The Poser (5 page)

“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.

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.

Apache, of course, was shackled and thrown into the brig. “They were gonna hang his ass,” Max said, but a host of beguiling particulars emerged, complicating what had seemed such bald betrayal. To start, the rear admiral often furnished the Japanese officer with incorrect data on troop strength, giving credence to the theory, harbored by some members of the tribunal, that Apache had been recruited from some other arm of government to perform extraintelligence work as a “mock mole” or “counterspy,” winning the trust of the Japanese commander in order to prey on the man's extramilitary sense of honor. How Apache had won, let alone maintained, the credulity of a blind-hearted enemy was a subject of great speculation. Some believed he and Ozu had cemented a real friendship despite whatever games of betrayals had passed between them. Others that Apache had journeyed so far into being a spy he no longer knew what he stood for. Apache answered none of the tribunal's questions.

In the end, the rear admiral's fluency in Japanese, his keeping a handwritten facsimile of the correspondence, meticulously ordered and dated in the valise under his cot, his skill in prosecuting such communiqués from the secure distance of an aircraft carrier, and his extraction of valuable intelligence from the Japanese officer (as well as the secret intervention, it was widely believed, of higher-ups in the government) saved Apache from execution. He was discharged without punishment, though many in the navy still called for his head. To his few staunch champions, however, Apache was a maverick patriot, a genius of war and other things.

“Finnegan said there were rumors,” Max told me. “That he was still doing spy work. That the theaters he owned were just a front. But this—” He snapped open the paper with a businessman's panache.

According to the
Gazette
, Apache had purchased the old Tinder Box Theater, a half mile west of Aberdeen Row, the heart of bohemia. “‘The relic of the building remains in Western Downtown on Fourteenth Avenue,'” Max read, as our cabdriver nosed toward the Fourteenth Avenue exit ramp, “‘an anomaly among the warehouses and meat-packing plants that have since sprung up around it. Renovating the Tinder has remained a cause célèbre among the more quixotic and nostalgic of the city's philanthropists, but was considered foolhardy, if not impossible, given the reestablishment of the Theater District two miles north of what is now an industrial neighborhood. The nightlife and ne'er-do-wells of Aberdeen Row are close enough, this is true, but the theater will need more than a bohemian audience to maintain its costs. And what would draw faithful theatergoers from their velvet-lined boxes in midtown to a rickety cabaret so far west?'

“Apache can do it if anyone can,” Max said, as the driver jolted to obey a stop sign and then peeled right onto a potholed street, stopping when we came to a redbrick building. “He once said to me, ‘Max, if you're good at killing in wartime, you'll be good at turning profit in peace.' This guy's got something, boy.” According to the article, Apache, outside of basic renovations, planned to make no structural changes to the building. But he was giving it a new name. It would now be known as the Communiqué.

 • • • 

Bookending the entrance were two copper-topped bars where men glared at us like deer. Many circular tables, chairs stacked on top of them, filled the space leading to the stage itself, between which hunched sweepers busily worked. On the stage an unoccupied ladder stood under a massive dangling light rig. It smelled like sawdust and beer.

“Is Bernard Apache here?” Maximilian addressed no one so much as the hall itself. The sweepers stopped their work to consider us. The bar hands, a few feet away, continued to peer in our direction as if incapable of speech. Max stepped forward, and I followed, both of us coming out from under the low ceiling, which, we saw now, supported a grand balcony glutted with red-cushioned seats. An illuminated box indicated a second bar above. “Is Bernard Apache here?”

Again, silence.

“Is Bernard Apach—”

“Who wants to know?”

The voice hailed from the far end of the room. Through the forest of upturned chair legs, a plume of smoke rose, like a signal in the woods, and we made our way toward it, around the sweepers. As we approached, we saw four wiry men in suits sitting around a table, playing poker, all of them vigorously chewing gum—producing a street-firecracker chaos of
pops
and
snaps
—except the oldest, a man in his early fifties maybe, who held between his middle and ring fingers a cigarette from which he extracted long, vulnerable sips. His pale blue eyes—amused, I would call them—did not stray from his hand of cards, despite this arrival of strangers, us. His tablemates, meanwhile, greeted Max and me with a uniform glower and even more hostile jawing of gum.