Jacob Rubin - The Poser

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’m oooon ,” 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.

“O kaay .” 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 sh iiii t,” 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.”