Jacob Rubin: The Poser

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 populated 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.

“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.