The Poser (23 page)

Like everything, borrowing the book seemed a frightful ordeal—what with surviving the solicitude of the nurses and the fluorescent lights of the library—but I managed to do it. In my room I practiced, and if it hadn't been for the terror of failing and the terror of succeeding, I could have torn through the book in an hour, so closely did it play to my talents. My hands were two ticklish birds, two anythings. Dancing origami—my knuckles, my meanings. There was a civility involved, a silence, and theatrics.

Awake. Do you know how you say it? You mimic the opening of the eyes. You form two L's with your hands and push them away from your temples.

Freedom. You make fists and cross your arms, then uncross them. Cross, then uncross.

Face. My favorite. With your forefinger, circle your face.

It was like cutting a hole in the air.

 • • • 

As much as it pained me, I kept my promise, switching with the doctor's help to B Schedule, which meant I did everything Amelia did an hour after her. Because her routine was so exact, it was painful but not difficult to avoid her entirely.

My sessions with Orphels those two days were among the least helpful yet. I went on and on about the letter, pecking at him for her reaction.

“Giovanni, you know I can't discuss this.”

“I don't know that. I don't know anything about what you're up to. You're like your father, Dr. Orphels. A master of justification.”

He grinned. “You distrust me, but that's okay. I would prefer you to be distrustful of me and in possession of your health than the reverse. Please tell me.” He said, “How did it feel to write that note?”

I shook my head. “I don't have to say.”

“That's true.”

A long silence. “As you yourself observed, Amelia suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder,” he said. “Must repeat most actions anywhere from three to forty times. Wash her hands. Open the door. She worked as a newspaper photographer, and this activity, photography, became a way of mitigating the obsession. Rather than touching a certain hydrangea bush three times, she would take three photos of it.”

“Big improvement,” I said.

“It was, actually. She's suffered fewer obsessive episodes. There was, however, one lingering problem.”

“What's that?”

“She did not like the photos,” he said. “Understand, the quality of the photographs was not a problem for me—I thought some of them were quite lovely—but Amelia
hated
them. None of those photos, in her mind,
captured
their subjects. Of course, I suggested many times that such ‘capture' was impossible.”

“What happened? I still see her out there taking photos.”

“A twist.” He raised his finger. “She started taking photographs without any film in the camera.”

“No film?”

He nodded. “By snapping the photo but not actually committing the moment to record, she was acknowledging that she could never fully ‘capture' the object, and yet was able to feel like she had.”

“There's no film in that camera?”

He grinned. “It reminded me of you, you know.”

I said nothing.

“Maximilian's quotation marks. That the stage is like a pair of quotation marks—everything you do inside them isn't something you're actually doing, but something you
could
be doing. Like taking photos with an empty camera, no?”

“You're up to something here. I can feel
it.”

“I know you distrust me. You will for a long time. But have I ever
withheld anything from you?”

I was trembling.

“Tell me. It's important for me to know. How did it feel to write that letter?”

I was looking off to the side, my hands cupped in front of me. “Crucial. Terrifying. I was trying to
explain myself
. Like you said, Doctor. Writing and betrayal. Writing and betrayal.”

 • • • 

I was returning to my room from one of these sessions when I nearly slipped on the note. It was folded primly in half, addressed to me:
Giovanni
. I held it, terrified. I brought it down with me to dinner, unopened, and, after eating, pondered it, folded, for a good half hour in order to savor the moment of knowing it had arrived but not yet knowing how it would disappoint me.

Again it featured those absurdly straight letters.

You're a hell of a lot more charming on paper than you are stalking around with God-knows-what blasting in your head. Don't think I don't recognize you either, even with that bush of a beard. (To your beard I have this to say:
Scram
!) I covered one of your gigs for City Paper. Just now I shut my eyes and saw the shots from that night. I mean it: on the inside of my eyelids, little dancing movies. There's one of you with a vein, size of a slug, popping out of your forehead. One of you wiping this fake tear from your eye. Digging real
hard
with your knuckle, like you were trying to fish out a silver dollar.

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.

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.