Jacob Rubin - The Poser

As the red curtains closed, however, my mood seemed to stiffen. I waved too much and smiled weakly to the applauding people below. In the trip from the sidewalk to the waiting car, I walked with a hitched gait, and once inside the Desert had difficulty finding my footing in the sand. I linked my elbow with Julie Dark’s, hoping that would help. Attentive as ever, she laid her soft fingers on my arm as we strode into the party, but this made it worse, and I just as quickly released the grip.

Soon I led us to a group of chatting actors, whose company was my favorite. The women held their heads at a soft-focus angle, the men made everything crisp and light. With actors each gesture rose to the level of event. The way they snapped an arm forward and back in order to check the time. The fruitful nodding. I stood around them in my customary silence.

Through the years, I’d tried different strategies, of course. I’d put my faith in politeness first, and later in wit, but silence, I learned, was better still and got you so far, especially in Fantasma Falls, where the point of someone was to not know them. People would descend upon me as tourists would a famous statue, and like a statue, I was charged only with the task of being still. By then, I lived under a haze of rumor: That I acted this way only after the movie came out. That I was “staying in character.” That Bernard was imitating me. We were fucking. Uncle and nephew. Crooks. What bits reached me I didn’t bother to dispel, and soon, to my delight, words like mysterious and laconic came to surround my name in the papers, like newsprint bodyguards.

And yet, when the feeling blasted me, as it did that night at the Desert, this armor of rumor, of reputation, did little, and it was best to have Bernard nearby, so that I could draw him live. So while an actor nattered on about the joys of the ninth hole at Trembling Hills, I looked discreetly for Bernard, finding him at last by the five-piece band where he danced in a kind of fever, digging his toe in the sand, twisting his hips, marking this effort with an ugly frown. When I looked up again sometime later, he was standing on his tiptoes to whisper to the band’s singer, a statuesque blonde with dark, diving eyebrows. As he seemed to gnaw on her ear, she nodded with slow-dawning comprehension and then shrieked, shoving Bernard to the sand, where he waved his legs and arms in playful arcs, giggling.

Out of the corner of my eye, with Julie at my side, I monitored his raucous passage through the party. Bernard pushed past a bushy-haired waiter, spilling a platter of ruby cocktails. Later he participated in a shouting conversation with a circle of very tall men. At one point he vanished from sight altogether only to appear later on a rafter high above the party, where he crouched like a gargoyle before the fake orange sun.

I’d seen such things before. Once when he was drunk at the Communiqué, he had climbed onto the bar to do a limb-tossing jig, the intended irony of which was difficult to gauge. As it was the time he shushed everyone in the Communiqué’s back room to sing a winding, impassioned ballad about sailors who survived the open sea only to perish after visiting the “midnight house” of a lightly mustachioed prostitute named Frangelina. As I remembered it, no one quite knew how to react to these emotive displays, and the few who attempted to muss Bernard’s hair or clap him on the back were met with vicious muttered insults.

He seemed to be moving toward us. “Have to go to the restroom,” I said to Julie.

“Go to the restroom, darling.”

As Bernard moved through the party, I did what I could to push in the opposite direction, hoping, really, to sneak out the back exit, though I soon found myself approaching Nathan Sharp, dressed in his customary premiere-night ensemble. Top hat, tuxedo, white gloves. Seeing me, he raised his arms in triumph. I bent down to receive his hug.

“I got that little feeling in my chest. And it’s not angina.” He gave me a coquettish look. “It’s that sequel feeling.”

“There you are!” I turned, and there stood an actress who looked exactly like Mama. The aged version I’d seen in the City. Her drooping cheeks. Hair fully gray. Max stood next to her. The woman smiled in an absent, anxious way.

“Mama.”

Her smile filled the Desert, and it was as if all the separating years vanished, like that! In the middle of the Desert, I shrank to the size of a nine-year-old, drowned in an oversize suit and too-big cowboy boots, peering up at my Mama. How many times had I been poked or headlocked or scowled at by some petty parent before Mama arrived, saving everything! And it was as if all the Desert — the peering, braceleted women, the men cocking their heads to airdrop hors d’oeuvres into their mouths — shimmered and then vanished altogether, mere emanations of our play inside the Sea View living room.

“Well?” I said. “What did you think?”

She did not hesitate. “My favorite part was the panhandler. The way you shook the tin — that was my Giovanni, that had the old joy in it.”

“Dollar, sir . Dollar, please.” I couldn’t resist, shambling in the sand with that hunched back, my hand raised above my head. I passed Mama, who was already giving me her Look. “Charity helps all, goddamnit!” But as I circled her, planning one more go-around, there appeared before me, somehow, the man in the wedding dress, from Marguerite Harris’s party. “Quite something, really,” he said before disappearing, an apparition of memory soon replaced by my room at the Ambassador, that den where I had shivered and sweated. The bursting feeling. And I stood up very straight and looked at Max, with Bernard’s appraising eye. “Did you arrange this?”

“Well, I did, yes. Call me naïve, but I was hoping you’d listen to her and forget all this moviebiz masquerade bullshit.”

“I thought we agreed that you wouldn’t come,” I said to Mama, trying to hold my tone.

“Oh, I know, Giovanni, but I just couldn’t resist. The idea of seeing it in Sea View and coming out of the theater all alone — no, I couldn’t stand it. I had to surprise you.”

“And what a delightful surprise it is,” a voice said.

I turned, and there stood Bernard. His hair and face, since his time in the rafters, had somehow become wet. The bolo tie hung around his neck like a towel. “If we knew you were coming, Ms. Bernini, we certainly could’ve gotten you better seats.” He made a vague tsk-tsk gesture in Max’s direction and then reached for Mama’s hand, which she snatched away.

“But of course, but of course, please, I insist!” Bernard extended his arm toward me with the unctuousness of a maître d’.

“Look at him!” Mama had a fist on her hip and a finger in the air, accusingly. “For a day, fine. For the screen, yes, but not to stay, Giovanni.”

“But it seems to be working out?” Bernard said. “It seems everything’s been going sort of perfectly well since he left home, no?”

“I would never have let you go with Max…” she said, ignoring Bernard, who began doing a strange, sort of absentminded pirouette and who, hearing this latest riposte, began to repeat “let you?!” with mock disbelief, with bent knees, and a hand cupped above his waist as if nursing a stab wound. “Thank god, she let you,” he kept saying until Mama, with whitely pursed lips, stepped through the sand and swatted him with her handbag.

She lit into him, striking him about the head, shoulders, and neck, a look of unholy concentration in her eyes. Bernard, in response to this assault, protected his head with his hands and hopped around in circles, like a tickled chimp, the two of them kindling onlookers’ attention until a ring of people had formed, Nathan among them, and Julie, too, who, finding me there amid this chaos, constructed a look of disgust, and then, seeing my own expression, downshifted to concern.