Man About Town

by Mark Merlis

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Sit down, sit down a minute.”

  “I really have to run,” Joel said. Nothing good ever happened when a drunk told him to sit down a minute.

  “Sure,” Walter said, as if he knew Joel had no place to go. “But let me just ask. You and—what’s his name?”

  “Sam.”

  “Sam. You’ve been together a long time.”

  “Fifteen years.”

  “No shit,” Walter said, unimpressed. “Do you still have sex?”

  “What?”

  “Sex. Do you and … what’s his name … still do it?”

  Joel was aware that the couple next to him had stopped talking and were unabashedly eavesdropping. He wasn’t embarrassed about it, exactly, but aware. “Um …” There was no reason he had to submit to an inquisition from some senescent drunk whose own sexuality was indeterminate—and, at this point in the slide to the grave, probably academic. But if he didn’t answer, that would be an answer. “Sure,” he said.

  Sure, they still did it. Not every night, of course, that must have lasted only a little while; he couldn’t remember. Nor was he certain just when they had drifted down to once a week, after Sunday brunch, or when even this observance became optional. They had never stopped enjoying it, not entirely; if they rarely saw stars, at least they knew what buttons to push. Sex was like … Communion, maybe. He imagined that people who partook of that strange ritual might have felt the same way about it. A routine most Sundays, maybe a few times a year a brief sensation that something faintly miraculous was going on. Except at least he and Sam had the weekly—or nearly so—miracle of, after the act, cuddling, dozing.

  Joel said, with some trepidation, but he couldn’t help it: “Why do you ask?”

  Walter looked vaguely thoughtful. Probably he wasn’t often asked why he said something; usually the accurate answer would simply have been that the spirits moved him. “Why did I? I guess I wondered why you didn’t go home.”

  “I’m just going home.”

  “Because if I had someone at home, I’d be there.”

  If Walter had someone at home, the guy would have to be drugged or manacled or bewitched. Joel didn’t say this, nor did he explain that he was out because Sam was working late. Which would have been a lie: he would have been out even if Sam hadn’t been working late.

  What he couldn’t explain to Walter—as if Walter even deserved an explanation—was that you could have a perfectly happy home and not be in any rush to get there.

  He hailed a cab. This was a pointless extravagance. Two hours at least before Sam would be home, nothing to do in the interval except maybe watch the Senate on C-SPAN engaging in their simulated debate and taking their five or six votes—the outcome of each predetermined, the roll calls meant only to get everybody on the record, for or against flag burning, for or against teenage pregnancy. He might as well have taken the Metro and saved a few bucks. But the sunset was spectacular: Washington was made for sunset, its monuments built low to the ground, leaving an open western sky. He wasn’t ready to scuttle down into some tunnel and wait for a train.

  He had asked to be taken to the Safeway on Seventeenth Street so he could pick up something for Sam’s dinner. Funny, he thought of it that way—Sam’s dinner—when he was the only one who cared very much whether they ate real food or energy bars. He even said it sometimes, “Got to get home and fix Sam’s dinner.” It was only an expression, maybe half a joke. Just because he did all the cooking didn’t mean he had somehow turned into the little woman, rushing to get something on the stove for her caveman. He cooked and Sam fixed things; they just did what they were good at, everybody wore the pants in their family.

  The cab was on Massachusetts Avenue, just ready to turn north, when Joel said no, he didn’t want to go to the Safeway, he wanted to go to P Street west of Dupont Circle. The driver uttered a brief expletive in some West African language but complied. As Joel got out he penitently overtipped the driver, then stood looking at the entrance to Zippers with some bewilderment. What had made him come here?

  He hadn’t been to Zippers in years. It hadn’t changed at all: the place still smelled of spilled beer no one ever mopped up, the ceiling over the oval bar was so mantled in tobacco resin it might have been mahogany. There was no place to dance, no one could really talk over the music, the drinks were minuscule and watery, the bartenders inattentive or surly. But the place was jammed, at seven-thirty on a Thursday night. People came to Zippers, as they always had, because they could be sure anyone they encountered there had come on exactly the same mission. That Joel had even walked into the place was a sort of imposture really. To be in Zippers with no carnal agenda was to violate an unspoken contract.

  For he surely had no intention of being picked up. He and Sam hadn’t fooled around in years and years. Fidelity had probably been—he couldn’t remember, but it must have been—Sam’s suggestion. Joel had agreed eagerly enough. There was AIDS, of course, whose modes of transmission had only just been identified. There was his relative contentment with their—back then at least semiweekly—lovemaking. There was the fact that tricking had always been a lot of work for Joel, and why would he go to the 7-Eleven in the rain when he had a cow at home?

  He had agreed, and he had kept his part of the bargain for—what?—twelve years, maybe, so long that the very idea of straying was outlandish and foreign to him. He could no more trick out than he could fly. What had brought him here? Some itch, after the hearing, after the Hill Club. Not an itch for sex, just some need to witness, to take in the smoky air of, a place where everybody was gay and did what gay people did. As if, far as he and Sam had soared away from this life, he needed every so often to touch down here. As if this, and not the apartment where he cooked and Sam fixed things, were home ground.

  It took him a good five minutes to edge his way to the bar and order a scotch and water—generic, no one specified a brand in Zippers. He turned and was scouting for someplace he could stand that was as far from the jukebox as possible when, right where Joel was, a guy got off his barstool and started fighting his way to the door. Joel sat down without even checking, as he once would have, just whom he was sitting next to. Another sign that he was definitely not cruising.

  Well, maybe a little. First ruling out the guy to his right, who looked uncannily like Peter Lorre, then canvassing the rest of the bar. Straight ahead, a guy wearing a tank top that not only displayed his arduously sculpted shoulders but also disclosed that they were covered with curly black hair. At three o’clock a thirty-something with thinning red hair and a face that was one continuous freckle—not Joel’s type at all, if Joel could still be said to have a type—but slender and with some flicker of intelligence in his gray eyes. At ten o’clock a man at least Joel’s age directing some sort of futile monologue at a sleepy-looking kid who couldn’t have been more than twenty-three and who wasn’t even pretending to listen.

  Joel turned back to the redhead, looked at him pretty steadily until the guy happened to glance Joel’s way and then instantly turned his head. Not peekaboo—first in the series of quick glances that would culminate in a connection—but a decisive and immediate “No way, sucker.” In his real cruising days an abrupt rejection like that would have left Joel shattered; how many nights he had gone home alone because he couldn’t shrug off one disdainful scowl from a stranger. Now he thought: it doesn’t matter what you think of me, buddy, I’ve got mine. You may see before you an unaccompanied faggot on the prowl, but I’m not, I’ve got Sam. This was not, he supposed, mere complacency. It was the whole point of their endurance and their fidelity, that Joel could be sitting there alone and still have Sam invisibly at his side.

  Still, it would have been nice if the guy had looked back, or even hit on him. So that he could have smiled regretfully and said sorry, he was seeing someone. He just would have liked to have had some signal, only for a minute, that a moderately desirable man might have seen some possibility in him.

 
; The old guy to Joel’s right departed, and somebody else immediately slipped into the seat. Joel glanced at him, too briefly even to form an impression beyond registering that he was an improvement over Peter Lorre, then turned away at once. If he didn’t look, he wouldn’t risk being shot down twice in sixty seconds.

  Maybe his glance hadn’t been as discreet as he had intended, because the newcomer instantly said, “Hi, how are you doing?”

  Joel turned as if he were only just now noticing his neighbor. “Fine, how about you?”

  The guy wasn’t exactly Joel’s type either, but—well, for someone sitting next to Joel in Zippers and actually initiating a conversation—not bad. Maybe pushing forty, but still slim. A couple of days’ stubble; Joel sometimes wondered how people managed this trick of always looking as if they’d shaved the day before yesterday. His jeans were torn at the knees. Maybe he was a little old for that particular fashion gesture. Though it was, actually, kind of hot.

  “Great,” the guy said. “You live around here?”

  He might have been asking if Joel lived near Zippers. But, even if the guy meant to pick him up, in the standard course of things this would be the next-to-last question, followed at once by, “You want to go there?” It wasn’t the very first question you asked. So he must have meant, was Joel from Washington?

  “I didn’t grow up here, but I’ve lived here about twenty years.” Joel at once regretted supplying the chronological detail.

  “No shit,” the guy said, as if it were remarkable to live in Washington. Or to live anywhere for twenty years. “I just got here.”

  “Oh, yeah? From where?”

  “North Carolina.”

  “Oh.”

  There was a little pause, during which Joel debated whether his next line was “Where in North Carolina?” or, molto accelerando, “Where are you staying?” Before Joel could resolve this, he recalled that he didn’t have a next line, much less anything to accelerate, as of course nothing was going to come of this.

  “I was in LA for a few years and then—last six months or so I was staying with my family. But I … I had to get out. So I thought I’d see what Washington’s like.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “Expensive.”

  “I guess,” Joel said. “So are you planning to live here, or just visiting, or …”

  “I’m not sure.” This was astonishing. At forty, or whatever age he was, not to be sure even of where you lived; there was something at once thrilling and scary about it. Scary, mostly; the guy was looking down at the bar, brow furrowed, as if he had to decide his future right then.

  Joel, for his part, was looking at the guy’s knee, which peeked out through the tear in his jeans. Joel had never thought of the knee as an especially rousing body part. Now, after a few seconds, he had to make himself look up. To find the guy smiling at him and holding out a hand.

  “My name’s Paul.”

  “Joel.” They shook.

  “Nice to meet you, Joel.” He chugged the rest of his beer; this was a goodbye, not a hello. Another rejection, and this time not a little bruise. Joel felt a sudden wave of disproportionate sadness and longing. As though, if Paul had been willing, something might actually have happened. Was this possible? It must have been: how else to account for Joel’s elation when, a second later, Paul said, “Can I get you a drink?”

  How many years since Joel had been granted the elemental pleasure of scoring: the affirmation of his value, the warmth in his groin.

  Now he really needed to say, “No, I just stopped in for one drink. I’ve got to be getting home and starting dinner for my lover …” He had had his little rush of self-esteem, what he must have come to Zippers for; only a louse would play games with this nice guy. This lonesome, affable guy whose naked knee was making Joel a little dizzy.

  “Sure,” Joel said. “A scotch and water, please.”

  Sam hadn’t, now that Joel thought back, suggested monogamy. Sam had announced it; that was how he and Joel reached agreements. Sam would say, “I’m giving up smoking,” and Joel would say, “Me, too.” Sam would say, “I’m not going to see anybody else any more,” and Joel would say, “Me either.” Nobody made Joel say, “Me either.” Sam was only talking about what he was doing, not commanding. Though it sort of went without saying that he couldn’t stop smoking in a smoke-filled apartment, or be faithful to a slut.

  On those occasions when Joel treated one of Sam’s announcements as the unilateral resolution it was—as, for example, when Sam said he wasn’t going to the Hill Club any more and Joel kept going—the silent reproach that greeted Joel when he got home was two-pronged. Not just, you went and got plastered again, you boring cretin. But also, I am strong and you are weak. If Joel did something Sam didn’t approve of but for which Sam had no predilection, like buying too many books, Sam would shake his head but it wouldn’t be a big deal. A big deal was when Joel did something that Sam was nobly refraining from.

  It would be a very big deal indeed if Joel were to fall off the wagon they’d ridden for twelve years and pick somebody up at Zippers. Of course he would have to tell about it. One of their rules, in the three or so years they had been together before monogamy set in, was that they always told about it.

  This seemed, suddenly, an especially silly rule. Why should Joel have to tell about something that was none of Sam’s business? A little excursion that had nothing to do with Joel and Sam, that wouldn’t constitute a betrayal any more than it was a betrayal if Joel thought about someone other than Sam when he jerked off. What possible good could come from telling about it? An hour or so with this nice guy, one explosion—Joel wasn’t nineteen any more—one explosion and it would be over. Sam would be mad, coming home and finding no dinner. One night of sulking and it would blow over: by tomorrow morning life would be the same as it had been this morning.

  Except that Joel would have a secret, an exciting, dirty, glorious secret—one little part of his life that was not transparent to Sam or anyone else. A little pocket in time that he could enter in memory whenever he liked and that, even as he sensibly, happily, returned to forever with Sam, would make being with Sam a choice, not a default. He would come back to Sam as somebody who had a life and not just a collection of habits.

  “So, um …”

  “Paul.”

  “Paul, sorry. Where are you staying while you’re in town?”

  “Place called the Hotel Latham.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Over on H Street. It’s a real dump, but it’s all I can afford right now.”

  “Oh.”

  “They got, you know, this weekly rate.”

  A single-room occupancy hotel, then, or practically. The poor guy must really have stretched to buy Joel’s scotch. Joel hadn’t, picturing the unencumbered life of someone who was undecided about where he was living next week, figured that the choice was among a variety of different SROs. Nor had he figured that he himself would shortly be visiting one. If they even allowed visitors. Maybe they could get a room somewhere else; where did guys take tricks if neither one could go home? What had been a sudden impulse, a momentary and refreshing detour from everyday life, was already something else. Arrangements would have to be made, practical details attended to. The place would have to have a shower, for example; Joel couldn’t just go home later without a shower.

  If a guy lived in an SRO, what were the odds that he had crabs? How could Joel, in a million years, account to Sam for an infestation of crabs? Or—he felt like Rip van Winkle—of course, now there were worse things to worry about than crabs.

  How could Joel be sure that his little secret wouldn’t somehow corrode everything? Or that, having spent an hour or two with someone other than Sam, he might not find life with Sam insupportable? Might not find himself hurtling back into that world he had so luckily left behind, those pathetic nights of dashing himself against strangers as unyielding as rocks, waiting for last call, settling for whatever he could get in those frenz
ied last minutes when the lights were turned up and the room was alive with connections and rejections?

  Paul said, “Where do you live, near here?”

  “Yeah, a few blocks. But I can’t …”

  What he could do, just for a minute, was touch Paul’s bare knee. Paul put a hand over Joel’s, held it in place.

  Joel said, “Do you think we can go to your hotel?” He didn’t need to say more, the guy would understand that he was in some sort of situation, he didn’t have to say how deeply situated he was. Or had been, until tonight. “I mean, will they have a problem if you bring someone in?”

  “Shit, that dump? There are so many people coming and going you’d think it was an all night supermarket.”

  Supermarket, Joel had been headed to the supermarket. Sam would come in—eight-thirty now, Sam could be home in an hour, sooner if there weren’t many patients—and find no dinner, no Joel. After waiting a while he would dig through the icebox, eat something, go to bed, turning off all the lights in the apartment as a sign of his disappointment and contempt. There would be hell to pay, and he was going to pay it. Because Paul had brought Joel back to the world after his and Sam’s protracted sabbatical.

  “Listen,” Joel said. “Maybe we should stop and get a bite somewhere. I’m kind of hungry.”

  “Me, too. I didn’t eat today.” Paul looked shyly down at the bar. Maybe he held Joel’s hand a little tighter as he said, “You know, I’m real broke.”

  Joel knew the guy was broke, he didn’t have to be told. Of course he intended to pay for dinner, but he was chilled by the simple sentence, “I didn’t eat today.” Which was one thing if uttered by some pubescent House staffer who was bragging about how many important meetings he’d been to, but quite another when said literally by a man who had nothing and—as if making some terrible gamble—had, instead of getting a Big Mac, spent his last couple of bucks buying Joel a drink.