The Poser (13 page)

“No,” I said. “I need sooner.”

“Next Friday.”

“Tomorrow,” I said.

“Tomorrow?!” He looked as if I had insulted God.

“I pay double. Double.”

“Fastest. Three days. Absolute fastest.”

The rest of the morning I looked for the starched white shirt, cowboy boots, and bolo tie. Shopping, what little I did of it, always caused me a certain dread, but this task was easier, for I knew exactly what I wanted, finding the first item easily enough and locating the latter two in the window of a western-themed boutique near the children's park. I rang both the tie and boots up without trying them on.

 • • • 

The following days were spent in stunted and anxious reimagining of the scene as I waited for the suit. I kept sitting in the chair, trying it again, but it would not be right, would not work, until I got the suit. This slow assembling of my costume did seem, however, to favorably alter my dreams. As before, I dreamt that I wended my way through the backstage of the Communiqué to the greenroom, where I found Lucy with another man. This time, however, that man was me.

The morning I was to pick up the suit, the doorbell rang. I had been seated at the chair, trying a new variation, and leapt up at the sound. I tiptoed to the door and, heart loud in my ears, peered through: there appeared a dark convex shape I soon recognized as Max's eye.

Quickly I surveyed the room. The chair, standing in its center, had exerted, it seemed, a magical pull on all nearby furnishings: the bedsheets groping at its legs, the nightstand drawn to its side. On that nightstand sat an ashtray piled high with cigarette stubs along with the silver-plated Zeno lighter, and four more unopened packs, the whole thing like a presentation on the life cycle of a cigarette.

The bell rang again. Hopping from one foot to the other, I yanked off the cowboy boots. I unnoosed the bolo tie and chucked it and the boots in the bathtub, like a drug dealer hiding his stash. Then I drew the shower curtain closed and, with one last organizing breath, swung open the door. “You found me!” I tried to make it sound happy.

Max smiled in a pained, knowing way. With a sigh, he brushed past me, entering the hotel room like a detective with a warrant. A moment later, he paused in front of the chair, taking it in, as he did all the room, with a slow-nod-deep-pout combination. His look seemed to indicate that this chair sculpture was just about exactly what he imagined he'd find here. Continuing past the chair, he walked to the curtains, parting them with a conductor's grand, winging gesture. The midday light poured in. He pulled up the window, too. In came the whining of cars. I went for the cigarettes.

“Smoker now, huh?”

“Oh, not really,” I said. He looked at the nightstand with its four packs of cigarettes and burial mound of stubs.

I lit this new one, cupping my free hand around the lighter, a gratuitous gesture given the total lack of wind but helpful in that the act, as a part of the larger process of lighting the cigarette, furnished me with a way of speaking—urgent, no-nonsense—as if the cig itself were talking through me. “In all seriousness, I'm glad you found me.”

He sighed, looking around, and then raised his arm and slapped the side of his thigh. He seemed not yet ready to acknowledge me conversationally. “I checked the Communiqué, even Lucy's. The Hotel San Pierre, just in case. I checked the Ambassador, the Belvedere, all the way down to Zephyr House, but then the old wheels started turning.” He tapped his temple. “And I thought, well, if the boy's hiding, he certainly wouldn't do it under his own name now, would he? Bernard maybe? Nope, no Apaches. Anthony Vandaline, perhaps? Came up empty. It took several hours, but I got it.” He eased into the chair and saluted gravely with his finger. “Mr. Jesse Unheim, I presume.”

I opened my arms, trying desperately to attain some levity. “In the flesh.”

“Were you planning to come to the Communiqué tonight?”

“What's tonight?”

“I don't know. Our show?”

“Ah.” I sat down on the corner of the bed, exaggerating a certain mope in my shoulders.

“Officially you have the flu.” He shook his head. “You know your mom's worried out of her skull.”

“I appreciate you two exerting such parental concern, but, really, I'm doing okay.”

“You look it, this looks great.”

“Well, I'm upset, man, yeah. Is that a crime?”

“No, it isn't.” He was lightly picking through the contents of the nightstand. Then, as if he'd given me enough of a hard time, added, “I heard what happened.”

I continued to play it somber. “You did, huh?”

“Bernard's a bastard.” Looking not at him but at the cherrywood dresser in front of me, I nodded in the jaunty, unserious way of a drug person, that is to say, as if some jazz, audible only to me, were playing in a nearby room. I held the cigarette in a slightly scissoring grip between my index and middle fingers, raising it up to my head. Who was this? Where did these gestures come from? “Your mom thinks you should take a break, go back home for a bit.”

Sea View. The words alone turned my gut to fricassee. I pictured a sort of antiparade, pictured myself being dragged through the street before a panorama of inbred scowls; Mama bringing her pointed finger up and down, like a judge's gavel; and only as I began to shake my head saying, “No way, man. Can't do it,” did I realize that I had been doing Jesse Unheim, the name on my reservation, ever since Max arrived.

I remembered Jesse's cadence well enough (rushed, muttering) and his voice, too, flinty even by the eighth grade. In what gaps there were I injected the standard hustler's body language, gestures I knew from cinematic visions of light degradation, the kind set in roadside motels and two-bit horse tracks. An alloy like this one (taking parts from one and adding to another) often stirred in me a clenched, wired feeling, like an upper at the tail end of its effect, and I was about ready to jump out of my skin. I was standing up again, pacing. I needed to get Max out of there. Needed to get the suit.

“No, no. I want to work. I've got an idea for a new set.”

“Slow down, boy. You seem quite—”

“Excited? Well, I am. Look, Max. I holed up here because I'm working on something, okay? Yes, I'm down. Yes, I'm heartbroken, and I should've told you, but I'm channeling it, or whatever you want to call it. I'm pouring it into this thing. I can't talk about it now, but this is going to be big, Max.
Huge
.”

I saw his skepticism, like some boxing challenger, putting up a fight and being slowly pummeled by his natural enthusiasm. He extended both arms, ostensibly to calm me.

“That sounds potentially exciting.”

“It is, I'm telling you. Hell, you're the one who's always saying to catch inspiration while it's in the room. Well, it's in the room, and I'm just trying to catch it!”

“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?”