by Mark Merlis
“How is your rent my problem?”
“You’re on the lease. A lot of your stuff is still there.”
“I’ll be getting it out. Look, you know you can afford that apartment.”
“That’s not the point.” Even as he said this, Joel wondered what the point was. He could afford the apartment; with twelve years’ tenure under rent control, they were getting two bedrooms at the going rate for a walk-in closet. So it wasn’t the money Joel wanted. He wanted the check, the physical object, like a little affidavit declaring that some connection was still there. A postcard from Sam’s new world: Having wonderful time. Coming home soon.
Sam said, helpfully, “Maybe you need to get a roommate.”
A roommate! The only worse thing Joel could imagine would be having to go through eighth grade again. A perfect stranger, haunting the living room, using the shower. Cooking in Joel’s kitchen.
“I guess you’re mad,” Sam said.
Joel considered this. Of course he was furious. But he had somehow lost the right to be furious. It used to be, if one or the other of them got mad, then it had to be dealt with: nobody was going anywhere, it had to be worked out. Now, if Joel was mad, it wasn’t Sam’s problem, any more than if Joel had a rash. There it was: anger now would just be a condition Joel had, an itch Sam had no obligation to scratch. So he said, “No. No, I’m not mad.”
“That’s good.”
“I’m not, you know, mad about any of it. I want you to know that. I mean, if this thing doesn’t work out for you, I …” Joel stopped; he despised himself for having said so much. He had meant it, the door was always open, it had seemed important that Sam know. But just saying it, feeling so pathetic, like a dog that has been kicked by its master and raises a forepaw in submission—something in Joel rebelled. He had thought he would do anything to go back to the life that had been ruptured two weeks ago, yet some mutinous voice inside was protesting. He suppressed the voice, resumed: “If it doesn’t work out, you know—”
Sam cut him off. “Joel, I didn’t leave you for this kid.”
“Huh?”
“I left you. And there was this kid. I was going to leave you if there wasn’t this kid.”
“You keep calling him a kid.” Joel wasn’t changing the subject, or failing to get what Sam had said. Joel got it fine: it seemed as though he could feel the blood jetting through every inch of his skin, as if he were blushing with his whole body.
“He is a kid. I’m … we have a good time, but I’m not fooling myself. I know I’ll never have what I had with you.”
“You still have it. Any time.” Mouthing those words, but already scarcely able to conceive of what it could possibly consist of.
Sam said, “I can’t pay the price any more.”
Joel had to keep from laughing. Not just because Sam had thrown at him, with perfect gravity, a line that might have come from some fifties teleplay, but because he was actually living, here and now, in the scene from which that line had been stolen. He felt the strangest elation: drama, however hackneyed, had reentered his life, after so many years of contented oblivion. Playhouse 90. He said his line with a gravity to match Sam’s. “What price?”
“I can’t explain it. I can, I don’t want to. You’ll have to figure it out.” Then, on cue, Sam hung up. Without his customary valediction: “Talk to you.”
“Can you believe it?” Joel said. “The price!”
Francis, the ex-seminarian, intoned, “The price,” in his deepest basso, and chortled.
It was funny: two weeks earlier Joel had dreaded telling the gang at the Hill Club what had happened. Of course, Ron had saved him the trouble; by the next time he came in everybody knew. And, so quickly, it had just become a fact about him. Joel works at OLA, he lives up near Dupont, he used to have a lover but now he doesn’t. Already Joel was casually retailing stories about his ex, and enjoying it when Francis chortled with him.
“So I asked him, and he said, ‘You’ll have to figure it out.’ Like I’m supposed to embark on a course of healthy self-criticism.”
Francis opened his mouth, as if getting ready to recite a few of Joel’s deficiencies, just to give Joel a little head start. Then he frowned, as if the project of enumerating Joel’s faults were too daunting, and muttered, “Well, who knows what he meant.”
Well, who did know? What was Joel supposed to do now, stew about it until he could assess the awful price Sam had somehow been paying? As if only Sam had paid anything.
Sam had never heard himself sigh, one of those long sighs that could fill the whole living room on a Sunday morning, squeezing the sunlight out and forcing Joel to put down his bagel and contemplate the abyss. Sam had never, on more jovial Sundays, gone shopping with Sam, those interminable excursions that left Joel feeling he had committed some misdemeanor and been sentenced to thirty days in the mall. Sam had never waited for Sam to get dressed, or sat cringing while Sam sent food back in a diner, for Christ’s sake, or watched as Sam swirled wine from an eight-dollar bottle around his mouth and spat it back into the glass.
Everything Joel had loathed and had overlooked, gritting his teeth, just to keep it going. Love had never blinded him, he had never come to regard Sam’s flaws as endearing idiosyncrasies. On the contrary, the years had magnified them, until even Sam’s most innocuous habits loomed as felonies; a day with him could seem like a crime wave. Joel would have to tell himself, over and over, this is trivial, you mustn’t focus on this when we have it so good.
Until perhaps the main thing they had, that was so good, was their very persistence. Some nights, when they went to bed angry, Joel would lie awake next to Sam, seething, and then recollect that he was lying next to Sam. Next to someone, on this cold night, when at that very moment at Zippers guys were darting around frantically, looking for any kind of connection before last call. This thought had been almost enough, even if it occasionally occurred to Joel that there wasn’t, from this perspective, a great deal of difference between Sam and an electric blanket. Except that an electric blanket didn’t pay half the rent.
Sam must have thought the same thing. He even talked about it. He was the one who would sometimes, just out of the blue, remark wonderingly that they were still a couple. When Peter and Hugh had broken up, Glen and Phillip had lasted—what?—not six months, poor James had never found anybody at all. Joel didn’t bring this up; it almost seemed like bad luck. Sam did, counting aloud their years together, as if the very number—thirteen, fourteen, at last fifteen—had some weight. But numbers didn’t weigh anything.
“You know,” Francis said.
“What?”
“You have kind of … let yourself go.”
This from some eunuch who was so fat he couldn’t even pull his stool up to the bar. But Joel had asked for it: no one had made him tell his story to the eunuch. Who was undoubtedly compiling a mental list of all those to whom he could repeat it.
“Married life,” Joel said.
“Uh-huh.”
“We both let ourselves go.” Just saying it made Joel realize that it wasn’t true. He and Sam might have grown matching paunches over the years, but Joel’s was definitely bigger. And Sam was, perhaps, a little more assiduous about little details like getting his hair cut or making sure both his socks were the same color.
Was this obvious to everyone? If even Francis thought so, maybe everybody thought, had been thinking for God knows how long: why is Sam sticking with this frump?
“Do you think that was it?” Joel said. “He could at least have warned me.”
“You mean like: ‘Honey, gain five more pounds and I’m out of here’?”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe he didn’t know the magic number till you went over it.”
“Maybe not.”
Francis shrugged. “What do I know? The only long-term relationship I ever had was with a teddy bear.”
“I wasn’t going to say that.” Or point out that Francis probably hadn’t even been laid since
…
“At least I still have the teddy bear.”
Well, yes, you do, you asshole. And at least I had—
Charles ambled over. The curator: today he was wearing a linen suit—he was meticulous about not bringing out the linen suit until after Memorial Day—and a suspiciously perfect bow tie. “What are we talking about?”
“Stuffed animals,” Francis chortled.
“We were talking about why Sam left,” Joel said.
“Oh.” Charles rolled his eyes. “I thought it was something interesting.”
“Sorry. I sort of find it interesting.”
“Why? What are you going to do about it now?” A sound question. “Anyway, I thought he left for this little cutie.”
“But Sam said it wasn’t the kid, he would have left anyway.”
“Hmm.”
“Francis says I … let myself go.” Joel smiled, as if this theory were absurd, though he was afraid Charles would second it. Let himself go: an odd phrase, if you thought about it. As if you held your self a prisoner but could commute the sentence any time. Freeing your self to become a frump.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Charles said. It wasn’t clear if he meant that Joel hadn’t let himself go or only that this wasn’t Sam’s reason. He scratched his head. “Maybe it was the drinking.”
Charles was clutching what had to be his third cosmopolitan. They might as well have strapped a nipple on the vodka bottle and handed it to him. “Sam drinks,” Joel said.
“Well, that’s true.” Charles was expressionless. “Beats me, then. Excuse me.” He went over to talk with Walter. If he was going to try to wake up old, pickled Walter, he must have found the topic of Joel-and-Sam immeasurably tedious.
It was, wasn’t it? Who but Joel could possibly have wished to unravel the mystery of Sam’s departure? Even Joel was, he found, suddenly tired of the subject. He didn’t want to know, didn’t ever.
He thought, just then, that maybe he didn’t ever want to talk to Sam again. Not just because Sam had been such a prick on the phone; Sam had always been kind of a prick. But because, if they didn’t talk again, he would never have to hear—he didn’t know how he could possibly bear to hear—that Sam knew everything about him, everything he knew about himself.
A day or two later, Joel had a six o’clock meeting at Senator Harris’s office. Rob the varsity receptionist ushered Joel into a conference room, explaining that Melanie would be a little late—as if six o’clock weren’t late enough. The room was decorated in the usual way: on the shelves a never-consulted set of the United States Code, on the wall a map of Montana and a blown-up photograph of the senator, on two-thirds of the conference table stacks of newsletters headed Capitol Update and bearing the same photograph. At the cleared space at one end of the table sat a man about Joel’s age or a little younger, his jacket off. Blue suspenders marked the boundaries between his powerful shoulders and arms and his perfectly proportioned chest. Above this intimidating vista floated a gentle, spectacled face; chestnut hair.
The hunk stood up and said, “Andrew Crawford, leg counsel’s office.” Leg—pronounced “ledge”—counsel were the people who drafted bills, translating members’ ideas into language so majestic and impenetrable that only a few initiates could detect just how bad the ideas really were.
“Joel Lingeman, OLA.” As they shook hands, Joel’s radar registered the tiniest blip. A man who called himself Andrew instead of Andy, the obvious hours at the gym. A definite maybe. They sat opposite each other, saving the head of the table for Melanie. “So we’re here to draft something?”
Andrew gave Joel a one-sided smile and said, “Oh, we’ve already drafted something. We’re here to perfect it.”
The pages he slid across the table were a dummy bill; leg counsel could print bills out now so they looked just like the real thing.
104TH CONGRESS
1ST SESSION
S.
To amend the Social Security Act to provide incentives for
personal responsibility.
-------------------------------------------
IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES
, 19
Mr. HARRIS introduced the following bill; which was read twice and referred to the Committee on Finance.
-------------------------------------------
A BILL
To amend the Social Security Act to restrict Medicare
payments for certain services, and for other purposes.
1 Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives
2 of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
3 SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE
4 This Act may be cited as the “Personal Responsibility
5 Act of 19__.”
6
7 SEC. 2. RESTRICTION OF MEDICARE
8 PAYMENT FOR SERVICES RELATED TO A
9 DIAGNOSIS OF INFECTION WITH THE
10 HUMAN IMMUNODEFICIENCY VIRUS
11 RESULTING FROM HIGH-RISK BEHAVIOR
12 (a) IN GENERAL.—Section 1862(a) of the Social
13 Security Act (42 USC 1395y), relating to exclusions from
14 coverage, is amended—
15 (1) In subclause (15)(B), by striking the word “or”,
16 (2) At the end of subsection (16) by striking the period
17 and inserting “; or”, and
18 (3) By inserting after subsection (16) the following
19 new subsection:
20 “(17)(A) where such expenses are for the treatment of
21 illnesses or conditions related to a diagnosis of acquired
22 immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) or infection with the
23 human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), and
24 “(B) the individual is determined, on or after January
25 1, ___, to have engaged in one or more of the high-risk
26 behaviors described in section 1861(oo).”
27 (b) DEFINITION OP HIGH-RISK BEHAVIOKS.—Section
28 1861 of the Social Security Act (42 USC 1395x) is amended
29 by inserting after subsection (nn) the following new sub-
30 section:
31 “High-Risk Behaviors
32 “(oo) The term “high-risk behaviors” means any act or
33 pattern of acts performed voluntarily by an individual and
34 determined by the Secretary to increase the likelihood that
35 such individual will become infected with the human immuno-
36 deficiency virus (HIV).”
37 (e) LIST OF HIGH-RISK BEHAVIORS.—NO later than 90
38 days after the effective date of this Act, the Secretary
39 shall cause to be published in the Federal Register a list
40 of the behaviors determined by the Secretary to be high-
41 risk behaviors for the purposes of this Act.
42 SEC. 3. EFFECTIVE DATE
43 The amendments made by this Act shall be effective
44 for services furnished to an individual on or after
45 January 1, ___.
“Jeez,” Joel said, when he’d finished scanning it. “They want to cut off Medicare to people who …” He almost used a graphic expression, but he wasn’t sure enough about Andrew. “People who have unsafe sex.”
“You got it. Or, you know, needles, whatever.”
The gleaming viciousness of this idea didn’t even surprise Joel, really. It was a wonder no one had thought of it before, Helms or Inhofe or Lott. But he had had the silly misapprehension that Harris was educable.
He hazarded: “I don’t guess this will have much effect in Montana.”
“Nope.” Andrew grinned. “I don’t think you can get AIDS from fucking sheep.”
They laughed. Joel was pretty sure about him now, and he must have reached his conclusions about Joel as well. Joel laughed a little too long; Andrew was looking at him.
“Anyway,” Joel said. “I think I see a couple little drafting question
s right away.”
Andrew got serious, took up a pen.
“First, in section seventeen B …”
“Uh-huh.”
“You can’t really tell if it’s the determining that happens on or after January 1 or if it’s the engaging in high-risk behaviors.”
“Oh. Oh, I see.”
“So if it’s the determining you’d move ‘on or after’ to the start. Or else you’d put ‘on or after’ right after ‘engaged.’”
“Right,” Andrew said, a little shortly. It was, after all, his handicraft Joel was picking at. “Well, I don’t know which it is. We’ll have to ask Melanie.”
“Okay. And then there’s this bigger thing. You’re making it apply to services furnished on or after the effective date, but the Secretary doesn’t even come up with his list of behaviors until 90 days after that. So, you know, a doctor wouldn’t know if he was going to get paid until after he furnished the service.”
This was an obvious blunder on Andrew’s part, so he got even more defensive. “I think a doctor could pretty well guess what’s going to be on the list.”
“Sure. But you probably shouldn’t make it effective until the list comes out.”
He shrugged. “That’s Melanie’s call. Anything else?”
“Not that I see right away, no.” To appease him Joel said, “Other than those couple of things, it’s done just right.”
Just right. Once he and Andrew had fixed those little things, the incendiary being hurled straight at them would be perfectly crafted. Here: let us help you with that fuse. Except the bomb wasn’t really being thrown at Joel. After all, it didn’t seem likely that he would engage in high-risk behaviors on or after any date they filled into the blank in the bill. Any solidarity he might have felt with the targets was abstract, a dull sense of insult rather than threat.