The Poser (10 page)

She would not give me her real name. “It's not the one I chose” is all she said. Her sole memory of her father, a goateed professor who left when she was three, was of him, in a silk waistcoat, holding her above the crib in a room of laughing construction workers. She produced a photo of her mother, looking like Lucy in disguise, with fake eyelashes and a fur stole. A minor stage actress in her time, she catered to men her whole life, as Lucy described it, and now lived without memories in a nursing home in Chinatown.

Lucy described her own men to me, with a detached, if vivid, interest. Among this crowded list she included Bernard casually, as if I already knew. “We went around for a bit,” she said. “He's a good man to see when you're feeling low because he makes you just a little looower.” Only when she was spontaneously cold, as she could be, or strangely remote, as happened, did the specter of these men, Bernard among them, haunt me. After all, I knew what they wanted. We, all of us, were like tired desert animals lining up to sip from the same oasis. Mostly, I enjoyed hearing her talk this way because there was a softened, hesitant, dreamy quality to her voice that I thought might lead me to her thread.

To Mama alone did I recount my secret repeated attempts to imitate Lucy, scribbling it to her in my letters like some deranged taxonomist. “So I've tried the way she walks (headfirst, rangy) in combination with the way she talks (loooong vowels), the way she talks in combination with how she tilts her head (a kind of smirking tilt). I've tried the way she pares her toenails, dries her hair, ties her shoes, opens envelopes, but Mama, none of it works!” It was Mama who first suggested I watch how she slept, not knowing the great frustration this would cause me. “That's a start at least,” she wrote. “No one's pretending while they sleep.”

In fact many nights I couldn't sleep anyway, hearing Lucy breathe, trying to match the rhythm of it. In slumber, though, the mystery swallowed her whole, contrary to Mama's theory. Lucy, a self-contained mound. I couldn't stand it, and once while she lay on her side, I reached under the covers and ventured a finger inside her—dry at first, but then wet. She stirred but didn't wake, produced a “Hmmpph” sound, as if considering a pleasant puzzle.

Yes, what I kept from Mama was how close fucking brought me to Lucy's thread. This goes a long way in explaining why I could barely keep my hands off her, even in public, why our sex mattered so much, and how unsettling it was when she withheld it.

We'd lie in bed, the radiator baking our cheeks. I'd run my finger up her thigh and lightly kiss her neck. “No, not tonight.” I'd try again. “I'm tiiired,” she'd say or, “A gal needs her beauty sleep, Giovanni, those performances can be
ex-hawww-sting
,” and I'd toil over the covers, corked and jittery, while she heaved in sleep next to me.

But this one time I needed her: that moist buried star inside her, I needed it. When we made love (“fucked!” corrected Lucy), her eyes, her smell—she began to unravel. I saw her shape emerge, as if out of a deep mist. Her thread almost—
almost
—appeared. I nuzzled her neck.

“C'm
oooon
,” she said.

“You can't do this.”
Tears were piercing my eyes.

“Do what?”

“You can't give it to me sometimes, then keep it away!”

“What? My pussy?”

“Yes,” I said, though it wasn't what I meant.

“O
kaay
.” The smirk was nearly audible. “Come and get it.”

Afterward, she'd kiss my chest and go to the bathroom, and I'd lie in bed, waiting to hear the water start. Once it had, I'd tiptoe to the mirror and attempt that shocked, hunted look, but it wasn't,
was never
right, and as soon as the shower had cut off, I'd retreat, heart pounding, to bed. Before that, though, for a delving moment, I'd lie there, considering the windows walled in frost. A stranger might be looking up at them right then, I'd think, wondering who was up there. And it made me nearly tearful, yes strangely joyful to think, I am.

 • • • 

Lucy performed Sunday afternoons at the Communiqué with an effete piano player named Geoff who snapped his head at the striking of certain high notes. Lucy herself sang huskily into the microphone and swayed in place like a mechanical doll. No banter, no seductive preambles introduced their songs. Geoff injected what life he could into each piece, but Lucy seemed bothered up there.

“That was sh
iiii
t,” she'd say afterward, Geoff trailing contritely behind her. Each Sunday I wreathed compliments around her neck, and each Sunday she shrugged them off.

“It was great,” I'd insist. “Best yet.”

“Lie-er!”

It was true. All of Lucy's ballsiness abandoned her onstage. Through most songs, she seemed hesitant to leave the microphone stand. The few times she did venture to the hemline of the stage or kicked out her leg or shimmied to her knees, it was always with a curbed physicality, an awkward smile, like that of someone apologizing for a misstep.

Yet I looked forward to these sets as they were a rare opportunity to watch her without being seen, and often in the dark, I would sway and tap my foot as Lucy did in that tollbooth of light. But it didn't help. Her voice was too husky, her hips too bridled.

“I do wish she were better,” a voice said one afternoon. I turned, and there was Bernard, raising a cigarette to his mouth.

“She's improving.”

“You're too kind,” he said. “Or think you ought to be. The stage always calls her bluff.”

Years later a man at a party out west would tell me that he once snorted a drug so good he refused then and there to ever do it again. That's how I felt with Bernard. I could feel it happening again.

“I assume Lucy told you about me and her,” he said.

“She did.”

“That doesn't bother you, I hope.”

“It doesn't.”

“Her goal is to undress the world. That's what draws her to people like us, who can't be undressed so easily.”

Together we watched the object of our talk, in her sleeveless green dress, swaying indecisively.

I said, “And the girl likes a good dicking, too.”

He said nothing, smoked. Like that, I hated myself.

Their song ended. Lucy and Geoff struck up a new, stilted number.

“I was surprised how much trouble you had doing her,” he said. “Onstage, I mean.” With that, he patted me on the shoulder and walked away.

From the beginning we had planned on Mama's coming to the City—first in the fall, then Christmas, then late January—but bad luck kept delaying her visit. Days before she was to take the train in October, Sandra DeMille, her beloved coworker at the library, suffered a stroke while shelving a textbook on naval history, cracked her skull on the fall from the ladder, and fell into a coma. The resident brain doctor at LaClaire County Hospital implored Mama to contact a member of Ms. DeMille's family, as the human voice, he said, reading or simply chatting, represented the patient's last tie to the living world. Since Sandra had no family to speak of (her husband had died of a cardiac thrombosis years before), Mama canceled her trip and spent the next five weeks running shifts, along with Mimi Washington and Doris Huitt, sitting by tube-fed Sandra in the hospital, reciting passages from
Journey to the North Pole
and
Everest, At Last!
, tales of exploration always having been her favorite.

The week before Christmas, with Mama planning her second trip—having recovered from the initial devastation of Sandra's fall and having arranged for Wendy Delacroix to take her afternoon shift by the patient's bedside—Sandra died. “Our time here is very short,” Mama wrote in her letters. “I must see you.” Because there was no one else, it fell on Mama's shoulders to organize the funeral and oversee the devolution of Sandra's considerable estate (her deceased husband the scion of one of Sea View's oldest shipping families) in the absence of a written will.

Herman Mayfield, local lawyer, aided in the stickier legalities. As it had been established town gossip for years that Mayfield adored, and perhaps in his timorous way, loved Sandra, no one questioned his motives in the matter, and it was with the unspoken, but essential, blessing of all of Sea View that Mama and Mayfield donated the lion's share of Sandra's estate to the small, cherished library where Sandra had devoted so much of her time, both personal and professional. The remainder was bequeathed to the county's public school system in keeping with the beliefs and philanthropic history of the DeMille family. There appeared a sweet obituary in the Sea View
News
, which Mama clipped and mailed to me. “There was too much ice on the road for many people to come,” Mama wrote of the funeral. “But there was a memorial at the library where all kinds of folks came to pay their respects. Mr. Halberstam and others gave very eloquent speeches. Who knew? You can live next to a person all your life and not know the feelings inside them.”

Those weighty matters settled, Mama rescheduled her twice-delayed trip for late January when bad luck, this time in the form of one Jesse Unheim, a rakish and far-flung nephew of Sandra's, sauntered into town. Unheim was a known entity in Sea View, having gone to Sea View Middle School, where, two years my senior, he readily established himself as the town's miscreant. In fact, I knew Unheim personally, as he and I were often sentenced to afternoon detention at the same time—me for having once again duplicated a classmate, him for a whole menu of sin. Most famously, he drowned Arnold Polski's gerbil for sport. Another time, he prank-called the office, pretending to be the husband of his homeroom teacher, a man everyone knew to have run off weeks before with a checkout girl at Sawyer's Market. Inspired only by a dislike for Ms. Edinger, Jesse left a choked-up message, saying he had made a terrible mistake for leaving a woman like that, and would she find it in her heart to take him back?

After he was expelled from Sea View Middle School, Jesse's father moved the family to Dun Harbor, where by all accounts Jesse worsened. There was a petty theft, car theft. He went to prison. Once out, he moved west. Many presumed him dead, including the late Sandra DeMille, who referred to her nephew, the few times she could bring herself to (being a woman of famous discretion), as “the poor boy.”

And so, one frigid Wednesday, this very same Jesse Unheim knocked on Mama's door, dressed in a canary-yellow suit despite the icy weather, accompanied by a short, energetic lawyer he introduced as Morgan Le Fleuer. Ashplant in hand, Unheim demanded his aunt's estate be returned to him, her only surviving relative.

“Some of you may have thought I'd never come back,” he informed Mama. “I'm sure you wished I wouldn't! Anytime a person gets out in the world and escapes this rat-trap, they must be dead, huh?” Unheim claimed he had found work as an actor in Fantasma Falls, and, though he had sworn long ago “never to return to this site of youthful struggle and underappreciation,” he had collected his lawyer (this is when he introduced Le Fleuer) and flown back to Sea View as soon as he received word of his aunt's untimely collapse and death. He then informed Mama that he was suing her and Herman Mayfield for fraud and for a “baseless and altogether illegal misappropriation of family funds,” a phrase ominously exact in its wording.

Common sense, however, dictated that Judge Sutpen, who knew Mama's and Herman's motives could not have been purer, would toss the case in a heap of rage, but Sutpen soon fell ill (bone cancer, bad chance) and was replaced by a new circuit judge from the landlocked county of Dyersburg, a tough, ruddy ox named Judge Thomas Tunder, who carried no loyalties to the community and exercised a clinical, dogmatic approach in all matters of jurisprudence. What's worse, Le Fleuer proved oddly well versed in the byzantine narrows of inheritance law, convincing Judge Tunder early on that a fair trial could not be conducted with a jury culled from the townsfolk of Sea View, since the community more or less abetted the decision made by the defendants. Mayfield objected and was overruled. The judge knocked his gavel, and soon Mama and Mayfield faced a gallery of twelve strangers from the town of Desperate Pines, fifteen miles away.

The trial lasted two months. A day didn't go by that Mama didn't write me to reprise the latest indignity she and Mayfield were forced to suffer. Included in her letters were newspaper clippings (the trial metastasizing into a major county scandal) that contained in their own right a skilled court artist's inked sketches of the trial, so I came to possess a piecemeal cartoon of all that strange drama: I saw cartoon-Mama sitting at the defendant's table, a righteous skein in her eyes. I saw Jesse Unheim, that haughty dandy, smirk etched into his face, hair parted down the middle, thin legs tapering into squiggles. (I remembered him as chubby with intelligent, scheming eyes, but he had lost weight and grown handsome.) Mama had said about Unheim, “He's the kind of man who struts around in borrowed clothes,” and I knew what she meant from the pictures. His whole dandy act, even in cartoon form, was fraught with unease.

Mayfield, who in the drawings was always chewing his nail or tapping his fingers on the defendant's table, Mayfield, whose very neck was a rectangle of queasy pen strokes, called as witnesses the entire cartoon population of Sea View to exhibit (a) how much the devolution of DeMille's estate resonated with the conscience of the community and (b) how little love the late woman had harbored for her nephew. Many witnesses recalled her referring to Unheim as “a scoundrel,” “my good-for-nothing nephew,” and (to gasps in the courthouse) “a cocksucker.”

Even sure-footed Le Fleuer (who in those drawings appeared as a kind of French horn of a man) buckled a bit under this avalanche of testimony and, in what many local reports took as a sign of his increasing desperation, produced a letter supposedly written by Sandra DeMille to her young nephew in which she wondered, “Where is this young Jesse? I know you've made mistakes in the past, but I don't think it's right for those mistakes, especially for a young man's mistakes, to define who he is. Home can be a cruel place. You are, Jesse, and have always been a part of the family.” Le Fleuer carted in his own handwriting expert (an undertaker by the look of the court sketches) who verified the “authenticity” of the letter.

Things were looking up for Mama and Henry Mayfield when, during a nasty spell of rain in mid-March, Jesse Unheim and Morgan Le Fleuer disappeared.
Poof
. Not at the Home Away from Home Inn. Not at McSteven's, Connell's, or any of the county bars. A garbage man, interviewed by the Sea View
News
, reported seeing four men in overcoats shove Unheim and Le Fleuer into a gray van around four-thirty a.m. one Tuesday. In their absence, Judge Tunder was forced to drop the case, and in the following weeks, word fumbled down the ladder of gossip that Unheim had owed money to the mob out west. By dangling the carrot of his aunt's estate, he had persuaded his creditors to lend him their lawyer—hence the bizarre competence of Morgan Le Fleuer. But the mob grew impatient with Unheim, lost faith in his chances of winning in court, and removed him. Or so the story went. As before, he was now presumed dead. He had come—hijacked Mama's life—and disappeared, this pathetic Unheim, who failed even at villainy.

Throughout this ordeal, that trial sketch of Unheim seeped into my imagination. I dreamt I caught that sketch of him in bed with Lucy, enmeshing its squiggly legs with hers. Dreamt I was lost in the bowels of the Communiqué, racing to find the stage, and when I reached the wing and stepped out, there stood that sketch of Unheim in my spotlight, Max next to him, the stage transformed into a courtroom.

Why, in all those months, didn't I take the five-hour train ride to Sea View and sit by my poor mother's side? Why did I content myself with writing her, with a leisurely reading of her struggles? There were reasons, though they all seem pale and tired now, like suspects under an interrogator's lamp.

For one, I'd offered to come. In letter after letter, I'd
insisted
on coming—even booked a train ticket—but Mama refused: “I miss you more than you know,” she wrote, “but please don't involve yourself in this mess. This Jesse is a joke, your Mama will be fine. Besides, what would your volunteers do if I stole you away from them?” And I, as always, obeyed, too naïve to know a woman's insistence in such cases is asserted solely to be overruled.

Even so, I might not have risked leaving for fear of deserting Lucy. In my absence, I was sure, she'd forget who I was or vanish altogether. Like Unheim. Thrown in a van, whisked away. If Lucy was five minutes late for dinner, if I couldn't find her after a performance, I experienced a light, if well-hidden, panic. She was one of those people who seemed ripe,
primed
for disappearance.

Plus, I had developed an allergy to Sea View. Or the fear of one. So many smiling angels had descended upon me since I'd escaped—Lucy, the Communiqué, these new handsome manners—all of which would float away from me, I was sure, if I so much as entered Sea View.

Besides, Mama and I had recovered such naked words in our letters it seemed a shame to test them with faces. A few times she and I spoke on the lobby phone, but it was never the same: We were tentative and alien. We hung up, ran to our pens. Our retreating hearts needed those letters, the distance and redemptive
fiction
of letters. That's what Jesse Unheim was now: insidious and pathetic, but
fictional
. He, and the home from which he and I had both fled, transformed into a cartoon. Ah, that Sea View could have remained so, that Mama and I could have lived as pen pals!

 • • • 

She visited on April 15, two weeks before Max and I were set to leave on a ten-city national tour arranged by Bernard and financed by the famous eccentric and patron of the arts, Marguerite Harris, granddaughter of the late oil baron D. W. T. Harris. Bernard had invited her to a March performance, and Harris, who above all sought out that which was “fresh,” declared me just that. A week later, Max and I met Ms. Harris and Bernard at the Harlequin Club on Forty-third Street. Within fifteen minutes Bernard and Max were phoning her lawyer. It amazed me how quickly the business was settled. Fates sealed with a handshake. As if to confirm a process already under way rather than inaugurate a new one. How long did it take Achilles to return Hector's body to Priam? For the Trojans to accept the horse?

There was
one
hitch, however: Giovanni, who delighted Ms. Harris's appetite for wit—
He's something, isn't he?
Oh, what a strange boy!—
insisted that an obscure singer, Lucy Starlight, open for him on these twenty tour dates. Lucy who? Ms. Harris asked. Bernard laid his hand on her elbow, whispering in her ear. “Why then it's settled,” she said. “A boy needs his toy.”

The day Mama was to arrive, I took a cab to Central Station and waited under its canopy. I wore an old pair of jeans and a suede jacket, an outfit I had owned for years, so as not to betray Mama with some new look. And yet, while waiting, I adopted a posture of cavalier world-weariness: shoulder against a lamppost, legs crossed, hands buried in my jacket pockets, a kind of cowboy's pose I never would have assumed in Sea View.

In front of me, as I waited, unfolded a tableau of arrival and departure common to any airport, bus terminal, or train station, any depot where travelers stricken with luggage ship off or dizzily return. Families hailed taxis and picked at the luggage-loaded arriver until he carried no bags. Many kissed and patted and hugged, and it was always so clear, just from the tension and grip, whether the hug meant hello or goodbye. A stranger in that scene looked amazingly like my mother, craning her neck in the timid way one searches for someone in public. “Mama!”

She smiled. I couldn't believe it. It had been just seven months, but Mama was years older. That can happen: in a month, a week, going to the kitchen for a glass of wine, a person can age fifteen years. Maybe the trial had done it. Her hair, shoulder length, was stippled with gray. Her cheeks puffed and pouchy. Yet her eyes were the same. We hugged.

Amazing how easily you forget the only things that matter, I thought, as we motored uptown to the Restless Sailor Inn. Right there, in the vinyl backseat, Mama. “The train ride was just fine! Just fine! Oh, you don't know how good it is to see you.” She rested her head on my shoulder. I put my arm around her, an action I'd performed for the first time with Lucy. “This trial, Giovanni, beat the life out of me. Jesse Unheim, that little prick—excuse me, Giovanni, you know I don't like to curse.”