The Poser

by Jacob Rubin

  “Well, you know what I mean.” He stood and began pacing, fanning the bottom of his sweat-stained shirt. “I was in a café in Sea View when I heard of you. Two men talking like they’d seen a ghost. Real shit-them-ole-panties fear.” He clasped his hands in front of his chest, wheeling his thumbs over each other. “Their fear—you need that first. Have you considered it? Performing?”

  I made a face that said as much as making no face at all, like nodding while breathing out your nose (to express amused agreement), raising your eyebrows while suppressing a smile (mild scandal), or shaking your head while breathing in through the mouth (sympathy)—all those safe expressions I’d perfected at the station.

  “What’s celebrity?” he asked. “Being different from everyone. Different, so they want to be like you. Usually, it’s beauty. Oldest hustle in the world. People never get bored of a beautiful face. Never bored of fucking beauty. I, for one, am bored of it. Me, I like a woman whose beauty is tilted ninety degrees.” He mimicked twisting the top off a bottle to express the ninety degrees to which beauty ought to be twisted. “Heavy potential. Because of that added layer. You’re not up there saying, ‘Like me ’cause I dance, like me ’cause I sing.’ You’re saying, ‘Like me ’cause I’m you.’ Quite brilliant. Quite a bit of everything, really.”

  He muttered this last part, and having completed that sprint of breath, collapsed back into the chair. It groaned. “Hmph.” Energies blew in and out of the man. He massaged the meat of his neck, pinched the baggy skin around his throat. “Hmph, hmph, hmph.” He was staring out the window, or rather, looking at the air outside the window as if it, too, were a window to be looked through. A quality that attracts dogs and babies to a person belonged to him: a certain largesse, a willingness to share oneself with strangers.

  Because of this quality, I found myself asking a question, a thing I hated doing. Questions were holes in my demeanor, windows through which rocks could fly. By then, I used the leavened voice of Richard Nelson, the father of radio-fiction (and previous go-to) Jimmy Nelson. Puberty, years before, demanded the shift. An improvement, really. On the diminishingly popular The Hoaglands, Richard stood as the true paradigm of the sensible and wry, qualities, if anything, his son (my first model) had aped. “What are these for?” I asked. “All these newspapers, magazines?”

  “Research.” He planted his elbow on the arm of the chair, rested his two chins on his palm, and sighed. “Been putting my finger to the wind. That finger. You gotta get it wet.

  “Month ago I was down in the City. Wore my ass off attending the latest horseshit day and night. Music, comedy, burlesque. Some were B-plus, I’ll give them that, but the majority, boy—it was like watching a child make a brown little surprise in his pants, then walk around the aisles, asking everyone to clap for him. Wouldn’t know it by the critics, though. Open up the paper, and the critics love Brown Surprise. They want more Brown Surprise. After all, what’s a critic gonna say? ‘These are bullshit times. Take a nap.’ No, they say, ‘Tour de force. Art’s as good as ever!’ Nonsense. The time is ripe for something new, and when they see it—oh, when they see it . . .” He shot up again, pawing through the newspapers on the table. Whether he was searching for something in particular or the frenzied shuffling was a point in its own right, I couldn’t tell. “Well, they’ll be making cider in their undies. White cider.” He looked at me. “What I mean is, they’ll sperm themselves.”

  I raised my eyebrows while suppressing a smile.

  “Well, that’s the thinking, anyway.” He dug his chin into his palm. “It’s not that I doubt it. Doubt and I—no, I don’t doubt things. I just want other people to give us the chance. It’s the chance that needs to—ah, God, what can you do?” He squeezed circles into his temples and then covered his face entirely with his hand. Out the window a hammer clinked, a common noise in Dun Harbor. Men in hardhats were always streaming in and out of the train station, the reports of their hammers and drills punctuating the afternoon. The place lived in a constant state of construction without anything, as far as I could see, ever being built.

  “What is it you’re proposing, Max?” I was surprised to hear myself ask.

  His eye studied me from between the knuckles of his middle and index fingers. Then his hand slid down his nose and mouth, unveiling a carnival grin. “How much time do you need?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “To go on—I mean, you imitated me in—what—a few seconds. Is that all the time you need?”

  “Sometimes less.”

  “Perfect.” He was pacing again.

  “Perfect what? What are you proposing?”

  He grinned. It made him look queasy, as evil men do when smiling in children’s movies. “What do you say we go down to the City, show the world your gift?”

  “But imitating who?”

  “Why,” he said. “The audience.”

  “I can do famous people. I can do the president and Dean Fashion, the singer.”

  “No! No! No!” He stood again. “Boy, the whole point of this—the revolution of it—is in imitating the audience. We do celebrities and we’re another two-bit nightclub act. But we get volunteers”—he grinned again—“and we’re artists.”

  “But people hate it when I do that. Hell, you slapped me for doing it. The only way I’ve gotten along is by not doing it. Don’t you understand that?” I couldn’t believe I’d said it. Though this was months before we downed cheap champagne in the mixed light of the City’s downtown, I imagined that this is what it felt like to be drunk. Max intoxicated a body.

  He was standing again. “Where did you get your name?”

  “What?”

  “It’s like you were born with a stage name. How’d you get it?”

  “It’s my dad’s. My mom liked it so much, she wanted me to have it. She said it reminded her of a beautiful old country full of statues.”

  “And what’s Daddy do?”

  “He left,” I said.

  It was the most I’d ever said. What I knew was: he was Jewish, a longshoreman, arrived here from Italy. One night he sauntered up to Mama’s beat-up sedan at the Sea View Drive-In to say, “You are my movie girl?” A month after I was born, he left to buy a bottle of wine and never came back. It was hard to squeeze out of her more than that, and I, who couldn’t bear to upset Mama and hated asking questions of any kind, wasn’t the one to do it. In the rare moments she did reminisce, it was like someone else was making the emotion in her face: she scratched the back of her neck, speaking in a pressured voice. Most often she said, “Your father was a magician.” Just as I was “sympathetic to the bone,” just as that phrase fenced in all my wandering impulses, so the Old Man was contained by that word.

  For years, of course, I dreamt of his return. I would be sitting in my desk-chair when a knock would startle the classroom door. Heedling, grumbling at the interruption, would swing it open and there would stand my father. So sorry, Giovanni’s needed home, he’d say, flashing me a juicy wink. Or he would stroll right through the heart of the boys’ stickball game, bow tie loosened, hands in his tuxedo pants, whistling a jazz number. At the train station he’d find me. One ticket to wherever. Sometimes lanky and busy-haired, other times barrel-chested and bald, but always in a tux. At a certain age these fantasies receded, or evolved, to imagine the home he had now, for certainly he had one—in Italy, maybe, or the City—where he stroked his new wife’s hair and held in his lap a second, tamer Giovanni.

  “Makes sense,” Max said. “It’s the first fact about most entertainers, y’know. Hell of a painful thing, but it’s true.”

  My hands had gone numb.

  When Max asked, “Well?” “Yes,” is what I said, feeling like I might burst. “Of course,” I added, “you’ll have to ask my mother.”

  • • •

  That week I burped, sighed, even sneezed like him. At work I slapped men on the back to say hell
o, doffed an imaginary cap to the hurried women. My coworkers must have thought I was drunk or in love. “Denburg,” I lectured one ticket buyer. “‘Verdant’ doesn’t begin to describe the greenery.”

  For many years I assumed everyone knew something I didn’t, a simple lesson had been disseminated, a dictum some angel or authority scribbled on everyone’s hand except mine. All my life that certainty clung to my heart, I realized as it left me. The businessmen pacing in tight circles, the women dabbing their necks with kerchiefs—each was a nerve-wracked impressionist.

  This view helped especially around women, my experiences of whom, before then, never progressed beyond the horniness of a wallflower. In high school I was always hiding behind lockers and trees to scrutinize the latest gut-churning pass of Margot Stamfield. And at the station, when certain hip-swayers approached the booth, I ducked, like a man attacked, behind the wall of my manners. But, as Max, I could flirt. “If only you gave me as much attention as that purse, I’d be a happy man,” I told a slender blonde who couldn’t stop fiddling with her clutch. “Why, thank you, mister,” she replied, blushing! Mister!

  During this period, Mama smiled mistily at my grunts and sighs—content, I think, to see me at it again. At the end of the week, I mentioned Max. “When approaching things that are difficult to say, it’s best to come out and say them—no other way, really. Whatever preparations you make, well, they must contend with the fact that at a certain point the thing needs to be said, so it’s time—”

  Mama leaned over and slapped my back. Burped me.

  “Earlier this week, a man, a show-business type, but not your usual show-business type, because there’s a bone of honesty in him, several in fact—well, he asked for some of my time. I think he’s got some bright ideas. Anyhow, he wants to meet with you to illume, as it were, the brightness of these ideas.”

  Mama ate in silence. “Must be a charmer, the way you’ve been stomping around.”

  “He is,” I said. “He is! He’s even offered to take us out, treat us!”

  She snickered. “What is it he wants?”

  “Well, I really ought to let him explain—it’s only fair a man gets to present—”

  “Stop it!”

  “He wants to take me to the City. To perform there.”

  Mama finished her plate in silence. After a long pause she said, “If he wants to pay, he can pay,” and cleared the table.

  • • •

  As the location for this fateful dinner, Mama selected Armison’s Famous Lobster and Steak Eatery, a tourist trap notorious through all of Sea View for its overpriced and mediocre lobster. “If this big-shot manager wants to treat,” she said, checking her lipstick one last time before we stepped into the balmy night, “he can treat at the Famous Eatery.”

  The short walk to Armison’s, she trotted along so fast in heels, I had to skip just to catch up, me in my penny loafers and navy-blue blazer with its brass buttons. It was a warm, starless night, a yellow moon perched in the sky like an unnoticed owl. Couples held hands and pointed at items in the illuminated storefronts as though watching TV. I wrapped my arm around Mama’s shoulder and squeezed. “Here we are, lady, you and me, headed to Armison’s!” She smiled the way she’d smiled ever since our conversation about Max—flatly, evasively—patted my hand and removed it from her shoulder.

  The host led us through the hushed dining room, a wall-length mirror repeating all the mild sumptuousness: noiseless busboys; white-gloved waiters, each table its own conspiracy of candlelight, protected from silence by the ignored music of the piano player. He led us to a back table near the mirrored wall where Maximilian Horatio—ample hair slicked back on his head—already waited. He escaped from his chair.

  “Ms. Bernini, I presume.” He took her hand and kissed it. He wore a battered, cream-colored suit.

  The host pulled back the chair nearest the wall, and Mama eased into it, the way people do when so dressed. He seated me between Mama and Max. The host then urged us to enjoy the meal and scampered back to the dais. A lone calla lily stood in a vase at the center of the table.

  “Giovanni told me he had a mother. He did not warn me of her beauty.”

  Mama smiled quickly and opened a menu. “It’s going to be hard to decide. The food here is just extraordinary.”

  “If the brandy’s any indication, we’re in for a fine evening of cuisine,” said Max, raising his tumbler. He patted my knee under the table.

  Mama snickered.

  “Something funny?” Max asked.

  “You sound like someone I know,” she said.

  “Someone good, I hope.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, squeezing my other thigh under the table.

  “Resemblance, in my experience, is a finicky thing. If I looked like someone you didn’t like, it would be, well, dooming. An Indian doctor I met once in the circus, he believed all the faces of the people we befriend in this life—they resemble people we knew in a previous one. Reincarnation, et cetera.”

  “Good hard science,” said Mama without taking her eyes off the menu.

  I should’ve known it would be like this. All week I’d looked forward to the dinner—knew that Mama’s wit and eyes would square off against Max’s bluster and teeth—but had failed to account for my own position: namely, after a week tramping around as Maximilian Horatio, I had to quit the act. Already I was sitting on my hands.

  The waiter, dressed in black, appeared, rubbing his hands together mischievously, as if he had a great secret for us. “A drink, ma’am?”

  “A gin martini up, please,” said Mama. “Perhaps a wine, too, for the table?”

  “In addition to our list, which you’ll find at the back of the menu, we have a special sauvignon red—a bit pricey but—”

  “We’ll take it,” Mama said.

  “Excellent,” the waiter said with a serious, servile pout. “Be back in a second.”

  “Please,” Max said, flashing a seasick grin. “Have whatever you want tonight. My treat.”

  After the waiter returned with Mama’s cocktail and uncorked and served the wine, Mama ordered two appetizers of crab cakes and the day’s special, a lobster savannah. Max and I requested the standard lobster plate. Mama encouraged me to order an appetizer, too, since Max was so generously offering, but I demurred. The truth was I didn’t think I could trust my hands, eating alone. A line of sweat had broken over my forehead, but I couldn’t wipe it, not then.

  Mama said, “Giovanni tells me you worked in the circus.”

  “Circle Top Circus, that’s right. Stage manager for four years. Developed some acts of my own, too. Mainly with animals. Animals and I have—it’s an almost unnatural kinship. Dogs in particular.” Max sipped his brandy. “People like to see animals do extraordinary things—jump through hoops, walk on two legs. You know why?”

  “I would love to understand why.”

  “We think it’s because they resemble humans, that they’re like us—but no! It reminds us that we—we mighty humans—we’re just like them. You see a dog dance on two legs, see a parrot talk—and we think, We’re animals, just like that, with animal needs: food, water, sex, shelter. It gives an audience relief.”

  “I see.”

  “Perspective. Like Giovanni’s imitations. And, believe you me, Ms. Bernini, there’s a market for perspective these days. Which reminds me”—he lifted a finger—“I brought my references since I was sure you’d want to, as they say, peruse them.” He reached into his breast pocket and produced a swatch of creased, gray documents so thick it was hard to believe it had fit in his suit jacket. He stood and, with both hands, delivered the brick of paper to Mama.

  She made a bemused expression and began, as it were, perusing them. Max winked at me, and I winked back and then blinked two times to erase the effect, a needless precaution, I was happy to realize, as Max was now eyeing Mama, biting his lip and
scratching his forehead with an arched finger.

  Either Mama truly had no idea Max was watching her read—sighing and tapping his foot—or she did an excellent job of dissembling, here and there snickering, or nodding while pursing her lips as people do to indicate something has impressed them. When the crab cakes arrived, she set the stack of folded papers next to her silverware and continued to read, as if alone at the table, flipping from page to page as she ate, here and there dabbing the corners of her mouth with the peach napkin. When she had finished eating, she looked at both of us and smiled. “Hmmm-mmm. That was good.”

  By this point, Max was halfway through his second brandy. He’d pushed his chair back from the table, resting his fist on his hip. A nervous checking of his watch would have completed the pose.

  “Would you like to take a look?” Mama asked me after she had restored the pages to their original order.

  “Okay,” I said in as calm a voice as I could muster, receiving the stack with trembling hands. This was unwise, I knew—freeing my fingers—but I was curious, not so much to read the papers as to touch them. The pile, I soon saw, consisted largely of well-folded letters, but included, too, such diverse media as bar tabs, cocktail napkins, fortunes from Chinese cookies, and, in one case, a laminated slab of toilet paper on which a man named Russ had attested, in curling pen strokes, to Max’s having “a confused kind of grace.” “You can’t do no better than Max,” signed Jenny. Most were unreadable. The only typed reference in the packet was signed by a Dr. Seamus Finnegan, Director, Circle Top Circus, and read as follows: “Maximilian Horatio is occasionally punctual.” Underneath this note was tucked a peacock feather.

  “Lady MacGuffin’s head-feather,” Max said when he noticed me twirling it in my lap. “A rare item, indeed.”

  “I was wondering what that was,” said Mama.

  “I was glad to see you take your time reading those. Too often people skip over important documents, contracts and whatnot, rather than dig in, really sink their teeth in and read.”