Man About Town

by Mark Merlis

  He knew it was crazy. Sitting here and feeling that he absolutely had to meet somebody; it was practically a guarantee that he would go home alone. But if he left now, he would go home alone anyway. So he might as well have just one more drink. He wasn’t hunting, he was merely … available. That was how he should feel. No special urgency. He had simply been unavailable for many years, and now he was available, like an out-of-print book that has been reissued.

  As the bartender, a kid with a shaved head and a black goatee, refilled Joel’s glass he said, “You just visiting DC?”

  “Me?” Joel said. “No, I’m from here. I just don’t go out much.”

  “I didn’t think I’d seen you.”

  “No.” The bartender must have been about the age of Sam’s Kevin; Joel found himself momentarily entranced by the kid’s Adam’s apple.

  “Well, it’s nice to see you now. What’s your name?”

  “Joel.”

  “I’m Scott. It’s nice to meet you, Joel.” He gave Joel a genuine and quite charming smile. “Excuse me, I’ll be back in a second.”

  Joel waited many seconds for Scott to come back before he recalled that a smile from a cute bartender was not a token of incipient devotion. Cute bartenders smiled at older guys because older guys tipped. Joel was an older guy. Of course he knew that, he received a telegram on the subject every time he bent over to pick something up. But he had not been an older guy hanging out in a gay bar. One of those gray objects his eyes used to just automatically pass over, fifteen years ago, when he scanned the bar. Missing from the picture, like a disgraced commissar airbrushed out of a photo of the Supreme Soviet.

  He made himself smile. Years ago someone had told him he frowned too much, he needed to smile more. He sat up and sucked in his belly and smiled. He could do it for only a few seconds before he felt like an idiot. Sitting there at the bar grinning at nothing.

  He had meant to leave himself casually open to chance, a calm harbor if the wind should happen to blow a vessel his way. But already he was cruising again, he had fallen back into it as quickly as that. Alive again, as he had wanted, every nerve awake, his peripheral vision lit up by every shift in the crowd around him, every momentary turn of a face. His back feeling each tiny draft that meant someone had just come in, and should he turn now to look?

  As if he had never been away at all. If he had not met Sam or any Sam, he might have kept coming here, 33, 34, 35 …

  The life here had gone on all these years waiting for him to resume it. And it wasn’t as though he and Sam had been in a foreign country and he was now returning to find his native land surprisingly unchanged. It was as though a parallel Joel had persisted in this world from which he had absented himself, and now the two had converged, they were in the same place now, Joel1 and Joel2.

  He had arrived exactly where he would have been if there had been no Sam: just Joel coming into the bar. Still coming into the bar.

  As was, uh-oh, Ron. Joel suddenly spotted him, leaning against the wall next to the exit. Part of the Hill Club gang, who hadn’t been there this evening because, undoubtedly, he had taken a nap before changing into his cruising ensemble and coming here. He might as well have come straight from work in his K-Street-lawyer ensemble instead of putting on jeans that were a tad too small, so that his polo-shirted gut stuck out as if it were cantilevered.

  Ron was panning the room, his head slowly turning like the security camera in a bank. When he saw Joel, he did a little double take, the head continuing its rotation and snapping back. He did it again, to make Joel smile, and Joel did. But he was staring at Joel rather sternly, as if he had caught Joel somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be.

  Joel should have figured Ron would show. up. The only guy in their circle who still had the energy, or the doggedness, to go out cruising four or five nights a week. Even though he was—what?—pushing sixty, anyway. Still casting his net out, night after night. As he had been doing since, Joel guessed, late in the Eisenhower administration. He had already been a fixture at Zippers, as much a part of the decor as the jukebox or the smoke-stained ceiling, when Joel started showing up. Late in the Ford administration.

  Ron used to be good. He used to scan the room, register whatever new face had innocently manifested itself in Zippers—not uncommonly someone Joel had already fixed on—then just lean back against the wall, expressionless, and suck on his beer. A minute or two later he would be standing next to the guy, already in earnest conversation. Joel never actually saw him cross the room, it was as if he beamed himself over. Sometimes, just before he steered the fresh meat out the front door, he would catch Joel’s eye and shrug. As if to say: it’s tiresome, but somebody had to rope in the little maverick.

  Joel wasn’t even jealous, more nearly awestruck. What did Ron say to them? What had he said to Joel, Joel’s first or second time there, when he swooped down and led Joel off for an encounter of which Joel could recall not the slightest detail? Joel could remember all of his good tricks and most of his truly horrible ones, so Ron must have been in that instantly forgettable midrange: both finished somehow, shooting stars were not witnessed, the one who wasn’t home went home at three in the morning.

  When they had started running into each other at the Hill Club a year or two later, they had, of course, not alluded to their prior encounter. Two men who had been naked together and had done … whatever they had done, and in all this time neither had ever mentioned it. Because it wasn’t a big thing, not back in those years; whatever they had done had been about as weighty as shaking hands.

  Joel was glad he couldn’t remember what they’d done, but he did wish he could remember what Ron had said, what incantation he had uttered that let him carry Joel off, carry off all the boys so effortlessly it was if he were just entitled, exercised a sort of droit de seigneur with every newcomer.

  Probably it didn’t work any more. Twenty years ago he was nondescript but in possession of some magic words. Now he was a ruin, no longer a troller but a simple troll. He still talked about going out, but Joel couldn’t remember the last time he had bragged about scoring.

  Oh, Joel was jealous, after all. The ugliest part of him thought: Ron shouldn’t still be here, not after a million tricks. He should have paid a price for having been endowed with those magic words.

  Ron materialized next to Joel; once again Joel hadn’t seen him cross the room. “Why, look what blew in!” Ron said. “You cruising or just drinking?”

  “I don’t know. How about you?”

  “You don’t know? You ought to at least know which it is you’re doing.” He thought about that a second. “Yes, I think you ought to at least know if you’re cruising or drinking.” Ron chuckled. “Not to say that you can’t start out doing one and wind up doing the other.”

  “Yeah, I think I’m just at that segue,” Joel said.

  “So you were cruising. I thought you and the hubby didn’t …”

  “Um …” Joel was distracted by the annoying “hubby”; for a moment he couldn’t think what to say. But there was nothing to say. Here he was, Sam was his ex, everyone was going to know sooner or later. “We kind of changed the rules.”

  “I wish I’d been a fly on the wall at that discussion.”

  “We didn’t, uh, have a discussion. It was more a fait accompli.”

  “Ah. And which of you accomplied the fait?”

  “Which do you think?”

  Ron closed his eyes, just for an instant, before pronouncing: “Sam.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Because, if it was you, you would have said so.”

  “I guess.”

  “And because I’ve seen him around.”

  “You have? Jesus. You never said anything.”

  Ron shrugged. Of course he hadn’t. What was he supposed to say? Hey, Joel, guess where I saw your hubby?

  “So how’s the new arrangement working?”

  “It’s—” Joel swallowed. “It’s not a new arrangement. He’s gone.�
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  “He’s … Sam left you?”

  “For some kid.”

  “Uh-huh.” Ron looked away. “Name of Kevin?”

  Joel felt himself blushing. Sam hadn’t even been hiding it, probably the whole city had been laughing at Joel for months.

  Ron must have understood; he shook his head. “I just bumped into them this one time, over at Gentry. Sam said it was a kid from his office, someone he was training, and they were going to have dinner. I didn’t think anything about it.”

  “Oh.”

  “I didn’t tell anybody.”

  “Might as well now,” Joel said. “What’s he like?”

  “Kevin? I don’t know. Young.”

  “Cute?”

  “Oh, sort of.” From which Joel understood that Kevin was a knock-out. He sighed. Ron said,. “Nothing that special.”

  “Sam must think so.”

  “Maybe. Maybe he was just ready.”

  For the first thing that came along, Ron meant. Joel preferred to think that Kevin was a knock-out. That Sam couldn’t have left him for anything less than a knock-out.

  “Can I get you another drink?” Joel said.

  “I better slow down. You better slow down.”

  “What for?”

  “What for? My dear, you are back on the rack.” No note of triumph, not even a suppressed one, nor of sympathy. Just matter of fact: Joel was back on the rack. People left the rack, people returned to the rack; it didn’t matter if they were gone fifteen hours or fifteen years.

  “I think I’ll get back on the rack some other night.”

  “Why? Sam’s getting his.”

  “I don’t … I don’t know if I even want mine.”

  “You don’t?”

  “I mean, it’s not like I’m horny, especially. I’m just here because …”

  “You’re just here because Sam is getting his.”

  “I guess. Which is stupid. I should just toddle home.”

  “Hey, might as well find your own little belly-warmer.”

  What an ugly phrase. But what else was Joel looking for? Surely he wasn’t here screening candidates for the next fifteen-year hitch. Just some trick, as in the old days, just take someone home and— What was the despair that gripped Joel as he conjured this … warming scene? That it probably wasn’t going to happen, not tonight? Or that, if it did, he would be back here tomorrow night, smiling and sucking in his gut?

  Joel called out to the bartender: “Scott!”

  “Oh, you’ve met Scott. He’s pretty cute.”

  “No kidding.”

  “There you go. Take Scott home.”

  “Right.”

  Scott refilled Joel’s glass, took his money from the little stack of bills that Joel had meant for a tip. Maybe Joel would replenish it, even though Scott had forgotten to smile this time.

  “Scott’s a little out of my league.”

  “You don’t know your league till you try out.”

  “I’m not sure I remember how,” Joel said. “You know, I was never very good at this.”

  “No, you weren’t.”

  Joel was stung, the way you are stung when you feign humility and are told that your estimate of yourself is right on the number.

  Ron went on: “I used to watch you sometimes. You’d stare at the same guy for about five hours, you’d work up some line to say to him. Do you know, your lips would move while you rehearsed?”

  It was all true, he had been such a jerk in those days. How awful that anyone remembered. It was like running into someone from high school who remembers you only as the guy with pimples. Ron must have recalled it every time they met at the Hill Club. Here comes Joel the jerk.

  “It was kind of funny,” Ron said. “Especially when you were so hot. Do you know that?”

  “Was I? I never thought so.”

  “I know you didn’t.”

  “If only I’d known.” If only he had. Then maybe he would have had a thousand tricks, instead of a couple of hundred. In which case he’d probably be dead. Or alive and with a thousand tricks behind him.

  Ron said, “The guys who are really hot are the ones who don’t know they are.” He looked around the room, possibly trying to spot one who didn’t know. He spotted something, at any rate. He was gone, as abruptly as he’d arrived at Joel’s side. This wasn’t rude: if two hawks are flying side by side and one sees a rabbit far below, he doesn’t pause to bid the other adieu. He swoops.

  Joel craned his neck to see if he could spot Ron’s prey But Ron was already deep in the crowd somewhere, Joel couldn’t find him.

  Sunday night—his fifth straight night of striking out at Zippers—Joel stopped on the way home for carryout. A super combo platter from El Toro, with (1 ea.) burrito, enchilada, taco. Also rice, refried beans, chips, salsa (add guacamole and sour cream 50 ea.). As he walked home he held the foam carton straight out before him, keeping it level so everything wouldn’t smoosh together. He felt silly and conspicuous. Passersby must have been thinking: look how that funny old guy holds his carryout, like Jeeves bringing in high tea. Look at that tacky old jacket he’s wearing. And where did he get those shoes, Thorn McAn?

  Dupont Circle wasn’t a true ghetto—it wasn’t the Castro, or West Hollywood. For every guy carrying a gym bag or walking a small, skittish dog, there was a guy pushing a stroller. Or a young woman like Melanie, going home with her carryout on yet another dateless night and mourning that there seemed to be only two kinds of guys in Washington, the ones with gym bags and the ones pushing strollers.

  Still, Joel did, on his little journey with the combo platter, pass many many many gay men. Of course, this had always been so; it was what made Dupont feel like home, a little village whose townspeople happened to have shaved heads and tattoos. But he had never really felt that he was one of them. He had been the star of his own life, and all the other gay men he passed on the street had been mere supernumeraries, faceless choristers in the opera of Joel and Sam.

  Now they were fiercely particular. Men just heading out to the bars, others hurrying home to their lovers. Others shuffling along, having just struck out at one bar and debating whether they should try someplace else or just … Now that Joel had been demoted to the chorus, he could see that every one of them had a face. He looked at them, they looked back.

  They looked away.

  “Georgetown Sports Medicine,” the receptionist said.

  “This is Joel, is Sam around?” He had said those very words a million times. At first stammering, feeling that he was saying, “This is Sam’s homosexual lover.” After a while realizing that she had no opinion, that he was just a call to be put through. Or, even if she had an opinion, she still had to put the call through. This small epiphany had been something of a milestone on Joel’s long reluctant crawl out of the closet.

  Today she had an opinion: she drew in her breath sharply before saying, “Uh, I—let me see.”

  If even she thought it was a bad idea for Joel to call, maybe it was a bad idea. It hadn’t occurred to Joel that Sam would have told everybody in his office what had happened. Of course, he had to: his home number had changed, they had to know where to reach him. Still, he could have just said, “Here’s my new home number,” he didn’t have to explain. But he must have: one by one or collectively they must all have heard, in the couple of weeks since the break-up, that Sam had left Joel and embarked on a new life. How had he put it, Joel wondered. Had he been mournful or jubilant, had he catalogued Joel’s deficiencies or just said softly that things weren’t working out? It was eerie, knowing that you were a character in a story being told to strangers.

  All strangers. Joel had never once been to Sam’s office, or met any of the people Sam worked with. His only experience of Georgetown Sports Medicine was the practiced greeting of the receptionist. Sam had told stories, about some doctor’s divorce or the funny thing that had happened to the nurse’s son-in-law. But Joel couldn’t really picture any of these people. He couldn’t even k
eep their names straight, any more than Sam could follow Joel’s stories from work. Though Joel’s stories were studded with bigger names, they were still just work gossip. A lover was obliged to listen politely, but couldn’t be expected to recall, from one time to the next, the difference between Congressman Miller and Senator Muller.

  Georgetown Sports Medicine: Joel couldn’t help conjuring a white-tiled locker room, radiant young athletes frowning stoically as the healers kneaded their wracked bodies. And perhaps Sam’s daily schedule of middle-aged lawyers with tennis elbows and jogger’s knees was indeed punctuated by the occasional golden youth. The lacrosse player would strip down to his briefs, Sam would give him his physical therapy—whatever the hell that consisted of; in fifteen years Joel had never quite pictured what exactly Sam did. Then Sam would come home and find … Joel. Maybe it was a wonder he hadn’t drifted off years before.

  “Joel,” Sam said flatly when he came on the line.

  “Hi. How are you doing?”

  “Okay.” There was a pause, during which Sam did not say, “And you?” He was just waiting for Joel to state his business. All right, maybe he was with a patient. But it wasn’t as if he’d been in the middle of brain surgery.

  Joel said, “You know, it’s the third of the month.”

  “So?”

  “The rent is due.”

  “The—? Oh.” There was a pause, during which Joel actually imagined that Sam was debating whether to mail his half or bring it by in person. “Joel, I can’t keep paying for half of an apartment I don’t even live in. I mean—you know, I can’t keep staying with Kevin, so I’m going to have to get a place of my own, and …”

  Curiosity momentarily outweighed indignation: “Why can’t you stay with Kevin?”

  “Are you kidding? He has one little room in a slum off Logan Circle with about thirty-seven roommates.”

  Well, of course he did: if you chose to start over with a twenty-three-year-old, that’s what you got. “How is that my problem?”