The Poser (4 page)

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.

“Giovanni told me he had a mother. He did not warn me of her beauty.”

Mama smiled quickly and opened a menu. “It's going to be hard to decide. The food here is just extraordinary.”

“If the brandy's any indication, we're in for a
fine
evening of cuisine,” said Max, raising his tumbler. He patted my knee under the table.

Mama snickered.

“Something funny?” Max asked.

“You sound like someone I know,” she said.

“Someone good, I hope.”

“Oh, yes,” she said, squeezing my other thigh under the table.

“Resemblance, in my experience, is a finicky thing. If I looked like someone you didn't like, it would be, well,
dooming
. An Indian doctor I met once in the circus, he believed all the faces of the people we befriend in this life—they resemble people we knew in a previous one. Reincarnation, et cetera.”

“Good hard science,” said Mama without taking her eyes off the menu.

I should've known it would be like this. All week I'd looked forward to the dinner—knew that Mama's wit and eyes would square off against Max's bluster and teeth—but had failed to account for my own position: namely, after a week tramping around as Maximilian Horatio, I had to quit the act. Already I was sitting on my hands.

The waiter, dressed in black, appeared, rubbing his hands together mischievously, as if he had a great secret for us. “A drink, ma'am?”

“A gin martini up, please,” said Mama. “Perhaps a wine, too, for the table?”

“In addition to our list, which you'll find at the back of the menu, we have a special sauvignon red—a bit pricey but—”

“We'll take it,” Mama said.

“Excellent,” the waiter said with a serious, servile pout. “Be back in a second.”

“Please,” Max said, flashing a seasick grin. “Have whatever you want tonight. My treat.”

After the waiter returned with Mama's cocktail and uncorked and served the wine, Mama ordered two appetizers of crab cakes and the day's special, a lobster savannah. Max and I requested the standard lobster plate. Mama encouraged me to order an appetizer, too, since Max was so generously offering, but I demurred. The truth was I didn't think I could trust my hands, eating alone. A line of sweat had broken over my forehead, but I couldn't wipe it, not then.

Mama said, “Giovanni tells me you worked in the circus.”

“Circle Top Circus, that's right. Stage manager for four years. Developed some acts of my own, too. Mainly with animals. Animals and I have—it's an almost unnatural kinship. Dogs in particular.” Max sipped his brandy. “People like to see animals do extraordinary things—jump through hoops, walk on two legs. You know why?”

“I would love to understand why.”

“We think it's because they resemble humans, that they're like us—but no! It reminds us that
we
—we mighty humans—we're just
like them
. You see a dog dance on two legs, see a parrot talk—and we think, We're animals, just like that, with animal needs: food, water, sex, shelter. It gives an audience relief.”

“I see.”

“
Perspective
. Like Giovanni's imitations. And, believe you me, Ms. Bernini, there's a market for perspective these days. Which reminds me”—he lifted a finger—“I brought my references since I was sure you'd want to, as they say,
peruse
them.” He reached into his breast pocket and produced a swatch of creased, gray documents so thick it was hard to believe it had fit in his suit jacket. He stood and, with both hands, delivered the brick of paper to Mama.

She made a bemused expression and began, as it were,
perusing
them. Max winked at me, and I winked back and then blinked two times to erase the effect, a needless precaution, I was happy to realize, as Max was now eyeing Mama, biting his lip and scratching his forehead with an arched finger.

Either Mama truly had no idea Max was watching her read—sighing and tapping his foot—or she did an excellent job of dissembling, here and there snickering, or nodding while pursing her lips as people do to indicate something has impressed them. When the crab cakes arrived, she set the stack of folded papers next to her silverware and continued to read, as if alone at the table, flipping from page to page as she ate, here and there dabbing the corners of her mouth with the peach napkin. When she had finished eating, she looked at both of us and smiled. “Hmmm-mmm. That was good.”

By this point, Max was halfway through his second brandy. He'd pushed his chair back from the table, resting his fist on his hip. A nervous checking of his watch would have completed the pose.

“Would you like to take a look?” Mama asked me after she had restored the pages to their original order.

“Okay,” I said in as calm a voice as I could muster, receiving the stack with trembling hands. This was unwise, I knew—freeing my fingers—but I was curious, not so much to read the papers as to touch
them. The pile, I soon saw, consisted largely of well-folded letters, but included, too, such diverse media as bar tabs, cocktail napkins, fortunes from Chinese cookies, and, in one case, a laminated slab of toilet paper on which a man named Russ had attested, in curling pen strokes, to Max's having “a confused kind of grace.” “You can't do no better than Max,” signed Jenny. Most were unreadable. The only typed reference in the packet was signed by a Dr. Seamus Finnegan, Director, Circle Top Circus, and read as follows: “Maximilian Horatio is occasionally punctual.” Underneath this note was tucked a peacock feather.

“Lady MacGuffin's head-feather,” Max said when he noticed me twirling it in my lap. “A rare item, indeed.”

“I was wondering what that was,” said Mama.

“I was glad to see you take your time reading those. Too often people skip
over important documents, contracts and whatnot, rather than
dig in
, really
sink their teeth in
and read.”

“I absolutely agree.”

“Too often they just, as they say,
sign on the dotted line
.”

“Without reading what they're signing.”

“A shame.”

“Too common.”

There was a long silence.

“What did you think of them if I might ask?”

“Your?” Mama said.

“References.” He smiled queasily.

“Oh,” said Mama. “Well, I wasn't very impressed, Mr. Horatio.”

“Max, please.”

“I can't say I was impressed, Mr. Horatio.”

“If we can just settle on Max.”

“Half of it is illegible. The other half's signed by people with only one name.”

“Those so-called one-names are what we call VIP personalities. That Russ, that Russ you see there—that's Russ Banham, owner of the biggest nightclub in Fantasma Falls. Sebastian Foy is
the
most important talent manager in the City. As for the illegibles, well, keep in mind, there's a certain smudge factor here. I'm a traveling man, things get smudged. That's just a reality.”

“Lobster savannah,” the waiter announced.

“Right here,” said Mama, with a smile.

He set down the platter with the butter-soaked cruise ship of lobster and laid down the rest of the dishes: the two pink one-and-a-half-pound lobsters, the pale corn, and small dishes of butter. “Enjoy.” The waiter smiled seriously and disappeared.

“Big names or not, Mr. Horatio, they don't mean much scribbled on toilet paper.”

“Let's—let's,” Max said, pumping his knee. “Let's just pause here to let the food happen?”

“Before such cuisine, how could we not?”

But Max missed this riposte, distracted, as he was, by the seafood's arrival into the realm of his senses. Anyone could see it: how much the impending feast had replaced the tug-of-war with Mama as the true, and only, business of the moment. He sniffed and rubbed his hands and even licked his lips, like a cartoon wolf over a captured infant. Without removing his eyes from the platter, as if the dead, pink creature might still slither away, he cautiously unrolled the Armison's Famous Eatery bib and tucked it into his collar, the news of hunger everywhere in his face. “Let's just let the food happen,” he muttered again at the volume of a prayer.

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.”