Jacob Rubin: The Poser

“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 hello, 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.