Jacob Rubin: The Poser

We sat for some time. A cloud of gnats hovered over the pond. I kept fearing she might disappear, or had already.

I turned. You just let me know — please let me know — if you ever want to leave.

When she smiled, it was like the world carving joy into her face. I had never seen a person smile like that. You can speak!

A little.

She punched my shoulder. You didn’t tell me you were practicing.

My last secret.

I doubt that. I doubt that highly, Mr. Bernini. I’d pin you for a secret machine. A secret machine , she repeated for emphasis and dropped her jaw. Then she frowned. A breeze passed and she lifted the camera to her eyes, snapping a photo. You getting all this?

What?

She waved her hand over her face. This. I feel like I’m posing for a portrait. With that, she leaned back, resting her head on her fist. Just as quickly, she snapped back to her previous position. The scrubs made the sound of raked leaves.

I’m getting it. I dared to flash a smile. But by then she was frowning again. Is it a bad feeling? If it’s bad, we can stop. Right now we can stop.

I don’t know. She shrugged. A new one. I don’t like new things usually, but this isn’t so bad. She checked over her shoulder. Twice. You really ought to do something about that beard. I don’t understand a man’s attraction to a beard. It’s something yet to be explained to me in any satisfactory way.

Hiding.

She said nothing.

I mimicked the strokes of a razor along the sides of my face. I can shave it.

It’s okay, I don’t care, really. Just making conversation.

She was sitting cross-legged, tearing out the grass. Each blade made a belching sound. I tapped her on the shoulder again. I’m worried we’ll run out of things to say.

Then we’ll say nothing. She smiled brusquely and then turned again to the grass. A moment later she looked up. And are you hiding now? With your hands? Is that what this is?

My expression, I realized, was greatly exaggerated: my brow ruffled, lips pursed. No, it’s better than that. Everything I’m saying is true, but it feels like, like something I could say , a what if. The quotation marks — it’s like we’re inside them.

Ah, Max’s famous quotation marks. She smiled wanly and tugged again at the grass.

I tapped her. You okay?

She pursed her lips in such a way that the lower lip hung out more than the upper, nodded, and returned to the grass.

I hope I didn’t say anything bad. If I did, please tell me.

But she was facing the ground.

I tapped her. I hope I didn’t say anything bad. If I did, please tell me.

She signaled again, and this time I understood. I cried. I covered my face and bawled. I hadn’t planned to, but there I was, weeping. It had been a fantasy of mine for years: to cry in front of someone I might love, and the moment, finally come, was like most moments. What I mean is, I wanted to be done with it, hide, and it hit me then how lonely a man I was. The loneliness — all of my life it had been my spine, and I didn’t know if I could live without it.

She smiled again, discreetly this time, as if many people were watching.

To the bone, I repeated, and she reached across and rubbed my knee.

We sat in silence. I said, I like speaking this way. It’s like writing letters in the air.

Not for me, unfortunately. Just chatting.

But you have a voice, don’t you?

She shook her head. Nope. A second later, though, she took my hand and placed it around her throat. I didn’t feel it at first. Then it came: a low hum, like the whoosh of a furnace. Then she executed a smile I won’t soon forget: a smile as vulnerable as it was unshy, a smile I would’ve killed for in my old days and might have stolen even then if I hadn’t been so happy — and frightened — to be the lucky fool for whom it was meant.

She released my hand. She angrily ripped the grass out of the ground, lost in her own thought, and then stood up, wiping the bottom of her scrubs. All in all it took about twenty minutes for her to make it back to the east portico. I was wracking my brain for a proper goodbye when she leapt up and kissed me. The whole thing was very quick and bashful, and felt like language. Like a specific meaning that could only be communicated one way: lips together.

That’s all you get till you’re done, she said.

Done?

With your story, and with that she opened the door and entered the sunny house.

• • •

I’ve stayed on at No More Walls for two years. It hasn’t been a thousand days, but one day lived a thousand times. I see the doctor, eat with the patients, and in every free moment, chip away at this account. That I survived all those years without this typewriter seems a miracle. Yes, the practice of writing, as I’ve learned, is the best moat there is, or rather, outdoes the apparatus of a moat, a mechanism very literal and clunky compared with the magic of a story. Words, I’ve come to see, not so much recount experience as replace it, and as I reread this account of the famed impressionist, it is as if he never happened at all or that he is happening only now, here, where he can live as Giovanni the Words.

Doctor Orphels and I have had our moments. Several months ago he accused me of exploiting this story, twisting it into yet another performance — this time, he said, a performance of words. He is right, of course. And I know I’ve toiled over this account not only to improve it, but also to delay stepping out from behind it, back into the gnashing world, where all the applause and punishment are made. I suffered a relapse while trying to write about my years in Fantasma Falls, and he allowed me to speak sign language with him during that time, when my voice wasn’t strong enough. He has read every page I’ve written, he and Amelia, both. Mama, too, I like to think. Her eyes passing over every word.

Max made good on his promise and sent me a letter stinking of beer and ash. He brought news from Mama’s neighbor, Doctor Kessman: how for three months neighbors placed flowers and candles outside Mama’s door; how Doctor Kessman will leave everything as is in Mama’s house until I return. It is quite respectful of him, but I doubt I can ever enter that place again.

Max lives in the City. “The people here still talk of Giovanni Bernini,” he wrote. “Street vendors. Street people, they recognize me still, and they want Bernini. What do I tell them? I tell them the stage is too small for him! And they say, Is that why he went into film? And I said, Films are too small for him. And they say, Politics then? Is he returning to politics? Of course not, I say, Too small, too small. What could possibly be bigger, they ask? And I say, Real Life! He’s entering Real Life!”

The other day I shaved my beard. I look tall and anonymous, a man easily unnoticed. I might be the stranger reading the morning paper at the lunch counter, the man clutching the handrail on the subway. When this account is finished, Amelia and I will take a walk together. The prospect makes me tremble, but I can always run back to my room and write it down. Spying on my life in order to live it.

I do my old work, too, sometimes. Early in the morning I tiptoe down the stairs and out onto the lawn, the sky a bruised blue, the land black. At this hour all is for the birds and their homeless kingdom in the trees. A thousand doors opening in nature: squeaking hinges. I crouch under the oak and talk to them: to the blue jays, the thrushes, and cardinals. It’s in the tongue, the details of a whistle. Just the other morning a riot of bluebirds lighted upon me. Come here , I said. At first they hesitated. But soon they hopped on top of me, tapping me with their curious beaks, amazed that such a creature could be one of them.