by Mark Merlis
Joel said, “You’re new at leg counsel?”
“Uh-huh.”
Leg counsel on the Senate side were usually fresh out of school; it was just a line in their resumes before they went off to the big law firm. So Joel wondered why a guy—well, almost Joel’s age—would take the job.
He supplied the answer without Joel’s asking. “I was with McCutcheon and Halsey.” One of the biggest firms, named for a couple of New Deal brains trusters who had gone on pulling strings straight into the nineties—theirs and the century’s. “But I never made partner because … you can guess why.”
“Oh.”
“And I— I don’t know, my … uh … friend died a couple years ago.” Joel wondered if he should say he was sorry, but Andrew went right on. “And I just, I don’t know, I just got tired. I don’t want to work so hard.”
“You came to the right place, I guess. You’ll pull a few all-nighters in the fall, when they’re scrambling to get stuff passed.”
“Right.”
“But, you know, the House guys draft most of the stuff. You can just copy their work.”
That was a joke, but Andrew bristled. “I’m sure I can do my own, once I get the hang of it.”
“Oh, sure, I was just kidding.”
Joel thought about Andrew’s being tired; did that mean he was sick? Like, presumably, his late … uh … friend. Making it, perhaps, a little more remarkable that he could, like Joel, just do his job on a bill like the one that lay festering on the table between them.
“Anyway,” Joel said. “Except for the fall, all you mostly do is wait around for meetings that never get started.”
“Like this one. I guess it makes her feel important.”
“Oh, staffers have lots of ways of feeling important.”
Of course Melanie arrived at that moment. If she had heard Joel, she didn’t show it. Nor did she apologize for being late. She was like some of the guys Joel dated in his pre-Sam years, twinks whose paper-thin gold watches were just jewelry, never consulted. Waltzing into a bar an hour after they were supposed to meet him and never explaining.
“Joel, you’ve seen this?” Melanie said.
“Uh-huh.”
She looked at him blandly. Probably she knew he was gay. He didn’t wear a pink triangle, or even an ear-stud, but she must have known. She was waiting for him to denounce her.
“Yeah,” Joel said. “I had a couple little technical things.”
They went over them; Melanie handled them. She didn’t need to talk to her boss; minutiae like the effective date of a law were beneath him.
“Anything else?” she said.
It was almost seven: any other time Joel would have been itching to get his liver out of there and down to the Hill Club. But he had just realized why her nasty little bill wouldn’t work. Sometimes he kept quiet about those things, happy to let the staffer and her boss look like morons. This time, maybe, he wanted to impress Andrew with his bravery and acumen.
“How’s anybody supposed to know who’s done something unsafe and who hasn’t?” Melanie’s eyes narrowed, but Joel went on. “When somebody shows up for a service, how’s the doctor or whoever supposed to find out if they did something unsafe months, years before that?”
Joel thought he was doing her a favor, actually imagined she would be grateful that he had pointed out this problem before somebody else did. Melanie was not grateful. Maybe because she worked for a senator who threw phones. If she told him he had a bad idea, who knew what he might throw at her?
Melanie said, coolly, “That’s interesting. I might have to think some more about that.” Meaning that the meeting was now adjourned.
Andrew didn’t get it. “He’s right,” he said. “You’d have to, I don’t know, you’d have to have some process for determining that …” He trailed off. “I just don’t see how it would work.”
Melanie gazed for a while, as if for inspiration, at the portrait of Harris. “Well, you know, if you have AIDS, you must have done something.”
Joel began, “Unless you had a transfusion or you’re a little baby or—”
“Do babies get Medicare?”
“No.”
“And transfusions, people aren’t still getting it from transfusions. If you didn’t do anything wrong, you can get a letter or something. Otherwise I think you can kind of assume …” She turned away from Harris’s picture and said to Andrew, “We’ll figure it out. For now, let’s just leave it the way it is.” Forever, she meant. This proposal wasn’t going anywhere, the bill was merely the physical embodiment of some random firing of neurons in her boss’s perfectly coiffed skull. She didn’t need to work one more minute of overtime perfecting it. “We want to introduce by Thursday.” She stood up. “Joel, I’m going to need some help with the floor statement.”
“Okay.”
“We want to emphasize, you know, this isn’t about punishing anybody. It’s, like we say, it’s about rewarding personal responsibility.”
“Right.”
“So you’ll have something tomorrow morning?”
“Um … sure. Late morning.”
“With numbers. Some kind of numbers.” She meant that literally, just any numbers at all. Harris was one of those members who liked to have an easel on the Senate floor and point to numbers on a big chart. Maybe in the hope that channel surfers would pause a moment at C-SPAN if they saw a chart and not just some guy in a thousand-dollar suit. It didn’t matter much what the numbers showed.
“Numbers,” Joel promised.
In the hall, he said to Andrew, just to say something: “You got all those changes?”
Andrew nodded, and Joel tried to think of something else, to hold him there a minute. Maybe some pretext for meeting with him. Just to sit across a table from him again. Joel couldn’t think of anything—didn’t try, really. Instead he was already rebuking himself for imagining it when he heard Andrew say, “You got time for a drink?”
Joel couldn’t believe his ears. Not just because, for a few more minutes with Andrew, he had time to walk across hot coals. But also because he couldn’t remember anyone ever having said that at the end of a meeting. In movies, as meetings broke up, people said, “Got time for a drink?” In real life people had to go pick up their kids, or they had to get to the gym, or it was just the nineties and they didn’t drink.
So it was with a sense of unreality that he strolled with Andrew the couple of blocks to Union Station, neither of them saying a word, and sat down with him at the semicircular bar in the Great Hall. Past seven: the commuters were mostly gone. At the bar just a scattering of travelers, their garment bags leaning drunkenly on the floor beside them, and at one end a few regulars who were leaning a little themselves.
Andrew ordered a beer, so Joel did too, much as he hated beer. Andrew began, “Back there …”
“Yeah?”
“I guess I’m new to this. I mean, we told her the bill wasn’t going to work, and she didn’t care, she just wants to go ahead.”
“That’s right.”
“But, you know … if it became a law, it would just be unenforceable.”
“It’s not going to become a law. They don’t even want it to.” Joel could never resist a chance to be wise and superior, even though he had learned in about first grade that it wasn’t the best way of making new friends. “He’s going to introduce it, and then maybe later on he’ll move to attach it to some bill that’s certain to go through. Just to get a vote on it, you know. It’ll pass the Senate, and then when they go into conference with the House the thing will just be quietly dropped.”
“So it’s just some kind of gesture.”
“It’s a way to make everybody go on record as being for or against decency. They do this three or four times a year. The vote’s always about 96 to 4.”
“Four, that’s all the friends we’ve got?” Andrew said. The “we,” so quickly, was unusual on the Hill. You could work with somebody for years, with a tacit understanding that bot
h of you were gay, without any direct reference to it. This hasty disclosure led Joel to suppose, only for a second, that they might not just be having a beer. He knew this was farfetched and tried to suppress it. This was never easy: once the hound inside believed it had caught the scent of possibility, he couldn’t persuade it otherwise. It just went on sniffing until Joel made a fool of himself.
“Uh …” Joel said. What had Andrew asked? “Four is about the number of members whose seats are so safe they don’t have to worry about a thirty-second ad that says they support sodomy.”
“Well, here’s to them,” Andrew said. They clicked their bottles, then Andrew looked around. “You know, the last time I was here I was with Kenyon.”
“Kenyon. Your friend.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Kenyon, um … he had …”
“No,” a little too emphatically. “I’m sorry. I mean, everybody just assumes that. He had a heart attack.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“Just wham, at the office.”
They were getting on—Andrew, Joel, everybody. Those who escaped the plague were starting to go wham at the office. Some of the guys who were cut down early would, if they had lived, be going wham at the office by now.
“What did he do?”
“Do? He just, I mean, fell over.”
“No, for a living.”
“Oh. He was at Labor.” Andrew added, “A Deputy Assistant Secretary.” Proudly, as if these were less common than pigeons.
“Public Affairs?”
“How did you know?”
“Just guessed.” If a gay man reached that exalted height he was always the press officer. Since they didn’t have deputy assistant secretaries for window treatments.
“Anyway, he just went. Nobody even called me. I mean, he wasn’t out, you know, at the office, nobody knew to call me, nobody knew there was a me. I just got home and he wasn’t there, and then for hours he wasn’t there, and I started calling hospitals.”
Joel remembered the night he was waiting for Sam—the last night he would ever wait for Sam—and thinking Sam might be dead. Would that have been worse? At least if Sam had been dead, it would have been no reflection on Joel.
“He was already talking retirement. I mean, we were both negative, we thought we had years.”
It was a little gratuitous, wasn’t it, this mention of his antibody status? As if he wanted Joel to have this information. The hound stirred.
Andrew sighed. “So anyway, I’m by myself.”
“Me, too.”
“Yeah?” This said with no apparent interest. The hound dozed. “Did you ever have a lover?”
“Until a few weeks ago.”
“What?”
“He left me. I mean, he just up and left a few weeks ago.”
“No kidding. How long were you two together?”
“Fifteen years.” That weightless number.
“Had you been … what, you hadn’t been getting along?”
“I thought we were. He was seeing somebody.”
“Oh.”
Joel realized, too late, that this made him sound like a loser. He shrugged. “So I guess we’re in the same boat.”
Andrew looked over but didn’t answer. From which Joel deduced that, in his view, being widowed and being dumped were not at all the same boat. Maybe they weren’t, though half the bed was empty either way.
Joel changed the subject. “Where do you live?”
“A little house we fixed up on H Street southeast. You know, down near the Marine barracks?”
“Uh-huh. Isn’t it a little scary down there?”
“It’s not too bad. We did have a drive-by shooting once.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. But I mean, we’re almost twenty years into the mortgage, my monthly payment wouldn’t rent me a studio now. It’s a nice place. Kind of damp.”
“Built on a swamp.”
“Isn’t every place? Sometimes on real rainy days these slugs will come inside, they crawl right up the kitchen wall.”
“Ugh.”
“Yeah, Kenyon used to always run to the front of the house, like slugs could catch him. So I had to take care of them—you know, I’m the country boy. Kenyon would stay out in the living room and make jokes about whether we should bake them in puff pastry or just serve them naked with a dab of garlic butter.”
Joel forced a little laugh. Andrew was opening up a little, Joel wanted him to keep talking. Even if his only subject was Kenyon. “So Kenyon was the cook?”
“Oh, God, yeah. I can barely make toast.”
Joel could hardly breathe. This had to be the sexiest thing he had ever heard a man say. The soft voice, the broad shoulders under his pinstripe suit, the old-fashioned aw-shucks masculinity: Joel might have been sitting next to Gary Cooper. “So what do you eat?” Joel said.
“TV dinners.”
Poor baby. Joel almost said, “I should cook for you some time.” Which would have been only a little less brazen than suggesting that they head to the men’s room for a quickie. But he could say: “I was going to maybe get a bite here before I head home.”
“Oh,” Andrew said. “I wish I could join you.”
“Why don’t you?”
“I’ve got to … I can have maybe one more and then I need to head home.” Joel was afraid he’d go on to say “to feed the cats,” replacing Gary Cooper with Franklin Pangborn. Instead he added: “Kenyon’s parents are going to be calling.”
“Oh, yeah? You’re still in touch with them?”
“Uh-huh,” Andrew said, tight-lipped; then he was lost in thought a second.
Joel had met Sam’s parents just once, for dinner when they were passing through town. He wasn’t sure they understood who he was. Sam had met Joel’s mother a few times before she died. That was it, they never became part of each other’s families. Joel wondered what that was like. Actually, the thought made him a little queasy, the way he got queasy when some queen brought his mother into a gay bar.
Andrew snapped out of whatever reverie he had been in, signaled the bartender for two more beers. “So where do you live?” he said.
“Up near Dupont. We have this two-bedroom. I have.”
“Are you going to stay there?”
“I guess. But, you know, he’s not going to be paying. He thinks I ought to get a roommate.” Joel had a momentary flash of Andrew in the apartment.
“I’ve thought about that,” Andrew said. “Just to have somebody around.” Now Joel was on H Street. He would cook; Andrew would kill slugs. “But, I mean, when I think about it, I wouldn’t want to keep running into some stranger. Someone just living there.”
“Me either,” Joel said. “You’ll—I guess you’ll meet somebody.”
“I haven’t even been looking.”
“No? You never … you haven’t …”
Andrew shrugged. “No, I just haven’t felt like it. Not since Kenyon.”
Two years seemed a little long to Joel. He had known guys who were, in their lover’s last months, dating the successor. One even brought the heir apparent to the apartment, while his blind lover called out, “Who’s that with you?” Even leaving these miscreants aside, he really couldn’t think of anyone who had stayed in widow’s weeds as long as two years.
Joel said, “He’d probably want you to …” Joel was too disgusted with himself to finish the sentence. Yes, indeed, your dead lover is looking down on us and wishing you’d take me right back to the bed you shared on H Street.
Andrew shook his head patiently. Not angry at the suggestion, almost apologetic, as if he knew he was being a little obstinate. “He probably would. I’m just not ready yet.”
The “yet” was like a rain check. Sooner or later he’d be ready.
“Listen,” Andrew said. “We better get the tab.”
“Oh. Oh, I’ll take care of these. You run along if you have to.”
“No, I … well, thanks. I’m sorry I couldn’t stay for dinner
.”
“Maybe some other time.”
“Great.” They shook hands; with his left hand Andrew grasped Joel’s shoulder, and he smiled broadly for the first time all evening—a big, affectionate smile. “I’m glad we did this,” Andrew said. “I mean, sometimes I get up from my desk at the end of the day and I don’t know where to go.”
Me too, Joel wanted to say. Except he had already been warned against comparing their predicaments.
As Andrew walked away, he turned and smiled once again.
When Andrew was out of sight, Joel traded in his untouched second beer for a scotch.
How many times, before Sam, he had felt this very glow, this sensation of being at the beginning of something. How many times he had been mistaken. The guys who smiled and kissed him goodbye in the morning, after scribbling what turned out to be the phone number of Kim’s Korean Bar-B-Q or Murray’s Car Wash. The guys who made dates and didn’t show up or, worse, the ones who did show up. So many times: the hope should have been burned out of him. Maybe it was built in, maybe the brain released some enzyme, Possibilitase, that induced this state of fatuous optimism for the hours until it wore off. Maybe the scotch kind of helped it along.
A rain check, for God’s sake. As if, whenever Andrew was ready, he would be ready for Joel. Probably Andrew was just this affable with everybody, probably he clutched everybody’s shoulder when he shook hands. Falling for him was as silly as falling for a movie star or a picture in a magazine.
Eight o’clock now; the bar was empty, all the commuters were gone, the huge main concourse was traversed by a few serious-looking people waiting for trains that would get them home very late, a few tourists who wandered among the shops, having found nowhere better to go in Washington on a June evening. Senator Biden passed by at a half trot—he went home to Wilmington every night and was just about to miss the Metroliner—but only Joel recognized him. A forgotten nebbish who seriously thought for a little while he might be president. What was it like, to have had that dream obliterated, so long ago, and then go on living? Did he sometimes fall into it again, a little spurt of Possibilitase tricking him into imagining that maybe next year he would …