The Poser (3 page)

“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.

Littered over it was a landscape of crumbs and dishware and almost every forum for the printed word:
The Evening Post
,
The City Times
, splayed hardcovers, yellow notebook paper, not to mention a pale thigh outlined by a garter belt, though the rest of the image—the woman's midriff, bra, and ruby lips, presumably—was obscured by a basket of rotten bananas. An excitable hand decorated every page on the table, circling words, adding phallic exclamation marks, the notes swarming like ants in the margin: “Exactly!” “Memorize.” “Money?”

“Some orange juice, young squire,” Max said, standing over me. Sweat ticked out of my armpits.

“Thank you.” I took the still-filthy glass and rested it on a relatively flat pile of magazines. I then scratched my nose so as to make returning my hand to its initial position less conspicuous.

“Awfully glad you could make it,” Max said, walking to the refrigerator. He swung open its door and grabbed—violently—a beer. “Glad as hell.” He tilted the bottle at a decisive angle and then decapitated it against the kitchen counter. After batting away whatever occupied his chair, he collapsed into a reclining position, wiping his brow. “This goddamn heat. There are things going on in my body no man should know.”

I shook my head though I meant to nod. This could happen. Sometimes at the station, when tired, I said “Please” instead of “Thank you,” winked when intending only to smile. Max hadn't noticed, though. He leaned back in that poor bursting chair. “You're not a talker.”

“Oh, sometimes.” I smiled my ticket-seller smile.

“Fine with me. Talkers, nontalkers. I don't distinguish. Hell, I don't distinguish at all. People are people. That's what entertainment's about.” He swigged his beer. “The best performers—the ones who can perform anywhere and get a self-respecting girl to drop her panties and grin
while she does it
—they don't make distinctions. They say, ‘Distinctions—'” He blew his thumb, making a flatulent noise, raised his middle finger, and planted his beer on the table. “Look at Shakespeare. His genius? You want a madman? Okay, I'll show you a madman. You want a king? All right. You want a pauper, pixie? Fuck you.

“But as soon as someone's got that talent—I'm talking about someone who can relate
to
anyone
, make
us
all
”—he drew a wide rink with his finger—“relate to him. When you got someone like that, what do they do?” He shrugged so much his palms were at his shoulders. “They put him on a pedestal. They say, ‘I wonder how he does it. How
does
he do it?'” He shook his head. “Have you ever heard the expression ‘People worship the lucky'? It's fucking—it's true, boy.” Either the hypocrisy itself, or his facility in exposing it, revolted him. He sighed and raised his arm as if to salute, then slapped his hand hard against his thigh. “I talk,” he said. “I talk.

“Well, you know what I mean.” He stood and began pacing, fanning the bottom of his sweat-stained shirt. “I was in a café in Sea View when I heard of you. Two men talking like they'd seen a ghost. Real shit-them-ole-panties fear.” He clasped his hands in front of his chest, wheeling his thumbs over each other. “Their fear—you need that first. Have you considered it? Performing?”

I made a face that said as much as making no face at all, like nodding while breathing out your nose (to express amused agreement), raising your eyebrows while suppressing a smile (mild scandal), or shaking your head while breathing in through the mouth (sympathy)—all those safe expressions I'd perfected at the station.

“What's celebrity?” he asked. “Being different from everyone. Different, so they want to be like you. Usually, it's beauty. Oldest hustle in the world. People never get bored of a beautiful face. Never bored of fucking beauty. I, for one, am
bored of it
. Me, I like a woman whose beauty is tilted ninety degrees.” He mimicked twisting the top off a bottle to express the ninety degrees to which beauty ought to be twisted. “Heavy potential. Because of that added layer. You're not up there saying, ‘Like me 'cause I dance, like me 'cause I sing.' You're saying, ‘Like me 'cause I'm you.' Quite brilliant. Quite a bit of everything, really.”

He muttered this last part, and having completed that sprint of breath, collapsed back into the chair. It groaned. “Hmph.” Energies blew in and out of the man. He massaged the meat of his neck, pinched the baggy skin around his throat. “Hmph, hmph, hmph.” He was staring out the window, or rather, looking at the air outside the window as if it, too, were a window to be looked through. A quality that attracts dogs and babies to a person belonged to him: a certain largesse, a willingness to share oneself with strangers.

Because of this quality, I found myself asking a question, a thing I hated doing. Questions were holes in my demeanor, windows through which rocks could fly. By then, I used the leavened voice of Richard Nelson, the father of radio-fiction (and previous go-to) Jimmy Nelson. Puberty, years before, demanded the shift. An improvement, really. On the diminishingly popular
The Hoaglands
, Richard stood as the true paradigm of the sensible and wry, qualities, if anything, his son (my first model) had aped. “What are these for?” I asked. “All these newspapers, magazines?”

“Research.” He planted his elbow on the arm of the chair, rested his two chins on his palm, and sighed. “Been putting my finger to the wind. That finger. You gotta get it wet.

“Month ago I was down in the City. Wore my ass off attending the latest horseshit day and night. Music, comedy, burlesque. Some were B-plus, I'll give them that, but the majority, boy—it was like watching a child make a brown little surprise in his pants, then walk around the aisles, asking everyone to clap for him. Wouldn't know it by the critics, though. Open up the paper, and the critics
love
Brown Surprise. They want
more
Brown Surprise. After all, what's a critic gonna say? ‘These are bullshit times. Take a nap.' No, they say, ‘Tour de force. Art's as good as ever!' Nonsense. The time is ripe for something
new
, and when they see it—oh, when they see it . . .” He shot up again, pawing through the newspapers on the table. Whether he was searching for something in particular or the frenzied shuffling was a point in its own right, I couldn't tell. “Well, they'll be making cider in their undies. White cider.” He looked at me. “What I mean is, they'll sperm themselves.”

I raised my eyebrows while suppressing a smile.

“Well, that's the thinking, anyway.” He dug his chin into his palm. “It's not that I doubt it. Doubt and I—no, I don't
doubt
things. I just want
other people
to give us the chance. It's the chance that needs to—ah, God, what can you do?” He squeezed circles into his temples and then covered his face entirely with his hand. Out the window a hammer clinked, a common noise in Dun Harbor. Men in hardhats were always streaming in and out of the train station, the reports of their hammers and drills punctuating the afternoon. The place lived in a constant state of construction without anything, as far as I could see, ever being built.

“What is it you're proposing, Max?” I was surprised to hear myself ask.

His eye studied me from between the knuckles of his middle and index fingers. Then his hand slid down his nose and mouth, unveiling a carnival grin. “How much time do you need?”

“I'm sorry?”

“To go on—I mean, you imitated me in—what—a few seconds. Is that all the time you need?”

“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.