Man About Town

by Mark Merlis

  He thought about the tickets to Provincetown. Nonrefundable. Maybe Sam would get over … whoever it was, and be back in time for the trip. Or Joel could go himself, no sense wasting both tickets. Go by himself, all by himself.

  When he and Sam had gone, he had sometimes met a man their age, or a little older, in a bar. They would chat, the guy would say he was staying a week, had a room in one of the tonier guesthouses. Joel would think: you pathetic, deluded geek, what could have brought you, all by your senescent self, to a town where boys in their twenties stroll down the streets in their underwear? You might as well have blown the money on a fun-filled week in Davenport, Iowa.

  He lit a cigarette. When he felt himself crying again, he knew he was crying for Riff. When you’re a Jet … He never got to be a Jet. He never danced down the streets of the West Side in rhythm with Riff, never hung out with him outside the candy store.

  He never got to be with Alex, never again after that one day helping him with his algebra. Never cruised with him to the drive-in on a Friday night. Never sat with him watching TV. Never heard him say Joel was his best friend.

  He never got to step inside that picture in a magazine, where a young man in swimming trunks had something to tell him.

  He had lived a possible life. Being gay was what was possible. He had come out into the world and there were these choices: he could be straight or he could be gay. So of course he picked gay, and then there were some further choices, submenus: postures in and out of bed, attitudes, costumes.

  None of it was what he’d wanted. It was what was possible; he couldn’t be a Jet, so he donned the gang colors of a faggot; All these years, played this game that had nothing to do with what he wanted. Sam had ended the game, which he had meant to play forever, or until the game was called on account of death. Sam had overturned the board, leaving Joel past the middle of his life, never having had what he needed.

  As if Sam, and not the world, had stood in the way of what Joel had needed.

  Innocently, Sam had held him, they had held one another. Innocently, Sam had left. Probably looking for something he had always wanted and never got. If Joel had been more noble, he might have wished Sam could find it. Maybe if he had ever really loved Sam he would have wished Sam could find it, whatever it was. Instead, he wished Sam were there with him, holding him.

  So he was, finally, crying about Sam. He was supposed to stay there for a lifetime, comforting Joel for the irrevocable loss of Riff or Alex or … Joel wondered if Sam knew. He could not possibly have known.

  When Joel went to bed, he put a drop of cologne on Sam’s pillow.

  three

  Monday, getting on noon. Joel almost didn’t pick up the phone, because it might be some staffer who needed the history of health care in the Western world before lunch. But he was pretty sure it was Sam.

  “Joel Lingeman.”

  “Hi.” Softly, the voice pitched low. The way you might murmur “Hi” to a friend you bumped into at a funeral.

  Joel said “Hi” and waited. A long time; could Sam really have made this call without thinking even of a first sentence?

  “I’ve been trying to get you all weekend.”

  “I was in and out a lot,” Joel said. Out, mostly; he was still kind of hung over. “Anyway, you never left a number.”

  “Oh. Oh, I thought I did.”

  He had, Joel just wouldn’t dial it. Not to hear the phone picked up by a stranger. Not to have to ask, “Is Sam there?” And hear a stranger say, “Who’s calling?”

  Sam coughed. “I … urn, I wanted to tell you what happened.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I, you know, I met somebody. Actually, it’s been a while, I met him a while ago.”

  “Couple of months,” Joel said.

  “About. What, have you known all along?”

  “I wasn’t completely sure.” Better than saying no, he didn’t know anything, he was a blinkered idiot. It struck him that he was calculating what to say to a man he had spent most of his adult life with. It struck him that he had always calculated what to say to Sam.

  “I—maybe I should have told you what was going on. I thought it might go away, you know? I thought it might just be a thing.”

  “Just one of those crazy flings.”

  “What?”

  Joel had spent most of his adult life with a man who didn’t know Cole Porter. “But it didn’t go away.”

  “No. And finally he said, you know, I had to choose.”

  He, the mysterious he, had issued an ultimatum. In bed, turning away from Sam, sullenly. Or over dinner, looking down at his plate, then up again, gravely, sincerely: “You have to choose.”

  “So you did,” Joel said.

  “It was hard. I had to think about it.”

  He could picture Sam thinking about it, the deliberate way Sam worked things out. The vertical line on the sheet of paper, the columns headed Joel and X. He would dutifully have filled the Joel column, maybe halfway down, with all Joel’s good points. Here fifteen years. Cooks. Pays rent on time. Then he got to X’s column and there was nothing to write down. He was in love, the name at the top of the column was so reverberant there was nothing else to write down.

  “What’s this guy’s name?” Joel said.

  “Kevin.”

  Would Joel have felt the same chill if the name had been Fred? Or Seymour? Kevin was cool, acute, slender and sharp-featured. Hair dark-brown and cut close to the head.

  “Tell me about him.”

  “I don’t know what to tell. He’s …” Sam cleared his throat. “He’s twenty-three.”

  Of course, that’s all he had to write in the column headed Kevin: twenty-three.

  “But he’s, you know, real mature.”

  Mature enough to sit across from a man who was pushing fifty and tell him, “You have to choose.” Only a twenty-three-year-old could have been so dramatic. Only a forty-seven-year-old who was head over heels would have thought he really did have to choose. Poor Sam: how long did he think he was going to hang on to Kevin, twenty-three?

  “So, um, anyway.” Sam paused, then said, enunciating carefully: “I’m leaving you, Joel.”

  A senator who has flown to New Hampshire every weekend for two years schedules a press conference. Unless you’ve just flown in from Mars you know what he’s going to announce, and still you might shiver a little when the clown finally says, “I am a candidate for the office of President of the United States.”

  So Joel was thrilled at the sheer expectedness of the words. I’m leaving you; he must always have been waiting to hear those words. Hadn’t wanted to, perhaps. If he had made a list of the pros and cons, two columns, he would surely have concluded that it would be better to grow old with Sam. Wind up with Sam in the Lambda Continuing Care Community, rocking side by side and whistling at the cute orderly, if either of them could whistle. There must never have been a chance: that Joel had even imagined their breakup must have made it inevitable.

  Like some virtuoso of the anticlimax, Sam now produced: “I want you to know that I … I’ll always think of you as my best friend.”

  Joel was thunderstruck. Of course, if he had ever imagined the scene any farther than that ringing line, I’m leaving you, these would have been the next words. But he hadn’t imagined one instant past that line. He would spend the rest of his life on the other side of that line, starting with Sam’s repeating: “You’re my best friend.”

  Joel must have answered, the conversation must have gone on. Yet after Sam’s usual “Talk to you” and the click of the phone he couldn’t have repeated any of it.

  You’re my best friend: it was something a ten-year-old might say. And it might have gratified Joel if he had heard it when he was ten. If he had heard it from the right boy—from Alex, say, or from some ten-year-old imago of Senator Harris. Instead of the asthmatic losers who actually tended to say it to him, letting him know that he too was a loser.

  Sam was his best friend, who else could poss
ibly qualify? Joel had been thinking, the other night, of everything they hadn’t shared. Piano duets. Middlemarch. But they had shared so much: Sam’s hernia operation, Joel’s periodontal work, all the vacations, all the people they’d buried. They were best friends.

  Maybe that was better. Maybe they would actually mean more to one another if, say, they had dinner every couple of weeks, with something to talk about, stuff to catch up on, instead of dinner every night, with the only sound the intermittent clack of silverware on plates. Maybe they could simply love one another, now that sex was out of the way.

  They had known such couples. Guys who had broken up and then become best buddies. Maybe this was how they could be. Sam and Joel: the exes. Maybe they could even use the nonrefundable tickets! What did you do for vacation? Oh, I went to Provincetown with my ex.

  Sam and Joel, the Jets. Womb to tomb, sperm to worm. Just as soon as sex was out of the way.

  A couple of days later Joel took a long lunch, mostly just strolling around the Hill, then spent the rest of the afternoon catching up on the Congressional Record. There was a whole week of issues he hadn’t been through. Lots of great stuff. Last Wednesday Senator Byrd had inserted one of his thirty-page term papers, explaining how the line-item veto had brought an end to the Roman republic. Also there was one of those nifty eruptions of gang warfare in the House. Some Republican called the President a liar; some Democrat demanded that the member’s words be taken down, whatever that meant; then rulings from the chair, votes; all told, at least an hour of carrying-on, two gangs of apes screeching and mooning each other. On Thursday there were the mysterious House roll calls he had watched while waiting for Sam. Friday the House passed the Commerce, Justice, State, and Judiciary appropriations, a hundred pages of fine print that Joel read with the greatest care, looking for the little poison pills that would make the President veto it. Tuesday there were about a hundred new bills introduced.

  Senator Altman’s aliens amendment had inspired the usual torrent of copycat bills. The less imaginative members had simply copied the proposal verbatim and introduced it under their own names. Others had grasped the underlying principle—that you could express your disdain for despised populations and at the same time save taxpayers money by cutting off Medicare for:

  H. 2419, persons convicted of drug offenses;

  H. 2471, flag burners;

  H. 2502 and S. 978, simultaneously introduced in both houses, child molesters; and

  S. 993, draft evaders amnestied by President Carter.

  Joel wondered how many veterans of the Spanish Civil War were still doddering around. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade, if any were left, had better start hunting for health insurance.

  Reading the Record these days was like reading about a snuff movie. Not seeing one, no one had ever attested to having seen a real snuff movie. There was just a flurry of articles about them some years ago, rumors that connoisseurs could buy videos in which women were killed right in front of the camera. Even if such a movie existed, the most attentive viewer would be unable to say if he had witnessed an actual murder or just special effects, ketchup and maybe, if the budget allowed, some chitterlings. The whole thrill was simply in what was alleged about the movie, and you already had this thrill just reading the articles that purported to condemn it. The frisson was in the concept, there was no need to execute it: just to say the words “snuff movie” made a world in which every woman was a little more at risk of starring in one.

  So with all of these bills. Even if any of them passed, the President might veto them, depending on what his pollsters told him that day. And they were probably unconstitutional, ex post facto laws. None of these proposals would ever take effect, but they had already done their work. Simply by introducing them, their authors had conjured up a parallel nation in which old people were left to die in the streets in retribution for ancient transgressions. A nation in which everyone, really, was an alien, to whom benefits might be given or taken away by a bunch of white guys with bad comb-overs, voting silently in the middle of the night while C-SPAN played Vivaldi.

  By the time Joel had worked through the pile of Records, it was almost six, quitting time.

  At the Hill Club a few of his friends were huddled in the queer corner of the bar, that shrinking space they clung to like penguins on an ice floe. Charles, who curated colonial furniture for the Smithsonian and whose raincoat was draped over his nondrinking arm, lining out, so everyone would see it was a Burberry. Albert, who had been chief of staff for a Senate committee until the Republicans lost the Senate in ’86. When they took it again in ’94, he had just assumed he could go back to his old job. Not understanding that he should have filled the eight-year hole in his résumé with something other than: at Hill Club. Francis, who had been booted out of the seminary and had then become celibate—maybe from sheer exhaustion. Joel supposed you had to be pretty frisky if even a seminary couldn’t overlook it. Buck, a paperhanger whose real name was Edward but who was called Buck because sometimes he worked in the nude. Tucked into the farthest stool, old Walter, who had possibly not moved since last week.

  His friends. They were chattering away, only Charles pausing to say, “Hey, Joel, what’s new?” Expecting Joel to answer, “Not much.” Nothing had been new in years: same job, same lover. Joel was a consumer of news, not a producer. Until now. As the ads in the back pages of comic books used to say: “Amaze your friends!” He could already see the looks on their faces as he told them …

  Until that instant, he truly had not comprehended that his predicament was a shameful one. Why? No one ever called a gay man a cuckold: infidelity was the norm, it was no reflection on you if your lover occasionally partook of strange meat. Here at the Hill Club, his friends, those who were coupled at all, routinely and unabashedly related their partners’ latest escapades. They would cluck affectionately, like a doting mother reciting the hijinks of an errant son. Why couldn’t Joel do that? Just make light of it? Wait till you hear what Sam has gone and done, the rascal!

  Because they had been not a couple, but a sermon. Their loyalty a standing reproach to all the doubters who insisted it was impossible, no faggots could live like Joel and Sam forever. He had never, he thought, rubbed it in. On the contrary, he had always been half-apologetic about their deviant behavior. As if fidelity were a little idiosyncrasy of theirs. As if it hadn’t cost them anything.

  He could already see the faces. After the moment of astonishment, how Charles and Francis and Buck would marshal their faces, each of them striving to craft the appropriate mask of consternation and empathy. He had done it so often himself. He knew just how the muscles in your face tensed as you concealed your simple delight in unearthing a large uncut gem of misery. He knew how it felt to look straight in someone’s eyes when you wanted to turn away with disdain for his fatuity and richly deserved ill-fortune.

  All of these ordinary human sensations would be sweetened in this instance by a special triumph: they had been right all along, it was never possible to be Joel and Sam. If Icarus had pals like Joel’s, they must have had to struggle just so, holding their frowns in place to hide their natural jubilation as he fell to earth.

  Oh, and how would they ever keep a straight face when Joel said the most hilarious thing of all? We’re still going to be friends.

  “Nothing much,” Joel said. “Um … listen, I just stopped in to say hi. I’ve got to get going.”

  “You’re not even going to have one drink?” Charles asked. With honest amazement, as if Joel had announced he was giving up oxygen.

  “No, I’m late for something.”

  Twelve years late, he thought, as he got into the cab and said, “P and Nineteenth.” Twelve years since he’d been with anybody but Sam. Maybe that guy from last week would show up at Zippers again, or maybe … He found that he was—right there in a taxicab—getting aroused, just thinking of that guy, remembering their kiss. He could almost feel its traces on his lips. The thought of simply repeating that kiss made hi
m short of breath, he didn’t have to think beyond it to what would happen when they got to … the apartment. Not some hotel; they could go to the apartment. All the better if, improbably, Sam were there when they came in, picking up more stuff. You see, you’re not the only one who …

  Sam’s catch, his Kevin, was twenty-three. And cared for Sam, didn’t give up a kiss because he’d just been handed forty bucks. So what? It wasn’t a contest. The issue was whether Joel was going to have a good time. But he couldn’t help feeling Sam watching, judging. Even if he weren’t literally present when Joel brought home his damaged goods, Sam would be there somehow. Like an angel: Joel had a sudden picture of him, his face floating near the ceiling in a corner of the bedroom. Just his face, like one of those grotesque putti who show up in Mannerist paintings, a head with wings sprouting from behind the ears.

  Would he be there always, that accusatory angel? Maybe so, maybe this was what it meant to have an ex. A Sam in his head, murmuring: Joel, Joel, how could you do something so stupid and degrading?

  Joel answered. Because it is my body now, and my money, and my dignity. All of these things were yours and you left them behind and I own them again. I can do anything I want.

  Of course, the corollary to this triumphant riposte was that he would need to figure out what he wanted. No sweat. He wanted another kiss. Except that it was one thing to buy a secret kiss while your lover was working late, and another thing to have no lover and buy a kiss.

  As it was one thing to sneak into Zippers while your lover was working late, just to see if anybody might look at you, and another thing to sit in Zippers having one drink after another while you waited to see if anybody might look at you. Past eight on a weeknight, lots to do tomorrow, he should just amble out, pick up a little food, go on home and …

  Zippers had been almost empty when Joel came in, but it was starting to fill up now. Guys who had finished their errands or their naps, one or two of whom Joel wouldn’t have thrown out of bed in a blizzard. He sat up, sucked in his stomach, wondered if he was holding his cigarette like the Marlboro man or if, come to think of it, maybe his cigarette was a turn-off now as it hadn’t been fifteen years ago.