Man About Town

by Mark Merlis

  The chairman woke up. “We give Medicare to illegal aliens?”

  “No, they’re legally here. But they aren’t citizens.”

  “What do you know,” the chairman said.

  “We let them get Medicare even though they may never have paid taxes.”

  “No kidding.” The chairman turned to his chief of staff, frowning. Why had he never been told about this outrage, larcenous foreigners pouring off the ships just to get Medicare? Why wasn’t he fixing it, instead of the junior member from the other party? The chief of staff avoided his gaze and turned to stare coldly at Altman.

  “So this would put an end to that,” Altman said.

  Joel chuckled. Yes, indeed: some eighty-year-old immigrant would get her goddamn fingers out of the public purse. This had to take the prize for the stupidest and most malignant proposal, in a year when Congress had displayed an unprecedented degree of insouciance toward widows and orphans. And from Gerald Altman, no less, a Democrat who was for some reason regarded as a liberal. Maybe because he looked like a liberal—the UNICEF tie, the hair a hemisphere of tight silver curls—or maybe because everyone just assumed that a Jewish senator from a rustbelt state had to be a liberal.

  Joel chuckled, partly because he couldn’t stand up and scream, but also because his revulsion was not unmixed with a sort of simple, sporting pleasure. Was this corrupt, his almost aesthetic delight in the sheer sordidness of the spectacle? Was he altogether too inside-the-beltway, smirking as nineteen unprincipled men got ready to ambush some widow in a babushka who probably lived on cat food?

  Because they would, surely, pass Altman Amendment #7. It was too beautiful to fail. Medicare on its way to bankruptcy, a bunch of parasites getting something for nothing. Usually you couldn’t do anything to old people: swarms of Gray Panthers would show up armed with pitchforks and shuffle-board cues. But Senator Altman had found—eureka!—old people who didn’t vote. Even the chairman was shaking his head in frank admiration. Eighteen to one, easy, or eighteen to zero if Flanagan didn’t stagger back from his hideaway in time to thunder what might be the only nay.

  Joel found himself thinking once more about high school. Maybe because sitting in a closed hearing while Senator Altman demonstrated that he could name every goddamn subcategory of Persons Resident under Color of Law was not at all unlike being trapped in a classroom on a spring day.

  He didn’t just think about high school: he dove quite deliberately into the fantasy he sometimes had—who doesn’t?—of going back and doing it right this time. Waking up one morning fourteen again and able to do it right. What would right have consisted of? Studying harder so he could have gone to Harvard instead of the ivy-deprived backup school he’d had to settle for? Coming out at about the same time as his first pubic hair, and then blowing every boy on the lacrosse team?

  Usually these counterfactuals were good for a few minutes’ entertainment as he waited for the Metro or stood in line alone at some movie Sam didn’t want to see. Tonight he couldn’t get into the game, for some reason. Even his favorite scene—the one where Alex put aside the algebra book and whispered that he had something momentous to reveal about himself, something Joel must never repeat to anyone—even conjuring that impossible instant left Joel feeling empty, empty and a little sour.

  Pathetic, a forty-five-year-old man sitting in a closed hearing where weighty things were being decided, picking at scabs left over from high school. But maybe it was pathetic only if he called that part of his life “high school,” those years of drama, ambition, burgeoning desire mockingly reduced to a situation comedy of phys ed, 45-records, and pimples. Those long years: whole lives, selves, tried on and abandoned in a single semester. Crushes—Alex only the most memorable in a continuous series, boys whose names he couldn’t remember but whose faces, bodies were still quite vivid to him, those young bodies alive now only in Joel’s memories. Oh, and vocations—lawyer, architect, actor, concert pianist.

  Such plans: when he was older he would have a penthouse in New York and go out every night in black tie, like some guy in a magazine. Or, more domestically: smoke a pipe, wear tweeds, live in a house by Mies van der Rohe. Have strapping sons who played lacrosse and—this part of the picture, tellingly, always a little vague—a wife, wisecracking, petite, adoring. They would go to plays and fine dinners, they would go to Europe. They would somehow produce those sons.

  Should it perhaps have been a clue for him, even at fourteen, that while other boys were keenly interested in the mechanics of production, wanted to do it—he just wanted to have done it? And, having done it, to lie with that terribly indistinct woman in their Mies bedroom, hold her and fall into sleep without thinking, not once, of Alex or Simon or …

  So much that hadn’t happened. Thank God: if he even tried to step into the dreams he had once dreamt so hard, he found them immeasurably tedious. A concert pianist—terrific. Whole days of practicing three measures over and over so he could stand in white tie and hear the ovation: “Good boy, haven’t you practiced hard!” A Mies house, with the winter cold coming through all those windows and probably—art being one thing and shelter another—leaks in a million places. Mrs. Lingeman going through menopause by now, and those sons—those sons, what had he been thinking of?

  He snorted; all too clear what he had been thinking of. A couple of captive boys, eternally sixteen, throwing the lacrosse ball back and forth on the lawn outside the plate-glass window. Even as a kid, years before he had uttered the word “gay” to himself, about himself, when he had tried to summon up a heterosexual future, he had peopled the conjugal dwelling with two hunks and, consigned to the shadows, the merely requisite Mrs. Lingeman.

  He was gay, he couldn’t ever have been anything else. That kid who had had other plans, he was just a laughable little chump. Whose very dreams were a tissue of self-deception and evasion. Except: how could someone lie to himself in his dreams?

  Once you made up your mind, once you called yourself by name, then you had to whip the past into line. No unruly memories. But that little chump wanted what he wanted. And he was still crying for it. Sitting in a hearing room and looking at some moronic senator and crying out for it, whatever irrecoverable something he had wanted and never got.

  A buzzer sounded, and a little light went on beneath the hearing-room clock. This was some kind of signal—one light for a quorum call, two for a vote, or vice versa. Joel had seen a card once with the code on it, but he could never remember. Though he did seem to recall that twelve buzzers was a nuclear attack. Whatever one buzzer meant, senators were standing up, wearily, like kids shuffling from history to algebra. Some were already heading toward the elevators and the new multimillion-dollar subway that would hurtle them the 400 yards from the Dirksen Building to the Senate side of the Capitol. The chairman was talking on the phone behind his chair. Joel was in suspense. The chairman could announce that they’d all come back and resume after the vote, or he could—

  The chairman put the phone down, turned to the room, sighed. “I gather there are five or six votes. And people will probably want some dinner. So if there’s no objection I think we’ll recess until …” Joel’s heart sank; he was going to say ten p.m. or something. “Until the call of the chair.”

  It was happy hour.

  In the corridor the lobbyists cornered various staffers, trying to find out what had been going on. What had the committee done about home health payments? Had they gotten to Flanagan’s amendment on teaching hospitals? One guy headed toward Joel, mouth already forming a question. Joel didn’t recognize him; he must have been new, just homing in on anybody with an ID badge. Before he could speak, Joel put a hand up to stop him. “I’m from OLA,” Joel said. Meaning that he wasn’t allowed to talk about what he’d heard; a vow of silence was the price OLA people paid for the privilege of sitting in on exciting sessions like the one he’d just escaped.

  Joel felt important: I know what happened to hospital payments in Montana and you don’t. But the lobbyist
said, “What’s OLA?” and turned to pursue someone more helpful. Joel waved at a few people, veterans who had waited in this corridor year after year—the guy from the psychiatric hospitals, a couple of people from HMOs. They waved back but didn’t interrupt their conversations with some of the more garrulous and indiscreet staffers.

  Joel had made it through the crowd and was waiting for the elevator when Melanie caught him. “Do you understand this stuff about aliens?” she said.

  “No,” he lied. “Why don’t you call me tomorrow morning when I’ve had a chance to check it out?”

  She pouted. “All right. But I know the senator’s going to want to know about this first thing.”

  “First thing.”

  It was only quarter of seven. Joel could make it to the Hill Club—on the House side, three or four blocks away—in ten minutes. And it was Thursday; Sam had evening hours Tuesdays and Thursdays. He wouldn’t get off until nine or nine-thirty, so Joel could have just as protracted a happy hour as he wanted and still be home in time to fix a late supper. These late nights for Sam were a recent innovation, just the last few months. Sam said the office had to stay open, there were a million lawyers and people like that who wouldn’t come in for physical therapy during the day, giving up a billable hour; if Sam’s office couldn’t accommodate them, somebody else would. Joel said it was a shame, though he was delighted that, two nights a week, he had a few hours of liberty.

  It was warm out, the first really nice spring evening, or the first Joel had noticed; spring was so short in Washington, it was easy to let it slip right by. Joel even slowed down a little, strolled down First Street with the unhurried exuberance of a convict who has just been paroled. Free: free to toddle over to the Hill Club instead of having to rush home to Mrs. Lingeman and the two brats. He had been headed for the Hill Club his whole life.

  Everything he had hoped for as a boy was silly. So why did he turn so often to the fantasy of going back and doing it over? It wasn’t about finding and correcting some actual slippage from the course that would have led him to a fuller life. He couldn’t imagine a fuller life. Or he could—not in a child-infested house but in that other fantasy domicile of his boyhood, he and Sam in that penthouse in New York, preposterously wealthy A-list faggots smiling for the photos in the parties-you-weren’t-invited-to pages of the Times. But even these fantasies, which he visited regularly every Wednesday as he walked away from the liquor store with his two-dollar Powerball ticket, bored him after just a minute or two. For, if he could even conceive of being some other place right now, then he would also have had to be some other person. Still named Joel Lingeman, maybe, but somebody else. He could furnish the penthouse, but he could not think himself inside the richer, more successful, happier phantom who dwelt in it.

  Who was to say, anyway, that Joel could have been any happier? He had a job that paid well and was intermittently satisfying. He’d had the same lover for going on fifteen years, a certifiable miracle for a gay man—people sometimes gasped when he said it. He had friends: losers and geeks, maybe, the grown-up versions of the marginal crowd he’d hung out with in high school, while he dreamt of being Alex’s pal. But probably about as much fun to drink with as, say, Hollywood stars or New York literati. If there were an Algonquin round table now, George and Dorothy and the rest would just talk about real estate, like everybody else.

  He couldn’t imagine another life, another way of being Joel. Sometimes, as tonight, he felt a little itch, but it was the itch an amputee feels in a phantom limb. There was no place to scratch, he had no wants that could be met through work or scheming or even the right Powerball ticket. Things were fine. It was spring, and things were as good as they were going to be.

  The peace that came over him—of complacency or surrender, if the two are distinguishable—was broken by the homeless guy who sat on the low wall in front of the Madison Building. Joel had passed this guy a million times; he must have staked out his spot on that wall the day it was built. They always had the same colloquy. The man would say, almost inaudibly, “Spare any change.” Not even asking—he knew the answer—but as if just feeding Joel a cue. Joel would say “Sorry,” without looking at him. Always, ten or fifteen years now, and he felt a little guilty every time. But this guy was just the first in a gauntlet that started in front of the Madison Building and stretched down Pennsylvania Avenue all the way to Eighth Street. Blocks and blocks of them: why would Joel give his change to the first one he encountered? Or to the second, or the last? How was he supposed to pick, as if he were some capricious god singling out one mortal for his favors? Besides, who was to say this guy was really homeless? Maybe he lived somewhere and just came here every day, as if commuting to his job.

  The man did his job. “Spare any change,” he said, perhaps more loudly than usual. As Joel said his “Sorry,” he was conscious of the jingling in his pocket. He blushed as he walked by. He had taken a few steps before the guy murmured, not angrily, almost resigned, “Yeah, you’re sorry, motherfucker.” Joel glanced back, saw him maybe for the first time, or at least the first time in years. A black man, close to Joel’s age, trim and dressed surprisingly neatly: clean flannel shirt, jeans, new-looking sneakers. His face had a sort of befogged nobility; once it was probably handsome. In some other world they might have fucked. In this world Joel was scared, suddenly; he turned away and practically ran the block or so to the Hill Club.

  The Hill Club was nearly empty. That is, there were people eating at tables, but nobody at the bar, just one straight couple. And Walter, of course, the besotted old man who seemed to have been propped up at the corner of the bar every night as an admonition. The way, on the Oregon Trail, there’d be the occasional skull to let you know what fate might be yours if you continued on this route.

  It used to be that Joel could come into the Hill Club at what they called happy hour—though they didn’t do anything excessively happy, like reduce the prices or give away any food—and he could hardly make it to the bar for all the people. What had happened to everybody?

  He ordered a Dewar’s and water from the bartender—even the bartender was a stranger tonight, some substitute, or Joel wouldn’t have had to say what he wanted—and looked around the room. All straight people, eating their burgers and the stuff the Hill Club called chili, a tomato puree you could have fed to a finicky baby. Several tables had, ominously, pitchers of beer. The one bar on the Hill that used to have a sort of gay tincture to it—never a majority of the customers, but a big enough constituency that the bartenders had to know how to make cosmos—seemed to be turning into the kind of place where annoying youths who thought they were still in school ordered pitchers of beer. Pretty soon the place would have a giant TV tuned to the sports network.

  Well, it was past seven. If Joel had got there earlier, he would probably have bumped into one or two friends; but they were a receding wave, a little contingent of survivors. That’s what had happened to the Hill Club. Everybody had died; the straight people were just filling a vacuum. Everybody had died except, improbably, Walter, who was staring deep into his drink.

  The couple on Joel’s left were staffers, or at least the boy was. He was trying to impress the girl. The Congressman thinks this, the Congressman wants to do that. As if he were constantly having intimate policy discussions with the Congressman, when he probably spent his days answering constituent mail. Form-letter answers, mostly: “I want you to know how very much I appreciate hearing your views on_______.” The kid would fill in the blank, print the letter out, run it through the signature machine. Which surely qualified him to expound, as he was now doing, on how to save Social Security.

  Joel turned toward Walter and said “Hey.” To no effect; Walter just went on gazing into his martini as if he expected to find an oracle there. Joel thought of trying to rouse him, but stopped himself. It was kind of pathetic, wasn’t it, that he should even have attempted to strike up a conversation with Walter. Maybe it was time to find a new hang-out. Or maybe it was t
ime to stop hanging out and go home at night like a grown-up.

  Joel chugged the rest of his drink and was about to stand up when Walter said, “How are you this evening?” As if it had taken him a minute or two to process Joel’s “Hey.”

  “Okay, how are you doing?”

  “Not bad for an impoverished annuitant.” Walter had a sort of trick: just when you thought he was comatose he could sober up sharply, just for a few minutes, and carry on a normal conversation. Joel thought about getting another drink. Except Walter would probably fade again before he was halfway through it.

  “Kind of late for you, isn’t it?” Walter said. It was hard to believe that Walter somehow kept track of people’s usual timetables. Probably he just meant that it was kind of late for anybody. Happy hour was over, unless like Walter’s your happy hour stretched around the clock.

  “I had to work a little late.”

  “Uh-huh. What is it you do again?”

  “I work at the Office of Legislative Analysis.”

  “Right,” Walter said, as if Joel had made a lucky guess. “So you work for these Republicans.”

  “No, we kind of work for both sides. We’re nonpartisan.”

  “Nonpartisan,” Walter repeated. With a little edge, Joel thought, as if the very idea were preposterous.

  Joel said, “So what did you used to do?”

  “What?”

  “You said you were an annuitant. So you used to work for the government?”

  “Oh.” Walter made a fluttering gesture; the subject wasn’t worth talking about. “Whatever happened to your friend?”

  “Who?”

  “That friend of yours, the one you used to come in with.”

  “Oh, Sam.”

  “Sam, that’s it. I haven’t seen him in ages. You still together?”

  “Sure, he just doesn’t come in here any more.”

  “Oh.” Walter’s eyes wandered back to his martini. Probably he was going back into his trance again, as abruptly as he had emerged from it. Joel stood up, glad he hadn’t ordered another drink. But Walter turned toward him again. “Let me ask you …”