of exploiting this story, twisting it into yet another performance—this time, he said, a performance of words. He is right, of course. And I know I’ve toiled over this account not only to improve it, but also to delay stepping out from behind it, back into the gnashing world, where all the applause and punishment are made. I suffered a relapse while trying to write about my years in Fantasma Falls, and he allowed me to speak sign language with him during that time, when my voice wasn’t strong enough. He has read every page I’ve written, he and Amelia, both. Mama, too, I like to think. Her eyes passing over every word.

  Max made good on his promise and sent me a letter stinking of beer and ash. He brought news from Mama’s neighbor, Doctor Kessman: how for three months neighbors placed flowers and candles outside Mama’s door; how Doctor Kessman will leave everything as is in Mama’s house until I return. It is quite respectful of him, but I doubt I can ever enter that place again.

  Max lives in the City. “The people here still talk of Giovanni Bernini,” he wrote. “Street vendors. Street people, they recognize me still, and they want Bernini. What do I tell them? I tell them the stage is too small for him! And they say, Is that why he went into film? And I said, Films are too small for him. And they say, Politics then? Is he returning to politics? Of course not, I say, Too small, too small. What could possibly be bigger, they ask? And I say, Real Life! He’s entering Real Life!”

  The other day I shaved my beard. I look tall and anonymous, a man easily unnoticed. I might be the stranger reading the morning paper at the lunch counter, the man clutching the handrail on the subway. When this account is finished, Amelia and I will take a walk together. The prospect makes me tremble, but I can always run back to my room and write it down. Spying on my life in order to live it.

  I do my old work, too, sometimes. Early in the morning I tiptoe down the stairs and out onto the lawn, the sky a bruised blue, the land black. At this hour all is for the birds and their homeless kingdom in the trees. A thousand doors opening in nature: squeaking hinges. I crouch under the oak and talk to them: to the blue jays, the thrushes, and cardinals. It’s in the tongue, the details of a whistle. Just the other morning a riot of bluebirds lighted upon me. Come here, I said. At first they hesitated. But soon they hopped on top of me, tapping me with their curious beaks, amazed that such a creature could be one of them.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I owe a great debt to the following people, places, and institutions: my agent, Jin Auh, for her strength, guidance, advocacy, and editorial help; Jessica Friedman, Jackie Ko, and everyone at the Wylie Agency; my editor, Allison Lorentzen, whose instincts, generosity, and steady hand have been a great mitzvah both for me and for this book; Katherine Marino and Sarah Whitman-Salkin for making introductions; Nick Bromley and everyone at Viking for their hard work; Will Staehle for the killer cover art; Andy Fink for my close-up; those friends who read this manuscript in an earlier form and improved it immensely: Marijeta Bozovic, Alexis Gideon, Leslie Jamison, Taylor Materne, Frank Sisti, Jr., Diana Spechler, Chris Stokes, and Ben Wasserstein; Ruth and Liam Flaherty for my delightful stay at Seventy-ninth Street; Jack, Bo, Ann Pettibone Riccobono, and the Riccobono family for my happy winter in Rock City; Teddy Wayne for his support; Vice Admiral Nick Britell; fellow
warrior Nick Louvel; Cameron Kirby, Jesse Schleger, and Ryan Snider, whose visits to Mississippi freed me from my head; Julia Turner, shrewd editor and pal; the New York Society Library and its librarians for fighting the good (quiet) fight; the Jentel Artist Residency Program, a sanctuary; Cormac McCarthy, whose judge said things about fatherhood I stole and gave to the character Bernard Apache; Lan Samantha Chang, who encouraged me for better or worse; my wise and generous teachers at Ole Miss: Tom Franklin, David Galef, Michael Knight, and Brad Watson; my writer pals from Oxford: Matt Brock, Greg Brownderville, Sean Ennis, Will Gorham, Alex Taylor, and Neal Walsh; Barry Hannah, “the sweetest mother in heaven”; my grandparents Ellie, Ted, Evie, and Sey, providers of love, food, stories, and wisdom; my family and friends, bringers of laughter and luck; my parents, Beverly and Jeffrey, lifelong models of love, care, good humor, and kindness, to whom this book is dedicated (thanks, Mom, too, for the title); and my big sister, Nathania, for everything.

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