Jacob Rubin: The Poser

What followed was not so different from one of the documentary films they sometimes screened at the Sea View County Theatre, those movies in which a grassland lion stalks and devours a baby elephant. Armison’s provided every patron with a silver-plated nutcracker: Max ignored his, assaulting the animal with his hands. There were three clean snaps , then he beheld the lobster’s sinewy tail. He eyed it with the respect of a predator and smushed it into the bottom of his butter dish, held it there. Two gulps later, it had disappeared. An emission somewhere between a hum and a groan was the sound of his chewing. The tail gone, Max hunkered down and vacuumed all meat and juice out of the remaining animal, sucking the pink-white fins, cracking the joints, lapping up the green mush of roe. His eyes, during this feast, remained in a state of vivid disuse: glassy, black, unfocused. He belched, sucked air through his nose. Whenever he required water (often, given the intense rate of his ingestion) he sent his free hand on a blind mission for the glass, scuttling over the tablecloth, and finally grabbing it, kept that hand — and the hand gripping a battered lobster claw — at the two sides of his mouth, like microphones at a press conference. His chin glistened with lobster juice.

I had to skip the ceremonious application of the bib. I jumped right into lobster cracking, dunking, chewing. Instead of staring off in a kind of gorged reverie, I had to keep an eye on Max to make sure he didn’t notice my humming or hovering over my plate or shoveling chunks of shellfish down my gullet. Twice I nearly choked. The lobster tough, tasteless. Pale bits of corn splintered between my teeth. By the time he sighed, tossed his balled-up napkin onto his plate, and leaned back in his chair, I’d returned my hands to their position under me, though I could feel a beard of mess on my face.

Mama had barely touched her dinner, eyeing Max and me with that mixture of horror, rebuke, and bemusement mothers do so well. “Is everyone okay?”

“Fine,” I said.

Max swooned in digestion. “Accch,” he said, as if lifting a piano. “Ecccch.”

“I take it you liked the food,” Mama said.

Max chuckled. “Oh, God, yes,” and a quiet settled over the table, as Mama, with an exquisite and almost parodic economy of manners, sliced and nibbled her lobster savannah. I sat with that mess on my face. My stomach whistled. Max, meanwhile, ordered a coffee and, when it arrived, sipped it, groaning in continued ode to the fallen meal.

No one spoke, but things had changed: the weather of the table shifted. A new front coming in. It was Max’s appetite, I think, unguarded and unruly, as if some mad puppy had leapt out of his person to frolic on the table, delighting Mama. People who did not comport with the narrow bounds of the world — these were her favorite, and she smiled for the first time all dinner, uncoiling her hands from her lap. I remember being scared of all things, terrified that she might say yes. That she would give me up.

“Where were we?” said Max. “Right, the names. The names . VIP personalities, all of them, and if you want, I can get more letters to—”

“It’s not the letters, the letters don’t matter, Max,” she said. “It’s my son. You’re asking to take him away from me.”

“A tall order, I know, but I’ve got a feeling about it. Giovanni, he’s really quite a talent. In fact, I—”

“He’s been destined for this since he was a boy.” Her voice deepened as if to match the finality of her pronouncement, and a strange, wholly illogical fantasy overtook me: that Mama had been the one to arrange this dinner. That she was trying to pawn me off to this stranger. A fist of gas rose in my throat.

“Well, there you go. Destined!”

“He used to perform for me every day, you know that?”

“You didn’t tell me that!” Max knocked my shoulder like a chum. I tried to smile, but my lips weighed too much.

Mama stared off, through a haze of reminiscence, then raised the martini to her lips. “So, what are you proposing exactly?”

“First we move to the City. Expenses covered by moi truly. I have a room lined up at the Hotel San Pierre, superb quarters. Then I say start at the top. Full Moon Bar, the Green Room. If those don’t work, on to the nightclub circuit. The comedy clubs.”

“But what’s the act?”

“Excuse me?”

“Who will he do?”

“Why,” Max said, grinning that same way he had for me. It was like seeing a comedy act for the second time. I burped and tasted lobster. “The audience!”

“Ha!” Mama covered her mouth. “The audience!” In her glinting eyes, I understood, ran the roll call of teachers, classmates, shopkeepers and parents, my former tormentors, lining up to be copied by Giovanni the Entertainer. “He used to do the silly faces I made when I was feeding him. When he was a little baby in his high chair — everything all right, sweetie?”

“Just the restroom.” I managed a cavalier grin. “Excuse me, sir, the restroom?” I asked a jumpy waiter, who directed me to a hallway at the end of the dining room. I jogged the last yard, made it just in time: vomited the lobster in the toilet, and spat and regurgitated, “Why, the audience! The audience! ” into the shallow acoustics of the bowl.

When I returned to the table, Max had already paid the check. Mama’s wineglass was empty, and her chin was swaying slightly. “Destined for this…” she repeated. I smiled in the pursed way I did at the train station, politely asking Mama for gum. Outside we said our goodbyes. Later, at home, I was brushing my teeth when I heard a noise. I hurried into the kitchen where Mama had parked herself at the table, crying. A long time passed with her that way and me standing in the foyer, holding my toothbrush. Eventually she yawned while fingering an eyelash from the corner of her eye. “Come here,” she said, I obeyed, and she held me in her lap. After a few minutes, she laughed and said, “You’re hurting me. Up.”

Mad cabbies gripping the wheel with stranglers’ eyes. Businessmen halving the newspaper like a martial origami. Traffic cops blowing whistles amid a second city, of voices in the air, saying, “And I told him, if he needed my compassion, well, I’d have to see some from him first, and that’s fair, I think, isn’t it?”; saying, “It’s not really cool, more hip — or not hip but now ”; explaining, “If you’re gonna get in on this, baby, get the hell in on this now, ’cause we makin’ some money tonight,” these amid voices more raggedy and berserk, singsongy and desperate, voices calling every ignoring stranger friend, big man, boss, doll —these calls of the homeless cluttered among the others’, each presenting itself on every block, as in a museum, yes, but a museum of voices. The trucks and cars a city-wide brass band of the vicious and deranged. Men on park benches expressing a deracinated life with a single sigh. Turtlenecked hipsters glaring with unsmiling mouths. And hours into our first foray, I, increasingly dizzy, followed marching Max down to the Fifteenth Avenue subway station where commuters performed their own hivelike choreography: toeing the platform’s edge, stepping back, checking their watch, jostling a briefcase before the train gusted into the station, upsetting their hair.

The subway car itself was even stranger. Weeks later, I would meet a similar territory in a theater’s backstage, that shadow realm where a sheriff unclips his badge and throws on a toga, or elves, between scenes, drowse on pink wooden clouds. Yes, the subway represented a vessel of quick changes and reprieve, a zone where the players of the City dabbed rouge on their cheeks or rested their eyes in a vacant stare, before resuming whoever it was they were aboveground.