Rence in Repose by J.H. Siegal

John Rence, the cobbled-up person you thought you knew, now lies here charming and cold.

His voice will endure, on those many recordings, and many of you will claim, hearing them again someday in a department store or in a television commercial, to have known him.  But he was not the sloppy socialite you thought you met in bright apartments and dingy clubs.  He was in fact a marionette holding his own strings.

At every scene, Rence acquiesced to you, gave you the luxurious tramp, sporting those famous baubles of costume jewelry, the garish spiraling broaches, those bulbous belt buckles, those loud shoes.  He floated around spilling highballs, squinting at everyone with reddened eyes.  He saw you better than you saw him.

Some of you here today avoided getting tangled up with him in this state, when he was unruly and prone to garish pronouncements. But you hissed your feelings into your gossip columns and trade rags, knowing he would soak miserably in those ugly syllables.

“Never make another one,” he’d say when his arm found my shoulder at some affair, and I was never sure who was the object of that sentiment.

I’d wrap my hand around his bony one and some ridiculous ring, and I’d say, “Yes, never.”  We’d toast and he’d put too much weight on me, and he’d go on about that evening’s performance.

I can finally tell you, out of earshot save for his ghost, I thought he was a disaster at the piano – wobbly limbs, posture grandiose and pouting, wild, save for the purity of his voice, his singing voice, his real voice, smooth, gentle, and honest.

One time he preached to me, “don’t you ever think it’s real.”  We’d been up late after a show, talking about that stage persona, about how to keep that knot tight at the tip, how hold it under pressure.  He said, “it can leak out slowly, or boy it can pop,” and he waved his hands like a blustering magician, “woosh!”  Then he leaned in, teetering, prodding me, leaving me hanging on those mad blue irises.

If you saw him without his getup, if you came too early for a hang, or if you crashed a little late one night and glimpsed him in the morning, shuffling unembarrassed through his apartment in a white tank top, burning a cigarette before breakfast, rougey cheeks all smeared, he’d wince at you and blow you a kiss.  Then he’d cackle at himself in the mirror.

He’d creak his knees into some silk trousers and perch in the seat next to his living room piano, and give you a penetrating lesson.  If you were lucky, you’d get a duet. He’d square his bony hips next to yours on the piano bench, and you could feel his huffing joyous energy vibrating through the instrument itself, and he’d forget himself and crowd you off the bench, elbows flaring, face red, those eyes entreating you to see.

That was him, sowing sound and mystery wherever he went, not the greasy patter to warm the audiences, not the reeling nightlife clowning.

You might truly find him when he bummed a cigarette and almost torched his own hair lighting it, mumbling through the smoke about how you blow life into a ballad like blowing breath into hot glass, his mind running a picture show of countless curtain calls, his eyes fixed on you, begging from behind the makeup for you to see him.

He doesn’t look like that now, all smoothed up in his casket.  He looks at ease, which is not at all his true resting state. 

Now he is, finally, fake.

Now you can have him.

J.H. Siegal

Image: Piano keyboard in closeup from Pixabay.com