The Poser (21 page)

“I think I know what you mean,” I said.

“Oh?”

“I, too, used a moat.”

“Yes? What form did yours take?”

“I played at being someone I wasn't. Someone terrible. I did it for years.”

“Who was that?”

I said, “The man I tried to kill.”

 • • • 

So it began. As the doctor recounted his father's death or discussed his start in the field of psychiatry, words, unbidden, rose in my chest. “My mother was murdered,” I declared. “I used to give these speeches. All of them lies.” In Orphels's voice, I would speak. The way it came out, it felt closer to listening than talking. With each name I uttered—Max, Mr. Heedling, Lucy, Bernard—with each anecdote I shared (when I thought I was being booed the first time I performed at the Communiqué, when I first learned to flirt while aping Max at the train station), the more deliciously foreign it sounded. What a rare fellow, I caught myself thinking, this Giovanni the Impressionist.

I wanted a story like the doctor's, one driven by its end, but mine resembled more the first blabberings of a child, when the impulse to speak trumps any ability to do so. My experiences were in a terrible knot, and we depended on the wayward, but thorough, logic of association to untangle them. Often we worked backward, starting, say, with my malfeasance in Fantasma Falls, which led to the sight of Lucy and Bernard backstage, which led, in turn, to my failure to imitate Lucy, which recalled, in the following order, my journey to the City; my encounter with Max; my politeness at the station; my fondness for Mr. Heedling; and last, always, to Mama.

Certain phrases in particular caught his attention. “Sympathetic to the bone,” for one.

“Do you feel that you are?” he asked.

“I don't think so, no.”

“Why not?”

“I'll explain this way: We used to do an act onstage. Two family members would come up. A mother and son, say. Max would lead the son and me behind a screen at the side of the stage, then the two of us—the volunteer and I—would go backstage for a second and come up with a little speech, one that used the names of the child's parents or some personal details that couldn't be faked. Then we'd hide behind the screen again and deliver our speeches, one at a time, so the mother would have to guess which of us was which. Usually the mothers (and the husbands, and the wives, and the children, for we did all types) were
dead certain
they could pick their son's voice. ‘The second one,' they'd say. ‘I'd know my Jimmy anywhere.' Lo and behold, after a tense silence, I'd come out from behind the screen. ‘Hi, Mommy!' I'd say, and the audience would applaud and this mother, who a moment ago in her heart of hearts
knew
that I
was her son, would stare at me, this huckster in a tuxedo—and how did she react? This is why I bring it up. How do you think someone would greet such a surprise?”

“She was happy.”

“Have you ever seen a person
embarrassed
by their own good fortune, a person
mortified
by luck? That's how it was. These mothers didn't know what to do with their hands. They blushed, hugged me. The men grabbed my shoulder, they pumped my hand.
Many times
this happened, and yet every time I stepped out from behind the screen, I secretly flinched, sure that the family would see what a charlatan I was, that the audience would join, and I would be stoned.”

“That seems extreme,” he said.

“The stage, Doctor, knows only extremes.”

“Why a charlatan, though? Were you cheating them? Would you pretend to have produced a voice you hadn't?”

“Not at all. Sometimes they
did
guess right, and that was notable, too, for how disappointed the mother or father always was.”

“Why a charlatan then?” he asked again.

“Because they thought I was doing something I wasn't. Why else would they react that way?”

“You interpreted their interest in your act as a belief that you were ‘sympathetic to the bone.'”

“I suppose so.”

“Were you? When you performed your stage act were you being ‘sympathetic to the bone'?”

“No. That's what I mean. I knew I wasn't, but I hoped I was.”

“How did you
know
you weren't?”

“Because I was so relieved when each volunteer stepped off the stage. After they'd thanked me—hugged me, patted me, shook me—after the applause had died, the volunteer walked down the stairs back into the audience, and a new volunteer emerged, and I was thankful. Because each one—they wanted to talk and share secrets, or do whatever people do to ‘get to know each other,' and each, if they didn't have to return to the audience, would have discovered what a fraud I was.”

“Fraud, charlatan, huckster. Why? You did exactly what you purported to do: you exhibited a skill and they appreciated it.”

“But they believed an insight attended that skill, and it didn't.”

“But how do you know that?”

“I appreciate it, Doctor, and I suppose it was thrilling to be imitated, but what I was doing, you see, it concerned the outside of a person. They thought I'd touched
the inside
.”

“To the bone.”

“Precisely.”

“But is there no place where the outside and inside meet?”

“Not that I know of.”

“But I think you do,” he said. “One of your peculiar phrases. The loose seam that sticks out and, when pulled, unravels a person.”

“The thread.”

“Let me ask,” he said. “Why does one pull it?”

“How do you mean?”

“Why must one—must
you
—pull
on it? Couldn't one observe a loose seam without tugging it?”

“I don't know. I suppose it's a malicious act—or it can be—to unravel
a person. As a child, it was pure impulse. I couldn't help it. I was impatient.”

“Impatient with what?” he asked.

“The theater of things, maybe. I think that was what my politeness was about—my being so polite when I worked at the train station. I was participating in a theater—‘Hello, ma'am,' ‘A good day to you, sir.' All that false gloss on life. What Bernard called the ‘show.' I was entering it.”

“It reminds me of the thought you had when you first mimicked Maximilian: that everyone around you was an imitator, too.”

“Perhaps. The world was crowded with impressionists, so, I suppose, one had to pull their threads and find out who everyone
really
was.”

“There's another word for that,” he said. “A projection.”

“Not my favorite word.”

“Perhaps the
hiding
and
acting
that you ascribed to others was actually your own.”

“Perhaps,” I said.

“Which begs the question: If you were projecting your own feelings onto others, and as a result pulling those people's threads—well, did you ever wish for someone to pull
your
thread?”

“Perhaps.”

“I believe we're hitting on something.”

“Why's that?”

“Whenever we hit on something, you say, ‘Perhaps.'”

“Perhaps,” I said.

“Let me then repeat the reporter's question. The one he asked you that night, for it's an important one, I think: What is your thread, Giovanni?”

“Mine?”

“If someone wanted to impersonate you, how would he?”

“I don't know. I've certainly never been imitated, but I suppose you mean it more abstractly than that. . . . When I discovered Lucy with Bernard, that maybe was close to it.”

“The moment of betrayal.”

“Yes. It felt like something had been revealed. Like something inside me had been
pulled
out.”

“When else?”

“This is strange. It just occurred to me.”

“What?”

“When I wrote those letters to my mother, when she wrote hers to me. The writing—I never described or thought of it so—but it felt like that. On the page, I was free to
pretend
to be myself. To pay out my thread, if that makes sense.”

“Opposite experiences, it seems to me, and like all opposites, quite similar.”

“I don't catch your meaning.”

“The two you mentioned,” he said. “Writing. And betrayal.”

 • • • 

Flooded as I was by the desire to reveal, I had to dam up at times and withhold certain close gems of facts and feeling. Most of all I had to maintain the ruse that I was not impersonating the doctor. This, of all my jeweled secrets, was the one I could not give away. An easy illusion to maintain, it turned out, since Orphels was too engaged in my story to detect the voice with which I told it. Each day he stared into his own wounded eyes, each day listened to his own overenunciated voice, and each day failed to notice. The differences between us were those of dress (he in his jeans and flannel shirts, I in my scrubs), hairstyle (his slick and parted down the middle, mine a cauliflower of black), and facial hair (he clean-shaven, I messily bearded). Early on I hunted around No More Walls for pomade, locating some eventually on a gaunt chin-scratcher named Tony. That night after some modest experimentation I succeeded in parting my hair exactly like Orphels's. For an hour I was delighted, striding about the room. “Money was my moat. It protected me,” I said, “Resentment is the language with which parents speak to their children,” before realizing, with crashing disappointment, that I would have to wash it out. It brought the resemblance too close. As much as I despised my own hair, it allowed me to maintain the ruse. From then on, I applied the gel only when alone in my room, usually before bed. The sound it made (the faint crinkling against the pillow) functioned as a kind of medicine.

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?”