by Mark Merlis
She said, “Oh. Um … we wanted Joel to come over to talk about aliens and Medicare.”
“Right,” Harris said, as if he had just been testing her. He faced Joel, drew himself up and gripped the arms of his wing chair—a posture of dutiful attention.
“Right,” Joel repeated. “Actually, Senator Altman pretty much summed it up. If you’re over sixty-five and you’ve been legally resident here for five years, you can get Medicare by paying a premium.”
“A premium,” Harris said slowly, as if the word were new to him.
“Yes. A monthly …” Joel couldn’t think of another word. “Premium.”
“Uh-huh. So they’re paying for their own costs.”
“Yes,” Joel said enthusiastically, as if Harris were a bright student. “Well, except …” He could have left it at “Yes.” They’re paying for it, it’s no problem, why don’t you just leave these poor old exiles alone? But someone else would explain it to Harris, sooner or later, if Joel didn’t. “Well, they don’t really pay all their costs. First, if they’re poor, the states have to pay their premium. And second—”
“The states, yeah, someone this morning said that. What about the states?”
“If somebody’s below the federal poverty level, then—”
“What’s that?”
“Sir?”
“The federal poverty level.”
“Well, it’s this figure that’s put out by … I guess the Census Bureau every year. It started out—this is interesting—they started out taking the cost of what they called the ‘thrifty food plan,’ and then they just multiplied that by three and said that’s what someone needed to subsist on. And since then—”
Joel was wrong; this wasn’t interesting. “No, no, no,” Harris practically shouted. “How much is it?”
“Oh.” Joel had no idea. “I think it’s like … seven thousand or something for one person.”
“Seven thousand!” Harris seemed amazed.
“Yeah, it’s really not very much.”
Joel had misstepped again. “Seven thousand,” Harris said. “There are lots of people in Montana getting by on a lot less than seven thousand. And they don’t come crying to the government for help.”
“Um, right. But it’s kind of a national average, you know? I mean, if you lived in New York, say, or here in DC, seven thousand wouldn’t get you very far.”
“Nobody says people have to live in New York.”
“No, sir,” Joel said, miserably. Five minutes into the briefing and he had Harris thinking he was some kind of communist. You had to be so careful with these guys, the new Republicans who had descended on the Capitol like blow-dried Martians. You could tell them the earth was round and they’d turn on you, snarling that this was just the kind of confused, outmoded thinking they’d been sent to Washington to straighten out.
“Anyway,” Harris said, with a little wave of his hand, conciliatory now that he had made his point. “Anyway, aliens below this … ‘poverty level’ get Medicare and they don’t have to pay anything, the states pay for it.”
“Well, it’s not just aliens. It’s anybody below that level. Citizens, too.”
“Fine, fine, but we’re talking about the aliens. What are they doing here?”
“Doing here?” How should Joel know what they were doing here? Maybe they all crept across the border to get free heart transplants. “Well, they were admitted here … you know, refugees from somewhere or, I don’t know, somebody’s mother, whatever.”
“So why don’t they become citizens? They could become citizens.”
“Um … I guess maybe they can’t pass the test. You know, they may not have learned English all that well, so they can’t pass the test.” He would have liked to see Harris pass the citizenship test. He would also have liked to see Harris subsist for a week on the thrifty food plan.
Rob the receptionist appeared in the doorway. “Senator, excuse me, it’s … it’s those people you were expecting. From—”
Harris cut him off. “Right, right.” He turned to Joel. “This’ll just be a few minutes, if you can stick around. I think we had some other stuff we wanted to go through.”
“Sure,” Joel said.
When Harris had gone, Joel said to Melanie, “I guess I put my foot in it.”
“Better you than me.” Melanie giggled. “I loved that. There are people in Montana living on nuts and berries!”
“Yeah. Proud and self-sufficient.”
“Real Americans.” She shook a fist in the air.
“Anyway, you’d think I’d know better, just keep my mouth shut.”
Melanie shrugged. “It’s kind of … I’m never quite sure what will set him off. You know, he’s not— He’s more complicated than you think. He really does care about people.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Look, just that he wanted to know more about this—at least he’s thinking about it, trying to think about it.”
“I guess.”
“I try to nudge him along. And then every so often he bites my head off.”
“Yeah, I hear he’s a bear,” Joel said.
“Oh, that’s talk, mostly. Honestly, I never saw him throw anything. You just have to know when to ease off.”
“Well, I’m sure easing off. Just the facts, sir. That’s if he ever comes back.”
“He’ll be back in a few minutes, he’s just meeting with—He’ll be back unless something happens on the floor. But do you mind if I go make a couple of calls?”
“No.”
“You sure we can’t get you coffee or something?”
“Yeah, coffee would be good.”
Joel stayed in his wing chair for a minute, looking over at Harris’s huge barren desk and the high-backed leather chair on which Harris had draped his jacket. It was just a jacket on the back of a chair; why should the sight of it have left Joel suddenly desolate?
Well, it was half of a thousand-dollar suit, for one thing—distinctly unMontanan; no pockets with openings like smiles. But Joel could probably have paid for a thousand-dollar suit, if he would ever have thought of such an extravagance, about as readily as Harris. Senators didn’t make so much, really; after they paid for two houses and sent their kids to St. Alban’s or wherever, they probably weren’t much better off than Joel was. Except for the ones—more and more of them lately—who had made their fortune someplace else and then bought their way into office. Becoming senators as a sort of hobby after retirement, the way rich guys used to become yachtsmen. But Harris wasn’t one of those.
The jacket wasn’t, whatever its price tag, an impressive object. Just a jacket, which Harris put on when he went to the floor and took off when he got back to his office. Harris had got up this morning—early probably, around the time when Joel was just realizing that Sam might be gone for good—Harris had got up, showered and shaved. Put on his pants, as they say, one leg at a time, and then the jacket. Walked out of his tract house somewhere in Virginia. Got into his car and idled through the same gridlock as everybody else, to arrive at the Hart Senate Office Building and begin his humdrum day. Draping his jacket on the back of his chair, already a little tired: a day ahead of floor votes on vital issues like flag-burning, punctuated by briefings and little side-meetings like the one he’d run out to now, where he was almost surely begging someone for money.
Tonight he would drive to the airport, leave his car in the special members’ lot that the newspapers lately had turned into some kind of symbol of how privileged senators were, how. isolated from ordinary life. Catch a late flight to Montana—several flights, probably, it must have been hard to get to Montana—several legs, riding in coach, because he wasn’t one of the rich senators. Then a weekend of flying around the state on puddle-jumpers and nodding thoughtfully as sheep ranchers bleated their grievances.
Who could have wanted such a life, why should Joel have been filled with sadness and self-reproach that he wasn’t a senator and Joe Harris was? A pretty obscure senator, to be sure
, who probably didn’t have to worry that anyone would recognize him on the airplane. But still a somebody, his jacket draped on a senator’s chair. While Joel, a nobody, sat in a senator’s office with, yes, now that he looked, gravy on his tie.
It was about Sam, Sam and the jacket had got all mixed up. As if somehow Joel had chosen between life as a senator and life with Sam, chosen irrevocably. Sam had cost him everything, and now Sam was gone.
The receptionist appeared, looking sullen. Here he had been a varsity—what?—wrestler, probably, who had graduated maybe a year ago from some school like Southwest Georgia Agriculture and Remedial Reading and had come to Washington planning to work at the White House. Instead he was bringing coffee, in a seldom-washed mug that read “Big Sky Country,” to this geek with gravy on his tie.
“Thank you, Rob,” Joel said.
Rob was a little startled to be called by name. “Uh … sure. Did you want cream or … whatever? Um …” He searched for the concept. “Sugar?”
“No, this is fine.”
“Um … okay.”
Joel regarded Rob’s departing, varsity butt, his vast oxford-swathed back. So beautiful, so young; so dumb. And with infinitely more chance of becoming a senator than Joel had ever had.
Because he was a straight boy.
It wasn’t Sam: being gay had cost Joel everything. Of course he would never have been a senator, not if he’d been as straight as a two-dollar bill. Perhaps there were some other, more plausible vocations that had been closed to him—or had seemed closed—in the early seventies, those last years before the closet doors started to crack open. Law, for example, or the foreign service: he had actually gone to interview at the State Department before he learned that they were still giving polygraph tests to screen out deviants. So he was cruelly prevented from embarking on a career of processing visa applications in, say, Zambia.
The price he had paid for being gay didn’t consist of these specific handicaps. There were other things he might have been, instead of nothing. But being gay had taken up his whole life. He had devoted the whole of his youth to it, had studied it year after year as intensively as if he had been training to be a neurosurgeon. There hadn’t been time for anything else.
First, of course, the many years of being not-gay. Starting with being not-in-love-with-Alex. Or even earlier, maybe, when he turned a page in a magazine, saw an ad with a little picture of a guy in swimming trunks, and knew. Knew, with hot astonishment, and from that instant devoted himself to the great vocation of not-knowing.
He spent the next ten years of his life not knowing: denying, renouncing, forgetting, explaining. How he explained to himself in those years. Ockham’s Razor, the principle that a scientist should prefer the simplest explanation that will account for the available facts, should have led him quickly enough to the correct hypothesis. However, as a creationist can disregard whole mountains of evidence, waving away every fossil and geologic formation, just as faithfully Joel had dismissed every sign of the simple truth about himself. Every sidewise glance in the locker room, every vision conjured up during his nightly self-abuse, the even more compelling testimony of his recusant dick when he tried to make it with women—nothing was persuasive enough. Not even several years of actual praxis—the twenty or so tricks scattered across his last year of college, the couple of years of graduate school, his first years at OLA. He could account for it all: annotate every feeling, explicate every incident, until he had compiled a veritable summa theologica of rationalization and denial.
He knew gay men who had got through all of this by the time they could tie their shoes, and others who had gone to their graves refusing the irrefutable. His decade of resistance was, perhaps, longer than average. Ending abruptly and rather anticlimactically one day when he was twenty-six. He said, “Okay.” Pushed into it, finally, by the crushing burden of the evidence? He couldn’t remember, but it probably wasn’t that way: would one more fossil make a creationist drop his Bible? Just one day—more exhausted than exuberant—he murmured, “Okay.” It was okay, and stayed okay.
Okay through the next couple of hundred tricks, over about four years. Once a week, then, on average, though an average would mask the dry spells, the bacchanalian intervals, the handful of micro-romances, the longest of which might have lasted about ten days. Once a week Joel summoned up the nerve to talk to a stranger in a bar and then follow him home. Or take him to Joel’s own place, whose pestilential untidiness in those years might, Joel could see now, have contributed to the brevity of his affairs. And of course the nights he scored were outnumbered by the nights he stood forlurnly at the margin of Zippers trying to decipher whether some guy was looking at him or through him.
Either kind of night followed by the mornings when he would drag into the office, sleepy or hung over or both, and try to focus on … whatever the hot issues were back in the seventies. They seemed as far away as his tricks. The Nixon national health insurance plan. David, who turned out to have a wife and a baby. The Carter national health insurance plan. Steven, who saw him for almost a week before asking if Joel would mind co-signing for a little loan. The Gephardt national health insurance plan. Keith, who flirted with him for most of 1979, finally went home with him, and turned out to be wearing a girdle.
By the time Sam came along, Joel was thirty. He had used up nearly half his life, all the years of saying “No” and then the equally taxing years of saying “My place or yours.” How could he have accomplished anything? Gay had been his profession; everything else had been a sideline. Now he was forty-five, Sam was very possibly gone, and he had nothing, was nothing.
Harris returned. He looked dismayed to find Joel still there, but covered pretty quickly. “Um … I guess Melanie will be back in a minute. Why don’t you just go on?”
Go on? What the hell had they been talking about? “Right. I guess … you were asking why these aliens didn’t become citizens.”
“Uh-huh,” Harris said blandly. He had already lost interest in this question. “Listen, let’s hold off on this till Melanie comes back. There was something else I wanted to ask about.”
“Yes, sir.”
“AIDS.”
“AIDS?” Joel’s voice cracked. It was just another health policy issue. Surely Harris just thought: here’s a health guy, I can ask him my AIDS question. Yet Joel felt himself blushing, as if he had given himself away somehow.
“Yeah,” Harris said. “I hear people with AIDS get Medicare.”
“Oh. Some of them do, yes, sir.”
“How come?”
“Because they … you know, if they get disabled and can’t work, they can get Social Security. And then two years after that they get Medicare.”
“They have to wait two years for Medicare?”
“Right.”
Harris was, astonishingly, taking notes. “Then after that they have it until …”
“Until they …” Joel repeated. It was creepy, joining Harris in saying “they.” They were they, people with AIDS: to Harris they must have seemed as far away as Eskimos, and as unimportant. But they were they to Joel as well. Joel and Sam were negative. So were most of the people they knew, those who were still around by 1995. The epidemic had about finished with Joel’s generation and had moved on to kids, with whom he felt only a tepid kinship.
“So how do they get disability? Just call in and say, ‘Oh, I don’t feel up to teasing anybody’s hair today?’” Harris smiled.
Joel was supposed to smile, too. He was not supposed to say, “We don’t all do hair.” He didn’t, but at least he didn’t smile. Mr. Integrity. “I … you know, I don’t do Social Security, but I think you’re automatically disabled if you actually have AIDS. If you have HIV but don’t have AIDS yet, there’s a list of, like, symptoms, conditions.”
Harris sighed. Joel had no sense of humor. Joel was boring. “So they … get something on that list and then two years after that they get Medicare.”
“Twenty-nine months, actually. I mea
n, they have to wait five months for their Social Security and then two years after that for the Medicare to kick in.”
“Twenty-nine months. I guess not everybody … makes it.”
“No, sir.”
“So what do they do in the meanwhile? Buy their own insurance?
“Well, they can’t do that, usually. You know, insurance companies don’t want them.” Joel was encouraged to describe all the insurance problems of people with HIV. COBRA coverage they couldn’t pay for. Limited drug benefits. State programs that required them to impoverish themselves. Probably he went on too long, but Harris listened with surprising attentiveness. Funny that a guy from a rural state should be interested in AIDS. Maybe Melanie was right, maybe the guy really did care about people.
When Joel ran out of steam, Harris shook his head and said, “My.” He looked off into space for a second. “Anyway, the ones on Medicare. They’re all on disability, none of them are over sixty-five?”
“Oh, I guess some are. You know, if they got it through a transfusion or something like that.”
“Uh-huh. But those people just … got it, they didn’t do anything.”
Joel drew in his breath. It had been some time—the late eighties, maybe—since he had heard anyone distinguish between the innocent victims and the guilty. He was wondering if he might dare to point out, gently, that everybody just got it, it was sort of a no-fault microorganism, when Melanie came in.
“Sorry,” she said. “Where are we?”
“Oh, Josh and I were just chatting,” Harris said.
“Joel,” Joel said.
“Right,” Harris said, unapologetically. “Why don’t we get back to aliens? How many aliens have Medicare?”
“About a million.”
“A million! Gosh.” Harris wrote down “I MIL” in giant letters. He looked over at Melanie and intoned: “Young American families are paying for free care for a million foreigners.”
Amazing. The man actually spoke in sound bites. “It’s not the whole million,” Joel said. “I mean, most of them—”