Jacob Rubin: The Poser

It — my hair — was nagging me the afternoon I narrated to Doctor Orphels the worst day of my life. I’d failed to wash it the night before. The doctor’s, meanwhile, shined and behaved, a black swim cap, except for that thin part in the middle. I envied his jeans and starched flannel shirts, too. Nonetheless, I managed to outline that fateful scene at the theater: the call in the office, the brawl between Bernard and me. “Jesse Unheim killed my mother,” I told him and, after the story, confessed that I had never talked about it before.

“How does it feel? To talk about it?” he asked.

“I don’t know yet. Good, I suppose. Emptying.”

“Emptying?” he asked.

“It’s always been that way for me. With my private stories. They’re like babies in the womb.”

“How do you mean?”

“A pregnant woman wants to deliver the baby, of course, but she is terrified, I’d think, to give birth: to divide with her child. It’s like that with these stories.”

“You’re afraid to separate from them?”

“I suppose.”

“This will sound strange: Do believe you were born?”

I looked at my hands. “I think so, yes.”

“You said your mother was the one person you never needed to impersonate.”

“Yes.”

“Is that because she was a part of you?” he asked.

“I divided from her pretty violently when I moved out west. For five years we barely spoke.”

“Escape is a far cry from separation.”

“It sounds wise, Doctor, but you’ll need to explain.”

“The place or person you’re escaping — that is the engine of your days. If your mother was what you were escaping, then you were quite close to her those years. Too close still. Unseparated.”

“Perhaps.”

“Is it a betrayal to be born?”

“Abstractly, I suppose.”

“Is it a betrayal for the baby to divide with the mother?”

“This is all too abstract, Doctor. You can’t talk about life this way. Like it’s some math proof.”

“Please answer the question.”

“But it’s the worst kind of shrink question,” I said. “Really, it’s absurd.”

“You’re unusually defensive today.”

“On the contrary, I’ve been maximally forthcoming.”

“Then be forthcoming again.”

“Let’s move on to something else: your early days in medicine?”

“Let me in, Giovanni.”

“I’m not? I just told you something I’ve never told another soul in all my life. Is that not letting you in ?”

“If you refuse to investigate what it means, yes.”

“How much does something like that have to mean ?”

“Please answer my question,” he said.

“Fine. Is it a betrayal to be born? Yes.”

“Now you’re being dismissive.”

“When you started in medicine, did you immediately know you’d made the right decision?”

“We’re knocking on the door, Giovanni, but you’re refusing to enter.”

“Was it the refuge you hoped it would be?” I asked.

“I think it’s time we moved on.”

“Good.”

He sighed. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed, Giovanni, for I myself have encouraged it. After our first session, I knew you would not talk about yourself, would not begin the therapy unless you could do so in another’s voice, so I lent you mine. I lent you my voice, my posture, my facial expressions. More than that, I lent you my history. It is the New Method, Giovanni. My father’s method. To play the role dictated by transference. Usually one becomes the patient’s father or mother or lover, but in your case, the transference has required my taking on the idealized version of the patient himself, of you, Giovanni Bernini, and so I gave you my life story, let you borrow it. I knew some of your story — the death of your mother, the attack on Bernard, whom you had impersonated for years — and shaped my own so that it could better mirror yours. So far it has worked. You’ve told me quite a lot, and for that I am grateful. And now we’re knocking on the door — your betrayal of your mother. But this, Giovanni, this you must understand. It is not sufficient for you to surround yourself with yet another moat if you are to be cured. Being me is no different from being Bernard. And so it must be said: You are not me, never have been and never will. Your fingers on the armrests of that chair do not feel the leathery scratch as mine do, your toes do not inhabit your cotton socks as mine do, your thoughts do not move and agitate in the skull as mine do. In fact, these past few weeks, as you’ve strode in and out of this office in that eerie reproduction of my gait, walked the grounds and, as me, exuded a subtle superiority over the other patients — all the while you have been yourself. When you were Bernard, you were yourself. When you were Heedling and Max, you were. You are yourself right now. You have always been yourself . Behind the moat there you lie, hiding still. We have just been skating on the surface — we’ve found some words for what ails you, and that’s a start, but we need to plumb deeper now. Tell me, Giovanni, is it a betrayal to be born?”

A window, too high to look through, let in enough light to tell night from day. Sometimes a shoe appeared in it. A bird. When the nurses came for food and medicine, I did not fight them. I yelled, but I did not fight.

The doctor visited. “You are not me, you never have been and never will,” I told him. “Your fingers on the armrests of that chair do not feel the leathery scratch as mine do, your toes do not inhabit your cotton socks as mine do, your thoughts do not move and agitate in the skull as mine do.”

He said, “It’s true, Giovanni.”

I lunged at him. “I lent you my voice, my posture, my facial expressions. More than that, I lent you my history.”

“Go on. Please.”

“When you were Bernard, you were yourself. When you were Heedling and Max, you were. You are yourself right now. You have always been yourself .” Tears flew out my eyes like snot. “Behind the moat there you lie, hiding still.”

My voice was hoarse, but I couldn’t stop speaking, even when alone. “Hell, I was hoping you’d hear about it. Really, what interest could I possibly have in a rotten piece of ass like that? No, when she was on me, I was thinking of you .” “Boy, the whole point of this — the revolution of it — is in imitating the audience. We do celebrities and we’re another two-bit nightclub act. But we get volunteers and we’re artists .” I tried my old radio voices: Richard Nelson’s, Jimmy’s. Each one eluded me. In the moment I reached for a voice, it escaped me, like Lucy’s in those wanting months, each attempt spurring another failed one until I was pacing, wringing one finger at a time. What terrified me most, what caused my heart to throb in my mouth, was to think that it had always been this way. That between each of these voices, the voices of my life, and my own, existed this — this gap . Always, onstage, in class, onscreen, this gap !

Yet I kept talking, babbling, for I dreaded silence more. I hummed, I clapped, anything to cause noise. In silence, I would vanish. I checked my hands, swatted the back of my neck. The fear was so great, I decided to express it to the doctor when he visited, but seeing him there — I had no voice to tell him with. “Your fingers on the armrests of that chair do not feel the leathery scratch as mine do,” I screamed instead. “Your toes do not inhabit your cotton socks as mine do, your thoughts do not move and agitate in the skull as mine do.”

• • •

There were new pills. Maroon. Sun-yellow. One gave me the jitters, another migraines. Orphels insisted we were making progress. Dips along the way to recovery. Important to feel the process, not just talk about it. I said nothing, except to hum or mutter his speech to me. “I know you can hear me,” he said from the other end of that padded room. Eventually I was returned to my room, so someone must have judged me better. It made no difference where they put my body.