The Poser

by Jacob Rubin

  By the glow of the vanity mirror Bernard Apache sat, smoking a cigarette, his brown trousers around his ankles, his moon-white legs spread. A head of long black hair bobbed furiously between his thighs. “Oh,” he said, seeing me.

  Lucy did not try to right her appearance or dissemble—a futile task anyway, but a kind of expected courtesy—beyond shooting up and rubbing her mouth with the back of her hand, straightening her tousled dress and saying, “Giovanni, oh my G-ah-d, Giovanni!” She squeezed and unsqueezed her fists, nervously.

  I squeezed mine, too.

  “Giovaaanni!” She hopped up and down. “What are you doooing here?”

  “Meeee?! What am I doing heeeere?” Like that, I had it! Yes! Her thread. The eyes had been right all along (hurt, wronged, accused, accusing), but I was missing the hands and tantrum feet. This was Lucy. When I would thrust her from behind and she would look back with those horrified, happy eyes, it was to reward me, to announce that she had, for a moment, been caught. Caught is what she wanted to be.

  “Stooop it,” I said to her. “Just—just leave me alooone.”

  Now that I had it, I could pull away, each strand joining the whole—the tilt of her head, the wild vowels. “Giovaaanni, please,” I said, squeezing and unsqueezing my fists. The plastic-covered clothes on the rack, the rusty pipes, Apache, who had pulled up his pants but did not move from the chair, lighting a cigarette; Lucy who headed for the door—all of it seemed to be shaking.

  “Giovaaaaanni! Nooo!”

  • • •

  A wailing infant on the crosstown bus, a homeless man saying, “Howdy do,” an irate black preacher surrounded by bruisers in fezzes notifying Second Avenue that God would be returning in a few days and wouldn’t be pleased. “You will be saved or you will be damned!” I yelled back at him. “A decision is required, it is required!” until one of those fezzed meatheads shoved me to the curb. “You the lieutenant of the devil,” he said. “Be gone, white man.”

  My ending up at the Ambassador Hotel must have required various darting actions—packing a bag, hailing a cab, surviving the rich, handsome life of the lobby (the perfume shop manned by women who seemed always to pull down the ends of their blouses in a state of vigilant self-maintenance; the ring of armchairs by the window where men with pinky rings and silk cravats spoke in hushed voices)—though I remember only shutting the heavy door to room 3015, entering that sealed chamber ensconced in crimson drapes. It was what I’d come for, that hotel-room silence, thick and expensive (yes, in this fevered state I began to celebrate money and its uses for the first time; it was a means of separating yourself from the noises of the street by thirty stories, to hide away in some tower by the park; I thought of it, physically, as padding that you could stick between yourself and the world).

  And yet, after only an hour or so, the silence proved far worse than any street noise. Like outer space, it coaxed a body to explode. I coughed up what voices I knew, but each stung my throat. Pacing, squeezing my neck, I noticed a radio on the nightstand. I flipped it on, undamming the voices. A newscast. A radio play about pilgrims. I mumbled along, like a parishioner. With some relief, I let it play through the night. That way, if I woke up at three a.m., there would be something in the air.

  After three days, I tried parting the curtains and stepping out onto the balcony, but that general waft of noise, the honks of trucks and taxis, even at this distance, attached itself to me, and I shut both the curtains and balcony door.

  Still, I believed I could conduct my life from that room—or would have believed it, if not for bad dreams, so solid they seemed to inhabit the room. In one, the hotel room was transported to the stage at the Communiqué, where an infinity of faces peered down at me, holding clipboards or winding large watches. Among the faces were all my old classmates in Sea View, Mr. Heedling, Bernard, Marguerite Harris, Mama, and Lucy. There was that man in the wedding dress from Marguerite’s party repeating, “Quite good, bravo, really.” Later I barged into the greenroom to find Lucy between the knees of a skeleton. Driven by this dream, I one night launched myself out of bed, dropped to my knees on the carpet, and worked my head up and down. “Giovaaanni! No!” I said again, whimpering, an ad for cigarettes playing in the background.

  Soon I set up the hotel desk chair, so I could grip its arms as I bobbed my head. After a few beats, I would turn, as if sensing someone behind me. Then I would wipe my mouth with the back of my hand, shift my weight to my left leg, and come to a standing position. “Giovaaaaanni! No!” I would say, stomping my feet. I alternated stomping my right and left feet more quickly, balling and unballing my fists while bringing myself to tears—tears that ended abruptly the moment I started over, kneeling again, and placing my hands on the arms of the chair.

  I repeated the act, turning off the radio in order to concentrate fully. With each iteration, I began to place more weight on the arms of the chair, a tweak that helped give more spring to the moment when I turned around, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, and put the weight on my left knee. I had started around three a.m., working straight till eleven a.m., when the crashes and ascents of inspiration flatlined into a kind of airless certainty. My mouth felt wind-bitten from the all the rubs I’d given it with the back of my hand. Peering down at that chair, I understood, in a moment of hopelessness, that no matter how many inches I moved it, no matter how I threw my voice or accelerated my stomping, this chair would not be a person.

  I turned on the radio again, my head splitting. And yet just as quickly shut it off. Before I knew it, I was hunting for socks.

  I would find him in the office upstairs. “C’mooon, you, we’re going to the greeeeenroom!” I’d say, leading him by the hand. Like Lucy herself, I wouldn’t care who saw us. And I could picture him laughing as I led him backstage, being game. Perhaps he had already done such things before. Perhaps he was, in his inscrutable way, all but encouraging it.

  As soon as I stepped into the hallway, though, I ducked back into the room. This time I sat on the chair, sliding my pants down my legs until they pooled about my ankles. I worked my way into that lightly perturbed expression. I sat there for some time, letting it “soak,” as Mama used to say. It needed something. I pulled my pants up, and with purposeful strides, entered the life in the elevator and lobby, passing the doormen in broad, brass-buttoned overcoats. With those same strides, all but holding my breath, I made my way to the corner store where I purchased a pack of Blue Arrow cigarettes.

  Returning to the safety of my room, I lit a cigarette with matches the cashier had given me. This made it better, except Bernard never used matches, and the falsity of striking one opened a fissure in the act. So I pulled up my jeans and ventured outside again, purchasing a silver-plated lighter at a tobacconist on Amity Street, maintaining what calm I could as I waited, along with two chatty tourists, for the gold-trim elevator doors to part. Then I hustled back to my room where I sat back on the chair and slid my pants down, this time trying the lighter.

  It was better, yes. But with this difficulty cleared up, my attention soon scurried to my ankles. Bernard, of course, had been wearing his customary suit, the fabric of which must have felt quite different from my bunched-up jeans. At first I tried to simulate the feeling of his suit by wrapping my legs in a bedsheet. Then I considered my shirt, which was, of course, all wrong. And my bare feet, which were not wearing his cowboy boots. It was like trying to plug holes in a sinking ship, only to have another appear.

  The next morning, very early, I went downtown to Bernard’s tailor, from whom Max had first rented and later bought our tuxes. (Of course, I could have enlisted the concierge in accomplishing these various tasks, but the idea of explaining any of it to him, even in Max’s voice, brought back a terrible sense of panic.) Whenever on the walk my nerves crackled, I smoked a cig.

  Marco, a perpetually drunk Greek in suspenders, kept repeating what I said to him. “Same as Mr. Apache?”


  “Same, yes,” I said.

  “Same exact as Apache?” he said.

  “Yes, exactly the same.”

  With a bewildered shake of the head, as if my request represented the latest instance of a larger, dispiriting trend, he reached wanly for his tape measure. “Next Friday,” he said after taking my measurements.

  That was nearly two weeks.

  “No,” I said. “I need sooner.”

  “Next Friday.”

  “Tomorrow,” I said.

  “Tomorrow?!” He looked as if I had insulted God.

  “I pay double. Double.”

  “Fastest. Three days. Absolute fastest.”

  The rest of the morning I looked for the starched white shirt, cowboy boots, and bolo tie. Shopping, what little I did of it, always caused me a certain dread, but this task was easier, for I knew exactly what I wanted, finding the first item easily enough and locating the latter two in the window of a western-themed boutique near the children’s park. I rang both the tie and boots up without trying them on.

  • • •

  The following days were spent in stunted and anxious reimagining of the scene as I waited for the suit. I kept sitting in the chair, trying it again, but it would not be right, would not work, until I got the suit. This slow assembling of my costume did seem, however, to favorably alter my dreams. As before, I dreamt that I wended my way through the backstage of the Communiqué to the greenroom, where I found Lucy with another man. This time, however, that man was me.

  The morning I was to pick up the suit, the doorbell rang. I had been seated at the chair, trying a new variation, and leapt up at the sound. I tiptoed to the door and, heart loud in my ears, peered through: there appeared a dark convex shape I soon recognized as Max’s eye.

  Quickly I surveyed the room. The chair, standing in its center, had exerted, it seemed, a magical pull on all nearby furnishings: the bedsheets groping at its legs, the nightstand drawn to its side. On that nightstand sat an ashtray piled high with cigarette stubs along with the silver-plated Zeno lighter, and four more unopened packs, the whole thing like a presentation on the life cycle of a cigarette.

  The bell rang again. Hopping from one foot to the other, I yanked off the cowboy boots. I unnoosed the bolo tie and chucked it and the boots in the bathtub, like a drug dealer hiding his stash. Then I drew the shower curtain closed and, with one last organizing breath, swung open the door. “You found me!” I tried to make it sound happy.

  Max smiled in a pained, knowing way. With a sigh, he brushed past me, entering the hotel room like a detective with a warrant. A moment later, he paused in front of the chair, taking it in, as he did all the room, with a slow-nod-deep-pout combination. His look seemed to indicate that this chair sculpture was just about exactly what he imagined he’d find here. Continuing past the chair, he walked to the curtains, parting them with a conductor’s grand, winging gesture. The midday light poured in. He pulled up the window, too. In came the whining of cars. I went for the cigarettes.

  “Smoker now, huh?”

  “Oh, not really,” I said. He looked at the nightstand with its four packs of cigarettes and burial mound of stubs.

  I lit this new one, cupping my free hand around the lighter, a gratuitous gesture given the total lack of wind but helpful in that the act, as a part of the larger process of lighting the cigarette, furnished me with a way of speaking—urgent, no-nonsense—as if the cig itself were talking through me. “In all seriousness, I’m glad you found me.”

  He sighed, looking around, and then raised his arm and slapped the side of his thigh. He seemed not yet ready to acknowledge me conversationally. “I checked the Communiqué, even Lucy’s. The Hotel San Pierre, just in case. I checked the Ambassador, the Belvedere, all the way down to Zephyr House, but then the old wheels started turning.” He tapped his temple. “And I thought, well, if the boy’s hiding, he certainly wouldn’t do it under his own name now, would he? Bernard maybe? Nope, no Apaches. Anthony Vandaline, perhaps? Came up empty. It took several hours, but I got it.” He eased into the chair and saluted gravely with his finger. “Mr. Jesse Unheim, I presume.”

  I opened my arms, trying desperately to attain some levity. “In the flesh.”

  “Were you planning to come to the Communiqué tonight?”

  “What’s tonight?”

  “I don’t know. Our show?”

  “Ah.” I sat down on the corner of the bed, exaggerating a certain mope in my shoulders.

  “Officially you have the flu.” He shook his head. “You know your mom’s worried out of her skull.”

  “I appreciate you two exerting such parental concern, but, really, I’m doing okay.”

  “You look it, this looks great.”

  “Well, I’m upset, man, yeah. Is that a crime?”

  “No, it isn’t.” He was lightly picking through the contents of the nightstand. Then, as if he’d given me enough of a hard time, added, “I heard what happened.”

  I continued to play it somber. “You did, huh?”

  “Bernard’s a bastard.” Looking not at him but at the cherrywood dresser in front of me, I nodded in the jaunty, unserious way of a drug person, that is to say, as if some jazz, audible only to me, were playing in a nearby room. I held the cigarette in a slightly scissoring grip between my index and middle fingers, raising it up to my head. Who was this? Where did these gestures come from? “Your mom thinks you should take a break, go back home for a bit.”

  Sea View. The words alone turned my gut to fricassee. I pictured a sort of antiparade, pictured myself being dragged through the street before a panorama of inbred scowls; Mama bringing her pointed finger up and down, like a judge’s gavel; and only as I began to shake my head saying, “No way, man. Can’t do it,” did I realize that I had been doing Jesse Unheim, the name on my reservation, ever since Max arrived.

  I remembered Jesse’s cadence well enough (rushed, muttering) and his voice, too, flinty even by the eighth grade. In what gaps there were I injected the standard hustler’s body language, gestures I knew from cinematic visions of light degradation, the kind set in roadside motels and two-bit horse tracks. An alloy like this one (taking parts from one and adding to another) often stirred in me a clenched, wired feeling, like an upper at the tail end of its effect, and I was about ready to jump out of my skin. I was standing up again, pacing. I needed to get Max out of there. Needed to get the suit.

  “No, no. I want to work. I’ve got an idea for a new set.”

  “Slow down, boy. You seem quite—”

  “Excited? Well, I am. Look, Max. I holed up here because I’m working on something, okay? Yes, I’m down. Yes, I’m heartbroken, and I should’ve told you, but I’m channeling it, or whatever you want to call it. I’m pouring it into this thing. I can’t talk about it now, but this is going to be big, Max. Huge.”

  I saw his skepticism, like some boxing challenger, putting up a fight and being slowly pummeled by his natural enthusiasm. He extended both arms, ostensibly to calm me.

  “That sounds potentially exciting.”

  “It is, I’m telling you. Hell, you’re the one who’s always saying to catch inspiration while it’s in the room. Well, it’s in the room, and I’m just trying to catch it!”

  “Gotta catch it. Catch it like a little fly. Can’t deny that.”

  “I know I should’ve called you and my mom—and I will call her—but I just needed some time. A couple days.”

  “Couple days?” He stood, Max again. “I mean, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that’s unreasonable.”

  “I don’t think you should.”

  “Channeling, yes. Some of the best work can come from sorrow, boy. Intensity—that’s what matters! Sometimes I believe the intensity trumps the tone of a feeling. Better to be totally devastated than mildly contented, no? I think so, yes!”

  “Yes,
for the love of God, yes!” I had my hand on his back, ushering him to the door.

  Just then he stopped. He seemed to peer through the cracked door of the bathroom. Could he somehow see the boots in a parting of the shower curtain? “I’ll give you two days, but tell me something about it. Something to nibble on.”

  “It will be . . .” I thought of the word as I ushered him out the door. “Total.”

  • • •

  Marco unzipped the canvas garment bag, handling the suit with the unsparing intimacy of those in his trade. Physicists describe tiny particles of mammoth density. That’s how I felt as he delivered it—so compressed I might burst. Awkwardly I walked in my cowboy boots to the changing room. There it happened, in that small wooden space. As if a trapdoor had opened, and I fell through it, out of this world, leaving behind only this lanky image in the mirror.

  “Keep the change,” I told him. A bell jingled as I left.

  Outside, in the humid afternoon, a mortal fear of rain seemed to grip each passerby. Some furrowed their brows as if already soaked. Others walked with needless pace, upraising their palms every few seconds or patting their heads to check for the first proof of wetness. I purchased a street umbrella and walked west. When the cloudburst came, I opened it, the rain making a great sound against it, like thick grass being cut.

  The hall maintained its own internal climate, a zone both airless and bright. Hands scrubbed the copper bar tops, others swept. A concerted, preparatory hour. There was the brushing of brooms, the light knocking of chairs. The empty stage imbued it all with unity and imminence, like some warship prepped before a grave setting off. “Glad to see you’re feeling better!” a voice called.