Man About Town

by Mark Merlis

  He did wait up, even microwaved the coffee Sam had been in too big a hurry to drink that morning. For Joel, having coffee so late in the evening was about as daring as, say, tricking out. But he needed to stay up: Sam would open the door, expecting darkness, and there would be Joel sitting in the living room: quiet, dignified, ready for a calm discussion. He knew he ought to prepare. He needed to adopt a position, formulate a few key talking points on the issue of Sam’s truancy.

  Every time he tried to focus on the issue he found himself instead trying to picture what was happening at that moment: Sam somewhere in the city, with someone. Doing something. Joel couldn’t picture the partner, just Sam, naked, some shadowy figure in his arms. And he couldn’t, really, imagine what they might be doing. The same things Sam and Joel did? Just the same insertions in the same orifices but with a different set of parts? Or something entirely different, something Sam and Joel had never done? There were things Joel wanted to do and could never have done with Sam, things one could do only with a stranger. Perhaps Sam had a list of his own; and he was with a stranger.

  At that very moment. In real time, that was the phrase computer people used. What was unreal time? Their last twelve years, probably; Joel thought it had been that long since Sam’s unilateral declaration of monogamy. This was the real time, the hour or so now since Sam’s call, and all those years were the unreal time. Joel had, more sharply, the sensation he had felt—only a few hours ago!—as he had sat with Paul at Zippers. The thisness, the presentness; the clock of his life had been restarted. He had a present tense, a future tense, a future conditional: possibility, uncertainty …

  None of which would be very much diminished by a calm discussion between a coffee-enhanced drunk and someone who, if he came home at all, would be about as alert as a lion after the meat course. Joel went to bed, leaving one light on in the living room. Which was more than Sam would have done for him.

  He woke up at around three. He didn’t even have to raise his head to look at the glowing numbers on the clock radio. If he woke up in the middle of the night it was always three.

  Sam wasn’t in bed, and there wasn’t any light from the bathroom. So Joel figured he must have been snoring: sometimes, when nudges, admonitions, actual rearrangement of Joel’s sleeping body had no effect, Sam would go to the guest room. The first few times he did this, Joel would discover it in the morning and protest. Sam should make Joel go to the guest room. No, no, Sam would say; it wasn’t Joel’s fault he snored. Meaning that it was. Sam scored points under so many different categories in this argument that Joel lost count. Finally he concluded that it wasn’t his fault he snored. This might have been the biggest victory over guilt in his entire adult life. If he woke up and Sam wasn’t there he would just roll over and return to a no-fault sleep.

  As he was just about to do when he remembered that Sam hadn’t gone to bed with him, and why. Maybe Sam had come home and gone directly to the guest room, rather than risk waking Joel and having to discuss things. If Joel had been the one, if he’d crept home in the middle of the night, he wouldn’t have wanted to discuss things either. Not because the discussion would have been so inherently painful: what had happened had happened, they were going to deal with it. But not that night, no; if it had been Joel, he would have gone straight to the guest room and drifted off to sleep. That’s where Sam was, maybe, with the faint scent of what had happened clinging to his body.

  Sam hadn’t come home at all. How did Joel know this? Or rather, how would he have known the reverse, what would have told him Sam was in the guest room? After all, Sam didn’t snore. But Joel could feel it: Sam wasn’t in the apartment. He supposed he ought to get up and check, but he couldn’t move.

  He picked up the phone to get his last voice-mail message. Except the mechanical voice-mail hostess now intoned that he had two unopened messages. Someone must have called while he was listening to the others.

  The first was Melanie again. “Joel, listen, seven o’clock is out, so we’re going to have to do two. Please, please, please get back to me as soon as you can and—” He pushed 3.

  “Message deleted,” Ms. Voicemail said. “Press one to hear your next message, four to return to the main menu, or nine to exit the voice messaging service.”

  It would only be Melanie again, unless …

  Ms. Voicemail, with her inexhaustible patience, repeated, “Press one to hear your next message, four to—”

  He pressed 1, as if hitting a detonator button.

  “Hi, I came over to pick up some stuff, and you’re not here. I thought I might catch you before you left for work, but I didn’t. So … I picked up some stuff. Talk to you.”

  “Talk to you,” Sam’s customary sign-off, had always been not a promise but a confident prediction, almost a statement of the obvious. Of course they would be talking, they would be talking together until the end of time.

  Joel wondered what stuff Sam had picked up. All thirty-eight of his—to Joel—indistinguishable sweaters? The VCR? Joel’s mother’s sterling? They had a lot of stuff. Early on, when they had first moved in together, each of them had his own stuff. It was possible to say this is Sam’s loveseat, these are Joel’s bookshelves. Even: those are Sam’s candlesticks, Joel’s colander, Sam’s screwdriver, Joel’s toilet brush. Since then, though, every household acquisition had been a joint one. The living-room rug might have gone on Sam’s Visa or Joel’s MasterCard, but it was their rug. How would they ever divide such things? With scissors?

  A premature question. Surely, Sam meant only that he had come to get fresh clothes, whatever else he needed for the office. They weren’t at the point of flipping a coin for the china.

  He called Sam’s office. The receptionist said, “Georgetown Sports Medicine.” Hitting every consonant squarely; Sam had reported how she’d spent half a morning practicing, sitting at the front desk and murmuring the words, oblivious to the stares from the wounded gladiators in the waiting room. Pretty, they must have thought, but not much of a conversationalist.

  “Hi,” Joel said. “I want to make an appointment.”

  “What is your name?”

  “Um … Joe Harris.” The senator’s name was the first that came to his mind. An errant choice, but there wasn’t much chance the receptionist knew there was a Senator Joe Harris. Possibly she didn’t know there were senators.

  There was a long pause while she called his name up on her terminal or, rather, failed to. “You’re a new patient?” she asked. Sounding a little irritated, perhaps because new patients involved work, challenging tasks like entering their address and phone number.

  “Yes.”

  “Who referred you?”

  “Doctor … uh … Jung.”

  “Doctor Young?”

  “Right.”

  “And when did you want to come in?”

  “I was hoping maybe Tuesday evening.”

  “Evening? Tuesday evening?”

  “Right.”

  “We don’t have any evening hours. What about next Friday at—”

  “Never mind,” Joel said. “Uh … bye-bye.”

  Joel played solitaire on his computer for the rest of the morning. Occasionally a staffer would call and ask him to explain Medicare and aliens. It was amazing how fast a silly proposal could become the issue of the day; another couple of days and no one would even remember it. After about the third call he had developed a canned recitation about the matter, one he could deliver without even ceasing to play solitaire. “What’s that clicking noise?” one staffer asked. Joel shifted a little in his seat, so the mouthpiece of the phone would be a little farther from the mouse. “Beats me,” he said, as he resumed clicking at the cards on the screen.

  The nice thing about solitaire was that, while it required no intellection, it took just enough attention that you couldn’t think coherently about anything else. He had a vague sensation of indignation and loss, that something terrible had happened, but he couldn’t focus on it, it was all less immediate
than the present task of putting the black eight on the red nine.

  When the computer said that he had lost $10,000 at solitaire, he took this as a sign to go and get lunch. What he really wanted to do was go to one of the darker bars on Pennsylvania Avenue and have about five beers and an enormous non-turkey cheeseburger. But he had the briefing with Harris at two. While he could probably have met any intellectual challenge Joe Harris could throw at him if he were comatose, he couldn’t stagger into a senator’s office smelling like a frat boy on a Sunday morning. So he went to Le Dôme, a costly bistro that used to be jammed with lobbyists and their prey. The lobbyist’s menu showed prices; the member’s did not.

  Today the place was practically empty. The rules had changed during one of Congress’s occasional ethical seizures: members and staffers couldn’t accept a lunch that cost more than a McDonald’s happy meal. Possibly the committee that set a five-dollar limit hadn’t meant to suggest that a member’s soul could be had for five and a quarter. Anyway, Le Dome was on its last legs. Few staffers, and no members, would reach into their own wallets for a thirty-five-dollar lunch. Joel was shown to the best two-top, the one that used to be Rostenkowski’s, by the window with its view of the eponymous dome.

  He sipped a single, prudent glass of merlot, looked out at the Capitol, and let himself think everything from which solitaire had distracted him.

  Two months, closer to three: almost three months since Sam had announced his new evening duty. Just told Joel about it, matter-of-fact. Yes, now that Joel looked back, Sam hadn’t been especially aggrieved, had made no show of dismay that two nights a week would be ruined.

  So he had been seeing his new friend for three months. And hadn’t just stolen moments with him: had built him into his schedule. As on the calendar on Joel’s computer you could make an appointment recurring. Every Tuesday and Thursday, 6–9:30: go and fuck with whoever. Once you’d done that, if you scrolled down you could see the same appointment months ahead, years. Unless you set an end date, it would go on as far into the future as the computer could see.

  Sam had also, of course, built into his schedule the recurring lie. Not a complicated one. He came home with perfect regularity, and the most Joel would ask him when he got home was, “How was work?” The most he’d answer was, “Okay.” He would look tired. Sometimes his hair would be damp. Joel would imagine he must have run water through it before leaving the office, because Sam was the kind of guy who had to look perfect before he’d step outside and hail a cab.

  Not a demanding arrangement at all: Sam could have kept it up indefinitely. He and … whoever, they would have had to be careful where they went, but not very. Joel’s Washington was a very small town, there were whole quadrants he never penetrated. And of course they had to part at nine-thirty; Sam had faithfully observed this rule. Maybe it was the other guy’s rule. But Joel fancied it was Sam’s—Sam had set the boundaries on his own adventure, and had for almost three months gotten up from the bed, showered, come home to Joel.

  Until last night. Last night he had, for whatever reason, lingered an extra half hour, then an hour. Then he had picked up the phone, maybe even as he picked it up still meaning to say, “Hey, we had a couple extra patients, I’m leaving now.” Then hearing Joel’s voice, looking across at his … lover and hearing Joel say, “Dinner’s practically on the table.” Those harmless words somehow the last straw. Perhaps he had even visualized the turkey burgers and the canned beans. And then saw himself and his lover going out for a bite somewhere, someplace lively, talking and laughing together and then on the street, Sam not hailing a taxi to go home but the two of them going back to the lover’s apartment; if it was dark enough, maybe even holding hands as they walked.

  It was almost Joel’s fault. If he hadn’t said those terrible words.

  The waiter brought Joel’s foie gras en brioche, sauce framboise, and plopped it down before him as unceremoniously as if it were a liverwurst sandwich. Joel took a taste. It was, perhaps, better than a liverwurst sandwich. Not fifteen times as good, or whatever the price ratio should have dictated. And at least a liverwurst sandwich wouldn’t have had raspberry sauce. He didn’t mind the money; he had come here to treat himself. Post-trauma treat: as when he was little, stung by a bee once, and his mother took him for an ice cream cone. He hadn’t understood that there wasn’t much comfort in buying yourself an ice cream cone.

  Harris’s office was in the Hart Building, the new one built in the seventies that looked like one of the white cardboard office blocks you pass on the way to an airport. This was a mark of his juniority; longer-serving senators were in the Dirksen Building, dreary but less obviously prefabricated. The truly senescent hunkered down in the Russell Building, a Beaux Arts monolith. If you looked at the Russell Building you could imagine that senators were inside it. If you looked at the Hart Building, you were more likely to picture people in cubicles processing mortgage applications.

  Joel always got lost in the Hart Building. The offices were grouped around a multistory atrium; no matter which elevator you took, the office you wanted was always on the other side of this chasm. By the time Joel could snake his way around to Harris’s he was a couple of minutes late and almost out of breath. He could barely gasp his name to the receptionist, a beefy youth who didn’t even bother to put down his cold-cut sub when Joel approached. The kid just nodded Joel toward one of the chairs in the anteroom and took a couple more bites before calling Melanie.

  Joel sat a long while. He needn’t have risked a heart attack trying to be on time for a meeting with a senator. Sometimes he would wait an hour or more, only to learn that the senator was backed up and would have to reschedule, or that someone had screwed up and the meeting had never been on the calendar at all. He hadn’t brought anything to read, and the table next to him offered only such dispiriting stuff as Montana Monthly, U.S. News and World Report, and, perhaps for the more youthful lobbyists, a Donald Duck comic book. Joel just sat.

  One wall of the anteroom was covered with a huge Montana flag. It said “MONTANA” in big gold letters, like the pennants Joel had in his room as a boy, the ones that blazoned the names of colleges he didn’t get into. On the other wall were the inevitable pictures: Harris with George Bush, with Gerald Ford, with Charlton Heston. Harris with assorted Montana luminaries, gaunt men whose suits had Western features: waist-length jackets, or pockets whose openings made little smiles, like the ones on a Gene Autry shirt. In the center of the wall, the sun of this Republican solar system, Harris with Reagan. Harris in profile, trying both to grin and to look adoringly; Reagan looking straight out, of course, oblivious to anything but the camera.

  Joel was about to nod off—either from a night without sleep or because he had, what the hell, had a second merlot—when Melanie appeared. She looked down at him but didn’t speak for a minute. Possibly she was noticing that Joel hadn’t shaved this morning. And had he, he wondered, put on that tie with the gravy spot? He didn’t verify this, just drew himself to his feet.

  “Thanks for coming,” Melanie said, in the grave murmur a camerlengo might use before ushering you in to see the Pope. “The senator’s just on his way back from the floor. Did Rob offer you some coffee?” On hearing this, the kid behind the reception desk stood up, disclosing the kind of body you see in half-hour infomercials for exercise machines. Joel thought about dispatching him for coffee, just to humiliate him. But if Joel went into the sanctum with coffee in one hand and a notebook in the other, this would be that rare day when a senator wanted to shake hands.

  It was enough of a putdown just to ignore Rob. He turned to Melanie. “You said he might have some questions other than aliens?”

  “I think so, some other health stuff. But we haven’t connected all day, so I’m not sure.” She cocked her head. “Oh, I guess he’s in his office.” Joel was always amazed at the way staffers could divine their member’s whereabouts. Maybe if your boss threw things at you, you could sense somehow when he was in his lair.


  Harris was on the phone. He must have seen Melanie and Joel come in, but he gave no sign of it, just went on talking. Listening, rather: he frowned and periodically went “Right, right.” His mahogany desk, the size of a Volvo, held no papers at all, just the phone, a nameplate, and a silver scale model of a warplane shaped like some voracious moth. Did they build planes in Montana? Well, they must have built planes everywhere; probably they made one part in each district, so that every member had a little stake.

  Harris hung up the phone, but still did not acknowledge Joel and Melanie, who stood worshipfully ten feet from his desk. He stood up and took off his jacket, draped it rather prissily on the back of his swivel chair, faced them again and turned himself on. Smiled as brightly as if Joel had arrived bearing a large check, came out from behind the desk, and held out a hand. “Joe Harris.”

  “Joel Lingeman.” They had met the night before. Was it possible? So much had happened. Just the night before and the man didn’t remember him at all.

  Harris didn’t exactly shake; instead he offered his hand, flat and firm as a spade, for Joel to grasp. “Really appreciate your coming over,” he said, as if Joel had had some choice.

  Harris gestured toward his standard-issue informal area: two wing chairs facing a loveseat. Joel seized one of the wing chairs. He had learned over the years not to sit in the loveseat. If you did, you wound up with two interlocutors, member and staffer, talking down at you from their chairs. Plus you couldn’t sit normally in the loveseat: you had to resist the impulse to cross your legs, and wound up with your knees touching and your hands in your lap, like a maiden lady. Harris took the other chair, leaving tiny Melanie to sink into the loveseat.

  Harris looked at Joel for some seconds with an expression of pleasant interest. Then he must have realized that he had asked for the briefing and ought to pose some question or other. He couldn’t remember what the subject was; he turned toward Melanie.