Man About Town

by Mark Merlis

  One or two of the advertisers cited credentials. Rick Harding reported that he was in the July issue of Baskets, while Tony Silva was the superstar of Latino Latrine. Each would be in town next week; there was a number to call for an appointment. Imagine: you called up, and at a specified hour there would appear at your door the guy from the magazine, the guy from the video. Magically endowed with a third dimension.

  Oh, they should always have had this service. What would life have been like if Joel could just have called up Stephen Boyd from Ben Hurl Or Riff from West Side Story. Or the guy in that swimsuit ad in man about town thirty years ago. What was the company? Something of New Mexico.

  These people existed. They had three dimensions. They and Joel walked the same planet. Once he had read in some gee-whiz science article that every time he inhaled he took in some number of oxygen molecules that had also passed through the lungs of Leonardo da Vinci. Golly. And maybe the water he drank was also the sweat on Stephen Boyd’s shoulders, the air he breathed was once a zephyr tickling the ineffable midriff of the New Mexico boy.

  Joel hadn’t seen that advertisement in thirty years, yet he remembered the boy more clearly than, say, his college roommate. He had been—what?—fourteen when he discovered the little ad tucked in the very back of the magazine, hidden in the crowd of cut-rate, back-of-the-book ads for memory improvement programs, hair-loss cures, elevator shoes. A young man wore white swimming trunks—not a bikini, but very abbreviated boxers—that stopped well below his navel. Low enough that you could see his hipbones. His dirty blond hair was a little longer than a crew cut. He looked straight at the camera and smiled.

  Joel had seen that picture and, after an instant, snapped the magazine shut, buried it about midway up the permanent stack of junk—books, LPs, sweaters from his aunt still in their gift boxes—in the corner by his dresser. He didn’t hide it: the spine, with the familiar man about town, was perfectly visible. It was okay for him to read man about town: it wasn’t as racy as Esquire, even. His parents couldn’t possibly tell, from a single exposed edge, that this one issue concealed—

  An opening. Three column inches in the back of the book, a fuzzy black-and-white rotogravure the size of Joel’s thumb: it blew a hole in the wall. In the cluttered bedroom of a fourteen-year-old who was lucky the word nerd hadn’t yet been coined, who knew nothing about the world and less about himself, there was suddenly this aperture, through which he could see everything. He wasn’t sure just what he was seeing, but he knew he had stumbled on a great secret. He felt enormously powerful and blessed, just to be in possession of the picture and know he could look at it again.

  For a week or two, every time he was sure he was alone, he would grab the magazine, flip to that back page, glance for just a second or two before stuffing it away, as if someone might break in on him at any moment. He knew it was a crime, looking at that picture, even having it in the room. Not just the obvious crime. Perhaps he already had some vague intuition that a good boy wasn’t supposed to be quite so profoundly interested in a picture of a handsome guy in swimming trunks. But there was something else about the picture, something seismically subversive.

  It didn’t seem to Joel that he had been captivated by the body itself. He couldn’t even remember it really, just the smile and the swimming trunks, nothing in between. What was in between was probably fine—the guy was in a swimsuit ad, after all—but he had no recollection of wanting to touch it, nor of even the slightest curiosity about what was under the swimming trunks.

  Something else about the picture: he couldn’t remember. Just that, after one look at it, he had never been a good boy again.

  For $150 in/$200 out, he could be a bad boy this very evening. Did he want to? Not any of the guys with pictures. Maybe Marco, hot Latin, hardbody? Except that particular adjective suggested that making love to him would be like humping a lamp-pole. Fred, perhaps—there was a wholesome, unthreatening name. Into most scenes. Older guys okay. Here was a wrinkle Joel hadn’t thought about. Did this mean older guys weren’t okay with Fred’s competitors? In which case who the hell were their clients? And was forty-five older? To be rejected by a hustler while Sam was banging a twenty-three-year-old Gulf War veteran … Fred, then, best to settle on nondiscriminatory Fred. Besides, Fred was into most scenes. Maybe including Joel’s.

  Why shouldn’t he call Fred? He had friends who unabashedly used these guys. Charles would talk about it as casually as he would about the new sweater he got at Nieman Marcus. More casually: finding cashmere in just the right shade at Needless Markup was a bigger event than an encounter, at roughly the same price, with a hustler. It wasn’t like the old days, midnight cowboys smashing in the teeth of pathetic old cocksuckers in fleabag hotels. Escorts were just part of the booming global service economy. Patronizing them was no more shameful or dangerous than—going to a tanning salon, say. Very like going to a tanning salon: it might not be the real sun, but your skin didn’t know any better. And Joel’s body would not recoil from whatever friction he and Fred contracted for, his body would not wonder whether it was true love. Not so long as Fred did his job and got hard.

  Really, how did Joel ever surmise that his passion was requited? The other guy got hard. Fred would get hard, and they would …

  Joel knew what they would do. He didn’t have a couple of months of pent-up longings, a couple of months since the last time with Sam. He had a lifetime of desires he had never satisfied. Because there were things he wasn’t ready to do before he met Sam, he hadn’t been far enough out to do them. And of course he couldn’t do them with Sam: there were things you couldn’t possibly do with someone who was going to be there the next day, and the next.

  Scenes. A whole repertory of sacrileges and indignities that he could inflict or endure. He had his hand on the phone, he was about to pick up the receiver and dial.

  “What are you into?” Fred would say. Expecting an acronym. Probably there was one. Joel would start to explain: first you do this, then I … Fred would say, “Oh, QZ. That’s cool, we can do that. But, hey, QZ will run you another fifty.”

  Or if, improbably, Joel was the only man on earth who had ever conceived of his particular scene—so that he would have to detail for an astonished but complaisant Fred the script he had been revising and polishing so many years—how could he put out of his mind that Fred was enacting it pursuant to his instructions? First you Q, then we Z, and then I … How could he possibly forget that it was only a scene?

  He could forget. His hand was still resting on the phone. He could call Fred right this instant, it was what he wanted, why shouldn’t he have it? Because he could have it. And, having had it, would—he could already see the end of it, was filled with premonitory despair as he pictured Fred gathering up his jock strap and his twenties and heading out the door—would only discover that it wasn’t what he wanted.

  No? He had been practically squirming just now, imagining his scene, the hand that wasn’t on the phone had left the crotch of his khakis grimy with newspaper ink. Why should he keep insisting to himself that he required anything more ethereal than a little QZ? Fred was real, and procurable; Joel could dial the phone right now and have his wish, in three dimensions, in real time.

  Or he could call Andrew—and get a busy signal because Andrew was talking to his demented auxiliary parents. He could call Sam, who would be short with him. Or Alex Rivers. “Hey, guess who this is?” Click.

  He wished—like a child for a moment he wished he had a magic phone, so he could call New Mexico.

  five

  In the Yellow Pages there were two listings under Magazines—Back Number. One was an 800 number, someplace you could call and order a search. Right: please find me an issue of man about town from 1964. I can’t remember just which month, but way in the back it has this picture … The other listing was right in town. The Past Recaptured—Vintage Records, Magazines, Collectibles. 2317 Monroe Street, NW. While the name was promising, Joel suspected that he would find only old
issues of Life or National Geographic, Chubby Checker albums, and maybe some Beatles posters. But it was only a couple of blocks from where the Coen brothers retrospective was playing, and there was nothing going on at the office. He thought he might just take the afternoon off and check the place out.

  It wasn’t there. He got to the 2300 block of Monroe and could see right away that there were no businesses at all, just a church and its appended school on one side and a block of uniform gray stone townhouses on the other. The address was a misprint, or he had written it down wrong, or, most likely, The Past Recaptured had sunk again into oblivion. These junk shops came and went so quickly: one more old queen’s dream of retiring as an antiquaire gone, along with all the money from his 401(k). He almost turned away, thinking now he’d have time for a wine before the movie, but he could at least take one look at the townhouses. 2317 was no different from the others: five doorbells by the door, each labeled with an ordinary surname; beneath the front stairs, the entrance to a basement apartment. He stepped down, found a door with a frosted glass panel. Taped to the inner surface of the glass, so that it was utterly illegible from outside, was a card that had three words written on it. These might or might not have been, “The Past Recaptured.”

  Joel rang the bell.

  The door was flung open by a stupendously fat man who wore suspenders and a necktie that reached only part of the way down the vast expanse of his shirt. “It says, ‘Open by Appointment.’ Can’t you read?”

  “Sorry,” Joel said. “I’m sorry. Is this The Past Recaptured?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well … could I make an appointment?”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  The man said, “If you don’t know what you’re looking for, you’ll never find it.” Still, he stepped aside—or as far aside as he could manage in the little vestibule—opening the narrowest of channels through which Joel could see a tiny, fluorescent-lit shop with knotty-pine walls. “Look around,” the man said. “But don’t be too long, I got places I have to go.”

  The shop was as Joel had feared. Movie posters, Hopalong Cassidy lunchboxes, Mondale-Ferraro buttons. Newspapers in plastic sheaths with headlines about moon landings and assassinations. A few stacks of Time and Reader’s Digest A bookshelf full of the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew. Tom Corbett, Space Cadet: Stand By for Mars! This last aroused a faint erotic tingle; something that went on at the space academy must have stirred Joel as a boy. Maybe he would leave with this book if nothing else. He opened it and found that the man wanted thirty dollars for it, for Christ’s sake. For that he could buy a whole batch of current periodicals that would give him more than a faint tingle.

  The man called out, “You got any questions?”

  “Um, no. I mean, you don’t have any …” Joel was, for some reason, ashamed to ask for man about town. As if an interest in that were somehow less elevated than a desire for a Hopalong Cassidy lunchbox. “Any other old magazines?”

  “In the basement.” Joel had thought he was in the basement. He had a vision, out of Gustave Doré, of endless descending levels. “Through the curtain.”

  What the man called the basement, beyond the curtain of plastic beads, was only two steps further down, but unfinished, with asbestos-wrapped pipes and a furnace so old it probably burned peat. Magazines were piled floor to ceiling in long arrays, with aisles between defined only by the absence of magazines. A temporary situation: vagrant magazines were spilling into the aisles like sand obliterating a desert highway.

  Or a cemetery: looking over the stacks was like reading the names on gravestones. Collier’s. The Reporter. Look. Coronet. The Saturday Evening Post. Show, man about town.

  Two piles of man about town, each about four feet high. The nearer pile so placed that if he worked his way into the narrow fjord between man about town and Holiday and squatted, he could just make out the dates on the spines. They weren’t in order, of course. January 1951 sat on top of October 1938 on top of April 1973. That would have been about the year of the magazine’s demise, Joel thought: the world it had depicted utterly blown away, even the possibilities of nostalgia and self-parody exhausted.

  Nothing from 1964. He tried to slide the whole first stack out of the way so he could look at the one behind it, but the bottom issues were mildewed and disintegrating. He had to move the magazines a few at a time, making a new stack. When he crawled into the space he had cleared and squatted again to study the exposed spines of the second pile, something popped in his right knee. He tottered, fell over onto his side. He could feel the damp concrete through his pants; probably he would emerge from the basement looking as though he had been mud-wrestling—and without any prize. As he righted himself he saw, midway down the stack, like a neon sign: may 1964.

  To get at it he had to move all the copies above it, making yet another stack. Then he reached for it, hand shaking. On the cover, Sean Connery in a white dinner jacket, holding a martini. Familiar, he seemed to recall this image, but there must have been a million such pictures in those years. He flipped to the back. Not on the last page, not on the two preceding, or the two before those. Before them was all text: the ghetto of cheap ads at the back of the book was just five pages. He took a breath and turned through them again, more slowly, though he couldn’t possibly have missed—

  He had missed it. And he had the name wrong. “Simms of Santa Fe,” above a little, rather fuzzy picture of a boy in white trunks, his head no bigger than a fingernail. Joel’s memory of him had been life-sized, as if Joel had actually known him, seen him. But there had been only this, so tiny, like someone seen from very far away. Or like a miniature that he might have worn hidden in a pendant close to his heart.

  Joel was moving into the light to see better when the proprietor loomed up in the doorway. Joel snapped the magazine shut, afraid the man had seen, afraid the man knew he had been crawling amid the mildew and the dust to recapture a tiny photo of a boy in a swimming suit.

  The man surveyed all of Joel’s little stacks, pouted. “I hope you’re going to put things back where you found them.”

  “Yes, I was going to.”

  “Did you find what you wanted?”

  “Yes,” Joel said. “This is what I wanted.”

  At the Hill Club he bumped into Ron. There was no one else around; they decided to sit and have a bite together.

  “So how you been making out?” Ron said.

  “You mean …”

  “I didn’t mean at the racetrack.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Oh. Well, God knows I’ve had the occasional dry spell.”

  “I’m not even trying,” Joel said. “I don’t know, it’s all … undignified.”

  “Undignified? You want it dignified?” Ron stuck his nose in the air. “Mr. Joel Lingeman requests the pleasure of your company sitting on his face.”

  This rather loudly; Joel glanced around the room. “No, I mean … You must know what I mean. I—anywhere else I go, I’m a person. A solid, middle-class adult, with a decent job and money in my pocket. I go into a store and they’re happy to see me, I go to a meeting and people want to hear what I have to say. I walk into Zippers, and I feel like some homeless guy who hasn’t been taking his Thorazine and hasn’t had a bath since October.”

  Ron sighed.

  Joel added: “Or like the Ancient Mariner.”

  “How do you think I feel?” Ron said. “What are you, forty-seven, forty-eight?”

  “Forty-five.”

  “Jeez, at your age I hadn’t even come out.”

  “You hadn’t? I thought you came out in kindergarten.”

  “I was married for twenty-one years.”

  “Married?”

  “Straight out of school. I didn’t come out till I was—what? Forty-six.”

  “Really.” Joel did the math: they’d met, probably, seventeen or eighteen years ago. Ron had to be sixty-four at least. He looked pretty good for sixty-four
. “Did your wife know, all those years?”

  “Oh, I suppose. She must have, suspected. But she must have thought: we got this far, maybe it just wasn’t ever going to come up. Hell, I thought it wasn’t ever going to come up. Just the peeps, and then going home to Helen, and then the old folks’ home.” He shook his head. “God, was she mad when I told her. She threw stuff.”

  “She threw stuff?”

  “Like in a movie,” Ron said. “She started throwing crockery.”

  “Why would she have been so mad if she suspected?”

  “It was … like we had some kind of understanding, even though we never said a word about it. Or that was the understanding, that we wouldn’t say it.”

  “Did you … I mean, did you know when you married her?”

  “We got married in—what?—1956. The only gay man in the world was Liberace. I knew I was awfully fond of my roommate in law school. I knew I wasn’t Liberace. And … I loved Helen, I kind of still do. I thought I could just put the other thing aside.”

  “But …” Joel said.

  “But.”

  Their food came. Ron had a burger and a stupendous bucket of onion rings. Joel had the fried shrimp special. He hadn’t realized shrimp were an endangered species; there were apparently only four left on the planet.

  Joel said, “So you must have been just coming out when we met.”

  “I was, I think.”

  “You seemed a lot more experienced than me.”

  “Did I?”

  “Well, more at ease with it. I mean, the way you could just walk up to anybody.”

  “I was in a hurry. I’d lost all those years, I couldn’t … wallow in my own insufficiencies.”