Man About Town

by Mark Merlis

  All of this used to be a joke. Something Joel might page through as he sat in the living room waiting for Sam to pick what sweater to wear. Discovering in the packed columns a whole metropolis of yearning of which he was luckily not a citizen. No, never entirely a joke. Even in the days when he was certain that he and Sam would be parted by death, not some accursed Kevin, he couldn’t help imagining how he might fare if he were hurled back into that world.

  He would fold up the paper so Sam wouldn’t know what section he’d been reading—as if there were anything else to read in the gay paper, with its riveting accounts of activists’ meetings with city councilpersons and the latest Toys-for-Tots drive by fat guys wearing leather hoods. He just didn’t want Sam to think he was shopping. He would set the paper on top of the recyclable stack, or sometimes bury it beneath a day or two of the Times. But he would know it was there, the chronicle of a whole world that was humming along in perfect oblivion of Sam’s and Joel’s oh-so-fortunate pairing.

  A scary world; he must always have wanted to know how he might fare out there. Like any armchair traveler, wondering if he could survive in the Arctic. Grateful to be in his warm apartment but knowing he had never truly been tested, never had a chance to find out if he had the right stuff.

  “So you want a Date or a Relationship?” Charles said.

  “I don’t know. How about a Date?”

  “Hmm.” Charles ran his finger down the column. “Hmm. Maybe we should go straight to Masseurs.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Not unless you can pass for thirty-five. It’s amazing, every blessed one of these queens says that’s the absolute cut-off. I personally have had some entirely satisfactory dates with more mature gentlemen.”

  “How about Relationships?”

  “They do appear to be somewhat more accessible. Do you enjoy going to sporting events and working out?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want someone discreet?”

  “You mean closeted?”

  “How about ‘tired of bar scene?’ There’s lots of those.”

  “I bet.” Joel was certainly tired of bar scene. Who wasn’t, except the indefatigable Ron? But there was something off-putting about a guy who said it in an ad. Tired of human condition.

  “Here’s someone witty. Witty is good.”

  “Absolutely nobody who says he’s witty”

  “Well, you are one extremely picky faggot. I wash my hands of you.” He folded the paper and gestured to the bartender for another negroni.

  Joel took the paper back and flipped idly to Situations. “Here we go.” He read aloud. “Enterprising young man seeks mentor.”

  “Right,” Charles said. “Lazy, grasping little brat seeks sucker to pay for his college tuition in return for four years of continually postponed access to his charms.”

  “Probably,” Joel said.

  Alex, turning to him for help with the algebra problem. Except a little gay Alex this time, so that there would be at least a chance that their growing closeness would culminate in the day the kid turned, looked at Joel, realized he was in love. Why did Joel resist acknowledging this, why should he have insisted to himself that it wasn’t about sex? When what he was picturing, undeniably, was some shapely youth in a towel, padding from the bathroom to the second bedroom, one night turning to Joel’s bedroom instead.

  All right, of course he was picturing that. Why should a lonesome man with an extra room not have peopled it, in his mind, with some hot little roommate? He wasn’t denying that, he just felt that he wanted two different things. To be with the boy, brother father friend, and also to lay him. Two different things that were hard to sort out now, after so many years of living out the possible, performing the acts that are possible for two bodies in a world of matter. So much easier to suppose that there had only ever been the one thing, that helping Alex with the algebra problem was just a pathetic substitute for giving him a blow job. But he was sure of it: he had wanted, still wanted, two different things—neither anterior to the other, not one chaste and one sullied. Just one possible and one not.

  Richard had said, when they set up the date, “I’ll be wearing a navy polo shirt.” So Joel already had the premonition, as he walked into the Trattoria Basilico, that Richard would be, if not queeny, a little too precise. The kind of guy who knew what color he’d be wearing two days ahead. The kind who said “navy” instead of just “blue.”

  Anyway, there he was at the bar, his back to the door. The bar faced the wood-fired pizza oven. Which was better than if it faced a mirror: Joel could approach him without his knowing, or fail to approach him and get the hell out of there. Joel didn’t know how he would bear the flicker of disappointment that was sure to cross Richard’s face when he slid onto the adjacent stool. Joel hadn’t misrepresented himself; nor, from what he could see, had Richard. But each of them must have had some frail hope that the other was being too modest.

  Richard greeted Joel, when he sat down at last, with a big smile, a warm handshake, a rush of friendly words: Joel looked just the way he’d described himself, Richard knew the navy polo thing was corny but he was so nondescript he had to pick something Joel could identify him by. If he’d known it was so hot, sitting practically inside the pizza oven, he would have worn a tank top. From what Joel could make out, this would have been unwise. Still, Joel was taken with him, started babbling right back. The bartender had to get Joel’s attention, an almost unprecedented reversal.

  In the moment it took Joel to order—several moments, Joel was torn between a scotch and some citrus drink like the one Richard had before him—in the moment before Joel turned to look at him again everything cooled down. Just a little. Richard was nice-looking: that was the exact phrase, he looked nice.

  “Should we get a table?” Joel said.

  “Sure. Let me take care of these.”

  “Thanks.”

  While Richard paid, Joel looked at the guy who made pizzas. A young Latino with a baseball cap, strewing the toppings on a disk of dough and sliding it into the oven with his paddle almost in one continuous movement, already glancing at the next order slip. Moving very fast, yet with a calm and gravity that made Joel think of somewhere far away, El Salvador maybe, wherever the boy or his people had come from. Joel felt colorless. They were all colorless, Joel, Richard, everybody eating. They might all have been a haze to this dark, graceful boy, a blur of white faces that streamed by while he worked, so quietly. He took off his cap for a second and wiped the sweat from his forehead with a slender brown arm.

  Richard must have been watching Joel for a second, watching Joel watch the pizza guy. “All set,” he said. Joel followed him to the headwaiter’s station. Joel couldn’t help noticing that Richard’s khaki-swathed butt was … rather broad.

  Richard ordered a pizza. Joel for some reason didn’t want to be an order slip for the kid to glance at, so he got some kind of pasta with about thirty ingredients. Then, while they waited, they exchanged data. Richard was a librarian in the DC public system. This seemed—Joel didn’t say it—very sad. The one time he’d been to the main library he had counted more bums than books. To be a librarian there must have been like being a lifeguard in the Gobi desert. Joel explained his own job, they established that Richard was from Ohio and had gone to Bucknell and then University of Maryland library school and … here he was.

  Joel found himself, uncomfortably, able to see Richard’s entire life, every step on the way to here-he-was. The closeted years at Bucknell, coming out in DC, partying in the seventies, shivering through the eighties and then finding himself, inexplicably, still alive, still here. Across from another middle-aged guy who was also here; however differently they had lived, they were both here.

  So this was a date! Not a Date, Richard was from the Relationships column, but this was how a date worked. Joel had never been on a date. People used to ask how he and Sam had met, and Joel would say, rather proudly, “At the baths.” Proudly because, while it sounded so unroma
ntic, meeting at the baths, it was really the most romantic possible start. Something out of a fairy tale, that two people could bump into each other in the half-light and then make a life together.

  If he and Richard were going to make it through the next half-hour, Joel would need to say something. Well, a librarian, he could ask who Richard’s favorite writers were. Richard promptly mentioned Anne Rice. Joel said, “Oh, uh-huh,” perhaps failing to conceal his dismay. What a fool he was, now Richard was sure to ask who his favorite writers were, and what was he going to say? All he read any more was the Congressional Record and the occasional underwear catalogue.

  He was spared: their food came. By the time the waiter had done the peppermill thing and the cheese-grater thing Richard had forgotten the subject. He delicately ambushed his pizza with a knife and fork.

  Some while later, Richard coughed. Joel wondered how long he had been staring at the pizza boy. “Urn … this is so good,” Joel said, gesturing with his fork at his gummy pasta. “How’s yours.”

  “All right.” Richard formed his mouth into a small, mildly off-putting pout. Joel tried to imagine kissing him, and then …

  Would he do? As, in the old days, at the bars, when last call came, you stopped grading people, stopped handing out A minuses and C pluses, and shifted to a pass/fail system. Is this one better than sleeping alone?

  Joel’s standards had gone up since those days. In all the years with Sam the only people he’d concretely imagined going to bed with were in porn. So the curve on his pass/fail system had skewed sharply. If Richard had popped up on a video, Joel would definitely have hit the fast-forward button. But this wasn’t a video. If Joel was hoping ever again to date someone other than his fist, he’d better relax his standards.

  The waiter cleared their plates. No, no dessert. Nor coffee; if Richard had a sip after noon, he’d be up half the night. So he wasn’t, anyway, planning to be up half the night. Joel wanted another drink, but Richard might find it odd to order a cocktail right after dinner. Joel didn’t want him to think there was some kind of problem.

  It was only eight o’clock. Still light out. They hadn’t timed this at all well.

  Richard was looking steadily at Joel. To avoid his eyes, Joel craned around the room, as if trying to find out where the waiter was with the check.

  Richard was looking at Joel and trying to decide. Grading Joel according to his own pass/fail system. Joel wanted to pass. It was more important, really, than what he thought about Richard. His difficulty in imagining what they could possibly do together, Joel and this … nice man, didn’t matter. He just didn’t want to flunk on the first date of his life.

  Richard insisted on paying, the waiter brought their change fast, because the place was filling up and he wanted their table. So they were hurled out onto the sidewalk, in the bright light. They faced each other: two middle-aged men gazing reciprocally at the possible.

  No. Joel could see the No gathering in Richard’s throat and, to forestall it, he said, “Well, it was nice meeting you,” and stuck out his hand.

  Richard was aghast. He had thought they were going home.

  Was it too late for an amendment? Just kidding, my place or yours. It was too late. Already Richard was shaking Joel’s hand and saying, with a cold smile, “Nice meeting you, too.” Then he rushed down the street.

  Luckily, Joel was only a block from the video store. Maybe one of those tapes with the cute Latino boys.

  The phone rang. Joel ignored it and went on playing solitaire on the office computer. If he didn’t answer after four rings, the system sent the caller to voice mail. Unless he was pretty sure who it was, he always let this happen. He felt guilty, but it was better than picking up and having to deal with whatever surprise was on the other end: a staffer with a self-declared crisis; his boss, Herb; a former lover. You couldn’t pick up and hear people leaving their voice mail. You had to wait until they were finished and the message light on the phone started flashing. Joel would feel, in the minute or two this took, like a deaf man who can’t read lips, as he helplessly watches someone try to tell him something.

  The light came on. The message was from Stanley Hirsch, who covered health stuff for the Post. “Mister … uh … Lingeman,” he said, reading from a Rolodex card. “I had a couple of questions about Medicare. I’ll be around here for a half hour or so.”

  Not asking, commanding. Who would fail to return a call from the Post? Still, it was always flattering to get a call from Stanley Hirsch, to know that one was in his Rolodex of experts. Joel called back right away, and of course got Hirsch’s voice mail. They played tag most of the day. Finally the phone rang just as Joel was turning off his computer and heading out for happy hour. He hesitated: it might be Stanley Hirsch or it might be some staffer with an emergency that would keep Joel there half the evening.

  “Joel Lingeman.”

  “Yeah, Stanley Hirsch. Listen, you got a minute to talk about this AIDS thing?”

  “What AIDS thing?”

  “This bill Senator Harris dropped today.” That was the usual word, dropped. Perhaps new bills really were still dropped into some actual container, but the word always made Joel think of a dog, dropping a couple of bills, kicking some leaves over them, moving insouciantly on.

  “Oh, so he finally introduced it? I hadn’t heard.” It had been a couple of weeks since Joel had supplied the numbers for the senator’s floor statement. Melanie had been frantic, Harris had to introduce it the very next day, and then it had just vanished. This was the way things worked: matters of great urgency suddenly disappeared, then became urgent again weeks later, as if governed by phases of the moon.

  “You knew about it, then,” Hirsch said.

  Oops. This was a serious breach: people at OLA weren’t supposed to say what they’d been working on. “No, I… maybe I heard somebody talk about it. What does it do, exactly?”

  “It looks like it cuts off Medicaid for people who—”

  “Medicaid? Are you sure?”

  “Oh, no, right. Medicare, I meant Medicare.”

  How could somebody who’d covered health stuff since about the Truman administration be unable to distinguish between Medicare and Medicaid? Joel sometimes wondered if there was a Stanley Hirsch on every beat—he could spot the mistakes in the health stories, but could it be that every story in the papers was equally misinformed?

  Hirsch went on: “It cuts off Medicare for people who’ve done something … I guess risky.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So what do you think about that?”

  “I …” Joel sighed nonpartisanly. “I think it sounds like it might be kind of hard to enforce.”

  “Right. But if they could, would this save a lot of money?”

  Joel had given Melanie some numbers, but he couldn’t remember them. “I don’t know. Did they put out any numbers?”

  “Yeah, their press release says Medicare spends about a billion dollars a year for AIDS.”

  “That sounds right.”

  “So that’s what they’d save?”

  “No. They … oh, we’re on background, right?” He was supposed to say this at the start of the call, he always forgot. If you didn’t say it you could find your name in the paper, along with a misquotation. Herb didn’t like seeing Joel’s name in the paper. Herb’s boss liked it even less.

  “Right, sure, background,” Hirsch said dismissively. He had had no intention of making Joel famous.

  “Okay. First of all, they’re just guessing what Medicare spends, because doctors’ bills don’t come in with ‘AIDS’ written all over them. And second, there are these offsets.”

  “Offsets.”

  “Offsets. If you save money in one program, you may wind up spending it somewhere else.” Joel launched—partly as an experiment, to see how many things Hirsch could get wrong the next morning, partly just showing off—into a discourse peppered with arcana like SSI and spenddown and the FMAP.

  Hirsch pretended to take it all
in, even made Joel repeat some of it. At the end he said, “So you think maybe they wouldn’t save a billion?”

  Joel sighed. “That’s right. I think, with the offsets and the enforcement problems and all, maybe …” Joel’s message light flashed on, someone else had called. “Maybe a hundred million.”

  “That’s all?”

  “I’m still on background. And, you know, I don’t do these estimates, the budget office does. But I’d bet they score this at about a hundred million.”

  “Maybe I should call them.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “You got a name I can call?”

  He gave Hirsch a couple of names at the Congressional Budget Office. They wouldn’t talk to Hirsch even on background.

  When he was through with Hirsch, he got his new message. “Hey, Joel, it’s Andrew. From leg counsel?” As if Joel wouldn’t remember. “Listen, I wasn’t up to anything, and’ I thought I’d see if you’d like to have a drink. But it’s … about six-twenty, I guess you’re gone. I’ll catch you again. Enjoy your evening.”

  Now it was past six-thirty, Andrew had to be gone. Joel almost didn’t call, thinking that the sound of Andrew’s extension ringing, ringing, would make him even more lonesome than if he didn’t try.

  Andrew was already at a table, at the outdoor bistro on Massachusetts Avenue where they might have dinner if they felt like it. He was deeply tanned, when a few weeks ago he’d been as pale as Joel was. His brown hair was bleached almost blond; even his eyebrows had little flecks of red-gold in them. The sleeves of his crisp white shirt were rolled up; his forearms, sinewy and dark, were also lightly strewn with gold. When Joel got to his table he stood up. As at their last meeting, he smiled hugely and grasped Joel’s shoulder as they shook hands.