Jacob Rubin - The Poser

“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.

The red velvet steps seemed a material confirmation of the gliding I felt with each movement forward. The knob was just the right shape for my hand. Unlocked.

When I entered, he was pacing behind the desk, the receiver in one hand, the phone nestled against his shoulder. A cigarette hung in the corner of his mouth. Behind him stood an elaborate painted screen depicting a charge of soldiers shouldering their way vertically and left, through clots of gun smoke, toward a pink moated castle.

“I don’t disagree, Tom.” When he saw me, he opened his mouth and closed it very suddenly. In a low clear voice he said, “Sorry, Tom. I’ll have to call you back,” hung up the phone, and set it on the desk. He smiled. “Look at you.”

“Okay.” Before he could offer it, I helped myself to the chair across from him.

As if following my lead, Bernard sat behind the desk. “You come to spook me?” He smiled again in that grand fake way.

“Something like that.” Already I was learning so much: The way his eyes changed when he inhaled smoke. How he paused before the last two words of a line, to squeeze the moment. The rain outside was soft and low.

“For the record,” he said, “she told me you two had split.”

“Guess it’s fine then.”

He seemed to consider this. “You knew she and I had some times. What’s one more?” He exhaled smoke through his nose. “I think the word for that is showbiz.”

I said nothing. This alone felt like a revelation — that I was under no obligation to speak.

“She was upset,” he said. “Apparently you put on quite a show at Marguerite’s.”

“Keep talking. You’ll find something that sticks.”

“Look, you’re young. You like Lucy. Guys tend to. Hell, sometimes she even likes them back. Believe me, this gig ain’t your last stop, but it’s hers.”

“All that up to you?” My body felt so pliable, so light — it could tense up or fly away, freed as it was from housing me.

“What can I say?” He made a show of repressing a grin. “The girl likes — how’d you put it? A good dicking?” He did that thing where he revealed the hardness of his eyes without shedding his grin. After a moment, he stood up. My lap began to lift with his, but I tensed, remained seated. “We have some things in common, y’know.”

“I think that’s why I’m here.”

“Is it? I’ve got an inkling you don’t entirely know why you are. Scotch?”

“Sure.” I should have said, “Fuck off,” or nothing at all.

“You ever think about who our customers are?”

Perhaps it was because he was at the sideboard, out of view. I tried the cigarette.

“Y’know, I think about it a lot. Of course, if I’m gonna keep a shop like this in operation, I need to consider who comes in the door, don’t I?”

“Sure you do.”

“Well, a customer’s someone who buys a ticket to the show, right? We could start there. Grown up around window displays and advertisements and radio programs, our man couldn’t help but be born with the dream of becoming one — a customer, I mean. Ask a kid, he’ll say he wants to be a doctor or engineer, some new kind of electric fag who’ll shock the world. And, hell, he may do it, but he’ll also all his life, first and foremost, be a customer just the same way he’ll be a citizen.” He was pacing, out of view. “So let’s say our customer, he meets a nice brunette right out of a glossy mag, and when the time comes, he gets down on one knee because, well, that’s what tradition says to do, no? And he buys into tradition. After all, he’s a customer, hell, that’s the first thing he buys. And he and this little bride, they get a nice apartment on the east side or a split-level out in Woodberry Heights, and they go out to restaurants and drive home with not a helluva lot to say. And he looks out his window at the windows of other customers and wonders what kind of furniture they have and what they look like when they’re vacuuming, doesn’t he? Maybe he gets bored. Maybe he’s sick of watching his pukish little kids do long division, and he decides — well, fuck it, he decides to take out that office girl, the one with the fat ass. The customer’s having an adventure now, isn’t he? And on any given Tuesday night, after chewing on his girl’s cunt for a half hour, he likes to sit on her fire escape and smoke a cig just like that guy in that thing, the handsome one he saw back when he was a customer at the movies. But he’s getting older, isn’t he? Our customer’s getting gray hair! Sundays he sits with the paper and has a good ole time getting as indignant as he can. That’s the service the paper provides — indignity all the way home. Yes, he sprays his opinions at it. He’s got opinions that are his alone, the customer does; they’re precious to him, near holy. Tears come to his eyes when they sing the national anthem at ball games and when he holds his opinions in his mind.” Bernard came into view, grinding out the cigarette in the desk’s ashtray. “But, alas, he’ll forget his opinions. He’ll have trouble remembering what the big ones were and why they mattered. Luckily, he socked away some dough. A gravesite, a funeral — these are his last purchases, his last acts as a customer. And they all gather around it — his customer buddies, his customer wife and kids, the girlfriend, whose ass isn’t fat anymore — and these mourners cry, because they buy that the customer lived a life, don’t they? They weep around our customer’s grave.” He scratched his chin and then waved his hand almost effetely, as if to dismiss all that he had previously said as nonsense. “But what I wonder, as the owner of this outfit, is before he kicks the bucket, why does the customer come to our show?”