The Poser

by Jacob Rubin

  “Giovanni,” Vandaline said.

  “Yes?”

  “I said, if everyone has this—this thread as you call it, this seam sticking out—well then, I must ask, what’s yours?”

  The men leaned in. At the far end of the bar, Bernard raised a cigarette to his lips. I didn’t dare look at Lucy.

  “Why,” I said. “I’m the exception.”

  MAX

  ONE

  After high school, my mother’s friend Julius Weld helped me land a job at the train station in Dun Harbor, a dour nub of coastline twenty minutes south of Sea View. Mainly, I was relieved to finish school, where nearly every week I was banished to Derringer’s office. Too much stimulation, Mama said. The girls with their skirts and sculpted hair; the boys oily and mean. “Giovanni!” someone would howl, and I’d come to, like a boy who with every step knocked over an expensive vase.

  As I soon discovered, my job as a ticket seller required me to utter the same pronouncements dozens of times a day: “We recommend getting to the track ten minutes before scheduled departure.” Or, “Kindly check the board for updates.” I kept to the ticket seller’s booth. I knew what to say, and if ever the old urge came over me, I dammed it with politeness: the simple rules that, once followed, erected a brick wall between you and the world. Excuse me, Good day. “After you,” I insisted, holding the door for all strangers, unless, of course, a man my senior insisted otherwise, in which case I dug my chin to my chest, said, “’Preciate it, sir,” and strode ahead.

  Of course, this meant every businessman and runaway, every stubbly bachelor when buying a ticket unwittingly logged the details of their appearance with me. My politeness, I discovered, made for an acceptable disguise, so when wishing a man a good day, I could secretly relish each detail: the way he checked his watch, say, or slid change off the counter, sharing these bits with Mama at night.

  Always she was my strongest encourager. If ever I got into trouble at school, she would tell all offended parties that I was sympathetic to the bone. This, her constant response to the hurricane of hair pulls, harangues, schoolyard exclusions, and teachers’ meetings I was always causing the world.

  When I was four, for instance, Great Uncle Arthur, Mama’s only living relative, visited us from out west. A sigh punctuated each effort of his limbs, and the old man’s kiss he gave Mama sounded like tape being ripped from a wall. “Put it there,” he said, throwing out his hand. “You heard me, pardner, put it there,” I answered. “I heard about this,” Arthur said, turning to leave minutes after arriving. Mama jumped in front of him. “You can’t, Arthur. He’s just—”

  Or at Susan Sanders’s June party. Lobster, shrimp, and steamers served in their never-ending backyard. The older children cavorting by the tire swing. I remember chasing a freckled girl with straw-colored ringlets around some oaks, believing if I caught her, my whole life would explode, and must’ve still been exhilarated by that chase when we gathered, fifty of us, around the red picnic table for Susan’s annual toast. Many wore white linen suits and pearls. Mama beamed at me from behind a cityscape of champagne bottles. The girl I’d chased was thumbing bits of brownie from between her teeth.

  “A toast,” Susan said. On cue the adults raised their flutes of champagne, the children their glasses of chocolate milk or ginger ale. “We are just delighted everyone could make it,” she said, playing with her earrings. To speak Susan Sanders had to kick the grass or twist her legs around each other. But most of all, she couldn’t keep her hands off her earrings, and I often wondered what mute depths she’d sink to if parted from that essential jewelry. “A delight to have you. An absolute delight. With the money, the money, the friends, and the money,” I surprised myself by announcing, and soon all I could hear were the birds, and the mouths around the table were getting bigger until Mama draped her arms over my shoulders and said, “He means perfectly well. He’s just—”

  Or when Mama and I attended Brad Mason’s funeral at the Sea View Cemetery, which sits atop one of the few real hills outside of town. Even with its weeds and jagged gravestones the cemetery provided a sort of grandeur because of its view. Seagulls ambled around between flights, like ducks. That day it was overcast and blustery. Me, in a blazer with brass buttons, Mama sniffling out of view. It was the tragedy of that year: Brad Mason, my ten-year-old classmate, smashed by a truck. The women had to keep one hand atop their wide-brimmed hats to prevent the wind from snatching them. The priest’s exact words were lost in the wind. You could hear his sincere voice but couldn’t make out the words. When he stopped speaking, Brad’s mother, behind a speckled veil, buckled to her knees and wept so that two handsome young men in black suits had to hoist her up; and soon they were glaring at me with iron mouths—Mrs. Mason, too, her eyes white as eggs under her veil—because I was buckling my knees and weeping to the sky; Oh, no, I think I was saying, Oh, no, and poor Mama had to explain—as she had to Uncle Arthur and Susan Sanders, as she had to so many people—that Giovanni, her son, was sympathetic to the bone. She even wrote a note that I was to keep in my pocket and present to people if ever things got out of hand.

  By the time I began work at the train station I had gained control enough of my instincts to spare myself and others these outbursts, storing them for my performances with Mama. We had a ritual. After dinner, Mama would sit Indian-style on the couch while I cracked my neck and stretched as if we weren’t alone in our one-story house but center stage at the Sea View County Theatre. Mama might even shush imaginary attendees and then flick the lamp on and off, signaling the start of the show. To this day I wonder how those demonstrations appeared to any passerby chance may have placed at our picture window: a woman, they would have seen, upright as a piano teacher, yanking and steering her boy around with the strings of her words. “Tilt your head.” “Sloshy hips.” “Raise it, yes! Perfect!”

  Sometimes Mama even stopped by the train station to observe the exact way a favorite of ours doffed his cap or, say, lightly licked her finger, making a pleased expression of the mouth before turning a magazine’s glossy page. This was no mere indulgence. These field trips felt, if anything, like missions, akin to our jaunts to the movie theater, a sanctuary of my childhood. There all the dull bits of life had been excised, the world distilled to happening, a dream in which even homely acts—a body tossing in bed, say—rivaled a general’s howl for sheer immortality. There I could hike knees to chest and mirror it all. At a deserted matinee, I would sometimes even gallop through the aisle to hail a cab like the hair-flying prosecutor onscreen, Mama ogling me as much as the picture.

  And yet, as I grew older, I preferred to stay in my movie-theater chair, watching like anyone else. Each moment like learning a new word. The way a man grabbed a woman’s shoulders before kissing her. The flashing eyes of a pursued driver in the rearview mirror. The correct style in which one combs a bronze coiffure after removing a hat. Or the way to set that hat down at the edge of the desk. Or, for that matter, the difference between the way an honest man sets a hat down on a desk and a liar does (the latter removing his hand right after, as if the lid might snap at him, then briefly rubbing his escaped hand with the other before slipping both in their respective pockets, whistling and pacing with shifty eyes).

  Yes, I preferred to observe these gestures rather than make them. The same was true at the train station, where my politeness helped make me a viewer. I don’t remember when exactly in my four years there my nightly performances stopped—or slowly receded, to be revived only by a rare peacocking figure or bona fide celebrity, as when the movie actress Lydia Peele came up on the south train from Pellview. Mama pushed, but I begged off. To mimic felt like a risk, a frightful departure from a far cozier act, one that began at seven a.m. sharp with the bleeping alarm clock and ended at five when I rode the bus home. Nor did the ticket-seller act have to end then. It carried on past dinner when I read a popular novel in bed and would live on soon enough, I hoped, in a house of my own p
opulated by a ticket seller’s wife and ticket seller’s children, a family who would kiss and be kissed by me and who would never meet, as long as they lived, the heaps of sleeping strangers inside their man.

  • • •

  One August afternoon I was walking to the bus station when a voice called for me. “Excuse me,” it said. “You, there. Excuse!” I turned. There stood a broad and tall man with apple-sized cheeks and a shock of black hair. “You’re the boy, correct? The boy with the million faces?” When he smiled, he revealed teeth so white and square they looked fake.

  “Correct is right!” I said. “That I am. He is I.”

  He slapped me. “No games, boy! I’m not some object to piss on!” A moment later, though, he sucked in a deep breath. He was wearing gray slacks and a satin blue shirt stained with sweat at the crown of his belly. “My apologies for not introducing myself,” he said. “Maximilian Horatio, Management and Artist Representation. A great pleasure to meet you.”

  I weakly accepted his hand.

  “I have to say, that was quite a good Maximilian Horatio you did and you’ve only known me—what—the time it takes for two fits of gas to escape a horse’s rear?” He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “You’re Giovanni Bernini, no? I’ve heard of your talent, and I think there’s money in it. And after money come the other treats—women, fame, girl fun . . . but let’s get out of this goddamn sun. Discuss it at my place. Just an hour of your time?”

  He kept shifting the jacket he was holding to one hand, then the other, then to the crook of his elbow, so he could point and gesture without interruption. I dug my hands into my pockets. Felt something, a ball of lint, maybe.

  “What I thought,” he said. “Quotation marks.”

  I focused on not knitting my brow.

  “Now, an imitation like that—you do a dead-on imitation like that with no warning and someone will slap you. Hell, they might wait for you to fall asleep and urinate on you. But do it on a stage, do it for an audience, and they’ll piss themselves.”

  We were the only people on the street. Outside of the port, where longshoremen hauled containers on and off ships, Dun Harbor’s greatest landmark was the state prison, a dismal knuckle of gray, from which you were wise to keep your distance.

  “What’s a stage?” he asked me.

  “I don’t think I know,” I said in my ticket seller’s voice. I couldn’t believe how much effort it took not to do him.

  “A set of quotation marks. On a stage, you’re not saying anything as you. You’re saying, ‘What if I said this.’ You’re saying, ‘What if I were this.’ Now, I’m willing to bet you’ve been living a what-if kind of life all along while everyone around you’s been saying and doing, getting in their cars and drinking cherry soda.” He lifted his gaze toward the low, lifeless buildings. “What do you say we get out of this goddamn heat?”

  I couldn’t say no to him. What I mean is, I was physically incapable. I was like a moon in the orbit of a bullying planet.

  “Okay,” I said.

  He patted my back so hard I rattled. “Excellent! Excellent!”

  Together we walked up the sorry boulevard. He talked more and more, his hands dancing to his speech. I pulled out the ball of lint to toss in the gutter, realizing, as soon as I did, what it was.

  “What’s that there?”

  I handed it to him, hoping he’d read it in silence. Instead he cleared his throat. “If Giovanni has given you this note, it is because an incident has occurred. Please understand no harm is meant. He is simply sympathetic to the bone.” He frowned, impressed. “A boy who comes with a manual!” Maybe he noticed my expression. “Have you heard the one about the man who wanted to forget his past?”

  I shook my head.

  “Oh, it’s a classic.” He smiled like a ringmaster. “An old widower, right? Terrible past. His wife killed, all three of his sons killed, his two daughters, cow, dog, even his lovely, baby pigeon ‘Orangutan’—all dead. Someone destroyed his pigeon. It’s a whole other thing. Anyway he prays to God, saying, ‘How can I get rid of the past? Jesus, please erase my past. I’d rather be ignorant than live with this foul dung on my brain. Please, oh, please.’ Because he’s afraid, you see. ‘With this past, how can I have room for anything new, oh, Jesus.’ And so one night the man’s praying, and Jesus comes to him and says, ‘You want to forget the past?’ ‘Yes,’ the man said. ‘Yes, thank you.’ ‘You want to be freed of it, have it erased?’ ‘Yes, Jesus,’ the guy’s saying. ‘You really want to?’ ‘Yes, oh, yes.’ And Jesus tells him, Jesus looks at him and Jesus says: ‘Forget about it!’”

  He slapped his right thigh and hooted toward the sky.

  “Now, that’s a joke,” he said after his laughter softened to a sigh. Then he said, “Oh, right,” as if remembering something he’d planned to do for a long time. He held the note with both hands and, with a magician’s solemnity, tore it up in the sunlight, like confetti, like a celebration, like he’d made a rabbit disappear.

  TWO

  “The place is, well, unclean,” Max warned as we trudged up the five flights in the tenement where he rented a room. The light fixtures droned like insects. “You’re my worst disease!” a woman somewhere yelled. When we reached his door, a copper 4 hung sideways, resembling in that position a crude sailboat. He fought with the lock. “C’mon,” he muttered. “Mean, goddamn—” Then it yawned open, and the odor hit us.

  It smelled like many things, like curdled milk, newsprint, and cabbage, but above all reeked of meat. Either Max had murdered a pig or his native musk hung around so long, had become to the air what wallpaper is to walls. “Home—sweetest—sit, boy, sit.” The door opened directly into the kitchen, and he motioned to what must’ve been the kitchen table, though drowned as it was in magazines, brown banana peels, coat hangers, and, strangest of all, a lady’s green pump, its surface could not be seen.

  Two green socks, soaked black at the heel, occupied the nearest chair. I gloved my hand with my sleeve, removed them, and sat. Many of the kitchen cabinets swung all the way or partially open, revealing amorphous garbage bags and what looked like deeply used athletic equipment. There was no other room, but a small bathroom, and no bed that I could see, just a mat of towels with a pillow behind the refrigerator. The man lived in the kitchen.

  “Beer?” He pushed open the window above the sink.

  “No, thank you.”

  “I was right, huh?”

  “I’m sorry?” A delicacy of politeness: I’m sorry?

  “About the place,” he said. “It’s a mess?”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Damn right!” He grabbed a glass and turned the handles above the sink until the water burped out over his hands. Pipes came alive in the wall, and he poured a lengthy stream of green dish soap over the glass, rotating and scrubbing it under the brownish water. “La dee daa dee daa.” It seemed to bring his hands such pleasure I had to sit on mine, or else I would’ve leapt to his side and scrubbed along with him. This jubilant, bearish man—I’d never met a person so preoccupied with the business of his body. I stared again at the table.

  Littered over it was a landscape of crumbs and dishware and almost every forum for the printed word: The Evening Post, The City Times, splayed hardcovers, yellow notebook paper, not to mention a pale thigh outlined by a garter belt, though the rest of the image—the woman’s midriff, bra, and ruby lips, presumably—was obscured by a basket of rotten bananas. An excitable hand decorated every page on the table, circling words, adding phallic exclamation marks, the notes swarming like ants in the margin: “Exactly!” “Memorize.” “Money?”

  “Some orange juice, young squire,” Max said, standing over me. Sweat ticked out of my armpits.

  “Thank you.” I took the still-filthy glass and rested it on a relatively flat pile of magazines. I then scratched my nose so as to make returning my hand to its i
nitial position less conspicuous.

  “Awfully glad you could make it,” Max said, walking to the refrigerator. He swung open its door and grabbed—violently—a beer. “Glad as hell.” He tilted the bottle at a decisive angle and then decapitated it against the kitchen counter. After batting away whatever occupied his chair, he collapsed into a reclining position, wiping his brow. “This goddamn heat. There are things going on in my body no man should know.”

  I shook my head though I meant to nod. This could happen. Sometimes at the station, when tired, I said “Please” instead of “Thank you,” winked when intending only to smile. Max hadn’t noticed, though. He leaned back in that poor bursting chair. “You’re not a talker.”

  “Oh, sometimes.” I smiled my ticket-seller smile.

  “Fine with me. Talkers, nontalkers. I don’t distinguish. Hell, I don’t distinguish at all. People are people. That’s what entertainment’s about.” He swigged his beer. “The best performers—the ones who can perform anywhere and get a self-respecting girl to drop her panties and grin while she does it—they don’t make distinctions. They say, ‘Distinctions—’” He blew his thumb, making a flatulent noise, raised his middle finger, and planted his beer on the table. “Look at Shakespeare. His genius? You want a madman? Okay, I’ll show you a madman. You want a king? All right. You want a pauper, pixie? Fuck you.

  “But as soon as someone’s got that talent—I’m talking about someone who can relate to anyone, make us all”—he drew a wide rink with his finger—“relate to him. When you got someone like that, what do they do?” He shrugged so much his palms were at his shoulders. “They put him on a pedestal. They say, ‘I wonder how he does it. How does he do it?’” He shook his head. “Have you ever heard the expression ‘People worship the lucky’? It’s fucking—it’s true, boy.” Either the hypocrisy itself, or his facility in exposing it, revolted him. He sighed and raised his arm as if to salute, then slapped his hand hard against his thigh. “I talk,” he said. “I talk.