The Poser

by Jacob Rubin

  The red velvet steps seemed a material confirmation of the gliding I felt with each movement forward. The knob was just the right shape for my hand. Unlocked.

  When I entered, he was pacing behind the desk, the receiver in one hand, the phone nestled against his shoulder. A cigarette hung in the corner of his mouth. Behind him stood an elaborate painted screen depicting a charge of soldiers shouldering their way vertically and left, through clots of gun smoke, toward a pink moated castle.

  “I don’t disagree, Tom.” When he saw me, he opened his mouth and closed it very suddenly. In a low clear voice he said, “Sorry, Tom. I’ll have to call you back,” hung up the phone, and set it on the desk. He smiled. “Look at you.”

  “Okay.” Before he could offer it, I helped myself to the chair across from him.

  As if following my lead, Bernard sat behind the desk. “You come to spook me?” He smiled again in that grand fake way.

  “Something like that.” Already I was learning so much: The way his eyes changed when he inhaled smoke. How he paused before the last two words of a line, to squeeze the moment. The rain outside was soft and low.

  “For the record,” he said, “she told me you two had split.”

  “Guess it’s fine then.”

  He seemed to consider this. “You knew she and I had some times. What’s one more?” He exhaled smoke through his nose. “I think the word for that is showbiz.”

  I said nothing. This alone felt like a revelation—that I was under no obligation to speak.

  “She was upset,” he said. “Apparently you put on quite a show at Marguerite’s.”

  “Keep talking. You’ll find something that sticks.”

  “Look, you’re young. You like Lucy. Guys tend to. Hell, sometimes she even likes them back. Believe me, this gig ain’t your last stop, but it’s hers.”

  “All that up to you?” My body felt so pliable, so light—it could tense up or fly away, freed as it was from housing me.

  “What can I say?” He made a show of repressing a grin. “The girl likes—how’d you put it? A good dicking?” He did that thing where he revealed the hardness of his eyes without shedding his grin. After a moment, he stood up. My lap began to lift with his, but I tensed, remained seated. “We have some things in common, y’know.”

  “I think that’s why I’m here.”

  “Is it? I’ve got an inkling you don’t entirely know why you are. Scotch?”

  “Sure.” I should have said, “Fuck off,” or nothing at all.

  “You ever think about who our customers are?”

  Perhaps it was because he was at the sideboard, out of view. I tried the cigarette.

  “Y’know, I think about it a lot. Of course, if I’m gonna keep a shop like this in operation, I need to consider who comes in the door, don’t I?”

  “Sure you do.”

  “Well, a customer’s someone who buys a ticket to the show, right? We could start there. Grown up around window displays and advertisements and radio programs, our man couldn’t help but be born with the dream of becoming one—a customer, I mean. Ask a kid, he’ll say he wants to be a doctor or engineer, some new kind of electric fag who’ll shock the world. And, hell, he may do it, but he’ll also all his life, first and foremost, be a customer just the same way he’ll be a citizen.” He was pacing, out of view. “So let’s say our customer, he meets a nice brunette right out of a glossy mag, and when the time comes, he gets down on one knee because, well, that’s what tradition says to do, no? And he buys into tradition. After all, he’s a customer, hell, that’s the first thing he buys. And he and this little bride, they get a nice apartment on the east side or a split-level out in Woodberry Heights, and they go out to restaurants and drive home with not a helluva lot to say. And he looks out his window at the windows of other customers and wonders what kind of furniture they have and what they look like when they’re vacuuming, doesn’t he? Maybe he gets bored. Maybe he’s sick of watching his pukish little kids do long division, and he decides—well, fuck it, he decides to take out that office girl, the one with the fat ass. The customer’s having an adventure now, isn’t he? And on any given Tuesday night, after chewing on his girl’s cunt for a half hour, he likes to sit on her fire escape and smoke a cig just like that guy in that thing, the handsome one he saw back when he was a customer at the movies. But he’s getting older, isn’t he? Our customer’s getting gray hair! Sundays he sits with the paper and has a good ole time getting as indignant as he can. That’s the service the paper provides—indignity all the way home. Yes, he sprays his opinions at it. He’s got opinions that are his alone, the customer does; they’re precious to him, near holy. Tears come to his eyes when they sing the national anthem at ball games and when he holds his opinions in his mind.” Bernard came into view, grinding out the cigarette in the desk’s ashtray. “But, alas, he’ll forget his opinions. He’ll have trouble remembering what the big ones were and why they mattered. Luckily, he socked away some dough. A gravesite, a funeral—these are his last purchases, his last acts as a customer. And they all gather around it—his customer buddies, his customer wife and kids, the girlfriend, whose ass isn’t fat anymore—and these mourners cry, because they buy that the customer lived a life, don’t they? They weep around our customer’s grave.” He scratched his chin and then waved his hand almost effetely, as if to dismiss all that he had previously said as nonsense. “But what I wonder, as the owner of this outfit, is before he kicks the bucket, why does the customer come to our show?”

  I did what I could to make my answer sound flat and rote, like a kid who’s heard the same lecture too many times. “Because it makes him feel like less of a customer.”

  His smile vanished. “I know how it is. You were born, cursed, with that urge. To peek behind the curtain. No, the stage can’t hold you for long.” He added, “I was pleased to see you finally got it right, by the way.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Your impression of Lucy backstage. It was finally whole.” His smile erupted again. And it was then I realized. The way he acted when he saw me in his office—I was sure he was taken aback, ambushed, but it wasn’t that at all. He had been excited.

  “I don’t know how much longer I need to be here,” I said, even as I was feeling all the more bolted to my chair and the second chair of my knees and arms. I was back in it. Such a subtle thing, such an infinite difference. The lift of the chin, the tap of a finger. A centimeter between happening and tumbling, between having and being had.

  “What is it you want?” I asked. But I already knew, it had already started. He was going to make me a spy.

  BERNARD

  TEN

  Once inside the bedroom Bernard with bearlike swipes chased her from the dresser to the mantel to the four-poster bed, at the edge of which the broad-shouldered woman squealed in delight, the belt of her fur-trimmed negligee still somehow staying tied. Earlier she’d performed a perfect B-girl curtsy, turning on white slippers when offering her hand, even doing that thing where she stuck her index finger in her dimple and screwed it in. I understood. It didn’t matter how well she pretended, what mattered is that she would never stop.

  On all fours on top of the bed she made eyes at me in the armchair as Bernard kissed her neck.

  “Am I gonna know your friend, too?” she asked.

  “Shut up.” He began to insult her body. Each time she emitted gasps as round as quarter notes. It went on like that. Not like he was playing an instrument so much as moving his hands over one of those pianos that play themselves. Buttoning up his shirt, he nodded to me. “You want this?”

  “Please,” she pleaded as I rose. “Help.”

  Sauntering toward the bed, I produced a high, whimpering laugh. Around the sheets hung the stench of bad fruit. “Please.” Her shoulders were warm and pressed, her hair like steel wool. I pulled it. “Shut up,” I told her.

 
Laughter arose from the beaten armchair the moment it was over. The woman slapped me loosely on the back, her hands slick and warm. “Where’d you find this one, Bernie?”

  She had gotten up and was fixing her hair in the mirror. As she did, she bit her lower lip self-consciously and sprayed a lavender bottle around, shaking her head into the mist of it. “Sweet of you to come see us at the Jade House.” When she turned to me, her eyes bruised with makeup, I turned away.

  She led us back down the dark hallway, holding my hand. In the room lined with green drapes the women positioned themselves not any one too close to another. On the widely opened laps of gap-toothed men. By the bar. Their legs like unsheathed swords. “Come back soon, won’t you?” she said. A host of women in negligees joined her in ushering us to the door. In their languid movements only their hips seemed tightly wound. “Thank you,” I said again as the door shut. In the canyon below, the lights of the city shimmered a ghostly blue. A hot wind ratted out the palm trees, which were darker, wilder lengths of darkness. My hands trembled as I lit the cig.

  “Don’t thank them,” Bernard said.

  • • •

  Often I didn’t know where we were going. “Remember to compliment the teacups,” Bernard would say, or, “I hope he doesn’t go on and on about that boat,” and Frankie or Lou would snicker in the town car’s backseat as the pinks of the city oozed down their suits.

  Ever since our meeting in his office, my days at the Communiqué felt numbered. For three weeks I continued to perform on Saturday night, a run of awkward and transitional shows during which I appeared in Bernard’s getup and, between volunteers, acted in his manner. Max hated it, and I suppose I did, too, but for different reasons. Every facet of the routine bored me, but the ubiquity of touch seemed worst of all. At the bar, after shows, they passed me around like a wind-up toy.

  Mostly I kept to the back room with Bernard and his people. I liked to slide the cards to the edge of the table and peek at an inside straight draw. By then I’d gone back to the tailor and had all the duds straightened out—the suit and later the boots, several pairs. One afternoon Frankie found me in the office and, without a word, handed me a heavy crumpled paper bag. A .22, which I kept holstered out of view, like Bernard’s. I never once used it. But its heft was crucial, like a sandbag.

  All of this helped, of course, with Lucy, the few times I saw her darting around the Communiqué. As Bernard, I viewed her in her totality, like an animal at the zoo, the way everything it does inadvertently contributes to a definition of what it is. The few times we found ourselves alone in a hallway, she made a general show of exasperation, muttering, “Excuuuuse me,” as she shouldered past me.

  Except it did happen one more time, backstage. Bernard was right: She liked to make people naked. Our bodies started it without us. And once it was happening, it was like staying in a house you used to live in, you know where they keep the gin. She thought it would be like it was. She thought we would frolic and lounge, that I would risk it all to entertain her in that unventilated room. But I got my clothes on quick as I could. “You two fuuucking now?” she shouted, and I walked thirty blocks home trying not to shake.

  Mama had written me after the incident with Lucy. Someone had tipped her off. Maybe Max.

  MAY 5

  Oh, my Giovanni has the heartache. It is a terrible feeling, isn’t it? I think you ought to come home at once, away from those show-business types. I’ve got half a mind to go down there myself and scoop you up, put you in my pouch like a kangaroo. I liked Lucy all right, Giovanni, but for her to do this? And don’t get me started on Bernard. Really! I have a very bad feeling about that man. Come home. We’ll eat fancy foods and see movies and even do some of our old shows, just you and me.

  M

  She left messages at the Ambassador Hotel. I ignored them. When I wrote, I made it as short as I could.

  Mom—

  Bernard’s not half as bad as you think, and it’s all swell, really. As you said, it’s done with Lucy, and that’s good.

  When she wrote and called after that, I didn’t respond. At first this made me nervous, but Bernard insisted. He had theories. I don’t know if I believed them, but I liked to hear them delivered that way, with the certainty of the vicious. His father also left around the time he was born. “I was deprived all that,” he told me once. As I soon discovered, he was as capable of lengthy speech as he was of silence, the latter like a holster from which the former was drawn. “Not the father exactly, but his long decline. Daddy’s looking a little stooped going up the porch stairs. Daddy forgot Aunt Donna’s name today. Decline is the real inheritance,” he said. “A man with a father who’s present has seen him age and weaken and throughout the process feels himself edging closer and closer to manhood. But our fathers are always of immaculate age and strength, and so we are always boys. It’s the principal job of the father to show his son how to die. You had Max, and he’s a serviceable model, but I think it’s time you became your own man.”

  It may seem ridiculous to claim that I was doing that—becoming my own man—when I was in every way aping another, and yet it did feel that way, as if finally, as Bernard, I might tunnel my way to freedom. As I’d hoped, the impression sustained that dreamy sensation, that fog that descended whenever I’d imitated him previously. It was so potent, the feeling, I often woke up at three a.m. at the Ambassador Hotel not knowing where I was, or knowing where my body was, but feeling that I was distinctly elsewhere—in the hallway, perhaps, collecting ice or strolling down a path in the park. When, at the Communiqué, people gawked at our identical outfits, I didn’t care, because I knew they weren’t seeing me, really. That I wasn’t there to be seen. In this sense, no, it didn’t feel like becoming Bernard. It felt like entering a monastery. We wore the same uniform in the way monks don saffron robes, symbols of the ego’s retreat.

  In fact, there was something Eastern in Bernard’s view of the world. He often described life as a theater or illusion in whose grip most people lived. “Look at this guy,” he’d say sometimes as Clem, one of his associates, left the table. (The eccentricity of our shared appearance went over fine among the poker players, largely because Bernard was the boss and I the star.) “Can you believe this guy?” he’d say, though the man had done nothing more than cough into his fist. And yet I knew what he meant, and it took his doing it several times, with other people, to realize it reminded me above all of Mama, the way she and I used to hunt for threads in Sea View.

  It was Bernard who started bringing up the move out west, the idea of getting into the movies. Each day it waited for us, like a fat chauffeur in a town car. “A star of the screen’s the perfect Trojan horse,” he said. “You can put anything in it.” I cherished that phrase: a star of the screen. For a man onscreen can be gawked at and scrutinized, but he cannot be touched.

  • • •

  As the founder and president of Monument Pictures, Nathan J. Sharp possessed a likeness seen widely about town. There was one shot in particular that papered industry rags of the Tinsel Titan, as he was known, striding out of a shiny black limo in coat and tails, like a general taking his first step on conquered ground. It was an image, I discovered, that had little to do with the man bending cautiously over his desk to extract a sip of chicken soup. Every two minutes the phone on his desk would ring, and Sharp would scoop it up and yelp, “Never again,” or “Did he mention the carpet?” before hanging it up and gesturing with his arm for Bernard to continue.

  Nathan was an old friend of Bernard’s. “Old friends,” as I soon learned, encompassed a variety of acquaintances, rivals, businessmen, and madams. The phrase functioned, really, as a euphemism for debt, the directionality of which became obvious soon enough. In this case, Nathan seemed to owe Bernard a half hour, no more. In the short breaks between the tending to the phone and his soup, he prodded Bernard with questions about my act back east.

  Bernard answered, I smoked. It
was the old wind-up toy routine from the Communiqué. Be still. Spring to life. I was not listening is the truth when Bernard tapped me on the shoulder.

  “Said I read somewhere you’re from Italy,” Nathan was saying. He didn’t seem much fazed by our getups.

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “You tried to scrub it all off. But it’s still there.” He grinned. “Let me tell you, I came over here with nothing. Nada. Now look at me! They call that self-made.” He’d started out as a furrier in Poland, he told us, making three cents a day. “My real name? Nathan Sharpovitch. Now I am the famous Nathan Sharp!”

  He grew so animated I was moved to share an anecdote about the time I got thrown off a passenger train for imitating a steward with a whistling S. Lying in this way felt like the opposite of effort. Nathan slapped the table viciously and at the end of the meeting pulled me aside to mutter that we foreigners were the ones who invented this country. “You did all right, Bernie,” he shouted, mentioning the screen test as we left, like an afterthought.

  • • •

  “Play it low,” the director instructed me in the drafty room. “The surface is calm but underneath’s where we feel it.” When he left, I tried a cig. My face, in the bulb-lined mirror, looked thin and colorless. My hands were cold. “Play it low,” I thought, walking out.

  The lot was vast and dark, the size of a hangar and loud with banging doors. The day of the screen test I got lost inside it, finding myself on a gangplank high above a film shoot in which a blonde stabbed a man to death with a letter opener. Later, I ended up in a hall lined with red doors. When I tried one, a ring of tuba players glared back at me, each wearing a bib. Behind a second, a gray, speckled wolf snored fatly. Another revealed a row of actors in feathered headdresses raising their arms before a firing squad. Several more of these doors I tried, witnessing a kaleidoscope of increasingly bizarre scenes, before tumbling out into the afternoon.