Jacob Rubin: The Poser

I swear I’ve got a museum in my head.

I like you in letters. In the letter you sound like a little boy wanting permission from the world. You’ve come a long way from that, huh? Perving around with hungover eyes? Write me letters, that’s fine. Nothing in person, though. I mean it. I can’t stand a man to throw his thoughts on me like that.

Amelia Stern

PS I’m sorry about your mother.

I read the note ten, twenty, thirty times. As I held it, my room took on a doomed and blanched quality, and a great panic fell on my head.

The next day I showed the letter to Doctor Orphels. I could barely sit still. “It’s the voice,” I said, “the voice inside of her.”

“You sound almost religious,” he said.

“I want it for myself.”

“Want what?”

“That voice! That can’t be spoken.”

“But you have your own, Giovanni.”

“I don’t think so, no.”

“But look at what she said about your letter. She seems to think you did.” He said, “You won’t tell me what you wrote?”

“Honestly, I was in such a state. It was after our session, when I told you about her note to me, and you told me that I ought to explain myself. Those words had never sounded stranger: Explain yourself —I took a long walk at night and all of a sudden I remembered things. That’s when I ran back to my room and wrote her.” I said, “Why do I suspect you’ve arranged this all?”

“Tell me about the envy, Giovanni.”

“When I was imitating you,” I said. “What I envied was the telling — your telling your story. Not just telling it but that it was complete , that it made sense. You explained yourself .”

“Write yours then.”

“What?”

“Your story, Giovanni. Write it to her.”

• • •

Without the benefit of frenzy, the second letter took longer. My fist wouldn’t release the right words, but I took solace in knowing when a phrase was right and when it wasn’t. Soon I found myself writing, “Sympathetic to the bone,” and “Mama’s eyes could do things no one else’s could.” She wrote me back a few days later. Then I told her of the doctor’s suggestion. I didn’t think I could do it, I wrote, unless she, too, provided me with her own letters. The next day there was a note under my door: “Whatever the doctor thinks.”

• • •

Since then I’ve received hundreds of notes from Amelia. Each morning they appear under my door like the most important newspaper in the world.

Here’s one:

Men always take it upon themselves to pity me, but don’t for a minute fucking do it, no. My father’s a rich man, Giovanni, the publisher of newspapers. I had maids, a big fat yellow lab, the advantages. Anything for Amelia, that’s Dad’s philosophy. Here’s an image: He used to spread the Sunday issue out on the floor of my bedroom, and the two of us would roll around on it like mutts.

Her eye is as good as Mama’s. Her notes like clues in a treasure hunt. A crack in a tile, a certain chef’s frown:

Look at the bark on the first tree in the fourth row of the apple orchard. There’s a kind of gray patch on it I really like. The color of an elephant.

Or,

I love the doctor’s teeth. The way he just leaves them out. Does it make him more or less trustworthy?

Sometimes she describes old photographs. Like one of a candidate for state assembly:

He had thinning hair. You know how that looks — like a man failing to keep a secret. I climbed up a fucking tree to get it. To get the spots where the scalp showed, pale as a halibut under his wheat-tipped combover.

Or photographs she snapped with the empty camera:

I took a photo today I wish, I wish, I wish I had a copy of. Of a nurse (young, female) and a patient (the one with the gray goatee?) sitting on one of the benches on the south lawn, right at sunset. Both of them with their hands in their laps, hands not clasped, just floating in their laps, both with their shoulders sort of slumped, both with their heads tilted toward the sunset. The same exact pose. You know the way a dog tilts its head up at his owner — that’s how the two of them looked at the sun.

Her notes are a physical presence for me, a human company, and without their touch I couldn’t have produced this account.

Doctor Orphels saw to it that I was provided with a typewriter. Every night I left a fragment of my life under Amelia’s door, until, writing longer and harder, I would leave a whole sheaf of papers by her door every couple of weeks, describing the spring boardwalk in Sea View, for instance, or the pigeons outside the Stone-Wild Museum. Then I became more serious and asked for the pages I had given her back so I could revise what I had written, add what was missing, and deliver it when complete. She agreed, leaving the pages by my door, and I have been earnestly working since.

Throughout we’ve maintained our promised distance. Given Amelia’s schedule, this hasn’t been as difficult as it might sound. I’ve stayed on B Schedule and, in that way, experience the circuit of No More Walls an hour after she does: I see her residue in the kitchen, in the front lawn during exercise class. A few times I’ve glimpsed her blond ponytail in the commissary or the rose garden and my heart gasped, like seeing a figure from the other side, like seeing Mama, and I turned away, terrified. At first I ached to see her, but I know this is best, the two of us, close neighbors, pen pals.

Or so it had been until recently. At that point I had reached the moment in my story when I started following Amelia, and I asked if we could take a walk together to help me better describe it. The faithfulness of our accounts had taken on a religious seriousness for both of us. Later that day I received a note from her saying, “East Portico 3pm tomorrow.”

• • •

I showed up a half hour early, forgetting how bad being early can be. The night before I had memorized certain remarks in sign language that now crackled in my fingers like static electricity. I tried to run my hands through my hair, pass them over my face, but all they wanted was to talk, to talk to Amelia, yet when I looked up and saw her fidgeting before me, one hand on her hip, they fell dead at my side. The dimple in her cheek looked like a play of light.

I said, “Are you early, too?”

She smiled, snapped a photo of me, and motioned with her hand, as if to say, Are we gonna walk or what?

I nodded. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. After you,” but she had already stepped ahead of me and didn’t see.

We walked as if chaperoned, maintaining a sort of legal distance, and in that way passed through the bee-haunted orchard and the garden. Amelia stayed a pace ahead of me, starting with the second row of apple trees in the orchard, doing what she always did, even with me trailing her, which I took as a handsome sign. From my week of following her, I knew what would come next: a walk to the garden, where she would snap the blue hydrangea bush four times, lean in, and smell its top flowers twice, circle it once more, and then continue down the embankment to the pond, where she would crouch next to the weeping willow.

All of this she did without once looking back, and I felt like Eurydice in the tale of Orpheus, one of the best and most pitiable from Heedling’s class. Watching her head to the embankment, wrapped so firmly in her repetitions, I thought of that myth all over again, and thought I understood it, too. It was that Orpheus loved Eurydice too much to look at her. He had to walk ahead or behind her. But to look at her directly, to see her head-on, the love would become a thing too real to exist. Amelia crouched under the weeping willow, anchored to that patch of earth she trusted. I sat next to her so we could face the same direction and not each other.