Jacob Rubin - The Poser

“But I still can’t do her!” I stomped my foot. Heedling — that’s who.

“It’s the head, I’m telling you.” She said, “The tilt of her head.”

“Oh, c’mon . Like I haven’t tried it.”

“Let’s see.”

I shucked off my shoulders. I took a deep breath. “Giovaaaanni,” I said, “you’re so creeeeepy .” I was going around in a circle by the roof’s ledge in that gait of hers, a kind of sped-up lumbering. “Are you kidding me?” I said. “Our show was teeeerrible .” I was tilting my head too much. “Geoff keeps fucking up.”

“Almost,” Mama said. “Walk a little slower.”

I slowed down, sped up. I threw my head back. I cackled. I ranged around the roof, lying on my side, hands folded under my head, breathing that slow, deep-sleep breath.

“No, no,” Mama said. “Stand up.”

Marguerite and the man in the wedding dress had gathered near us like spectators drawn to a foreign ritual.

“Try the head again,” Mama said.

I heard my neck crack. “But it iiiiiiiisn’t right, Mama,” I said. “Giovaaaaanni.”

“Tilt it more.”

I was groaning.

“No, no, no,” Mama said. “The head!”

But I was grunting and moaning. “Oh, Giovanni, oh, oh, yeah!” I was grinding the air with my pelvis. “Oh, Giovanni, oh!”

I could hear Marguerite cackling.

“Giovaaaaanni, you’re gonna, you’re gonna…”

Mama blanched. But I couldn’t stop.

“… you’re gonna maaaaake me cum !”

There was silence. The man in the wedding dress spoke first. “Bravo, really. Quite something.” “How little one needs to understand in order to adore!” Marguerite added. Then I turned and saw Lucy. A tear hung in her eye. I tried to say her name but could only say: “Giovaaaanni!”

I had never seen her cry before, her eyes like blurred pits. “Lucy—” Now that I landed on her name, I could only say it. “Lucy!” But she ran away, and after a frozen moment I chased after her. As I wheeled on to the head of the stairs, a herd of those homeless men was coming up it, thick as the crowds in midtown. “Excuse me,” I said. “Please!” I tried to push through, but there were too many men, so many. A familiar voice came crying out behind me: “You must understand. He’s just sympathetic, sympathetic to the bone….”

What I remember of that tour are the phone booths: on street corners, in hotel lobbies and gas stations, those phone booths, which across the country have graffiti keyed into their doors and smell like human palms. The country lay before us like a nude in an oil painting, and I didn’t once sneak a peek, burying myself in those booths as into a vertical tomb.

Soon after Marguerite’s party word had trickled from Lucy to Bernard, from Bernard to Max, from Max to me, that Lucy had quit the tour. “She doesn’t want to see him” is the message I received. It seemed absurd that so many people could fit between us. I did all the things: sent flowers and cards, waited outside her apartment, called and called again. I couldn’t know if I was doing it correctly, if I was picking the right cards, sending the right flowers, saying the right things.

Mama rang to comfort me. I saw her to the train the day after Marguerite’s party in a state of mute despair. “She’ll call you,” she said on the phone a few days later. “Tomorrow you’ll hear from her, I guarantee it, Giovanni, or the day after. And if you don’t, well — what you did on the roof — she has to know that’s who you are .”

I said, “Yes.”

The tour was clammy hands competing to shake mine. The vegetable smell of certain stages. Everywhere we went I saw her silhouette: patterns of shade on a suburban lawn, the stars above the desert.

We held a press conference in the lobby of the Bellwether Hotel in Lake City, the crown of the Midwest where we were scheduled for four sold-out nights at the Northern Juke. We sat before a conference table topped with a floral arrangement of microphones. The cameras whirred and cranked. The journalists hovered over their chairs instead of sitting in them.

“How’d you learn to do it?”

“Same way I learned to walk.”

“How’s that?”

“Who knows?”

Chuckles.

“What do you think about when you’re doing it?”

“A choice combination of everything and nothing.”

Guffaws.

“What do you think accounts for the popularity of your act?”

“I don’t know. But I’ve never trusted popularity and don’t plan to now, just because I’m enjoying some.”

Applause.

The quotation marks swaddled me. It was all something I could say, something I could mean, but the reporters jotted it down as news. One fingered a stray lock, another smirked to himself. I could see them right then hatching their phrases, cherry-picking their quotes to concoct the mystique of Giovanni the Celebrity for their readers, men and women who would happen upon these pieces while waiting for their toaster to spit out their bread or while buckling along on the elevated train, readers who would wonder about this Bernini and so buy a ticket for the tour date nearest them, readers who might, at first, hover by the back of the amphitheater before edging forward to volunteer themselves, readers who would enter the spotlight with circumspection and leave it with merriment — the merriment of having been verified —and all of us, in that way, collaborating in a lie.

Touch. This is what Max prescribed. “ Distract yourself, boy. Goddamnit, that’s what life is — food, money, sex. Sex and money , Giovanni!” He escorted the faux-coy to the beaded leather booths where we always somehow were.

The sheer pulchritude — I couldn’t stomach it. Those buxom brunettes, those doe-eyed blondes, all armed with rehearsed insights and sweet rebukes for the traveling entertainer. “You’re like a sculptor,” said a redhead with a waist as wide as my hand. “And we’re all your marble.” “I’m all right,” I said, “I’m okay, thank you,” and disappeared to claw at Lucy through the phone.

Once — once! — I caught her at the end of the line. I stood in a telephone booth in the lobby of a hotel out west, decorated in melons and pinks. It rang for a long time. Finally I heard, “Heeello?”

“Lucy?!”

There was a pause.

“I didn’t meeean to pick up. I’m going.”

“Please.”

“Whaaaat?”

“Oh, please, oh, please.” I said, “I love you.”

There was the phone-crackle.

“Ugh, I know,” she said and hung up.

• • •

Those two words— I know —buoyed me the last days of the tour. As did that sound she’d made: ugh , that grunt of disgust, so nakedly expressed it could only be meant for family. Those two words and that ugh —preserved in my brain exactly as Lucy had said them (through the crackling of the line, in a tone of exhausted, motherly forbearance) — steadied my quivering gut, and I returned to the Communiqué that first Sunday I was back.

I caught the last two songs of her set. To watch her sway in that spotlight before a crowd of men in the afternoon dark was to know the blackness of desire. I downed two shots at the bar, waiting until she exited through the wing before opening the side door. I stumbled backstage as through thick undergrowth, tripping, retracing my steps, getting lost again, until I arrived at a small metal table, a replacement for the glass one I’d tripped over months before. Pawing the wall, I located the handle of the door and, with a pause and a wild beating heart, swung it open.