Jacob Rubin: The Poser

Privy to such unveiled expression, I, like a jewel thief allowed into the cutting room, might have rampaged through the car (Max, sensing as much, started to collect me in his arms) were it not for my discovery of a new expression worn by several weary passengers, one they’d clearly donned for outside use but still wore, almost forgettingly, like a scarf. It was new, this face, did not exist in Sea View or Dun Harbor; similar to the thousand-yard stare of a patient too long in a waiting room (that same absentminded physical uprightness, the closed but loosened mouth) but with a dose of alertness injected in the eyes. You might choose to ball and un-ball your hands, or scratch your chin, or keep the body in a slightly tightened state of repose, but what mattered most was the face, on guard but unaggressive.

I began to make this expression myself, and when we emerged at War Hero Square, noticed more pedestrians wearing it, like a uniform. Indeed, in those first few weeks as I adjusted to the tumult of the City, it was this face alone that saved me. Without it all those people would have conducted through me as through a lightning rod — I would have burst into flames. Max would talk and talk, and I hardly listened, taking in the City under the saving veil.

When I did begin to tune in, the news, I gathered, was uniformly bad. It took just one week of calling upon Maximilian’s various “friends” in show business to discover none were the slightest bit interested in showcasing my talents. Reactions ranged from apathy to open violence. “You see this bat?” Mo Fisherman, the owner of the Horn Club, asked, brandishing a Kensington slugger.

“Of course I see the bat!” Max said. “What kind of questions are we asking?”

“I’m gonna kiss your skull with this bat.” He was advancing toward us when Max grabbed my arm and ran us out the door.

Club owners hurled the names like rocks: Horoscope the Nine-Foot Horror; Darlene the One-Legged Clairvoyant; Rascal Rodriquez, Mexican comedian — Max’s run of previous stage acts, failures absent from his pitch in Sea View. They shared a freak-show flavor, unsettling, to say the least, like learning of a lover’s exes. It seemed I was but the latest in a doomed and repetitive cycle.

“Mo fucking Fisherman,” Max said as we walked up Eighth Avenue. “Runs some cabaret, thinks it makes him King Master of Taste.”

“He’s not the only one,” I said.

He stopped dead in his tracks. The people rushed by on both sides of us, like trees through a car window. “What you say?” He jammed his finger in my chest, and we rode the subway in silence up to New Parthenon, a Greek diner across the street from our hotel. Max, still grumbling, muttered his order to the waiter, who minutes later delivered a matzo ball soup, two grilled-cheese sandwiches, and a hefty pizza burger, all of which my manager, using what implements he had — namely, hands and mouth — incorporated zealously into his person. When the last bun-tomato-beef matrix had disappeared, he crumpled his napkin into a ball and tossed it onto the plate, sighing like a spent lover.

After two weeks of living with him, I learned that Max’s otherwise buoyant moods could be sunk only by the pulls of hunger. Earlier in the week, I’d seen him shove a Chinese man for walking too slowly in front of him and then whistle in pleasure not twenty minutes later after devouring two veal cutlets and a chocolate sundae.

I understood. A personality such as his required fuel. Just being the recipient of his hypotheses, exclamations, gossip, and complaint exhausted me, though the City, I should say, had largely cured me of him. How could I stay faithful to Max alone, after all, among the hollers of the street? As we went from venue to venue, I watched these folk march out of apartment buildings or pour back into them, where windows higher up, like paintings on a gallery wall, framed certain portraits: a man splashing water over his face with the expression of one coming up for air; a woman removing an earring with two hands. A paltry fantasy, I admit, but this was mine: to occupy an apartment, to be observed by a stranger!

• • •

“Be back this afternoon,” Max said, tapping me awake. “Office of Permits and Registration. The talent ought to be spared such drudgery.”

After two weeks of profitless cold calling came Max’s new plan: to perform in Archer Park, a swatch of greenery behind the public library. Buskers and jugglers put on shows there, apparently. “Resorting to street performance is in no way evidence of failure,” he insisted, though no one was arguing otherwise. “This arrived, too,” he said before closing the door.

When I identified the flat, right-leaning hand on the envelope, any prospect of sleep vanished. I tore it open.

SEPTEMBER 26

My Giovanni,

Oh, my boy, my boy, it’s lonely without you. How couldn’t it be without my Giovanni? You know how the people are up here, the stupidity they can’t help but be and how tiresome it gets (I swear, I think small towns make us all dumb). I walk along the boardwalk and see Dottie Charles with her little pug and Mr. Pitt and think about you waddling around like them — patting your head, straightening your hair — and that’s about the only way I can take them seriously. No one should be taken seriously, should they? You know better than me, my loveliest boy. Did it upset you to see Mama cry? I hope not. It shouldn’t. My gorgeous little monster, it’s only that I miss you. Write me, write me, write me, and know that Mama will be visiting soon.

With all possible love, Mama

We had talked twice on the lobby phone since Max and I arrived in the City, but those calls were always derailed by some commotion. All in all, the Hotel San Pierre fell well short of Max’s description. The staff stank of booze. Empty food carts, shelled with stained plates, drifted squeakingly down the hall. The lobby’s row of phone booths, in particular, proved a site of much desperate activity. A man pleading with a creditor with fake good cheer. A woman with wet heavy lips whispering, “Baby, baby, baby, please pick up.” Most of these people were not occupants of the hotel, I understood, but wanderers, in from the street, and their voices, strained and exposed, threatened to seep into mine, a danger that at least partially accounted for the brief and stilted quality of my phone conversations with Mama.

None of those talks rivaled the life of this letter. It was like receiving a monologue delivered by a superb actress playing the part of my mother. I wanted to try it, too, sounding like someone who turned out to be me. Just then the door burst open and in rushed Maximilian wild-eyed, brandishing a rolled copy of The Skyline Gazette . “Clothes. Now,” he said. “Luck finally deigned to call.”

• • •

Down hilly West Highway in and out of traffic we weaved, past the cruise ships docked on the pier like napping dinosaurs, the river beyond the concrete guardrail wind-tossed and moody. “An old friend has opened a nightclub in town! I have a beautiful feeling about it, boy. No more lies.”

With eyes as big as moons, with bellowing interest, Maximilian told me the story of Bernard Apache, the man we were headed to see. “We met out west in Fantasma Falls,” he began. “An old acquaintance of Dr. Finnegan’s, the circus chief. Ran for Congress, I think. Then got into theater stuff. Maybe worked on the movies. Powerful guy. Connected . The mob. Dirty cops, all of it. After we left, Dr. Finnegan told me the big rumor, the famous one.”

Apache, Finnegan told him, had served in the war as a rear admiral and, as such, oversaw some of the most brutal campaigns in the South Pacific. He summoned a loyalty from his soldiers as great as any they held for a commander. In fact, he was soon to rise to the rank of vice admiral when a correspondence between him and a Japanese lieutenant general, Kendo Ozu, was unearthed from a valise under Apache’s cot in which the two, in addition to debating topics as disparate as baseball and The Iliad , wagered on the outcomes of war.